But for the first time, I wasn’t the interloper. I was the main guy.
“Well, well, Henderson,” he said, standing a couple of urinals over from me, “you and your stunt you boys pulled has a great deal of folks around here pretty steamed.”
I gave him a look that said: “well, if I interpret your tortured, semiliterate syntax correctly, my only comment is that all great artists are misunderstood in their own time.”
He stepped away from his urinal, which was kind of scary, but it turned out he was fully dressed and buttoned up. Thank God. I gave up trying to pee and buttoned up as well. I can’t do that with anyone else in the room, especially Mr. Teone. He was holding his reading glasses to one eye and squinting at a copy of Sam Hellerman’s song zine.
“Chi-Mos,” he said slowly, but he pronounced it, Schtuppe fashion, “chee moss.” “Mind telling me what that’s supposed to mean?”
Now, I had been in many ironic situations before, but none of them had quite prepared me for this. I mean, here was a leading figure in the normal hierarchy, a high-ranking official representative of the Perpetrator Nation, asking me to explain the meaning of the derogatory name foisted upon me by their own sadistic test several years ago and used against me as a weapon by their lower-ranking minions ever since. I snorted. How quickly we forget.
“It’s the plural of ‘chy moe,’” I said, correcting his pronunciation. “It stands for ‘child molester.’”
He continued to squint at me. “Where are you getting this stuff?” he said.
I stared at him with a serious look, the look that says only a (devil-head) philistine asks an artist where he gets his ideas. Then I laughed a little, because, you know, sometimes I crack myself up.
“Now listen to me,” he said suddenly, his red face a match for that of any PE teacher, his voice a (devil-head) histrionic stage whisper. He tapped the zine with his finger. “This crap…” He trailed off. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but watch your step, Henderson. Keep your nose clean!” Well, I could understand why he didn’t like the lyrics to “Mr. Hitler, Mr. Stalin, Mr. Teone,” but this was a bit over-the-top. He was still whispering, but it was loud, kind of like yell-whispering. His face was throbbing red, and drops of sweat were spattering from it in all directions. Yuck.
Enter the interloper, who happened to be Syndie Duffy’s floppy fake-hippie boyfriend.
“You remember what I said,” said Mr. Teone. “Don’t be an a-hole.” And then, as he stormed out: “And that goes double for you, Shinefield!”
“Dude,” said Shinefield, after Mr. Teone left. “Radical show!”
Pause. “Really?”
“Insane,” he said, which I took to mean “yes, really.” Then he added: “What did Teone want?”
“He was just advising me not to be an a-hole.”
“Yeah,” said Shinefield. “Me too.”
I felt a strange sense of well-being. Here was the only conversation I’d ever had in the boys’ bathroom that hadn’t consisted of introductory remarks to an eventual attempt on my life. In fact, I was trying to think of another conversation I’d had anywhere with anyone other than Sam Hellerman or Dr. Hexstrom that hadn’t been at my expense, but I was drawing a blank. So this is what it’s like, I thought. Going to the bathroom would never be the same again. As I was soon to learn, though, suddenly becoming a quasi celebrity doesn’t necessarily mean that attempts on your life cease to occur: they just tend to move to venues other than the boys’ bathroom. Still, it was progress, any way you sliced it.
“Rock on, Chi-Mo!” Shinefield called out as I left, and I didn’t really mind the nickname all that much.
A DR. HEXSTROM-ECTOMY
When I got home from school that day, Little Big Tom took me aside and told me that my mom had had a falling-out with Dr. Hexstrom and that they were looking for another therapist for me. I’d expected this. My guess was that they wouldn’t actually get around to finding another doctor, and that that would be the end of the experiment in Chi-Mo modification unless I did something major like set something on fire or killed somebody.
A little later on, I talked to Amanda, who said that as far as she knew, suicide prevention hadn’t even been the main thing on Mom’s mind with the psychiatrist plan; she had just been hoping Dr. Hexstrom would give me some pills and set me on the road to being more normal and maybe then I’d go out for sports or something. But in their meeting, Dr. Hexstrom had told her that she was the problem, not me, and suggested that she come in with me for some family-type counseling, because she needed help. My mom fired her on the spot. Well, good old Dr. Hexstrom. Not that I would have gone along with the family counseling thing. That sounded like a nightmare. I was going to miss talking to her, but oh well. Maybe it’s my destiny to remain a non-normal, unmedicated and uncorrected eccentric with no one interesting to talk to. It would figure.
“Did you know Dad killed himself?” I asked, after a brief struggle to remain silent. To my surprise, for once she didn’t give me the look that says “you’re as dumb as a freeze-dried coffee crystal.”
“That’s what she thinks,” she said. “I don’t know. She thinks a lot of weird things.”
“She told Dr. Hexstrom he left a note.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve looked for that note. There is no note.”
So while my mom had been telling me a story about how my dad had died in a car accident, she was also telling Amanda a story about how he had killed himself. Or more probably, she was just being her crazy self, oblivious to both of us, and we had sensibly assumed that whatever she was implying had to be wrong. It’s just that Amanda and I had accidentally drawn different conclusions about which fake story was being implied. Who knows who was right?
Amanda had started to cry a little. I felt bad for bringing it up, as I’d known I would.
“I don’t care how it happened,” she said. “I just wish it didn’t happen.”
She had the right idea, of course. I put my arm around her kind of awkwardly, and she put hers around my neck and squeezed really hard, still sobbing. I almost joined in, even though she was doing enough crying for both of us. All the reasoning and investigating in the world were never going to bring him back. Part of me still wanted everything to make sense, but the biggest part of me realized that Amanda was right and that that was an impossibly high standard.
IS THE RELATIONSHIP STILL IMAGINARY IF YOU CAN MAKE EACH OTHER CRY?
On Saturday afternoon, the day after the Festival of Lights, I walked into the kitchen to find my mom waiting for me with that familiar family-discussion look on her face. Little Big Tom wasn’t there, though, which was pretty weird: he lives for family discussions. I expected we were going to be talking about psychiatry and suicide and sports, that sort of thing, and I braced myself. But she wasn’t looking all that disturbed or crazy—she was more like bemusedly exasperated, if I read her body language correctly. You never could tell with her, though.
“I’ve been on the phone with Marjorie Blakeney all morning,” she said. “Kyrsten was very upset by your little poetry booklet. Everyone has been teasing her. She locked herself in her room and hasn’t stopped crying since yesterday. So…”
I hadn’t noticed before, but my mom was holding a copy of Sam Hellerman’s zine—one of the new ones that he had printed up that said “The Chi-Mos” instead of “Balls Deep.” The cover had a big picture of Mr. Teone and the title was “Never Again.” Carol moves in mysterious ways. I didn’t even have one of those yet.
I shot her my best “you’re losing me, sweetheart” look. I mean, “Callipygian Princess” is really just a heartfelt celebration of feminine beauty, and “Shake It Like You Mean It” doesn’t even mention her by name. But she had the zine open to “I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass,” and I guess it wasn’t too hard to fill in the “so.” Who knew Kyrsten Blakeney would have such a thin skin? She had to be used to people checking out her ass, but maybe she just blocked Mr. Teon
e out of her mind when the subject of ass-gazing popped up. I mean, that’s what I would have done. But here it was in unavoidable black and white. Now, I had meant that song as a righteous indictment of Mr. Teone’s (devil-head) iniquity, but I suppose I had also accidentally robbed Kyrsten Blakeney of the peace of willful ignorance and forgetting. I knew how that felt, I really did, and I genuinely felt bad about it. It was a bit of a stretch, but I made a quick attempt to feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Kyrsten Blakeney, and it even kind of almost worked in the end: that is, the resulting song “Up for Grabs” ended up being one of my few good girl-point-of-view tunes when I finally got around to writing it.
But that was long after all the stuff that I’m about to explain happened. At the time I just said, “I didn’t mean to hurt Kyrsten Blakeney’s feelings.” Then I couldn’t help adding that the callipygous among us have a certain responsibility as public figures. My mom just stared at me in incomprehension, which I suppose was the reaction I wanted. I don’t even understand what motivates me sometimes. She finally said she thought it might be nice if I apologized. So while she lighted up a Virginia Slims 120, I tore a sheet from my notebook and quickly wrote:
Dear Kyrsten Blakeney,
I apologize for mentioning your callipygousness in the context of Mr. Teone, and for immortalizing it in song. That was inappropriate. I see that now. But you should probably get used to the idea that one of your roles in life will always be to inspire devotion and poetry among the dreamers, even though I can see how in a certain way that can be a pain.
Anyhow, I am very, very sorry. Please don’t develop another eating disorder on my account. It’s really not worth it.
Sincerely,
Thomas Charles Henderson
I was folding it up, but my mom was holding out her hand, so I gave it to her. After she read it, she refolded it and put it in the Chi-Mos zine. Then she said, in a wry manner I hadn’t really thought her capable of, “maybe you’d better leave the apologizing to me after all.”
That seemed to wrap it up, but Carol had more to say. She asked me what Chi-Mo meant. I told her it was a fond name that the other kids had given me just to show how much they loved and cared for me. She didn’t believe me, but she wouldn’t have believed the truth, either.
“Well, I’ve also been on the phone with Tony Teone,” she said, after a brief pause. “He’s also very upset by your little booklet. So…”
I almost didn’t realize who she was referring to. Then I did, and I snort-laughed uncontrollably. Tony Teone? Tony Teone? Fully retarded. She misinterpreted the laughter and looked at me sternly. “You really hurt his feelings.”
Now, this was too much.
“Mr. Teone,” I said carefully, “is a devil-head maleficent, depraved, iniquitous, sadistic blackguard.” Except, in excellent Mr. Schtuppe style, I said “mal-efficient.” I was finally getting the hang of the mispronunciation thing. The trick is to make the mispronunciation have a totally different meaning from the correctly pronounced word. My education was finally starting to bear fruit.
She stared at me. “A devil-head, inefficient, black—uh, what?” Okay, I hadn’t intended to say “devil-head” aloud, and I could see why she was confused.
“Look,” I said, trying again in words she would be sure to understand. “Mr. Teone is a bad, bad man. The font of all evil.”
“He has always felt warmly toward you,” she said. “He had a lot of respect for your father.”
The fuck? I told her about Mr. Teone’s constant ridicule and abuse, the sarcastic salutes, and so forth. “Yeah,” I said, “he’s the devil-head embodiment of warmth and respect. A real swell guy. No way I’m apologizing to him.”
“Well, they were in the navy together,” she said, and I had to admit, though reluctantly, that that kind of could account for the saluting thing. And maybe the “say hi to your father” had been a retarded attempt to say “pay my respects when you visit the cemetery”? I had to concede that it hadn’t, perhaps, all been sarcastic. When you think about it, it’s kind of hard to pull off Respect without everybody assuming it’s Sarcasm. It just is. But while I was considering this, my mom was still talking. “…they were very close, the two of them. So…”
I was trying to fill in that so when a weird thought struck me. “Mom, do you know Mr. Teone’s middle name?” I asked, but I already knew the kind of answer I was going to get.
“Yeah, it’s Isadore,” she said. “And it’s actually kind of funny. Because of his initials, everyone always used to call him Tit.” She giggled, and under other circumstances I would have found that cute.
Tony Isadore Teone. Well, ramone me with a Mosrite.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
So Mr. Teone was Tit. A middle-aged Tit, rather, just as my dad would have been a middle-aged CEH had he lived. It was really hard to imagine that in 1960 my dad’s best friend had been a twelve-year-old version of Mr. Teone. On the other hand, how did I know what was hard or easy to imagine? I hadn’t known my dad then, and, as was constantly being brought home to me, I hadn’t known him very well even when the two of us had happened to be alive at the same time. Maybe he and Tit were two peas in a pod, just as evil as each other. Or maybe Mr. Teone had once been sweet and delightful, an all-around great guy and a joy to be around as a child, only turning evil later on. But no, Tit was evil by at least 1963. The coded note proved that. I loved my dad and trusted that he hadn’t been evil but had merely associated with at least one guy who happened to be evil, which wasn’t quite so bad. Because you have to believe in something. Don’t you?
I was also having some trouble squaring the clever young Tit, who could write codes in backward French and manipulate biblical quotations to his own nefarious ends, with the fat, dumb galunk he had apparently become. But people degenerate as they get older, and anyway, it was possible that Mr. Teone wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked. He knew Latin, after all, though that could simply reflect the fact that he had gone to school back when they still taught you things other than how to make great collages. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, really. Evil was the common thread here. And maybe the obesity, too. Poor, dear little MT, I thought. Something told me we weren’t talking about top-quality ramoning here.
A thought struck: what if Mr. Teone wasn’t evil after all? What if he turned out to be a Disney-ish figure, unjustly maligned at the beginning, who would eventually be revealed as a kindly soul with an important message to impart? “Son, your old man wanted you to have this,” he’d say, waving some object or other, a sword or a curious gold coin. “But I had to wait till I knew you were old enough to understand. Fortunately, you passed the test. Oh, you didn’t realize you are descended from kings? Well, you are, and it’s time to claim your rightful place.” Descended from kings? Oh my God, it all fits. “I’m terribly sorry,” he’d continue, “about the hazing, the mockery, the torture, the permanent psychological and emotional scars. We had to do that so you wouldn’t suspect the big surprise party we’ve been planning for you.”
Somehow, I couldn’t see it. I had to stand by my instinct that Mr. Teone was a bad guy, the apex of a pyramid of despicable, sadistic normal psychos who wanted me and Sam Hellerman dead. I never really doubted it. The fact that he had known my dad just made his evil a bit more complicated, that’s all.
That said, I realized that Mr. Teone would have answers to many of my questions, if only I could figure out a way to ask them. I was still sitting in the kitchen, thinking things over. My mom got up and I could hear her footsteps as she walked over to the living room. Then I heard some shuffling, followed by another little burst of giggling: and I knew she had just looked up “callipygian” in the dictionary.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote another note:
Dear Mr. Teone,
In light of recent events, I feel there are important matters we need to discuss. These concern materials among my deceased father’s effects which you may be in a position to elucidate. Please contact me at
your earliest convenience to arrange a meeting so that we can discuss these issues and, I hope, come to a satisfactory arrangement.
Best wishes,
Thomas Charles Henderson
I put the note in an envelope and put the envelope in my backpack. Then I went into the living room. My mom was sitting on the couch, reading the Chi-Mos zine and looking up words in the American Heritage dictionary.
“Mom, was Dad really in the navy?” I asked.
“Yes, he was,” she replied absently. “For three years.”
And then, since I was on a roll, I dared to add, “and did he really commit suicide?”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. I had a sort of feeling that she meant that as a “yes, but let’s say no more about it.” But it could just as easily have meant “no” or “maybe,” or perhaps “decline to state.” I tried one more.
“Can I see the note?”
“No.”
Well, that answer seemed to imply that there had been a note, but I remained unsure. I was ready in case she started to flip out, but she didn’t. She looked pretty sad, though, and there may have been tears in her eyes; but there were almost always tears in her eyes. So I just went over and kissed her on the cheek.
I left the room in silence. I was going to leave it at that, but then something came over me, and I reversed course and went back in and approached the couch.
“Why can’t you be straight with anyone?” I said. “You tell everyone different things and you keep the truth to yourself.”
She looked up, surprised: it was a very uncharacteristic outburst from me. Then she said, quietly, “I’m sorry, baby.” This time I knew what it meant. It meant she didn’t know why she couldn’t be straight with anyone. She touched my arm, and it was the most affectionate thing I’d had from her in a long, long time.
UNCLE TONY
On Monday morning, it was already clear that our performance at the Festival of Lights had had an impact on Hillmont High society. Sam Hellerman’s new version of the lyrics zine was quite popular. He was selling them for two dollars apiece, and he already had over a hundred dollars by the end of first period. It was a good thing, too, because Todd Panchowski’s parents were reportedly planning to sue our parents’ asses over his wrecked drum set: we needed the money. At this rate—well, I couldn’t quite calculate how many we’d have to sell to cover a drum set and legal costs and still maybe have enough left over so that my share would be at least a hundred and fifty dollars so I could schedule my own appointment with Dr. Hexstrom. Because I really wanted to discuss Tit with her, after all that had happened.
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