Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bathroom a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.
At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from kings after all. Rats.
It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs available in stores, we would sell our story and make a million dollars.
CHI-MOS ARE REAL ROCK AND ROLL
My mom had come to visit at the hospital briefly during one of my most out-of-it phases. I hardly remember it, but I know I asked her to bring me the CEH library. She had passed the task along to Little Big Tom.
So Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then—well, in a way this was one of the bigger surprises of the whole affair. Little Big Tom and Amanda walked in together, and they seemed to be getting along pretty well. It’s not like they came in holding hands and skipping or anything. But Amanda was acting civil toward him, almost friendly, which was quite something. I mean, her eyes were rolling less than usual, and you’d be surprised at what a difference a small thing like that can make. She even pretended to laugh, just a little, when he said “Calling Dr. Howard!” Now, I have no idea why that was supposed to be funny, but you could tell by the look on his face that it was supposed to be a riot. I had never seen Amanda humor LBT like that. As for him, he was clearly in fake-dad heaven. Say what you will about Little Big Tom: it doesn’t take much. And a hospital visit can really help pull a fake family together.
One thing about being in the hospital: people always feel they should bring you something when they visit. Amanda brought in this impressive series of drawings illustrating the Chi-Mos story, kind of like the Bayeux Tapestry, except instead of William the Conqueror and the Pope and so forth, the main characters were me, Sam Hellerman, and Mr. Teone, whom she had drawn as a kind of effeminate Satan. The last one depicted a wailing Mr. Teone being crushed under huge granite letters that spelled “Chi-Mos Are Real Rock and Roll!”
The drawings were childlike and brilliant, almost like real art. I totally wanted to use them for the first Chi-Mos album. Actually we had already tentatively changed the name to the Elephants of Style, me on guitar, Sam Enchanted Evening on bass and animal husbandry, first album Devil Warship. Well, there was plenty of time to talk about it. I kissed Amanda on the forehead when she leaned over. She said: “You’re the most famous person I know,” which was sweet. She was being all Phoebe-esque and nicer-than-usual to me, too. Weird.
Little Big Tom had put two and two together and had realized I had been doing research into my dad’s youth reading list. So he decided, helpfully, to provide me with a complementary LBT library. He had been impressed that I had swiped his Che Guevara T-shirt, so the LBT books were tilted toward impenetrable and/or goofy books on radical politics that no one would ever read voluntarily anymore. Among them was a beat-up copy of The Little Red Book, which is a collection of retarded sayings by this chubby mass murderer from China. (He made an appearance earlier in this story on Sam Hellerman’s hand-lettered T-shirt—guy by the name of Mao.) People in the sixties liked to be seen carrying this book around, hoping it would make them appear more radical and cutting-edge and sexy and intellectual. I guess you started out carrying around The Catcher in the Rye, and then, when you got a little older and the thrill was gone, you “turned political” and switched to The Little Red Book instead. The funny thing is, by all accounts, doing this really could get you dates. With the hairy women of the time, perhaps, but still.
There was of course no need to investigate Little Big Tom: he was already an open book, and there wasn’t even one little thing about him that wasn’t painfully obvious. That was part of his charm, maybe, but it made the LBT library a bit less compelling than he probably imagined. I nodded politely, though, and went along with it.
“Kill the bourgeois pigs,” I said. “And the running dogs of the imperial yo-yo or whatever. Except for you and Mom. We need you to hang in there long enough to pay for our college.” Amanda nodded solemnly and put her arm around me, and we both flashed him sardonic peace signs.
You’ve got to hand it to Little Big Tom, though: he was either too clueless or too “centered” to let anything like that bother him. He just smiled back and rumpled our hair.
“Kids today,” he said, and we all laughed. I mean, he did.
Just before they left, as I was saying good-bye to Amanda, I made a sudden decision and handed her the bloodstained Brighton Rock.
“It was Dad’s book,” I said. “It’s the best book ever written.”
As she walked out, she had the book open and was staring at the inside front cover, at the bloody CEH 1965, and I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking. Maybe I’d even tell her the whole story one day if she played her cards right. And if I ever figured it out.
Whatever they were giving me in the hospital was pretty outstanding. They should put it in the water supply or something: the world would be a more peaceful and rewarding place. Life flies by in a nice breeze, and you remember stuff as if none of the boring or unpleasant parts even happened. So I’m not sure if it was before or after the LBT/Amanda visit, and in fact I may be mixing up or joining a couple of different episodes, but there was at least one other significant hospital event, and here’s how I remember it.
Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then I saw Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s floppy boyfriend, coming past the curtain. He was followed by Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy. Yasmynne Schmick and Sam Hellerman came in a couple of minutes later. Sam Hellerman discreetly handed me two sealed envelopes as he walked by.
So was Sam Hellerman hanging out with the drama people again? Or had he been all along? Or maybe they had just given him a lift. At any rate, the scene was very much as it had been during his hippie lunch phase. They weren’t paying too much attention to Sam Hellerman, though they didn’t seem to mind that he was hanging around. And the whole time, even when he was talking to me, he just stared at Celeste Fletcher’s ass, even going so far as to reposition himself so as to get a better view whenever she happened to move it out of his line of sight.
The other weird thing was that Celeste Fletcher seemed pretty friendly with Shinefield, though he was still Syndie Duffy’s boyfriend as far as I knew. When Syndie Duffy left to go to the bathroom or smoke, Shinefield would move even closer to Celeste Fletcher and touch her butt, acting like it was accidental. I couldn’t tell whether she was in on it. Maybe Syndie Duffy and Celeste Fletcher had switched boyfriends or something. I’m not sure how dating politics works in the subnormal/drama world, so I could be misreading it. Clearly, though, on some level what we were seeing was the emergence of a new girl trio, out of the ashes of the Sisterhood. The question was, would Celeste Fletcher or Syndie Duffy end up as the dominant girl? My money was on Celeste Fletcher, because her open flirtation with Shinefield really did seem to give her the upper hand. Yasmynne Schmick, of course, would be a #3 till the end of her days, but I was glad she was there. She was always nice and usually funny and generally seemed so happy to see me.
Much of the raw information about Mr. Teone’s act
ivities and the Chi-Mos’ continuing influence at Hillmont came from the conversation between me and this weird-ass group. I was kind of woozy and fuzzy, and the drama people were, no doubt, totally high. Sam Hellerman was ass addled. Yet somehow we figured out a way to exchange information, though I didn’t manage to tease out all the implications till I’d had a chance to think it all over during the next few days. It was a pretty interesting topic. The whole time, though, I was holding Sam Hellerman’s envelopes, dying to know what was inside them, but realizing that he had sealed them for a reason, and that I couldn’t open them till everybody had left.
I’ll say one thing: Shinefield was a true fan. He couldn’t stop talking about the Chi-Mos and the Festival of Lights and the zine. He had started to call me Chi-Bro. I kid you not. The girls didn’t pay too much attention to the band talk, but even they said some nice things, too. I mean, it was ridiculous. We had sucked, probably worse than any band that had ever played at any high school ever. But I guess running the associate principal out of town, even accidentally, counts for a lot.
Just being in a band counts, too. I’m convinced of that. By my calculations, girls find you around fifteen percent more attractive and worth their attention if you’re in a band than they do if you’re not. It works with subnormal/drama girls, anyway. And apparently, in a different way, of course, it can even work with your own ordinarily ill-tempered sister; it doesn’t appear to have much effect on your mom, though. Fifteen percent may not sound like much, but it feels quite substantial when you start the game at close to zero.
Eventually they left, and Sam Hellerman gave me a “we’ll talk later” look as he followed Celeste Fletcher’s ass past the curtain and out the door. I tore open the first envelope.
It contained $240, my share of the proceeds from the song zine. On the twenty-dollar bill on top of the stack, he had written “Keep making me money, kid.” Which was from some movie, I’m pretty sure. Anyhow, it was kind of funny. More money than I had ever had at one time. Liquid assets. Which is not a bad band name if you think about it. Hey, we’re the Liquid Assets, and this one’s called “Pheromone City….”
I would have been happy if the other envelope had contained more money, but it was a lot thinner, and I could tell by feeling it that inside were a few sheets of folded paper. Documents, information of some kind. I slid my thumb through the flap.
STILL NOT DONE LOVING YOU, MAMA
Before I got a chance to see what was in Sam Hellerman’s second envelope, I heard Mr. Aquino begin to moan, and then to wheeze. I hurriedly shoved both envelopes back under my pillow. To my surprise, Celeste Fletcher came back in.
“They’re getting the car,” she said. “I was hoping I could get your autograph.”
I was surprised, to say the least. Or maybe it was here, rather than before, like I said, that I made the calculation that girls like you fifteen percent more when you’re in a band. Or no, it was right after that, when she handed me a Sharpie, and then, instead of offering the zine or a piece of paper for me to sign like I had expected, leaned over and pulled her shirt down. She wanted me to sign her tits. I had heard of this before, but come on: how many ordinary guys in lousy high school rock bands ever land in this situation, let alone King Dork? It’s not supposed to happen. You know, thinking about it, it’s really more like at least twenty-five percent. What was I thinking? Maybe more like forty-four percent, actually. Give or take.
She was pretty demure and tasteful about it, but she also did it smoothly, as though she’d done it many times before. I mean, she pulled the neck of her scoopy T-shirt down and to the left but not low enough to expose the nipple, and simultaneously pushed the breast up from below with her palm, so that the top of it bulged out and up. My guess is that that’s not the sort of thing you do well the first time you try it. I don’t know if you can picture it, but trust me: it looked fucking amazing.
“Certainly,” I said, trying to act as though I had done this many times as well, though my shaking hands probably gave me away. I hadn’t touched too many breasts, you know. This was only number four, by my calculations.
So I leaned forward and wrote in a spidery hand: “Best wishes, Thomas Charles Henderson.”
She said thanks. But as she was turning to leave, she pulled her top out and glanced down and said, haltingly, “Trombone Chablis Ampersand?” I guess my handwriting was even shakier than I thought. They didn’t cover breast autographs in third-grade penmanship, you see, though maybe they should have.
I explained that that was my real name, well, pretty close, anyway. Clearly, though, she knew me as Chi-Mo, and wanted my autograph because I was one of the Chi-Mos, and hey, I might as well face it, I was as much Chi-Mo as I was anything else. She wanted a Chi-Mo autograph, and who was I to deny her? So she came back around with the unsheathed Sharpie and pulled her shirt down and pushed the other breast so that most of its northern hemisphere bulged out and up. This time I wrote, much more carefully: “Nice breast. CM.” Which made her laugh and seemed to please her well enough.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem,” I said. “But I’m not sure how long we’ll keep that name. What do you think of Sentient Beard?” (Me on guitar, Samerica the Beautiful on bass and upholstery, first album Off the Charts—Way Off. )
“Well, it’s better than the Stoned Mamelukes.”
I was on drugs, so I was a little slow, but not so slow that it didn’t click. I could think of only one way she would have known about the Stoned Marmadukes. I realize now that there may have in fact been other ways, especially if she had spent time hanging around with Sam Hellerman. But her reaction gave it away: she realized she had slipped up, and even made a kind of half-motion to cover her mouth, almost as though to stuff the words back in. It looked kind of melodramatic and theatrical, and only halfway unintentionally so, which was familiar, too. And that’s what clinched it, pretty much. Fiona. Celeste Fletcher was fake Fiona. Note the nice, Schtuppified deformation of Marmadukes, which actually was a vast improvement, and which was another clincher: that’s exactly the kind of joke the Fiona of my dim memory would have made while leaving you guessing as to whether it had been intentional or not. Or wait, it was me, not her, who would make that kind of joke; but those were jokes she could get, so presumably she could make them as well. So it wasn’t breast number four after all. We were back to breast number one, with whose nipple I had spent so many happy moments in my innocent youth.
Wait. Really? She totally didn’t look like Fiona, even adjusting for the lack of the Fiona costume. Fantasy and reality sure can get in the way of each other, can’t they?
When people disguise themselves as other people in movies and no one in the movie is supposed to realize it, you usually don’t believe it for a minute. In real life, though, it’s not so easy to figure stuff out. I had only seen the original fake Fiona once, in the dark and while a little buzzed, and I hadn’t even known Celeste Fletcher or seen her up close at the time. Plus, I had seen the Fiona’d-out Celeste Fletcher mostly from the front, whereas up till now, I’d only examined Celeste Fletcher playing herself from Sam Hellerman’s vantage point—that is, from behind. Even without the costume, and as a general rule, that’s a totally different look for a lady. Celeste Fletcher’s breasts even felt different from how I had remembered Fiona’s breasts feeling—but I had had a different focus at that time. I mean, I hadn’t had to worry about keeping my handwriting neat and steady. Not to get too philosophical on you here, but in different contexts, and depending on what you’re doing, the same rack can be totally different worlds. Anyway, God help ’em if they ever try to make a movie out of this, with the same sexy teenaged actress playing both fake Fiona and Celeste Fletcher in different costumes and makeup. It’ll be hard to pull off in movie form. But it worked in real life. I swear to God.
Anyway, there I was at Mercy Hospital in Santa Carla, on the other side of the curtain from the moaning Mr. Aquino, around ninety percent convinced that I was staring at the
girl of my dreams, who just happened to have my name scribbled all over her breasts in black Sharpie. What would you have done?
It all went back to Dud Chart. Sam Hellerman hadn’t tried to exempt me from the contest, as he had said. Quite the contrary: he had set me up, as he had done with all the Hillmont High School Untouchables, organizing my presence at the party, and advising Celeste Fletcher on how to dress and behave to “push my buttons” effectively when I got there. My point value had been high, and she had wanted to win. Why such a complicated plan? Well, an ordinary Make-out/Fake-out would have been unlikely to succeed because I was well aware of the technique and was always on guard against it, almost maybe to the level of paranoia. There had been Make-out/Fake-out attempts the week before the party, in fact, which I had wiggled out of—maybe those had been part of Dud Chart, too. I don’t think you got any points for a failed attempt, so they had to figure out a trickier, more elaborate way. Plus, from what I knew of the Sisterhood, Celeste Fletcher is one of those people who just prefers things to be elaborate. Sam Hellerman is certainly like that. In fact, the Fiona project had Sam Hellerman written all over it, even down to the name, which probably had had a subtle influence on me because it sounded kind of English and rock and roll had made me a devil-head Anglophile.
This had been at an early stage in the Dud Chart game, where the object had just been making out rather than something really serious and extreme like walking around Center Court. Her plan had only been to get to second base in a publicly observable setting. That, and not ladies’ week, was why she hadn’t wanted me to go down her pants, why she had directed my attention to her tits instead, and also presumably explains her stalling, constantly glancing around the room, and eventual sudden instigation of the making-out part. She had been waiting for the witnesses to show up. Witnesses. How embarrassing.
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