Sam Hellerman had said I was welcome to “hang” on the lawn during lunch period with him on the drama people’s turf if I wanted. I’m sure he said it with solid confidence that I wouldn’t take him up on it. Yet I did in fact give it a shot on the following day, more in the spirit of field research than from a sincere desire to be one with the earth.
It was a weird scene, man. Celeste Fletcher was lying on her stomach on the grass facing away from us, raising her head every now and again to tell Yasmynne Schmick to fetch this or that, or to draw subtle attention to Yasmynne Schmick’s weight, height, or skin condition with less-than-convincing compassion. Syndie Duffy was lying nearby, with her head in her scruff-grunge knit-cap boyfriend’s lap. The boyfriend was half asleep, leaning back between the Hillmont Knight’s legs, and Syndie Duffy was sucking idly on his fingers. You could tell her group’s #3 was on the way out because whenever the #3 would try to say something, Syndie Duffy would roll her eyes or, with a great show of aggravation, remove the boyfriend’s fingers from her mouth and tell her not to be stupid before putting them back in. That’s normal 1-on-3 behavior, perhaps, but there was something about the way she was saying it that made it clear it was pretty much all over.
There were some dudes a bit farther down, engaged in a philosophical debate about how high they were now as opposed to how high they were going to get at some future point in time. Everyone over by me was idly watching Née-Née Tagliafero and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon make their rounds, and talking amongst themselves about male and female actors, getting high, The Music Man, how LPs sound better than CDs (which I actually agree with), and (did I mention?) getting high. And about Bobby Duboyce, the helmet guy, who, it was claimed, had been seen making out with some unspecified, and grossly implausible, girl in the football-field bleachers. (I was skeptical. Is it even physically possible to do that with a helmet head? But of course I mental-noted the grim fact that, for the sake of argument, even narcoleptic helmet boy was more of a hit with the ladies than I was and filed it away for use in some future flight of self-pity.)
I sat next to Sam Hellerman, cross-legged in my army coat, in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only time anyone acknowledged my presence was when Yasmynne Schmick, for some reason, asked me what I played in the band. “Guitar,” I said. Except that I said a few ums and uhs beforehand, stammered a bit during, and had a little coughing fit afterward. I was jumpy. I was doing the ear thing. For some reason, I felt kind of warmly towards Yasmynne Schmick, maybe because of sympathy for her role in life, which really wasn’t her fault. But I couldn’t talk to these people. My one line in the whole scene, and I had flubbed it.
As for Sam Hellerman, he said not one word the entire time, and no one said anything to him. He just sat there staring at Celeste Fletcher with a faintly stupid expression. He did manage to leave the impression, though, that he was drooling on the inside.
So it was obvious. I guess. Sam Hellerman had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and for some reason she had decided to tolerate his presence and to allow him to subject her ass to the Hellerman eye-ray treatment for thirty minutes each day. I couldn’t blame him for that: it’s a nice ass, and I have to admit I was giving it the relatively less dramatic Chi-Mo treatment myself. What she got out of the deal was harder to fathom. It was clear, though, that his deep and tender feelings for her ass were not reciprocated. As to why she decided to tolerate his (devil-head) parasitic presence, who knows? Maybe she was just one of those people who likes having a large (devil-head) entourage and she felt she needed another extra to make the crowd scene look more believable. Maybe her ass needed the positive reinforcement.
All I knew was, Sam Hellerman was no more a genuine participant in the lunch period Grooviness on the Green than I was. Celeste Fletcher hadn’t even looked back at him the entire time. It made zero sense.
WE COOL?
I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute-father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.
I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just stick his head in and out without warning.
He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics magazines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.
He set them down on my dresser and said:
“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.
“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”
He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for reading my notebook, but he used way more words than necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone:
“Some of the things you said the other day have been rattling around in the old brain box. Young men always think they know everything and that old men know nothing, and old men always think the same thing. But maybe the answer could be somewhere in between.”
Mmm, deep.
That’s what I thought, but what I said was “We’re cool, Big Tom.” Then I added, uncharacteristically, but because I knew he’d like it: “You’re not even that old.” I’m shameless.
He looked at me, still expecting something.
I held up two fingers at about shoulder level in a peace sign with what I hoped was the right attitude, slightly sardonic but good-natured.
His mouth crinkled just a bit at the left corner, and he did this little sniffy laugh while shaking his head. Then he rumpled my hair, which was the real sign that he was more or less satisfied with how things had concluded.
“Rock and roll,” he said as he went out, sighing just a bit, I think.
LADIES’ WEEK?
I was starting to lose track of all of the mysteries. There was Tit’s code and the cryptic notes and documents associated with my dad’s teen library. There was my adult dad’s death. There was Sam Hellerman’s unusual behavior. And above all, there was Fiona. I still had the sense that somehow all the puzzles were related and could solve each other if only one were to come undone. I also had the sense that that was crazy. At any rate, I thought about Fiona practically constantly, both as a context within which to experience my horniness and as a puzzle piece. I decided to write down everything I knew about her, imagining that it might be useful one day if I ever gathered my possessions in a satchel, kissed my mom good-bye, and set off on a perilous journey to track her down and discover her secret. Like a hard-boiled detective. Or a hobbit.
I hardly knew anything about Fiona. I sure wished I had paid more attention to what she had been saying while I was ogling her like a sex maniac.
To summarize what I came up with:
Fiona was most likely a junior. She was in drama, acted in plays, made costumes and her own clothes, and was kind of hung up on vocabulary-level feminism
but not in any way that mattered practically. She was interested in the occult and the paranormal, though in fact she had no psychokinetic or supernatural powers. She was nearsighted. She liked the Who. She had a boyfriend who was not at the party but who had friends who were. She wouldn’t go past second base with anonymous strangers in dark basements; or, the party had coincided with her period (ladies’ week, as my mom calls it). She liked to smoke pot.
If she went to CHS, she was known by a name other than Fiona, and dressed and behaved so differently from how she had been at the party that no one who would have seen her at school recognized the description. But most likely she didn’t go to CHS. I had assumed she did because she had been at a party with lots of CHS kids, and having the Who shirt and being in drama had made it seem like she had to be one of the CHS drama mods. But that wasn’t necessarily the case. She could go to another high school but know some of the CHS drama mods well enough that she would be invited to their parties.
In fact, the Who shirt was the only definite mod-related thing about her, so maybe she wasn’t even a real fake mod at all. Maybe the drama people at her high school were all on some other trip (though I don’t know what—crochet-core?) and the Who shirt was just random, or worn because she knew she’d be hanging out with CHS drama mods on that particular evening.
There was another reason I had assumed she went to CHS, though. Something in the back of my mind that had been bugging me, though I didn’t consciously realize what it was at first: somehow she had known I was from Hellmont.
I had instinctively assumed that she had reached that conclusion because she didn’t recognize me from school at CHS, which would have made it obvious. Most kids from Hillmont went to Hillmont High, though a small chunk, from the hills, mostly, went to CHS. No Clearview or Clearview Heights kids ever went to Hillmont, that I knew of—CHS was a much bigger school, and had kids from several towns. What I’m getting at is: if Fiona didn’t go to CHS herself, it wouldn’t have been at all obvious that I was from Hillmont. I mean, even if she knew a lot of CHS kids, she couldn’t have been positive that she could identify every one, especially a random dweeby one, if she didn’t go there. She would have assumed I went to CHS, like almost all of the kids at the party, right? She would have said “How’s tricks in Queerview?” And I would have said “Homoerotic.” And the pop-up devil-he—oh wait, that was before the devil-head started popping up. Those were simpler times.
Now, maybe she had just guessed right, or had mentioned Hillmont randomly. Maybe not, though. But I couldn’t figure out how or why she would have known anything about me. Man, maybe she was psychic after all.
So where did you go if you lived in Salthaven but you didn’t go to CHS? OMH (Old Mission Hills) possibly. I didn’t know a whole lot about the school system out there. I was going to have to do some research. Or maybe she wasn’t even from Salthaven or Salthaven Vista. Sooner or later, thinking about all this, everything started to go in circles and I had to take a break.
In my fantasy, Fiona is still a mod, a real one, and she and I are living in a grimy, sweaty gray underground flat in Carnaby Street, London, listening to “Substitute” on a little gramophone. I’m standing in the doorway in a parka and she’s on a couch in a houndstooth miniskirt and go-go boots. We’re both crying, but I can tell by how she’s looking at me through the tears that she wants it. The time, I mean…
I woke up the next morning feeling pretty stupid about all that “Fiona must have known who I was all along” crap. Who was I, Miss Marple? Sam Hellerman, please assemble all the guests in the drawing room, and you might want to take the precaution of bringing along your revolver. I rather suspect there may be trouble. Does that mean you have cracked the case, Aunt Jane? Oh my, yes. I have known for some time. People can be very, very cruel….
There was really only one blindingly obvious conclusion here: I was starting to lose my marbles.
I wondered how long this part was going to last. I mean, mooning over the mystery woman, wondering who she was, where she was, what she was doing and with whom, and why she was doing it, walking around feeling like I’d just been punched in the stomach. I was starting to get a little tired of it. Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed thinking about expressing my horniness in the context of the mystery woman. I did it all the time. And I still tended to feel fairly lovey-dovey and soppy and emotional when I thought of her, imagining what it might be like to be going out with Fiona and doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things like going to the library and making out, or going to the movies and making out, or ridiculing normal people at the mall. And making out.
Actually, you know what? I’m still not all that clear on what’s involved in doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things. I just assume it’s a lot of making out and groping in public, sex in cars, blow jobs in public restrooms, going to movies, eating at restaurants, listening to the radio, arguing about trivia, and—what else? Do you help each other with your homework? Play Scrabble, build models, buy food at the grocery store and cook it for each other, meet at the Rec. Center or at the beach for a game of volleyball with her Nair-commercial friends? Does she ask you which dress makes her look fatter, like Carol does with Little Big Tom? Does she throw a stapler at you and stop talking to you for days when you can’t figure out the right answer? Do you share your secrets and deepest fears with one another, or are those subjects still just as weird and awkward and best not brought up, maybe even especially to someone to whom you are constantly, incessantly, relentlessly giving the time?
I only mention it because I have this idea, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it’s frowned upon, even if it’s a doomed scenario, even if the world is definitely gonna win. Like you’re allies. The last remnant of your people. A Sex Alliance Against Society. But maybe I have it all wrong. It does sound like a quaint, farfetched idea, now that I’ve put it in words. And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. d. and q. at the same time.
Nevertheless, Fiona was like that in my mind. What does it have to do with “having sex,” as Sam Hellerman might put it if he were in a particularly dainty mood? I’m not all that sure. But I know it’s related somehow.
Having made out with Fiona that one time made the issue seem more real. But that was an illusion. There wasn’t any difference at all between the idea of being in a Sex Alliance Against Society with Fiona and the idea of being in one with Kyrsten Blakeney. Both notions were remote, impossible, out of the question, preposterous. Both girls were, with regard to me, equally imaginary.
And I was sure, as sure as I was that C. S. Lewis invented Narnia, that neither of them would, in the unlikely event that the option were ever to come up, fail to choose the world. Of course not. I probably wouldn’t, either, if the world would have me.
MAKING AMENDS
It wasn’t till a couple days after Little Big Tom and I got in touch with our feelings on the occasion of his apologizing for the Stratego Sex Incident that I happened to glance at the stack of deconfiscated weapons-and-tactics magazines on my dresser.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but Little Big Tom had put a Post-it on the top magazine. It said “look in the closet.” I frowned and slid open the closet door and, well, maybe you guessed it already, but I was totally thrown: there was a guitar case in there with a Post-it on it that said “Merry Christmas in advance.”
Damn. Little Big Tom had trouble expressing himself in spoken words, but he was a master of concise communication in Post-it form.
I pulled out the guitar case and opened it. There was a great electric guitar in it. I mean, fucking great. Gibson. Melody Maker. Midsixties. Kind of beat-up. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen or touched with my hands that wasn’t attached to someone named Fion
a. There was yet another Post-it on the headstock that said “you’re on your own for the amp.”
Okay, so that might have been one Post-it too many. Even the master of the Post-it communications revolution can overdo it sometimes. But damn. How had he known that that was pretty much my ultimate fantasy guitar? I had no idea. Oh wait, yes I did. Because he had read my notebook. Little Big Tom had done everything wrong and had broken a great many well-established, TV-dramatized, “Dear Abby”–certified rules about parental conduct with regard to respecting people’s privacy whenever drugs are not involved, but I’ve got to say that in the all-important stage known as Making Amends by Trying to Purchase Affection and Trust with Extravagant Gifts, he had really come through.
Maybe it’s just the lust for worldly possessions talking, but I think this may have been the first time in my life I was this unsuccessful when I tried to make everything disappear in a cloud of cynicism. I admit, I got a little choked up.
I made a silent vow not to ridicule him without his being aware of it for at least a week.
Having the new guitar made me want to play better, to sort of do it justice, and I started to practice a lot more. Little Big Tom had bought it from a friend of his who had been in some old blues-country-jam band and who now had a guitar repair place, which was the reason it was set up so well and played so easily. According to my mom, Little Big Tom had been planning to get me an electric guitar for Christmas even before the Stratego Sex Incident. He had found out from my notebook that I lusted after a Melody Maker and had felt so bad about the snooping that he had decided to expedite matters and try to scare one up.
This was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I couldn’t forget it. I let a lot of prime opportunities for LBT ridicule slide right by because of it. I knew Little Big Tom could tell that the gift had worked and that I was more positively disposed toward him, because he increased the frequency of his trademark pop-in comments. That was the downside. It was annoying. On the other hand, I didn’t mind too much. Why not let him have his fun, too?
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