The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.
My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been watching Rosemary’s Baby with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that? Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.
And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had….
I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.
Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them. But all I could find were things like “fux” and “yum,” and none of them were even in a straight line like they’re supposed to be. There was “mmmmm” running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right. All that stuff reminded me of Fiona somehow. But that was the only intelligible thing about it.
It didn’t take me too long, though, to realize that it was probably a code. Then it took about twenty minutes of staring at the note and thinking about the CEH library to develop what I thought was a pretty good theory about what sort of code it was, and how it might work. But several solid hours of scribbling yielded only gibberish. Either I was totally on the wrong track or I was missing something. I even swallowed a bit of my pride and phoned Sam Hellerman to see if he had any ideas. But there was no answer at Hellerman Manor.
I eventually had to admit defeat. I closed my notebook and settled into an uneasy, half-asleep night of fretting about Tit, the dead bastard, zombies, pod-hippies, Halloween, witchcraft, my dad, my mom, murder, Sam Hellerman, Mia Farrow, Little Big Tom, Amanda, Black Sabbath, Paul Krebs, Roman Polanski, Anton and Zena LaVey, Matt Lynch, Nostradamus, Mrs. Teneb, Superman, Dr. Dee, Elvish, Klingon, Brighton Rock, Fiona, and Jane Gallagher. It was exhausting. When I finally dropped off, I had a dream that I solved the code and that the revealed message suddenly made it clear how it all fit together perfectly as part of a single story that explained everything. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what it was.
Ordinarily, I’d have immediately run, not walked, to Sam Hellerman with Tit’s mysterious note. He hadn’t been too interested in my dad’s teen library when I’d told him about it. He only liked science fiction and fantasy. Basically, if a book didn’t have a map of somewhere other than earth in it, he couldn’t see the use. He had a point, but then, he didn’t have a mysteriously deceased dad to investigate. I had tried to tell him how great Brighton Rock was, but he had just rolled his eyes.
Tit’s note would have been right up his alley, though, and I’m sure he would have been able to help. He’s a clever guy. However, things were a bit strained between us because of the Fiona situation, and because of—well, something was going on with Sam Hellerman, something hidden from me. It wasn’t just that he was being a dick about Fiona and hanging out with hippies. He was also acting weird toward me in general, kind of distant and secretive.
Calling him had been my first impulse upon finding the note. But of course, he had been out. Later, when I asked him where he had been, he said, “Visiting my grandma,” which I didn’t believe for a minute.
A thought struck me.
“Hey,” I said. “If you ever happened to be somewhere like another party or something and you happened to see Fiona there, you’d—you’d tell me, right?”
He just looked at me like I was the most pathetic creature he had ever seen. Which was well within the realm of possibility, especially since Sam Hellerman didn’t get out much.
He was also evasive when I probed for the story behind the new Hellerman/drama hippie nexus.
The first thing he said was “I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.”
“Nobody,” I said blankly, “expects the Spanish Inquisition,” supplying the required response but continuing to stare at him as though to say “there is a time for quoting Monty Python and a time for choosing another path.”
Then he said: “trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then, after watching me continue to stare at him for some time, he cleared his throat and claimed that, actually, he was considering going out for drama and trying out for The Music Man.
I allowed my expression to change from “your feeble attempt at false jocularity will never succeed in changing this subject” to “who exactly is this moron and why is his Sam Hellerman impression so laughable and unconvincing?” He finally said, lamely: “There is a thing called hanging. It’s not a big deal.” And he asked me what my problem was, though I don’t think he expected me to answer. He added that it “probably won’t be for much longer anyway.” Which sounded pretty fucking weird to me, but he clammed up after that, and no amount of eye-rolling, sarcasm, or even long, steady, unblinking stares would induce him to say any more.
Look, I never said it was a “big deal.” Just that it was unusual. And the more he tried to make it sound usual, the more unusual it seemed. That’s all I was saying.
We were more or less civil to each other, and still spent a lot of time together working on the band (the Medieval Ages, me on guitar, Samber Waves of Grain on bass and bodywork, first album That Stupid Pope.) And we were still alphabetical-order friends, and that’s forever. But there were now some topics that were more or less off-limits, and that made me feel self-conscious about bringing up other matters. Rock and roll was okay, but not too much else. Plus, for the first time since the Order of the Alphabet had brought us together back when we were little kids, I was on my own for lunch.
I have to admit, though, that apart from all that, I kind of wanted to keep Tit’s note to myself. Even though it was little more than nonsense, the fact that only I knew about it made it the most intimate thing connecting me and my dad. Similarly, and rather selfishly, I hadn’t told Amanda about the CEH library, even though I knew she would have been pretty interested in it. I had no clue what the coded message might be, but I had developed this absurd idea that if I did decode it, it would turn out to be a kind of message to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone else to know what that message was. I wasn’t even all that sure I wanted to know it myself. While it remained unsolved, it retained boundless promise. Solving it could only disappoint. On the other hand, you can’t just leave an unsolved code kicking around in your life.
LOU REED
It was in the midst of all the pod-hippie business that Sam Hellerman’s bass finally arrived. I had to admit, it was sweet. It almost looked like a copy of a Fender Jazz Bass, but it was made in Korea and the fine craftsmen in the Korean bass sweatshop had put their own collective individual stamp on it. And by that I mean the name on the oddly rectangular head stock was not “Fender Jazz Bass” but rather “Apex Dominator 2.”
He didn’t have an amp yet, but we figured out how to plug it in to the back of the Magnavox stereo console in my living room so the sound would come out of the speakers. It sounded kind of distant and rumbly and fuzzy, but sort of cool, too. Famous recording engineers and producers spend millions of dollars experimenting with effects and overloading preamps and poking holes in speakers with pencils and even pouring foreign substances over circuitry to achieve the sort of thing Sam Hellerman could accomplish just by being too cheap to buy an amp. We are geniuses.
He looked cool with it, too. He had it slung so low around his neck that it hung well below his knees, and in order to reach the G string he kind of had to dislocate his right shoulder
a little. He appeared to be in considerable pain. Like I said, way cool.
We had just finished working on the band’s signature tune, “Losers Like You,” which goes:
Catcher in the Rye is for losers
Losers, losers,
Catcher in the Rye is for losers
Losers like you
(The Sadly Mistaken, Moe Vittles on guitar, Sam “Noxious” Fumes on bass and landscaping, band name spelled out in bullet holes on the side of a family station wagon, first album Kill the Boy Wonder.)
It sounded a lot better with bass instead of clarinet, I’ll tell you that right now.
We were playing the next tune when Little Big Tom popped in.
“Nice!” he said. “Lou Reed, right? ‘Sweet Jane.’”
“No,” Sam Hellerman said. “‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven.’ An original.”
Little Big Tom tilted his head in that birdlike way he has and said, “Hmm. I thought it might have been Lou Reed.”
Then he tilted his whole body from one slight angle to the other by raising first the left foot, then the right, but keeping the rest of his body stiff, and stuck his lower lip out slightly while bringing his chin firmly downward, as though to say “I have just performed this little dance to celebrate the fact that I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal with this illuminating discussion.”
Then he said, “Rock on!” and flitted out.
Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other for a while with the same thought, though he was the one who said it first:
“You know, ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Sweet Jane.’”
“Fuck,” I said.
Sam Hellerman couldn’t believe I wasn’t more pissed off at Little Big Tom for snooping in my room and confiscating all that stuff. I mean, I was pissed off, but not enough to go crazy about it. I was embarrassed about the notebook and resolved to take steps to protect my data more carefully in the future, but practically, it meant nothing. The magazines had already served their purpose. And as it happened, I had another “Kill ’em All” T-shirt as a backup. I didn’t even care too much about the confiscated records: I was at the point in my creative life where listening to other people’s music was just a distraction from my own stuff, and what he confiscated was mostly lame crap anyways. And believe it or not, I was finding I could get along just fine without the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. Just knowing the Talons of Rage fantasy blades existed, somewhere out there, was enough for me. I guess I was growing up.
But the real reason I wasn’t more pissed off is that I’m a sentimental fool, and I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Little Big Tom. I could understand why he and, well, anybody, might be freaked out by me and the Talons of Rage fantasy blades and all the other Guns ’n’ Chi-Mo paraphernalia. Though I still think Stratego is pushing it.
When you stare at people, saying nothing for long periods of time while they try to think of ways to fill in the space, and they know they don’t get you at all, they can get a little tense, and sometimes how tense they get is proportional to how likely they judge it to be that you might have access to some kind of dangerous weapon. I developed the method to use on Matt Lynch. Little Big Tom just got swept up in the net by accident, a dolphin with the tuna. That had never been my intention.
I think it may have been the image of him as an uncomfortable, flailing, sitcom dad substitute caught in a net suspended from a crane on the port side of a Japanese fishing boat that made me decide to make a peace offering.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:
Dear Big Tom,
My magazines are not a cry for help. They were only a tool to help deter abully. They are not needed now anyway.
I don’t have a girlfriend. Fiona is an imaginary girl.
I’m glad you stopped the Vietnam War.
Peace and Love,
Thomas Charles Henderson
P.S. ban the bomb
And I left the note on the keyboard of his Mac.
My life hadn’t had a lot of content till this year. And now that it suddenly had some content, it was being turned upside down and slowly shaken, so that everything got a little mixed up with everything else.
As this process continued after the Fiona party, this weird thing started happening.
Whenever I would try to make a word my slave, that is, when I would use a word from 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, a little image of Mr. Schtuppe’s head would pop up in my mind. Like, I’d say “obsequious” and suddenly I’d see a little shiny pink devil-head with lots of ear hair pop up really quickly, spin around, and pop back down again.
I was pretty sure that the little pop-up devil-head was trying to prompt me to mispronounce the word. I rarely ended up mispronouncing them, as it happened, because when you get right down to it, it’s kind of hard to mispronounce most words. You have to work at it. How would you mispronounce “obsequious,” for example? I guess it would be awb-seh-cue-ee-us. But I had to think about it far too long. I mean, I couldn’t do it intuitively so that it would flow the way it probably would coming from Mr. Schtuppe. He is a master of his craft and I had a lot to learn. But that’s why we have public education, isn’t it?
IN THE SHADOW OF THE KNIGHT
The Hillmont High School drama hippies always spend lunch period on this little patch of lawn on the northeast corner of Center Court, over by the Hillmont Knight. The Hillmont Knight is this huge god-awful sculpture made of scrap metal and old auto parts, welded together in what is supposed to be the shape of a knight, which is the Hillmont High School team mascot thing. If you squint and use your imagination, you can just about see how it’s supposed to look like a knight, though it’s kind of a stretch. The funniest thing about it, though, is that on what is supposed to be the knight’s shield, in welded-on letters cut from license plates and old metal signs, it says:
PRESENTATED TO HHS BY THE CLASS OF ’94
Presentated. A more fitting symbol of Hillmont High School would be difficult to imagine.
So the drama hippies sit in the shade of the Hillmont Knight, leaning against its rusty “legs” or just lying on the grass in the general area. Sometimes they hang their coats on it or do something really funny like put a hat on it. And that’s where Sam Hellerman had been when I observed him that first day, “hanging,” as he put it, just a little to the left of the Hillmont Knight.
Now, here’s something I’ve noticed about girls, after years of careful observation. They tend to sort themselves into groups of three. There’s the hottest one, who is the boss. She dominates and controls the second-hottest one, who is the sidekick and second-in-command, and she instructs her in the art of clothes and sexiness. Then there’s a third one, usually chubby or freakishly tall and skinny or otherwise afflicted, whom #1 and #2 both boss around. #3 is a sort of gopher, doormat, punching bag, object of loving condescension, and project for improvement rolled into one.
It’s more complicated than it is for guys, where there’s a much clearer line between victim and oppressor, and you always know which one you are, and the victims and oppressors never mingle or feign fraternity. In Girl World, #3 is truly friends with #1 and #2, and they do, in fact, enjoy hanging out together. #1 and #2 will help #3 with makeup and clothes, pretending that that will make a difference, and if either of the dominant girls have a boyfriend, they will try to set up #3 with the least attractive of the boyfriend’s friends, though everybody really knows that that, like so many of their other #3-related activities, is a (devil-head) charade. Because even though they’re sincere about being kind and helpful, there is an undercurrent of (devil-head) malevolence. #1 and #2 love #3, but they’re also conscious of how much hotter they are than she is, and they like rubbing it in. #3 resents it deep down but goes along with it because she likes being in a group of friends, which would not otherwise be possible. Eventually, though, the bitterness begins to slip out bit by bit, and #1 and #2 decide #3 is a bitch and that they hate her and e
nd up (devil-head) ostracizing her and replacing her with a new #3. Why don’t the #3s all team up and form an anti-1-2 front? I don’t know: they just don’t.
Anyhow, it happened that the #2 in the subgroup of drama people Sam Hellerman had started hanging out with was Née-Née Tagliafero, the girl who was supposedly going with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon. The #1 in that group was Celeste Fletcher, who was, as drama girls go, pretty much at the top level of sexiness. And the #3 was Yasmynne Schmick, who was very short and whose body shape was almost perfectly spherical. She had a slight black-velvety goth thing going on. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between goth and fake hippie, I’ve found.
In fact, this trio, though definitely in drama and thus associated with the whole fake-hippie pretense, was among the least extreme, most tasteful trios of drama girls. They could pass for nonhippies if they wanted to—maybe their hearts weren’t completely in it, though they did listen to that awful jam music. They were on the (devil-head) periphery of the fake-hippie drama movement.
Man, I’ve got to do something about that devil-head situation. Maybe there’s some kind of drug they can give you for it.
Anyhow, the Celeste Fletcher trio was closely associated with the Syndie Duffy trio, which was closer to the center of the drama establishment. Syndie Duffy was quite mean, for a drama hippie. They also had a much looser association, through Née-Née Tagliafero, I imagine, with the Lorra Jaffe group, who were thoroughly normal and thus quite psychotic. It was the #2 of the Lorra Jaffe group who had tried to pull a Make-out/Fake-out on me recently in PE, if I’m not mistaken.
At the lunchtime be-in, Sam Hellerman had been sitting in the shadow of the Knight, roughly in between the Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy trios, and had appeared to be talking to both. I would have given quite a bit to know what the hell they had been discussing. But Sam Hellerman wasn’t talking.
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