It kind of made me shiver like when you’re afraid of something spooky. Coincidences will do that to you.
THE ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO
If we were really going to be in this Festival of Lights thing, we had our work cut out for us. We didn’t sound—what’s the word I’m looking for? “Good”? Yes, that’s the one: we didn’t sound good. We had grand ambitions but limited talent and finesse, and we had less than six weeks to get our act together.
Nevertheless, choosing the band name, stage names, credits, and first album title for your first performance during a midday talent exhibition in the high school auditorium are some of the most important decisions in a band’s career, and we gave them a great deal of thought.
Eventually, we settled on Balls Deep, Comrade Gal-hammer on guitar, Our Dear Leader on bass and embroidery, the Lonely Dissident on Real Fancy and Important Percussion, first album We Control the Horizontal. We were going for a kind of communist guerilla/seventies porn vibe. If we had had the time or ability we would have grown mustaches and chest hair. That wasn’t possible, but we did have big medallions and little blue Chinese hats with red stars on them from the surplus store, and these huge white shoulder holsters that looked great with the black mechanic’s jumpsuits we got from the St. Vincent de Paul. I swiped Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara T-shirt, which looked pretty cool when I unzipped the jumpsuit down to Che’s cute little chin and positioned my medallion over his nose.
Amanda, who has a lot of artistic talent, even painted us a big banner, following Sam Hellerman’s specifications, though I think she put a lot of herself into it, too. It was very seventies, with some silhouetted figures in educational kama sutra poses along the bottom, and a big AK-47 on either side.
“You’ll never get away with this,” she said, and I supposed she was probably right. It did look great, though.
Sam Hellerman’s idea for the audition tape was simple: just make a tape of a real, harmless band and put our name on it. Well, not our full name. We were going to be B.D. till the day of the show. We ended up putting some of Little Big Tom’s bland elevator rock on the tape.
I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I’m only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.
Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get right on it.
A WEIRD, WEIRD THING
I was scheduled to visit Dr. Hexstrom’s office every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. In our second session, during Spirit Week, she continued to talk to me about books and my dad’s teenage library, never even bringing up the suicide thing. Or rather, I talked about the books. Strangely, I was doing most of the talking. Usually my role in a conversation is just to stare at the other person till they lose track of what they’re trying to say and eventually give up. But with Dr. Hexstrom, it was almost like these roles were reversed. Sometimes her facial expressions would communicate things like “oh, come off it,” or “I see what you’re getting at,” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.” Other times her face would be like that of a blank, unreadable mannequin head.
I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something. I can be addled, or totally lost, or even feeling crazy, but I usually have at least some confidence in my ability to describe the confusion, even if I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m doing. Out loud, though, it’s a mess. I sound like way more of an idiot than I like to think I am. I’m worse than Little Big Tom. It was only because I liked and trusted Dr. Hexstrom so much that I could handle the humiliation—I would have run from the room screaming if anybody else had been there.
Anyway, as I explained to Dr. Hexstrom during our second ride on the funky mental-health express, the main guy in The Doors of Perception really is an ass. At one point, he picks up The Tibetan Book of the Dead, opens it at random, and finds great significance in this quotation: “O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.” Mmm, deep. I guess if you’re on drugs all the time, and if you’re confident that everyone will be all impressed by the fact that you’re o. d. all the t., and if you make sure you get in at least one mention of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you can get away with scribbling down any old thing, and pretending it’s a book. And everyone will just go along with it. Or it was like that in the sixties, anyway. The Doors of Perception guy is a Little Big Tom type, only much less loveable. You get lost in one of his convoluted sentences and you may never find your way back again: just light a signal fire with a couple of otherwise unattested adverbs and hope the rescue squad notices you and sends in a helicopter to fly you out. The book is short, but it took what seemed like several lifetimes to be over, and when it finally was over I felt as though I had just been informed that I didn’t have terminal cancer after all. There was another “book” in the same volume called Heaven and Hell, but I was confident that this guy would have nothing to teach me about hell that I had not already directly experienced while slogging through The Doors of Perception, so I decided to give it a miss.
The Seven Storey Mountain started off slow, but at least you could tell it was about something real, not just some poseur showing off. The main reason I started reading it was to see if I could figure out if there was a reason why the funeral card and the book shared the same scriptural quotation. So far I couldn’t tell about that, but the book was strangely absorbing. It reminded me of Slan, a bit. It’s about this weird, slightly freaky kid whose mom is dead and whose dad is this crazy artist. He reminded me a little of me, too, to be honest. Well, he’s not quite as freaky as me or the slan kid, maybe, but I could tell his true freakiness was scheduled to come out later, since he drops a lot of hints right from the beginning that he’s going to end up becoming a monk at the end. That sort of blows the suspense, though maybe the excitement is all in how he ends up getting there—the best stories are sometimes like that.
I hadn’t even known they still had monks outside of D and D, kung fu movies, and heavy metal albums. But I have this weird interest in priests and churches and that sort of thing because the seventh-grade aptitude test and my derogatory nickname set me up for it. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the dim but well-intentioned social engineer who had designed that aptitude test had read The Seven Storey Mountain and incorporated it into the test, so that when I answered questions indicating that I was a weird, slightly freaky kid with one parent missing like this slanlike monk-to-be character, the test said “ding! Clergy!”
If that’s the case, I bet the Seven Storey Mountain guy never dreamed that his book would set in motion a process that fifty years later would cause a fourteen-year-old rock and roller in suburban California to have as his derogatory nickname an abbreviation for Child Molester. Or maybe he knew all along that that’s what would happen. And wrote the book anyway, the bastard.
So I had to explain to Dr. Hexstrom about Chi-Mo in order to talk about my Seven Storey Mountain theory. I could tell she didn’t believe me at first, but then I could tell she did. She seemed pretty taken aback by it. I can see why. It’s a weird, weird thing.
NATURE’S MARVELS
We had known it was coming,
and eventually it did, the day after my second Dr. Hexstrom session. To pay us back for skipping boxing to discuss Deanna Schumacher at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, Mr. Donnelly decided to subject Sam Hellerman and me to this thing they call a “grudge match.” That’s when they put two best friends in the ring of subhuman PE students. There’s this theory that such fights will be especially vicious and entertaining because of the fighters’ long history with each other and because they’re more likely to react with indignation when attacked by one another. “Grudge match” doesn’t seem like the most appropriate term for it, but that’s what they call it, being psychopathic semi-literates with vocabularies that are, let’s face it, not all that powerful.
This is the sort of thing that gets everyone really excited around here. The girls took time off from Rape Prevention to crowd around and watch. The normal guys in the class even pushed pause on their “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” tape loop. Which rarely happens: this was a big occasion. Mr. Donnelly cranked up his facial hue till he was approximately the color of ketchup and opened the proceedings in the usual way: he made us touch our gloves together, bellowed “Don’t bleed till you’re hit, Hellerman! I mean it!” and trotted backward to the corner of the mat. Then he shouted, as he always does: “Commence!”
Well, it was a dumb idea, of course, because everyone knew that bleeding before he was hit was precisely what Sam Hellerman intended to do, and that I wasn’t going to hit him anyway. In other words, there wasn’t destined to be much dork-on-dork drama, and the crowd was going to be disappointed. But in fact Sam Hellerman just stood there for a long while, staring at me. I shot him a puzzled look, and everyone shifted a little uncomfortably, as mystified as I was. I was almost starting to wonder if something had snapped inside his brain and he really intended to go through with “boxing” me, but then I realized what he was up to. He was trying to stall as long as possible, knowing that once he and his spontaneously bloody nose had finally pushed off to the nurse’s office, I might still have to face another opponent. I doubted he’d be able to stall long enough, but I appreciated the gesture. I focused my mind on my own nose as though it were Fiona-Deanna’s candle, but try as I might, I just couldn’t make the blood flow Hellerman style—that’s why I don’t call myself a hypnotizer.
The crowd started the customary chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,” though some were saying “kill, kill, kill,” which was ludicrously wishful thinking, under the circumstances. Some of them started trying to shove us farther into the ring toward each other. Mr. Donnelly, his face now throbbing and glowing and looking just a bit like a Lava lamp, was still shouting, “Commence! Commence!”
It was at this point, amidst all the shoving, that someone successfully “pantsed” Sam Hellerman. That is to say, someone grabbed his gay little blue and white George Michael shorts by the hem of each leg and yanked them down, so that he was standing there with the g. l. b. & w. GMS’s around his ankles, looking extremely ludicrous, wearing nothing but his Boogie Knights T-shirt and his rather ill-fitting jockstrap. A wave of giggling from the Rape Prevention girls swept the room and shook the rafters. I was glad it wasn’t me they had pantsed, not least because of that whole ball-spotting thing, but my heart really went out to Sam Hellerman, especially since he had only been standing there in pantsing position in the first place out of kindness to me.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Sam Hellerman’s situation, but if you have, you probably already know how difficult it is to pull up any gay little George Michael shorts that may happen to be resting on the floor around your ankles while your hands are encased in boxing gloves. Try it if you don’t believe me. It’s very hard to get a grip. Sam Hellerman, poor guy, gave it a shot, though, exposing himself to even more indignity as he did so. That was enough for him: he looked up at Mr. Donnelly with a transcendent kind of hatred and opened the floodgates. He even leaned his head back so that the blood bubbled up from his nostrils like lava. Mount Hellerman. It was very impressive.
The crowd recoiled and seemed to hesitate between disappointment and disgust, finally settling on the surly, vapid bewilderment that is pretty much the normal person’s natural state. The vein just under the surface of Mr. Donnelly’s shiny burgundy forehead slithered like a shrink-wrapped lizard, and I almost thought he was going to say something like “curses, foiled again!” But he didn’t say c., f. a. Rather, he sputtered inarticulately and turned his attention to me, a snake eyeing a tasty rodent. Fortunately, I was saved once again through the agency of the solid, dependable Mount Hellerman, which even in the midst of a major eruption had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm on the way out. It was at best a temporary reprieve, but it was almost worth whatever consequences lay ahead to have the opportunity to witness Mr. Donnelly’s face turn from a light burgundy to a hitherto unrecorded shade of deep magenta. One of nature’s marvels.
A BROOD OF VIPERS
One thing was certain: the mysteries and puzzles in my life were percolating with more oomph than they ever had previously. Yet I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At any rate, I now had two people to investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he was the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could there be in this thing?
Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual between Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the Catcher code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he was impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.
The first thing we did at the library was to use a concordance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from Matthew 3:9.
The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.
Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic “question authority” message. “Maybe they were trying to say that this Timothy J. Anderson was some kind of rebel.”
He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie Carrie. J. the B. was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”
I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the Seven Story Mountain guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe, which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who knows? The SSM guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats” for all the difference it would make. You can m
ake something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.
But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.
“Look,” he said in a library whisper.
I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:
“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, if I’m not mistaken, but who am I to criticize John the Baptist on stylistic grounds? I’m sure it sounded very convincing at the time. You probably had to be there. Anyway, Tit, remember, had written in the uncoded part of his note: “The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire.”
That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the Seven Storey Mountain guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.
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