Mr. Janisch, for reasons known only to him, likes to make you fill a page of notepaper, front and back, with zeros, in groups of three like this: 000,000,000, etc. The weird part is that he seems genuinely pleased when you hand him the finished page of zeros. It’s like he gets caught up in the excitement and forgets that it’s supposed to be a disciplinary measure. My theory is that he saves these pages in a series of black binders in a specially designed rebar-and-concrete lead-lined underground bunker. When the bomb drops, or on Judgment Day, or by the time he retires and goes underground to plot his revenge, he’ll have thousands of binders filled with millions upon millions of zeros. Then he’ll add a one to the beginning and suddenly he’ll be in sole possession of the world’s largest number in manuscript form. Or I guess it’d be even better to add a nine. Then he can laugh maniacally and die happy.
Whatever gets you through the night, big fella.
Anyway, that was my punishment this time. I enjoy it, actually. It’s mindless, routine, repetitive, familiar, and no more pointless than anything else they make you do in school. The hand moves automatically; the pen goes circle-circle-circletic, circle-circle-circle-tic, a soothing rhythm; and the mind is free to wander. I started trying to think up some lyrics to “Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over).”
THE FLOWERPOT MEN
One thing that was slightly freaking me out was the thought that even though I felt I couldn’t be more different than the CHS people at the party, we did seem to like a lot of the same music. Because I love the Who. But I’m not a fake mod like the dolphins at the party. Not at all. I don’t dress up like anything. True, I did let my hair grow a little longer and started to wear flared jeans over the summer when I got more into seventies bands and stuff, as a sort of tribute to their fine work; and I’ve got the army coat, though that’s more of a practical tool than a fashion statement. But I don’t “dress punk,” or mod or metal or goth or garage or rockabilly or anything. I don’t wake up every morning and put on a music-genre-oriented youth-culture Halloween costume—that’s what I’m saying.
My tastes do tend to be a bit retro, though. I’m really into the Who, the Kinks, the Merseyside/British Invasion sort of thing. And like I said, I also like a lot of seventies stuff, which I find myself listening to more and more often. 1975 was a great year for rock and roll, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different. But I can find something to appreciate about most pop music—it’s all part of rock and roll history, which I’m trying to know everything about. I have a pretty big record collection of mostly old stuff, and I’m totally proud of how schizophrenic it is. I even kind of like Wishbone Ash. And I’m not even exaggerating all that much. But for some reason I’m not necessarily too interested in very much of what was recorded after I was born. And, as a matter of principle, I don’t dig whatever mindless, soulless crap all the normal people are into at any given time, because what would be the point of that?
My personal ultimate in art rock will probably always be, well, either the Who or the Sweet. Or Foghat. But I’m also really into Bubblegum, and that’s probably what confuses people most.
Bubblegum is this music they had in the seventies, created and marketed for little kids, and, apparently, not taken very seriously by anyone involved. But it somehow ended up being brilliant by accident without anyone realizing. I love that. I have a pretty big collection of Bubblegum records. Now, I admit, maybe I got into it at first because it was so clearly the opposite of what everyone else liked. But whatever: it’s some of the best rock and roll music there ever was. I think normal people think it sounds corny or wimpy, not realizing that there would have been no Ramones without “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” But I’m quite confident that when we’re all dead, history will clearly conclude that my retro rock revival was years ahead of everybody else’s retro rock revival.
Sometimes, when I’m trying to cheer up Little Big Tom by finding some interest we can temporarily pretend to share, I’ll ask him about the music of the sixties and seventies, which was his era. Back then, he and all his friends didn’t pay attention to most of my favorite music from the time. They thought it was childish, not serious, meaningful music like, say, Led Zeppelin. Now, Led Zeppelin is all right (good drums and guitar, anyway, though that singer should have been silenced or muzzled or something—frankly, I prefer it in Yardbird form to be honest). But Little Big Tom’s example of how serious and important and adult it all was? “Stairway to Heaven.” I kid you not. Don’t get me wrong: I like hobbits and unicorns and wizards and hemp ice cream as much as the next guy. And I suppose it’s the antimaterialist message that seemed so sophisticated and meaningful to those guys—no one does antimaterialism better than multigazillionaire rock stars. But my view is that there’s something seriously wrong with a subculture that would prefer “Stairway to Heaven” to “Wig Wam Bam.” Come on: go listen to “Wig Wam Bam” and tell me I’m wrong.
I was thinking about all this, and kind of counting the ways in which the Sweet ruled Led Zeppelin’s relatively sorry ass, when I returned home from the first post-Fiona school day. On my way in through the patio, I noticed Little Big Tom using a sledgehammer to break big pieces of concrete into little pieces that would fit in his wheelbarrow. (He was trying to turn the backyard into Spaceship Earth by reversing the paving process and planting ferns and vegetables so that one day they might be able to film a margarine commercial there.) I heard him whistling a tune I recognized from my own record collection: “My Baby Loves Lovin’” by White Plains, originally recorded as a demo in their previous incarnation as the arguably superior Flowerpot Men. It is the perfect pop song, more or less. I had just been playing it pretty loudly the previous day. So—here I was, influencing Little Big Tom with an unjustly rejected gem from his own era. Kinda neat.
So I went over and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’” and doing this little Greg Brady/Jackson Five dance—well, not a dance, exactly. It’s more like genuflecting and using your knees to move your whole body up and down while smiling like an idiot. There is simply no bait that Little Big Tom will leave on the hook. He broke into a big smile as well and faced me and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’” and doing the Greg Brady/Jackson Five genuflect dance, too, though I suspect he may not have been aware that it was the G.B./J.F. g. d. So there we were, rising and descending, facing each other, singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’.” Amanda came through the back door, stared for a few seconds, and then turned on her heel and walked back in. I really couldn’t blame her.
It got old quickly. But Little Big Tom was having such a great time that I hated to pull the plug, so I continued doing it for a while, looking at him with a frozen yet fading smile that gained and lost altitude while I tried to figure out a way to end the baby-loves-love-a-thon gracefully. He couldn’t take a hint, though. Finally, I just had to say:
“Hey, you know: I’ve got some things to do.”
Probably not the best way to handle it, but I was desperate. I went into the house, hearing his trademark sigh and eventually his sledgehammer-on-concrete sound.
WOMEN GETTING IN THE WAY
Maybe it was more or less predictable that the whole Fiona situation would eventually start to affect the band. It’s well known that that has been the downfall of all the great bands of the world: women getting in the way.
Sam Hellerman had a weird attitude. At first I thought he was mad at me for leaving the party without him, but it turns out he didn’t care about that at all. It was Fiona.
When I told him what had happened, at our first post-Fiona band practice—and then told him again, presumably so he could pay attention once he realized I hadn’t been making it up—he said: “Fucking bitch.”
Now, you have to understand something about Sam Hellerman. He never swears. I don’t swear much, either, out loud, but that’s mostly because I never say more than a couple of words at a time. I keep it to myself, but in my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special. Everyone would be shocked if they had a
ccess to a transcript from my head. I don’t know about Sam Hellerman’s head’s transcript, but he talks out loud all the time, and as he’s talking you can almost see him struggling to avoid saying swear words. Like, he’ll always say have sex instead of fuck, or boobies instead of tits. The first works sometimes, though it can sound awkward; the second is pretty much inexcusable and reflects poorly on him. Once he said crotch instead of nuts when he was describing where Matt Lynch had been trying to kick him during a recess scuffle. That alone was good for a couple more beatings. I think his parents are Seventh-Day Adventists or Mormons or something like that.
That was part of the reason Serenah Tillotsen had to break up with him. Not the having Mormon parents. The swearing thing, I mean. To be dateable at the time, you had to excel in at least two of the following four areas: swearing, bullying, smoking, sports. And to go out with a girl who dressed as slutty as Serenah Tillotsen you probably had to have mastered at least three, and even that might have been pushing it. Sam Hellerman had the smoking down, but he was a disaster at all the others.
Sam Hellerman’s swearing thing had already affected the band a bit, but so far only in a good way. He objected to the song “Normal People Are Fucked Up” in favor of the alternate version “People Who Are Normal People Are the Most Retarded People in the World,” which turned out to be a much, much better song.
So it was shocking to hear those words come out of his mouth. He was taking the whole thing pretty seriously. Now I admit, I may have slightly exaggerated when I told him the story. Just a little, in that I may have managed to imply that things with Fiona might have gone a little further than they actually had. But even considering that, it was still just a stoned teen party grope-a-thon any way you sliced it. He should have been happy for me. Maybe he was jealous; I guess I would have been.
In any case, that’s so not how I saw the situation: for me, Fiona was not, literally or in any other sense, a “fucking bitch.” I had nothing but esteem and admiration for her and her sinful ways. And I had a kind of high-minded reverence for her memory. Sure, there was much I felt remorseful and embarrassed about, and I had had absolutely no luck trying to figure out a way to understand her confusing behavior. But I blamed all the awkwardness and most of my current predicament on my own deficiencies, and I was quite sure I was right about that. So was I bitter and hate filled at the thought that that had probably been my one opportunity to participate in a make-out session in this lifetime? Sure. But I could hardly blame the one girl who had been sporting enough to give me a shot at it: it just made me hate everyone else even more, which automatically made me love Fiona more by comparison. See? It’s all a matter of proper hate calibration. You have to take a balanced view.
I haltingly asked Sam Hellerman if he could ask his CHS friends about her, try to find out, um, I wasn’t sure exactly what. But could he ask around, find out what her deal was, in some way?
“Her deal?” said Sam Hellerman. He said “deal” mockingly, and did that thing where you put your hands up on either side in front of you palms out and wiggle your fingers sarcastically. Sometimes it just means “ooh, I’m scared.” But sometimes it means, “the word that I am now quoting back at you is so absurd that the human voice alone is insufficient to convey the appropriate level of sarcasm, and therefore I must use my hands as well, as they used to do in the days of the silent cinema and in vaudeville where they had to make sure that everyone way in the back who couldn’t hear the dialogue would still get the point that the person being addressed is a total ass.”
It was in this sense that Sam Hellerman did the sarcastic hands thing on this particular occasion. I thought it was a bit over the top, frankly.
“Her deal?” he repeated. “You mean, other than the whole cock tease thing?” Again with the swearing.
Yeah, that’s what I meant, Hellerman. Thanks for breaking it down. I really didn’t get his attitude. So I just stared at him.
But I almost forgot to mention how the Fiona Deal was affecting the band like I said. (See what I mean? Making out with Fiona really seems to have poked permanent holes in my brain that I can feel even now. Plus, well, you don’t know about it yet—it happens toward the end of the year and I’ll explain it all when it comes up because I’m really trying to describe things in the order that they happened—but I’m still recovering from this massive head injury I got from this attempt on my life. What I’m saying is, for a variety of reasons, the Fiona Deal among them, my thinking tends to be a little fuzzy these days.)
Anyway, it wasn’t just that the Fiona Deal made Sam Hellerman act like a total dick. It had to do with the songs.
Sam Hellerman tended to like the topical songs the best. He liked “Mr. Teone and His Lady Butt,” and “Matt Lynch Must Be Stopped (from Spawning and Generating Ungodly Offspring).” Political stuff like that. But he would tolerate the personal, sensitive tunes, too, even though I sometimes wondered whether he thought they were too corny. He liked “World War B” and would even tolerate “I’m Only a Page of Zeros but You Are the One,” for example.
But somehow he could tell what “Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over)” was about, and it was way too Fiona oriented for his taste.
“We’re not doing that one,” he said.
Well, the difference between the ones we were “doing” and the ones we were not “doing” was not easy to spot, as most of them didn’t yet have many or any lyrics, and very few of them had repeatable music yet. Even the ones with words and music were—well, I’d play them on the guitar and mumble the words I had and say “mmm-mmm-mmm” for the ones I didn’t have and Sam Hellerman would play random notes on his clarinet.
What I’m saying is, I’m not sure the set list matters enough to take personally at this stage in a band’s career.
Luckily, I realized what was going on soon enough to refrain from telling him about “My Fiona” or “I’m Still Not Done Loving You, Mama.” He would have hit the roof. If it’s possible to hit the roof in the spirit of utter contempt and condescension.
I had wanted to keep the Stoned Marmadukes going for a little longer, mostly as a tribute to the band I said I was in during my one conversation with her. And also because of this very unrealistic line of thinking that went: were we to keep the name long enough that we would still have it when we finally got instruments and learned to play them, and were we to have a “gig,” and were that still to be our name even then, and were she somehow to find out about it, well, then she might remember me and my powerful vocabulary and decide to show up or something. (Rock legend in the making: “Who is this mysterious Fiona that Moe ‘Fingers’ Henderson puts on the guest list every night?” “No one knows. But she never shows up.” “And Moe is alone and silent with his mysterious pain?” “Yeah, that’s right.”)
Now, even I could see how pathetic that was. But it was also kind of random and off-the-wall. Sam Hellerman was starting to develop a nose for the Fiona-related, though, and he could sniff out the vaguest hints of it. And he sure didn’t like how things were smelling lately at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA.
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “The Fionas. You on guitar and Fiona-phone, plus Sammy ‘I Heart Fiona’ on bass and Fiona Reconstruction Therapy, first album F-I-O-N-A! What’s That Spell? I Can’t Hear You! Fiona! Fiona! Yay, team!”
Hmm, I thought…but I knew he wasn’t being serious. He was kind of funny even when he was being a dick, though, I’ll say that for him. I’ll admit also that he may have had just a teensy-weensy point. But it still left something to be desired attitudinally from my point of view.
“The. Name. Is. Ray. Bradbury’s. Love-Camel,” he said firmly, before walking out and slamming the door.
Then he had to come back because he had forgotten to take his clarinet case with him.
He left again silently. But two seconds later he came back again, stuck his head through the door LBT style, and said very quickly: “Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel, you on guitar, Scammy Sammy on bass and calist
henics, first album Prepare to Die.”
Which made me feel a bit better.
JANE GALLAGHER AND AMANDA HENDERSON
Meanwhile, I still didn’t quite know what to make of the CEH library. I had all but given up trying to interpret the scribbles, the dates, the whole tits/back rubs/dry cleaning puzzle. There was a story there, presumably, or at least an explanation, but there just wasn’t enough information available to figure out what it was. It was lost in the past, for good, probably.
Still, I had developed this crazy idea that by reading the books my dad had read at my age, I could get to know him better retroactively. Maybe reading his books would provide some insight into his character, an indication of the kind of person he had been and the sorts of things he had been interested in and had thought about. Now, in one way, this insight was something I desperately wanted. In another way, though, I wasn’t sure I wanted it badly enough to go through the ordeal of reading A Separate Peace again. I had been forced to read it last year and had found it to be among the most annoying of all of the state-mandated novels about disaffected East Coast prep school juveniles. Was anything worth that? On the other hand, Brighton Rock looked promising. I decided to start there and save A Separate Peace for last.
Of course, while I was reading Brighton Rock on my own and rereading Catcher in the Fucking Rye for the zillionth time for Mr. Schtuppe’s class, I was also obsessing about Fiona. This turned out to be a pretty weird setup. Mr. Schtuppe would mispronounce something from Catcher, and it would spur cascades of competing thoughts of my dad’s teenage years and of the mystery girl’s breasts at the same time. Particularly when the subject was sex, which turns up quite a lot in Catcher in the Rye, though it tends to be expressed rather quaintly. And particularly when the girl being talked about was Jane Gallagher, because of the underlined Jane Gallagher back rub passage in my dad’s Catcher.
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