Mr. Schtuppe’s tests were always true-false or multiple choice, except for the last question, which was an essay question. An essay question is a multiple-choice question with the multiple choices left off, and three wide-spaced lines where you’re supposed to write the answer.
On one of the tests, the essay question was “What was the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43?” By some entirely characteristic oversight, the identical question had also appeared above in the multiple-choice part of the same test. The answer to the m-c version was (b) Jane Gallagher. The answer Mr. Schtuppe was looking for in the essay question version was Jane Gallagher without the (b), or possibly something like “the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43 was Jane Gallagher.”
The real answer is that Holden Caulfield had the hots for this girl, Jane Gallagher, though he was too scared to try anything. And he was worried that his roommate might have hooked up with her before he got the chance to. But in the quaint world of Catcher in the Rye, the phrase they use for fucking is “giving her the time.” I kid you not. Giving her the time. Another one is “crumby,” which is how they spell crummy, but which you can tell from the context really means fucked-up. Seriously. It’s like this thing was written by Sam Hellerman or something.
Actually, it’s kind of cute.
Just to amuse myself, instead of writing “Jane Gallagher” in the essay-question space like I was supposed to, I wrote:
Jane Gallagher had wanted to know what time it was, but for some reason Holden Caulfield hadn’t wanted Stradlater to tell her. When Stradlater refused to tell Holden Caulfield whether or not he had told Jane Gallagher what time it was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and attacked him in a fit of horological savagery, possibly because he was mentally ill and hated anyone but him knowing what time it was.
I thought I’d get the question wrong, but when Mr. Schtuppe handed back my test, I got a hundred. The name Jane Gallagher had been circled and the circle had been checked. I guess he only needed to read the first two words. I was sad for a few minutes that my brilliant humor had gone unappreciated, but then I got over it.
Now, everybody’s favorite guy, Holden Caulfield, has a younger sister named Phoebe. I’ve never found her very believable. She’s way too sweet and loving and Holden-ocentric. She’s nothing like my sister, Amanda, that’s for sure. On the other hand, if Phoebe Caulfield had had a crazy mom, a dead father, a goofball stepfather, and a King Dork brother, and if she had grown up in blank, characterless Hillmont instead of rich, atmosphere-laden, fancy-pants Manhattan, who knows how she might have turned out?
Also, HC makes no secret of the fact that he is a pathological liar, so the real Phoebe may not have been all she was cracked up to be. (Some might say I’m one to talk, but I’m really not a p. l. like HC. I’m more of an exaggerator than a liar, really, and unlike Mr. Wonderful, I don’t do it as a sick compulsion or a recreational activity.)
Amanda is hard to peg, though. She has many modes, some of which seem to be battling for supremacy over the others. There’s her Harriet the Spy mode, where she’s kind of a grumpy, introverted oddball, constantly scribbling and drawing weird stuff on these notepads that she won’t let anyone see. And then there’s the budding bitch-princess mode, where she and her friends seem to be going through training exercises to prepare for when they finally emerge as full-fledged sado-psychopathic normal girls. She’s a pretty girl, and all indications are that, when she grows up just a little more, she’ll be a knockout. The thing is, she’s way too intelligent, and—what? individualistic?—to pull off the normal mode very convincingly for too long. And I’m not kidding about the intelligence: she doesn’t always express it perfectly in words, but she’s supersmart, and in a sort of deep-thinking philosophical way that is nothing like my clever and glib but shallow preoccupation with sex and trivia. Sometimes she’ll say these simple yet unexpectedly true things that make me want to consider giving away all my worldly possessions, taking a vow of celibacy, and devoting my life to studying at her feet. But then she’ll spoil it by doing the nose-forehead slide or mimicking my walk. Honestly, I find her clumsy attempts at normalcy more cute than insulting, but you know: it does kill the Yoda mood.
I do wonder if she’ll make it as a normal person in the end—though simple hotness can make up for a lot of other deficiencies, it’s true. The worry is that she’ll have to over-compensate by being even meaner and more psychotic than usual in order to draw attention away from her Harriet the Spy–ness and pass as normal psychotic. If that’s what she ends up wanting to do with her life.
Protonormal Amanda doesn’t seem to think too highly of me and isn’t too fun to be around. I prefer the HtS Amanda, because I can relate to her better. We don’t interact much, but generally we get along okay.
There’s one more Amanda mode I have to mention, the mode she assumes whenever anything has to do with our dad. In those situations, she suddenly turns into a Phoebe-like little girl. She’ll cry, and sniffle, and reach out to hug me. Sometimes she’ll put her arms around my neck and squeeze so tightly that it seems as though her little arms could make permanent indentations. She doesn’t have anyone else to talk to about him. My mom is crazy and best avoided, and she hates Little Big Tom, so I guess I’m it. In fact, though, we never actually do much talking. We just hold on to each other and cry. Well, she does.
FILLING IN THE SO
My mom has this funny habit of ending practically all of her sentences like this: “[Random sentence]. So…”
There’s another part that comes after the so, but it’s either so obvious that it’s not necessary to say it, or she doesn’t quite know what it is and gives up trying to figure it out.
“I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So…” That means “I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So I’m going to bed early and I don’t want anyone making too much noise.” Or possibly: “…so I’m taking this big glass of bourbon into the bedroom and I do not wish to be disturbed and I’m seriously considering giving you the silent treatment for the next couple of weeks starting now.”
More interesting, and sometimes more disturbing, are the mysterious ones where you can’t figure out exactly what’s supposed to come after the “so.”
“Elaine [old lady down the street] said she’s sorry she decided to have children after all and wishes she had spent the money on herself instead. So…”
“When I was growing up, they didn’t expect you to go to college. High school was enough. So…”
“Well, they do say if you ignore something, it goes away on its own in ninety percent of all cases. So…”
I bring this up because of the following:
Sam Hellerman had somehow talked his parents into giving him an advance on his Christmas present and had mail-ordered a bass from the Guitarville catalog. Now I needed to get my act together and get an electric guitar. I was currently playing my dad’s old nylon-string folk guitar, which I cherished because of my respect for him but which really wasn’t the right tool for heavy rock. If Silent Nightmare (me on guitar, Samson on bass and gynecology, first album Feel Me Fall) was ever going to get off the ground, we needed pro gear.
Somehow, I couldn’t see the Christmas present advance concept being comprehensible to Carol Henderson-Tucci, but I figured it was worth a shot.
I brought it up with a great deal of subtlety, mentioning that Sam Hellerman’s parents had given him a bass as an early Christmas present and that it had been very easy to order it from the Guitarville catalog. I let my voice trail off.
Her answer amounted to a no, which didn’t surprise me. But for the life of me I really, really couldn’t fill in the so.
“Baby, don’t even talk to me about Christmas right now,” she said. “More people commit suicide on Christmas than on any other day of the year. So…”
THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF MY ROOM
“Hey, chief,” said Little Big Tom. “We’d like a word with you. If you’ve got a minute.”
My mom had on her Picasso Guernica-print shorts, cowboy boots, a red and white checked halter, and a polka-dot scarf worn like a headband, and was leaning against the counter smoking one of her Virginia Slimses. You’ve come a long way, baby, I thought. It was shocking to think how much she wasn’t even kidding.
Little Big Tom started to caress his Little Gray Mustache at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, as though he were trying to stretch it out to get that extra droop that used to drive the ladies crazy in Vermont in the seventies.
There was an uncomfortable pause while we all looked at the kitchen table. A whole lot of my stuff was spread out, neatly arranged in little piles. Some books. Some records and CDs. Some random martial arts materials. My Talons of Rage fantasy blades that I got from Ninja Warehouse, which had been used as a D and D prop long ago and were now purely decorative. Some of my old role-playing military strategy games, and some board games, including Risk and Stratego. Some of my dad’s stuff: videos of Clint Eastwood movies and war movies. Tora! Tora! Tora! The Enforcer. Patton. The bowie knife he gave me for Christmas the year before he died. My army coat. Jane’s Military Small Arms of the 20th Century and the Tanks and Combat Vehicles Recognition Guide. A couple of my notebooks. (Uh-oh.) My “Kill ’em All and Let God Sort ’em Out” T-shirt. And a big stack of my weapons-and-tactics magazines, fanned out like cards on a blackjack table.
“What is this shit?” said Little Big Tom, eventually.
“The entire contents of my room?” I said.
Well, it wasn’t quite everything, but that was essentially the correct answer. See, in real life parents raid their children’s rooms and confiscate the porno magazines and drugs; in the back-assward world of Partner and Mrs. Progressive at 507 Cedarview Circle, they leave the porn alone and confiscate everything else.
There was another bumpy stretch of awkwardness, during which all you could hear was the rhythm of my mom’s sucked-and-blown Virginia Slims 120s. Short, hissing intake. Pause. Long, exasperated release. It sounded like a factory in a cartoon, or in an educational film on how they make steel tools. Ordinarily, it can be very soothing.
“Why,” Little Big Tom finally said, “do you feel the need to read this garbage?”
Why, I thought, do you feel the need to try to impersonate Jimmy Buffett and wear shorts and sandals with black socks and eat tofu loaf on Thanksgiving? Some questions have no answers.
“I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to set an example so you would respect and share our values.”
Now that was funny. I just looked at him. The look that says: “what are you, high?”
Then he said something that totally threw me.
“It’s very important to have respect for women.”
I stared at him.
Well, now I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I ended up figuring out what the hell Little Big Tom was getting at.
It was hard to piece together because very little of what he was saying made much sense, but here’s my best guess as to what had happened. Little Big Tom, making his rounds, had overheard the conversation about the Fiona Deal and had found it disturbing. He hadn’t liked the way Sam Hellerman had referred to Fiona (I hadn’t, either, though I doubt we had exactly the same reasons). I don’t know how much of the rest of the conversation he heard, but if he missed anything, he could have read all about it in my notebook. I’m ashamed to say that one of my notebooks contained, among other embarrassing items, some tortured “letters to Fiona” I had scribbled out during a stretch of maudlin, sleepless nights. And I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about the lyrics to “She Likes It When I Pinch Her Hard.” And many of my other songs, I’m sure, like “Gooey Glasses.”
He must have read the notebook. Otherwise, how would he have reached the conclusion that my “relationship” with “my girlfriend” was undermining his generation’s sacred achievement of the institution of easygoing touchy-feely ouchless deodorant-optional crunchy-granola Hair–sound track butterflies-and-unicorns sexuality?
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. After overhearing the conversation, and in the throes of a full-blown paranoid, sex-obsessed, politically correct midlife-crisis meltdown, he had decided to search my room for evidence of more disturbing-ness and had basically freaked out over what he’d found.
He was much, much more bothered by the war stuff, the magazines, the nunchakus, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, and the Stratego than he had been by the cock tease conversation. And there’s where he made his mistake. He tried to combine two discussions, the one where you tell your stepson it isn’t nice to call girls bitches and the one where you express your inner turmoil over the fact that being into war and weapons betrays the deeply held values of the generation that stopped the Vietnam War. The result was incoherence, confusion, and the least successful attempt at Family Conflict Resolution since the White Album told Charles Manson to give the world a big hug.
For Little Big Tom, these issues were like two sides of the same coin. He could jump from Stratego to Respect for Women without realizing he had changed topics, but he was the only one who had any idea what he was talking about. Even my mom, smoking in the corner, seemed confused.
I’m just speculating here as to his state of mind, but I think he looked at everything in my room, along with his very mistaken imaginative reconstruction of my “relationship” with “my girlfriend,” as a kind of personal attack on him and his fabulous generation. And he saw everything in my world only as it related to his own self-image and personal style, which he held in pretty high regard. He wasn’t too interested in hearing where he had things wrong, either. The theory confirmed his suspicions and he liked it that way. My first make-out session was all about him. So were the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. And so was Stratego from Milton Bradley. Plus, I think he was embarrassed, worried that some of his PC friends might see me wearing the wrong shirt or something.
His version of my life was pretty hilarious, at any rate. I wasn’t treating “my girlfriend” with enough respect. I didn’t understand how sex was spiritual as well as physical. “My friends” and I were in a “space” of negativity and aggression, which wasn’t healthy. The music he had confiscated was mostly metal, since those were the album covers and song titles that fed into his theory. But he left the Rolling Stones alone: see, they stopped the Vietnam war, too.
All the references to “my friends” threw me at first. Had he really failed to notice that I had no friends other than Sam Hellerman? Then it hit me that he was assuming that some of the band members in the Sam ’n’ Moe bands I’d written about in my notebook were actually real people. (What tipped me off: he mentioned a Debbie, and I was like “who’s Debbie,” until I realized he was talking about Li’l Miss Debbie, the imaginary nurse-slut vocalist of Tennis with Guitars. It’s a good thing he didn’t realize that some of “my friends” were really me: it might have turned his mind into a pretzel.)
All this from Stratego and a few fantasy blades? Un. Real.
At one point my mom chimed in: “Baby, all we’re saying is you have to try to find harmony between your masculine and your feminine natures.” I heard a tremendous guffaw from Amanda in the other room. Thanks for that, Mom. I knew I’d be hearing about my feminine nature from Amanda, and till the end of time.
The one bit of reality in the whole scene did come from my mom, however, though it was the kind of connection to reality that reveals an even deeper disconnection f
rom it.
“Are you having trouble with the kids in school?” she asked.
Bingo. Well spotted. Give the lady a cookie. But on the other hand, how could anyone who knew me or anything about me even have to ask that question? The mind reels.
The whole sorry affair wrapped up like this: we wheeled and dealed for the stuff. Little Big Tom kept the magazines, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, some of the albums, and the throwing stars, nunchakus, and decorative weapons (all except for the bowie knife, which I was allowed to keep for sentimental reasons). I got the books, the coat, most of the videos, the notebooks, some of the albums, and the games. He agreed to respect my privacy and I to respect his values from that point forward. If you’re thinking that that sounds like a joke, well, you’re right, but one of the unspoken terms of the truce was that we couldn’t actually laugh at it till we were out of the room.
My mom said, “Baby, if you ever need to talk, we’re always here.” I gave her a little “right back at ya, babe” salute.
Little Big Tom, under the impression that he had achieved something by accusing me of being criminally insane and taking half my stuff, rumpled my hair and said, “Growing up is rough for everybody. Even old geezers like me. I’d like to think I’m not above learning a thing or two myself sometimes.” That was supposed to be self-deprecating and lighthearted and philosophical and tension relieving. Hey, I’ll take it. Anything’s better than getting in touch with your feelings in show trial form.
I knew he had fully snapped back to his old self when he turned his head slightly sideways, handed me my notebook, and said, “Some righteous tunes in there! Very creative!” I thought I heard him sighing heavily as I walked out, but of course, that was normal too.
THE HELLERMAN EYE-RAY TREATMENT
There’s a scene in movies and situation comedies where the main kid starts to be “interested in girls” and the dad is supposed to take the kid aside and give him a lecture that used to be called “the birds and the bees” but is now usually referred to as “the sex talk.” The dad doesn’t want to do it and has to be goaded into it by the mom. If there’s no dad, the mom finds some dad substitute to do it. The dad or replacement dad module is nervous and dances around the subject and uses funny euphemisms and analogies, and the joke is that the kid is already very knowledgeable, a thirteen-year-old Hugh Hefner or Prince. Sometimes the kid will even be shown in an armchair wearing pajamas and a robe and smoking a pipe while the dad figure is squirming. And the live studio audience laughs and laughs.
King Dork Page 9