For one thing, to my surprise, I kind of liked Dr. Hexstrom. She wasn’t young or pretty, but there was something about her face that I liked, even though it was my considered opinion that her whole profession wasn’t much more than a shameless racket. And she was by far the most intelligent adult I’d ever talked to.
Here’s how sharp Dr. Hexstrom was: I happened to mention Mr. Teone’s “naked day of zombies” comment, as an example of his bizarre behavior and of how weird normal people can be. “Pretty strange, huh?” I said.
“Not really. If you were wearing that shirt.”
I looked down at my T-shirt, then raised my head and gave her the look that says “how so?”
Dr. Hexstrom said: “Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. It’s Latin for ‘Kill them all, and God will know his own.’ From the Middle Ages, the Crusades.”
Damn. I had been wearing my “Kill ’em All” shirt that day, and he had made me turn it inside out. And Dr. Hexstrom’s phrase did sound kind of like what Mr. Teone had said, allowing for his speech impediment. It made more sense than “day of suicide-osity,” anyway, though I’d still classify it as a bizarre episode, especially with all that laughing.
I looked at Dr. Hexstrom, and my look said: “how the hell did you figure that out?”
Then, when she didn’t respond, I said, out loud, if I remember correctly: “How the hell did you figure that out?”
“It’s well known,” she said imperiously.
It’s well known. Not by me it wasn’t. I’m not sure she was able to pick it up, but I gave her the look that said: “well, ladi-da.”
I had expected Dr. Hexstrom to plunge into the suicide thing right away, but instead, the first thing she said was, “That’s an unusual book.”
She was talking about The Doors of Perception, CEH 1966. I know I said that the next CEH book on the reading list was Slan. I had started it, and it was pretty cool. It was about this freaky kid whose dad is dead. He and his mom are members of a mutant alien species called slans that have telepathic powers because of tendrils on their heads, which they try to disguise by hiding them in their hair-dos. But the normal people still pursue them and try to exterminate them. They got the dad already when the main slan was a little kid, and they get the mom, too, right at the beginning of the book. I could totally relate.
But there had been a change in plans since I solved the Catcher code and gained a new interest in underlining, so I put Slan aside temporarily. Only two of the books had a whole lot of actual underlining: The Doors of Perception and The Naked and the Dead. The Naked and the Dead was the one that had been inscribed only CH with no date, so I wasn’t even sure it belonged with the others. However, it was the one where the markings had seemed the most codelike. There were individual words underlined, sometimes very insignificant ones like “of” or “very” some were circled and sometimes only parts of words were underlined or circled. If there was an encoded message in there, though, I couldn’t find it. And I had spent hours and hours trying.
I had originally shied away from this book because I was worried it had to do with the Grateful Dead and nudity, and, well, let me put it this way: if you can imagine a more alarming combination, your imagination is quite a bit better than mine. Then I realized it was about war, and it was more like naked people and dead people, two of my favorite subjects, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Now, this book was by a guy named Norman Mailer, and he was a piece of work. You know how Holden Caulfield said “giving her the time?” Well it was the same with Norman Mailer. He said “fug.” I kid you not. Like “this is a fugging nightmare!” or “go fug yourself.” You know, it’s no wonder everyone was all crazy and weird in the sixties, if everything was being run by prissy grandma types like Holden Caulfield and Norman Mailer.
In the end I couldn’t take much of The Naked and the Dead, and I put it aside for later. It wasn’t like it was even a real CEH book anyway. I went for The Doors of Perception instead, because it had a lot of underlining, too, though admittedly it didn’t look very code-y.
The Doors of Perception is about this guy who takes a lot of drugs to try to see what it’s like to be a crazy person. It’s kind of interesting, but the guy is pretty full of himself and a bad writer, too. He seems to forget what he was going to say around halfway through many of his long, complicated sentences, and then he tries to cover it up by spattering the page with highfalutin words that I swear he just made up. 30 Days to a More Annoying Vocabulary. If Holden Caulfield were to read it, he’d say something like “Gee, Wally, that’s swell and junk, but I feel all crumby on account of how it’s so phony and all.”
Still, I got a kick out of watching the drug guy try to pretend he was doing his drugs for some noble purpose rather than just indulging himself and getting high and trying to show off how with-it he was. It’s cool if you want to do drugs, but if you go around claiming it’s like discovering Antarctica or curing cancer you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.
Believe it or not, that’s pretty much what Dr. Hexstrom and I talked about, and she even kind of seemed to see what I was getting at. She was the only adult I had ever met who was Catcher aware but not necessarily Catcher devoted. She said she thought HC needed medication, and we had a good laugh about that one. She was all right.
Dr. Hexstrom was very interested in the CEH reading list, which I hadn’t intended to tell her about, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself in the end. I didn’t mention Tit or the Catcher code, of course, but we did talk a lot about Brighton Rock and even a little about the guy I accidentally beat up (though I downplayed it a bit and left out most of the blood, in consideration of the sensibilities of my audience). It was nice to talk to someone about a book without being worried that they would make you copy a page out of it, even though it probably wasn’t going to cure my unspecified mental problems and even though I very much doubted it would turn out to be worth a hundred and fifty bucks.
I think it was the most I’d ever spoken out loud in one sitting, and in spite of myself, I actually had a pretty good time. In fact, we never made it to the suicide thing. It was just like on TV. She said, “I’m sorry but I’m afraid our time is up.” I doubt she was actually all that sorry, but I kind of was.
SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL
Remember how the world came loose from its hinges and the fabric of reality began to unravel thread by thread and the space-time continuum got all chopped up and out of order all of a sudden? Well, that was just a passing thing.
What I’m getting at is, after weeks of transgressions against the established norms of dating mandated by international law, Née-Née Tagliafero abruptly ditched Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, bringing to a close one of the most curious episodes in Hillmont High School history. She started going instead with an eminently normal slow-witted alpha sadist named Mike Moon, who promptly proceeded to beat the hell out of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon in the parking lot before first period, to the evident amusement of a small crowd of onlookers and with the apparent approval of sweet little Née-Née as well. Like I said, back to normal. WAGBOG.
Sam Hellerman’s stint of spending every single lunch period with the drama hippies also abruptly ended on the same day: he met me at around locker 414, like in the old days, just as if the intervening weeks hadn’t even happened. And, you know, maybe I should have spotted it sooner, but there were just too many coincidences in bloom in and around this particular patch of the Sam Hellerman garden.
We were in the cafeteria. I was staring at Sam Hellerman with the question on my face, and he knew what the question was without my having to say it out loud. His earlier evasiveness had evaporated, and he actually seemed in a pretty good mood, though I didn’t know why yet.
“There’s some stuff I haven’t told you,” he said, as though that were something I didn’t already know.
Then Sam Hellerman began to tell the following story:
It seems that the Celeste Fletcher trio, along with the Syndie Duffy group and a few
others as well, had this kind of club that they called the Sisterhood. (I know—I’m eye-rolling and gagging, too.) They had a lot of complicated activities and rules and procedures, but the one that concerned Sam Hellerman was this game called Dud Chart. Or, I guess it was more like a contest. The name comes from this board game for girls called Mystery Date, where you would open a door in the middle of the board and the guy behind it would either be a dream, meaning a Greg Brady–looking guy with big fluffy sideburns in a purple velvet tuxedo, or a dud, meaning a guy who pretty much looked like Sam Hellerman and me. It was pretty kitschy retro popular. I think Mystery Date was even the theme of one of the proms last year.
In Dud Chart, they had this chart of all the dorky, nerdy guys in school, and the object was for each girl to score points on the chart by flirting with them or making out with them in various ways. Like you’d get a certain number of points for flirting, for kissing, for getting to different bases, or for walking around like Née-Née Tagliafero did with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, which had had one of the highest point values because it was so public. But it all had to be in public to some degree so it could be observed and documented. Different guys had different point values: the less desirable the guy, the higher the score. It was originally supposed to be just flirting and making out, but like a lot of dare-type situations, the stakes escalated as the game went on.
“So basically,” I said, “you’re talking about an institutionalized Make-out/Fake-out.”
“Pretty much,” he said, a little curtly, and continued to explain the system.
I supposedly had a pretty high point value, mostly because of the now-famous PE Rape-Prevention balls incident, which had made a big splash. Bobby Duboyce was near the top, too, because of his helmet. But here’s where Sam Hellerman came in. Celeste Fletcher, hoping to gain unfair advantage over the other girls, had hired Sam Hellerman as a kind of consultant. He pretty much knew everyone on the chart, and had all sorts of information about them that might be useful, and might even, she thought, be able to help set some of them up. Sam Hellerman’s stipulation was that she use her influence to keep both him and me off the chart and out of the game, which she had somehow been able to do. I said a silent prayer of thanks: my life definitely didn’t need another formal humiliation ritual.
They had planned to do some kind of splashy announcement of the results at one of the pep rallies. I don’t know, maybe passing out a zine with all the scores, or posting the chart? That’s just a guess. It didn’t actually happen because before they could complete the game Syndie Duffy had had a big falling-out with Lorra Jaffe. I don’t know the details, but the whole Sisterhood had basically collapsed in a shambles of infighting and scheming against one another, and Dud Chart had been forgotten in the excitement. Lorra Jaffe had focused her energy on trying to destroy Syndie Duffy instead of winning the relatively inconsequential make-out-with-dorks contest, and everyone else had followed suit.
It’s pretty hard to keep these elaborate schemes going for too long, though they can sometimes coast along on their own for a while. Meanspiritedness is powerful. I have no doubt that Née-Née Tagliafero’s team would have won, though. The Pierre Butterfly Cameroon gambit had been so spectacular that it was still being talked about several towns down the strip months later.
In the end, the Dud Chart fiasco was an object lesson in how getting involved with normal people, if you’re not normal yourself, or even if you’re subnormal/drama, is always trouble. You start by allowing your own world to be corrupted by their warped values, and then you gradually start using their sadistic methods and eventually end up adopting bits of their sick ideology. And even then, when you have become just like them, they will eventually turn on you anyway. Normal people are savage beasts. Even Sam Hellerman hadn’t been immune: he sold out his people, though the corruption thankfully hadn’t been deep enough to induce him to betray the sacred bonds of alphabetical order. It’s sad. I imagine some of those girls at least had been decent, nice people before they were infected with normalcy by exposure to Lorra Jaffe. Maybe not, though.
I was impressed by the deal Sam Hellerman had managed to get for his services as Celeste Fletcher’s Dork Consultant. Two full bottles of Percodan (from her dad’s pharmacy), a half-bottle of Valium (from her mom’s night table), twenty dollars, and a blow job. No way did I believe the blow job part at first, but he looked so serious and, um, pleased with himself while he was saying it that I even almost started to believe it. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were circumstances where it was conceivable that a Sam Hellerman could get a blow job, even an insincere one, from a Celeste Fletcher. And if you are under the impression that I was not burning with envy over said insincere blow job, I can assure you that you are quite mistaken.
According to Sam Hellerman, anyway, Celeste Fletcher had been a Sister of her word despite the cancelled contest. But she had held out till the end of the term of the deal before delivering the i. b. j. as a kind of final payment, which partly explained his searching looks in her direction out there on the lawn (he had been keeping an eye on his business interests, among other things) and his seeming indifference now that the transaction had been completed. On learning this, it occurred to me that oral sex would probably have been worth a lot of points in their game and that maybe Sam Hellerman had been in the running for the Make-out/Fake-out after all without his knowledge. Or maybe he had known, but they hadn’t known he’d known. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s faking out whom in the battle of the sexes. It hardly matters, though. A blow job is a blow job. Or so I am given to understand.
The Hellerman/Fletcher eye-ray/ass phenomenon had been pretty spectacular, though, and I still wasn’t sure, so I asked one last question: was it all just business, or did he really have the hots for Celeste Fletcher?
“Henderson,” he said, as he does when he wants me to know he’s being serious, “I have the hots for everyone.”
I could see his point.
COINCIDENCES WILL DO THAT TO YOU
Meanwhile, it was time to reassess the Catcher code. There wasn’t any direct evidence that the note had in fact been addressed to my dad, but it was a fair assumption. So my dad had had a friend, a Sam Hellerman–ish figure, named Tit, and they used to give each other coded notes. Probably there had been many, many other such notes, because such elaborate methods only develop over time, and not if you’re just dabbling. Each of the scribbled dates in the Catcher had potentially been keys to notes that were now lost. The note preserved in A Separate Peace was, I was guessing, a tiny remnant of a vast body of other coded notes, like a dinosaur’s fossilized rib. The more bones you find, the easier it is to imagine what the dinosaur might have looked like when it lived. If you only have the one rib, it’s harder, and the results will be sketchier. More notes would have made it easier to see the total picture of my dad and Tit and their world, but I only had the one note to go on. It was clear, though, that it was a pretty weird world.
I knew right off the bat that the picture was going to be distorted, but that didn’t prevent me from asking some questions. What kind of things did they encode? It appeared that they were in the habit of discussing more important, meaningful matters than Sam Hellerman and I ever had when we were playing our code games. Our coded messages were entirely trivial. For my dad and Tit, it was all about sexual conquests and dead people, neither of which had ever figured prominently in my and Sam Hellerman’s lives, though I guess Sam Hellerman was showing some promise in the former category. Moreover, I got the impression that Tit and my dad weren’t doing it just for fun but because they really didn’t want anyone else to read what they were writing.
I could understand why the sexual stuff was coded: in the sixties, everybody was all uptight about sex, and I bet you would have got in trouble for writing about how you had ramoned someone. But there was something odd about the fact that “the bastard is dead” had not been deemed worthy of being encoded, but “are you going to the funeral?” had been. O
r maybe the bastard who was dead wasn’t the same dead guy they were having the funeral for? Or maybe “the bastard is dead” is some quotation, like the Superman reference, that I wasn’t aware of. It could have been sex again, though. The being tied up and whipped thing, I mean, though that’s just an expression, too, in a way.
Tit’s question, however, had an answer. I had no doubt that my dad had in fact gone to the funeral. The date on Timothy J. Anderson’s funeral card from The Seven Storey Mountain was March 13, 1963. It didn’t square with the date on the note, but of course that wasn’t a real date; and “3/[something]/63” had been written in the Catcher. This pretty much had to be the funeral Tit had been asking about. Funerals don’t come up that often in a fifteen-year-old’s life.
So Timothy J. Anderson was dead, whether or not he had been “the bastard,” and my dad had gone to the funeral. He had had a book with him at the time, as always, and had put the memorial card in it, and maybe used it as a bookmark. There wasn’t much information on the card, just the date, a generic-sounding quotation from the Bible, and the location: St. Mary Star of the Sea in San Francisco. The other card in The Seven Storey Mountain, from Happy Day Dry Cleaners with One-Hour Martinizing, had no date, of course, but it happened to be located in roughly the same neighborhood as the church, if I wasn’t mistaken. All that proved was that he attended the funeral and visited the dry cleaners in the same neighborhood during the period when he was reading The Seven Storey Mountain. I knew my dad had grown up in the city, but I didn’t know where—I note-to-selfed that I should find a way to ask my mom discreetly.
I hadn’t quite finished The Doors of Perception yet, but it was clear that The Seven Storey Mountain was the book I should be reading, even though it looked kind of boring. I picked it up to flip through it and almost dropped it in surprise, because the title page had a quote from the Bible, and it was the same one that had been printed on Timothy J. Anderson’s funeral card: “for I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
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