King Dork

by Frank Portman

  The Bible passage brought to mind my first response to the note, the Rosemary’s Baby/ Black Sabbath–influenced idea that it had something to do with burning witches. Was there something in that after all? I mean, maybe Tit was implying that Timothy J. Anderson had been some kind of heretic, through a (devil-head) oblique and maybe ironic reference to a biblical text about burning trees and vipers and questioning authority? I really wished I knew more about history, religion, the Bible, witches, the sixties, and so forth. My Academic Achievements were second to none, yet somehow I instinctively knew I wasn’t going to solve this particular problem by making a collage or appreciating ethnic food or putting on a skit. In fact, I felt severely handicapped by my lack of knowledge in general, which is not something that comes up very often in my day-to-day life. Or more likely it comes up all the time without my realizing it.

  We had discovered something potentially meaningful, yet I didn’t get much satisfaction from it. Part of that was because solving one puzzle had simply opened a new set of puzzles, and vaguer ones at that, and I was more confused than ever. But mostly, it was because the whole thing gave me an uncomfortable, creepy feeling. Tit’s note was creepy. The Bible passage was creepy. It wasn’t what I had been going for with this cute little hobby of trying to investigate my dad’s teenage life through clues he had inadvertently left behind. I looked down at all of our research materials spread out on the table: Catcher, CEH 1960; the note from Tit; The Seven Storey Mountain; the Jerusalem Bible; the concordance; my French dictionary; my various notebooks—I could almost see and feel them morph from charming-exhilarating-profound to sordid-depressing-pointless. For some reason the phrase “brood of vipers” kept echoing unpleasantly in my head. I had this idiotic notion that the materials spread out on the table formed a kind of picture of the world, and that it wasn’t a picture I particularly cared for. And my dad’s role in this picture was maddeningly dim and indistinct.

  I had once again been distracted from the investigation by my own fantasies and emotions. Not Sam Hellerman, though. He was a bespectacled teenage research machine, the dork Woodward and the geek Bernstein rolled into one diminutive, socially inferior package, loading the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle into the microfilm viewing machine.

  I tried to shake the vipers out of my head. It seemed to me that the way to approach the Seven Storey Mountain/ Timothy J. Anderson problem was not so much through trying to understand the meaning of the text itself but through thinking of the quotation as a kind of object, an accessory. I wear a “Kill ’em All” shirt and it pegs me as a Guns-and-Ammo guy, even if I don’t literally want everybody to get killed and sorted out by God. Sam Hellerman’s black high-tops put him in this category made up of the kind of people who wear Converse All Stars; and if you notice that I, too, am wearing black high-tops, you could conjecture that I might have more in common with Sam Hellerman than just shoes. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the same way with quotations from the Bible as it is with shoes. So this freaky monk character has Matthew 3:9–11 on the title page of his book; Timothy J. Anderson had it on his funeral card. Maybe Timothy J. Anderson was a freaky monk, too. Clergy.

  I had been thinking along these lines for a couple of days, since the Dr. Hexstrom session I described above, when I explained to her about how I ended up being called Chi-Mo.

  Now, one thing you have to understand is that my conversations with Dr. Hexstrom involved very few spoken words. We had quickly reached the point where a great deal could be communicated through a series of facial expressions and meaningful looks. It would have looked a bit like telepathy to an outside observer, probably, though it wasn’t. We were like two slans, that Dr. Hexstrom and me.

  She got the ball rolling, as usual, with a question: “So, in view of that, how do you feel about your father being Catholic?”

  My look said “how do you mean, Catholic?”

  She gave me a pretty complicated look, which basically meant “what part of Catholic don’t you understand?” but also implied “come, come, now, you’re a bright boy—surely such an obvious fact cannot have escaped you?”

  Well, she was right, of course, as I realized when I thought about it. We had never gone to church as a family, that I could recall, and I don’t remember there being any talk of my dad’s going to church on his own, either. But my dad’s funeral had been in a Catholic church and he was buried in a Catholic cemetery, or rather in a Catholic marble filing cabinet for dead people. When I brought it up to Amanda later on, she looked at me as though I were as dumb as a bag of dry leaves and said of course he had been Catholic. She even knew the names of the Catholic schools he had attended: Queen of the Universe grammar school and MPB College Preparatory. That’s what I get for spending so much time in my own world. Humiliating ignorance of the obvious.

  I guess I’d always figured my dad had had the same religious views as my mom. She thought organized religion was for unsophisticated simpletons. She wanted everyone to be “free-thinking” instead. So she embraced “spirituality,” which pretty much meant whatever happened to turn up in the Body and Spirit section of her organic cooking magazines.

  I’m not any religion myself, but for the record, I’m pretty sure I do believe in God. It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but since when are you supposed to prove a feeling? God is the only situation where they expect you to do that. (Though I have to say, the universe seems so flawlessly designed to be at my expense that I doubt it could be entirely accidental.) Even if I didn’t believe in God, though, I’d probably say I did just out of spite. To irritate people like my mom who think believing in God is tacky and beneath them. They’re wrong about everything else; chances are they’re wrong about that, too. Plus, God embarrasses people. Which I totally enjoy.

  Anyway, I couldn’t see how my mom could have handled it if my dad had been a full-on Catholic. She would have spent so much time ridiculing him that there wouldn’t have been any time left to ask which dress made her look fatter. Maybe, in fact, this method of avoiding that topic was the key to a successful marriage, but I couldn’t quite picture it.

  I must have been looking puzzled, because Dr. Hexstrom’s face once again went: “you’re a bright boy—this is not really all that hard to get.” Then she added, in words, “many of those books are books Catholics used to read in the sixties.”

  My look said: “Catcher and Slan and The Doors of Perception? Surely not.”

  Her look was once again complicated: “some of the books are books young people read in the sixties,” it said patiently, “some are books Catholics read in the sixties, and some are books sixties people read in the sixties. Ergo: your father was young and Catholic in the sixties.”

  “Plus,” she added in words, “your mother told me.”

  Well, that seemed like cheating, but there was no arguing with it. My inclined head said, with what I hoped was a touch of class: “Touché.”

  So back to the library research session with Sam Hellerman: there I was thinking about all this Catholic stuff, my nickname, and the notion that the stones/Abraham quote might be something Catholic clergy tended to associate with themselves. And I had pretty much reached the conclusion—in fact, I had little doubt—that what we were dealing with here was some kind of pedophile priest situation.

  Timothy J. Anderson was a clergyman who had molested Tit and maybe others, maybe even my dad—a weird thought indeed. Tit and company had finally risen up to take some kind of elaborate revenge. Poisoned the Communion wine. Pushed him out of a bell tower. The bastard was dead at last, thrown into the metaphorical fire, as such a man was surely going straight to hell. Tit had hated him so much that he hadn’t even considered going to the funeral, but my dad had gone for some reason. To view the body, to make sure the b. was d.? Did such things ever really happen? Presumably so: if it can be thought, it can be done.

  So when Sam Hellerman called me over to the microfilm viewer, I was expecting to read an obituary from around 3/13/63 noting the dea
th (under mysterious circumstances, perhaps) of someone by the name of Brother Timothy J. Anderson.

  “It’s a monk, right?” I said. “A dead monk. Possibly poisoned.”

  Sam Hellerman stared at me.

  “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “Or a priest, a bishop, something like that.” I started to explain my theory, but he was already shaking his head.

  Because here’s what he had found in the archives, or rather, what he hadn’t found: there was no obituary or death notice for anyone by the name of Timothy J. Anderson anywhere around that date.

  “Priests,” he said, “are prominent members of the community. There’s no way a death like that wouldn’t be in the paper.”

  I could see that he was probably right. Yet the card pretty clearly indicated a funeral in San Francisco at the time. Had the listing been suppressed because of the scandal? But if there had been a scandal, if the story was “out,” we’d have seen huge headlines about “Altar Boy Avengers” or something. (Which is not a bad band name, as Sam Hellerman replied when I mentioned it.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is usually dark and secret and behind the scenes and only comes out after everyone involved has had years of therapy and/or Alzheimer’s.

  Nonetheless, Timothy J. Anderson, whoever he had been, had clearly lived and died somehow. There were presumably official death records other than newspapers that could be checked somewhere, though the very thought filled me with fatigue and dread.

  A moment earlier everything had seemed to fit together neatly, if distastefully. Now nothing fit, but the distastefulness remained. We tried looking up Timothy J. Anderson in every local reference book we could find: no result, not even close. Well, we could call up all the Andersons in the phone book to ask if any of them knew a Timothy J. who had died in 1963. Yeah, right.

  “I’m sorry, dude,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say dude recently. “He doesn’t exist.”

  CONNECTIONS

  Tracking down Deanna-Fiona was going to be a snap compared to figuring out the deal with Timothy J. Anderson, and not just because she wasn’t dead. But the prospect filled me with terror because it would involve more speaking out loud than I liked even under normal circumstances, and these circumstances would not be normal. There were no listings for any Schumachers in Salthaven, Salthaven Vista, Old Mission Hills, Rancho Sans Souci, or any of the surrounding towns. But every year Immaculate Heart Academy puts out a booklet called “Connections,” which has contact information for all the students. Hillmont has a similar thing, called “What’s the Buzz (Call a Knight!),” and as I realized after I had thought about it a bit, there was a pretty good chance that I already had a copy of last year’s edition of IHA-SV’s “Connections” somewhere in my room.

  Mrs. Teneb, my mom’s nondiminutive female actor friend, had a daughter who went there, and last year there had been some talk of trying to stimulate my nonexistent social life by encouraging me to get in touch with some of the IHA-SV girls. The pretense had been my imaginary Monty Python/Dr. Who club and Susye Teneb’s hugely implausible claim that there was a group of geek girls who had a similar club at IHA-SV. No doubt that myth had its origin in some feeble practical joke attempt by Susye Teneb, but names had been underlined and the book solemnly received and eventually ignored, thrown in the corner with all the other junk in my room.

  It took a while to dig it out, but when I did, there she was: Deanna Gabriella Schumacher, 1854 North del Norte Plaza Circle, Salthaven, with a phone number and everything. I had trouble whacking up the nerve to call, though, and I kept putting it off and making excuses for why it might be better to wait. Because this was really it. Make-or-break time for the Fiona-Deanna Deal. I wanted to know what would happen, but I was scared at the same time. The library research session had filled me with a kind of resolve, though, and I decided to give it a shot that night.

  Holden Caulfield, when calling his various preppie girlfriends, would always say he planned to hang up if the parents answered. I told myself that’s what I’d do, too, even though I knew she would probably have her own phone. In the fifties, no one had their own goddam phone and all, as HC would have put it. In other words, modern communications technology and the higher standard of living had made things more convenient and less convenient at the same time.

  I almost couldn’t bring myself to dial the numbers, I was so nervous, and I had no idea what I would say. I got an answering machine that said “Didi’s phone, leave me a message.” Hanging up on the machine was like Holden’s hanging up on Jane Gallagher’s highfalutin parents. I was doing okay in the grand tradition of calling up girls and not knowing what to say and then hanging up without saying anything. Mr. Schtuppe should give me extra credit or something.

  The effort had taken a lot out of me, though. I was feeling a little faint and peaked. It was six-forty-five. I decided to try again in twenty minutes. I poured the rest of my Coke down the drain and poured some of my mom’s bourbon into the empty can. Because I needed some help, man.

  The fourth time I tried Deanna Schumacher’s number, the answering machine message had been changed to “Look, asshole, I screen, so if you don’t leave a message there’s no way you’ll ever find out if I would have picked up.”

  Off to a good start. So after the beep, I said, haltingly, “This—this message is for Deanna Schumacher—” I pronounced it shoe-mocker. But the phone was suddenly picked up and a female voice said, “Skoo-macker.”

  “Skoo-macker?” I repeated.

  “Skoo-macker,” said the voice.

  “Really?”

  I realized the conversation was going nowhere, and I decided to suspend my disbelief about the whole Skoo-macker thing. She was the Schumacher expert around here. “This is she,” the voice was saying with charm-school precision. “Who, may I ask, is calling?”

  “Oh. This is, um um Tom Tom Henderson.” The “um um” is where I momentarily forgot who I was. I was starting to say, though with perhaps a bit less suavity than I had planned, that we had met at a party in Clearview Heights last month, when she broke in:

  “Tom-Tom?” she said. “Is that Moe Henderson? Chi-Mo Henderson?”

  That about covered it. So she had known who I was. Not surprising, if she knew Susye Teneb.

  “Oh. Yes. We met at a party—”

  “How nice to hear from you. What can I do for you, Tom-Tom?”

  “Oh. Well, we met at a party—”

  “What?” She was determined not to let me deliver the rest of my suave “we met at a party” speech. She was quite the conversationalist.

  I decided to ignore her interruptions and charge ahead, so I explained that we-met-at-a-party-in-Clearview-Heights-last-month, and tried to make it quick so it would fit in the brief space before she burst out with another interruption. I just about managed it, too, and I think the information finally penetrated, because her next question was quite to the point.

  “And?”

  Well, that was a tough one. So many different things could follow that “and.” And, I don’t know if you remember, but we made out on the couch when a telekinesis experiment went awry. And you wouldn’t let me go down your pants, going “my tits, my tits” instead, and I was wondering whether that was because of ladies’ week or was there some other reason? And you asked about my band’s gigs, and, well, it just so happens that we’re playing at the Festival of Lights in a few weeks, maybe you’d like to cut class at IHA and come? And I look fondly upon the special moments your left breast and I spent together, and I’d welcome the chance to pick up where we left off and get to know the rest of you better. And, though I doubt it’s something people generally say about just anybody whose nipple they happen to maul in a dark room at this or that fake mod stoner party, I have this dream where we’re imaginary boyfriend-girlfriend in a Sex Alliance Against Society….

  None of those answers to “And?” would have fit into one of Deanna-Fiona’s pauses, I knew that, and most of t
hem would have come off weird over the phone. So I said, as quickly as I could:

  “I think we have some some matters to discuss, but I’d rather not do it over the phone. Maybe we could get together some time at your convenience if that would be be copasetic.” Devil-head. Boy, did I ever feel like an idiot.

  “You’re so professional,” she said, giggling. I’m not sure what she meant, exactly, though it sounded sarcastic. I guess she wasn’t stoned enough to be quite as amused by my virtuoso devil-headedness as she had been at the party. Then she said: “Are you asking me out, Tom-Tom?”

  Was I? “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Um. Well. I mean…”

  “You know, I have a boyfriend.”

  “Right. Dave.”

  “Tim.”

  “Tim?”

  “Tim.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I think I would know.”

  I could sense that this fascinating conversation was drawing to a close, and I was trying to figure out a way to slip in a quick “well, nice talking to you, bye now,” to make her hanging up on me seem a bit less embarrassing, when she said, to my astonishment:

  “Well, maybe you’d better come over, then.”

  WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU NEED TO GET TO SLUT HEAVEN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE BUT YOU CAN’T DRIVE YET

  Deanna Skoo-macker’s directions to her house had been from the freeway, so she had assumed I’d be driving. I wish. Salthaven is several towns away, near the bay, clear on the other side of Rancho Sans Souci. I figured I should give myself at least an hour to get there on my bike, just in case I got lost or something. So I said I had some things I had to do first, but that I could probably make it by around nine.

  “Okay,” she had said, “but I turn into a pumpkin at ten-fifteen.”

  Right. These modern girls and their mysterious ways. Best not to ask. They’re either going to explain things or they’re not, is how I look at it.