But, see, the truth is, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of Fiona even now that I knew she was fake. Even fake Fiona had a hold on me. I kind of lied about how it was all pure imaginary sex, and how I had stopped daydreaming about a Sex Alliance Against Society with her, even though she was now even more imaginary than she had been before Sam Hellerman showed me the IHA-SV yearbook.
I didn’t believe that Miami story for one second, of course. That was just Sam Hellerman trying to be clever and stage-manage my pain, like he does from time to time. He’s a born facilitator.
She still lived in Salthaven or Salthaven Vista and went to Immaculate Heart Academy, Slut Heaven. Of course she did. Except her name was Deanna now instead of Fiona.
Okay. Could there be a future for Deanna Schumacher and me? Well, no. But was it worth continuing to obsess over her anyway? Why the hell not? You know, I could track her down and she would fall for me and break up with her boyfriend and we could go away together. Deanna Schumacher and me, I mean, not me and the boyfriend. And maybe she could even dress up as Fiona for me from time to time. When you think about it, it wouldn’t be too different from how grown-up wives dress up in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms for their husbands, except in Deanna Schumacher’s case she’d be in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform to begin with and would have to take it off in order to put on the Fiona costume and then put it on again when we were done pleasing each other. Or maybe I could just develop the school uniform fetish myself, so she wouldn’t even have to do the fake Fiona thing. I’m sure she’d appreciate that, with her busy schedule and so forth. And you know, once I articulated that thought, I was pretty sure I already had started to develop the school uniform fetish. This was promising.
IMBECILE!
Knowing her true identity and where she went to school put the whole Fiona Deal, which had now become the Deanna Schumacher Deal, in a new light. Instead of blindly obsessing and trying to spot her at random, I now knew where to start looking, and it felt like waking up in a new and better world. Sam Hellerman had said I could keep the IHA-SV yearbook—one of his CHS friends had stolen it from an older sister who went there, and didn’t care too much about getting it back. I made a note of the name, Wendee Foot, etched in gold lettering on the cover, just in case I needed to contact her for further information. The messages this girl’s friends had scribbled in it were pretty hilarious, and that was diverting for at least a while, but other than the photo Sam Hellerman had pointed out, I couldn’t find any information on Deanna Schumacher in the yearbook. She wasn’t on any teams or in any clubs, not even drama, as Sam Hellerman had indicated. Well, she could have joined this year, I supposed. She didn’t even appear to have been in the group class picture—at least, I didn’t recognize her if she was.
Once I was back home, just to see, I looked up “Schumacher” in the phone book. No listing. Well, that would have been too easy. I clipped out the little black-and-white photo and put it on my desk, trying to decide if it would be too sad to start carrying it in my wallet. I know, I suck. But you have to give me a break. It was all I had.
I spent the Saturday after the Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway meeting staring at Deanna Schumacher’s photo, moping, and playing the guitar. The next day was Halloween, and I spent that day doing pretty much the same thing.
When it began to get dark, I broke down and dialed up Sam Hellerman, but he was out. Maybe he was at another CHS party and hadn’t invited me this time because he didn’t want to risk another Fiona-Deanna fiasco? In fact, I didn’t actually believe that Sam Hellerman had gone to a Halloween party, though it was funny to speculate on what kind of goofy-ass costume he would have worn. A month before, I’d have said it was weird that Sam Hellerman hadn’t been home, that he was always at home when he wasn’t here, but now I just didn’t know. At this point it was weird no matter where Sam Hellerman was.
Amanda was out trick-or-treating with her friends. It was a transitional time for her, the last year when trick-or-treating was appropriate, and the first year when all the girls switched from being cats or pumpkins to dressing up as hookers or French maids or slutty celebrities. Little Big Tom had been freaked out by her hoochie mama costume. “Everyone’s a ho for Halloween!” she had shouted, and then she had stormed out, slamming the door. Now, that, I thought, is one hell of a song title. I was looking forward to eavesdropping on the family discussion where LBT tried to explain how her Halloween costume was all about disrespect for women and Vietnam, but I knew I would have to wait.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I retreated to my room and turned the TV on. Channel two was playing horror movies all night, and Evil Dead II had just started. I put on Rattus Norvegicus, turned the TV sound down, sat down on my bed, and tried to think of something to do.
I turned to the CEH books, which I had arranged on my desk in a row against the wall, and thought about where to go next with the reading list. I had given it my best shot, but in the end I couldn’t make it through The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I think the most likely explanation for its existence is that some typesetter wanted to demonstrate all the different typefaces and font sizes and layouts his fancy printing press could do. Back in the days before computers, it must have been pretty impressive. As a story, though, it was a waste of three hundred and thirteen pages. And it told me nothing about my dad. If he went around pretending he was into it, I’d have to say he was one (devil-head) pretentious bastard of a kid. But maybe he tried to read it and didn’t get it and gave up on it in frustration just like me. That’s how I’d prefer it to have been, but there was no way to know.
I had had an easier time with Siddhartha, CEH 1964. It’s about this freaky Buddha-wannabe kid, a sort of George Harrison type who wanders the earth looking for enlightenment or whatever. Everybody in the book is all impressed with him, kind of like how the Catcher Cult people just love that Holden Caulfield to pieces. Personally, I couldn’t really see the attraction, but the book wasn’t bad. If Catcher in the Rye were a kung fu movie, and HC went up to a mountain to learn some paradoxical truths and some martial arts techniques named after animals from an eccentric old monk, then you’d pretty much have Siddhartha. Except they leave out the part where he flies through the air beating up ninjas and finally kills the guy who murdered his family when he was a little kid in the flashback at the beginning: maybe that’s in Siddhartha II. There were several passages that my dad had marked by drawing lines on the outer margin in pencil, sometimes with question marks and once with a kind of emphatic exclamation point. It made me think of my dad as an intense, yet deep and sensitive, guy.
One corner of a page of Siddhartha, CEH 1964, had been folded over to mark the place, which happened to be the best scene in the book, where this sexy girl named Kamala kisses the main guy to reward him for reciting a poem about how hot she is. It reminded me of how Fiona-Deanna had made out with me because she was impressed with my powerful vocabulary, and somehow that felt encouraging. It gave me a feeling of everything coming together.
But there was also, at the top of one page, a spot where the word “help” had been written heavily in pen over and over, so that it had almost pierced through the paper and etched the word into several pages below it. That seemed kind of desperate looking and sad, especially as it contrasted starkly with the serene tone of the book itself. In any other situation, this would have struck me as unremarkable. I’d done the same sort of thing countless times in my notebooks. But because it had been written by my dad, however long ago, it was simply excruciating to look at. I would never know what had caused him that kind of distress, though I suppose he had found comfort in Siddhartha, which was yet another thing I probably would never quite understand all the way. I shook the thought out of my head.
Well, at least Siddhartha was short, which was the way to go when choosing books from the CEH library. I decided the next one would be Slan, CEH 1965, which was short as well.
Evil Dead II had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes in
to Blood on Satan’s Claw. I let the last couple of songs on Pink Flag play out, and then put on Black Rose. I carefully replaced Siddhartha in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while. Something was bugging me. Something about the books…Many of the titles would make great band names. I had always thought that one of the best potential band names among them was La Peste, CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’ Catcher curriculum.
Now, if this were a murder mystery, and I were a weird Belgian guy with a big mustache, this is the point where I would suddenly stop dead, drop my tiny glass of chocolate liqueur, and say something like “But no! But I have been an imbecile! Imbécile!” And then you’d have to wait another fifty pages or so to find out exactly what the hell I had been talking about. But I won’t do that to you.
The salutation of Tit’s note had been mon cher monsieur, “my dear sir” in French and kind of a standard French way to start a letter. I hadn’t thought too much about it before. But the thought that struck me while I was standing there in front of the books, looking at La Peste, CEH 1965, and listening to Thin Lizzy was: what if mon cher monsieur hadn’t been a real part of the note, but rather part of the key, like the scratched-out and corrected date?
Well, that was it. Tit had been very, very complicated about it, though and even with the key from the Catcher I almost didn’t realize I had cracked the code. But after a lengthy scribbling session, I pretty much had it. The salutation was indeed an indication to the recipient that the coded message would be in French. Tit had left out the punctuation and accents, regrouped the characters in strings of fourteen, and recopied the resulting coded message backward before arranging the fourteen-character clumps underneath each other—man, those boys must have had a lot of time on their hands.
It decoded to:
“J’ai vu MT hier soir et je l’ai ramonée sec. Détails à suivre. Vas-tu aux funerailles? J’aimerais meiux être ligoté et fouetté.”
At first, though I recognized it as French, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where all the accents and spaces and punctuation went, though it helped that the capital letters had remained in the code-parallelogram. The word mieux had been misspelled. As I’ve said, despite three-plus years of study, French wasn’t my strongest suit. But I was highly motivated. In the end I had to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally a few discreet questions at school the next day, but eventually I was able to punctuate and translate it.
The first line threw me a bit because of the verb ramoner, which I’d never seen before but which grabbed my attention as it would any Ramones fan. According to the dictionary, it literally means “to scrub out or vigorously clean a chimney.” Here, though, it was clearly being used as a sexual metaphor. To ramone someone dry, as Tit’s sentence had it, is to, well, you know—do I have to draw a diagram, folks? It couldn’t have had anything to do with the actual Ramones—unless that’s where they got their name or something?
Anyway, the whole thing translates, roughly, as:
“I saw MT last night and I ramoned her dry. Details to follow. Are you going to the funeral? I would rather be tied up and whipped.”
I learned more French translating those sentences with a dictionary and a grammar and a weird conversation with Madame Jimenez-Macanally than I had in three-plus years of Jean and Claude, I can tell you that.
THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was to refrain from mentioning the Catcher code to Sam Hellerman on the way to school the next day.
He was in a buoyant mood when I met him at the usual corner. He wanted to discuss his new theory:
“Just think what a better world we would have,” he said, “if David Bowie had never met Brian Eno. That was the worst tragedy of the twentieth century.”
“Really?” I said.
In fact, I disagreed rather strongly with this, but my mind was on other things, and, to be honest, Sam Hellerman was getting on my nerves. Who wanted to think about Eno and Bowie when there was a Deanna Schumacher and a Catcher code on the menu? I didn’t even bother trying to ask him where he had been on Halloween night: I knew he’d only lie, which would demean us both. Plus, I still had some questions to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally about the French text before I could be totally sure what the message said, so I was preoccupied. I gave him the silent treatment for most of the way. But I doubt he noticed: it wasn’t too different from how things were when I was not giving him the silent treatment.
I found Madame Jimenez-Macanally in her classroom during Brunch and asked her my questions about accents, punctuation, funerals, ramoning, and being tied up and whipped. She had more questions about my questions than I thought necessary or polite, and she was giving me a peculiar look the whole time, but I ended up getting what I needed. Then, when class started, I’d catch her staring at me from time to time with this mystified expression.
“Mack Anally has a crush on you,” said Yasmynne Schmick, noticing.
That was kind of funny, but I had other concerns. Because Madame J.-M. and I were basically in the same mystified boat. The “solved” puzzle was still a puzzle. What the hell did it mean?
Now, the school calendar for November is dominated by this thing called “Homecoming.” I’m not all that clear on it, but I know it involves a football game, a “Rally,” and a dance, plus a slew of other pointless and embarrassing activities intended to promote the whole thing. It’s nothing to do with me. They always decorate the Hillmont Knight with flowers and blue and white ribbons. And this year, they had signs up everywhere trying to stoke excitement over Spirit Week: “Come See the Spirit Towel!” Even if I knew what the hell the Spirit Towel was, I don’t think I’d tell you: I’m pretty sure we’re all better off not knowing.
I have my doubts as to whether even the full-on normal people cared very much about Homecoming or Spirit Week, to be honest. But definitely no one in my world (which I have to concede now included not only Sam Hellerman but also, by extension, the drama hippies) had the slightest interest in any of this stuff, other than to mock it. Yasmynne Schmick, who had by now become my regular Advanced Conversation partner, had said: “I can’t help it, Moe—I’m obsessed with the Spirit Towel.” Which I thought was pretty funny, actually.
But with the announcement of the Spirit Week activities came some more interesting and surprising news. The Hillmont powers that be, for reasons that remain unclear, had decided to hold a “Battle of the Bands” instead of a Pep Rally for December. Well, first they called it a Battle of the Bands, but someone objected to the word “Battle” as being too competitive. Which is hilarious, because “Battle” is far too gentle a word to use to describe the game of survival of the most psychotic that is the soul and essence of Hillmont High School and that would have made Charles Darwin himself weep and wish he’d never invented a theory to elucidate it. Some things are better left unelucidated, he would have said, and it would have been hard to disagree with him.
So anyway, they changed the name to “Convergence of the Bands,” and then to “Convergence!” because they didn’t want to restrict it to bands. Then, and why I’ll never know, they changed the name to “Festival of Lights.” But essentially we were looking at your basic high school talent show. It was going to happen during fourth period–lunch–fifth period at the end of the second week of December, six weeks away.
“Green Sabbath should totally try to get on this,” said Sam Hellerman, during one of his increasingly rare appearances in my presence instead of in the shadow of the Hillmont Knigh
t and Celeste Fletcher’s ass. He was talking about Green Sabbath, of course, Monsignor Eco-druid on guitar, The Grim Recycler on bass and industrial sabotage, Todd “Percussion” Panchowski on drums, percussion, acoustic and semiacoustic drums, cymbals, tambourines, cowbells, chimes, gongs, toms, shaker eggs, bongos, stick clicks, wood blocks, percussion, percussion and more percussion. First album Our Drummer Is Kind of Full of Himself.
I looked at him dubiously. How could we ever get on it? You had to submit an audition tape to this group of normal students supervised by Mr. Teone. A tape of us actually playing, I was pretty sure, would automatically disqualify us, maybe even permanently, from playing anywhere, even with a more sympathetic panel of judges. Anyway, it sounded like a Festival of Insufferable Tedium and Aggravation to me. Did we even want to get in on it?
“We do,” said Sam Hellerman, “and we can.” And he gave me that “leave it to me” look. So I figured he had a plan.
At the time, I found it difficult to see how any good could come of such a thing. And as it turns out, I guess I was mostly right.
DR. HEXSTROM
My first “therapy” appointment was also during that first week of November. My mom insisted on driving me there, even though I wanted to ride my bike. That was to make sure I wouldn’t duck out, which was a valid concern. She checked me in with the receptionist but didn’t stick around to see the shrink with me—maybe that was against the rules or something.
The psychiatrist was Dr. Judith Hexstrom. My plan had been to give her the old freaky-youth-genius treatment and try to unnerve her with silence and unreadable facial expressions. I was thinking maybe if I could convince her I was legitimately crazy I could at least get some medication that I could give to Sam Hellerman for a Christmas present. It didn’t work out that way, though.
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