ALWAYS THE QUIET ONES
In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself. Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more confused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.
But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is. Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.
As I originally described the King Dork card game, a player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulating cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.
I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:
If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls, even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.
I admit, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an actual Sex Alliance Against Society. Maybe a Sex Alliance Against Society is in the end too much to hope for for some of us. But even though there is a small part of me that reacts with fury and indignation over that fact, another part of me would argue that considering where I was at the beginning of the school year and throughout my entire life previous to it, the current lack of a Sex Alliance Against Society is quite an improvement over the previous lack of a S. A. A. S. This second small part understands where the first small part is coming from, but still, all things considered, it can’t really see the flaw in it. Of course, the huge, hunkin’ part that’s left over has no idea what to think and is still totally confused and melancholy and bitter. So it’s not like we’re looking at a tremendous change here. My poor, adorable, flimsy character arc: you blink, you miss it, bless its little cotton socks.
Still. I’ve got two slightly less-than-imaginary secret quasi girlfriends whom I can call on Mondays and Thursdays, and on Wednesdays, respectively, when their official boyfriends are temporarily out of the picture because they’re on the late shift at the convenience store.
What you got?
SHERLOCK HELLERMAN
We were in my room at the beginning of Christmas vacation, listening to Ace of Spades. Sam Hellerman was seated on the floor, leaning against the dresser, with a glass of bourbon between his feet and a couple of my deluxe hospital-issued painkillers, one balanced on each knee. He had promised to delay actually taking them till he had finished explaining his Timothy J. Anderson theory—I didn’t want him to pass out in the middle of a sentence—but I could see it was going to be a struggle for him. Sam Hellerman had very little self-control when it came to tranquilizers.
“Once you realize that Timothy J. Anderson was a kid, or a teenager,” he said, tapping on the microfilm printout about the hanged student in the Most Precious Blood gym, “the whole thing starts to make a little more sense.”
He paused to headbang slightly, and to sing “the ace of spades” a couple times under his breath, but stopped when he saw me giving him a rather desperate “mercy, please, I beg of you” look.
“Okay,” he said, after taking a little sip of bourbon. “Starting with that Bible quote you’re so hung up on. Why did the mountain monk have the same quotation in his book that Timothy J. Anderson had on his funeral card? You had guessed that the connection might be that they were both monks or clergymen. But they had something else in common, too—they were kids. I mean the mountain story guy was writing about his childhood; Timothy J. Anderson died while still a kid. And that quotation really suits a kid’s funeral as much as an I-was-a-teenaged-monk book.”
Clearly, Sam Hellerman hadn’t actually read The Seven Storey Mountain, but I could see his point. “God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Matthew 3:9–11 did sound like something you might want to quote at a kid’s funeral.
The Catholic Church, he added, had had a pretty strict antisuicide policy, especially at that time. Adults who killed themselves weren’t allowed to have Catholic burials. Kids sometimes were, depending on their age, according to his research, though, of course, we didn’t know the hanged kid’s exact age.
“They were changing all the rules around at that time,” he said, pointing to the date, 1963, “including the rules about who got to have funerals and all that.” I hadn’t realized you had to earn the right to have a funeral by dying in the proper manner—it never ends, does it? But of course, a taboo like that doesn’t disappear just because they change the wording of something in Rome. Sam Hellerman thought that might be a reason why, even if there had been a funeral, as there appeared to have been, they might not have been eager to draw attention to it by publishing an obituary. “That’s assuming everyone believed it was a suicide, whether or not it really was.”
“But couldn’t you just as easily conclude,” I said, “that if suicides didn’t get to have funerals, the fact that TJA did have a funeral kind of suggests that he didn’t kill himself, that he wasn’t the one who hanged himself in the gym? How do we know for sure that TJA was that kid, and not some other guy?” And then, thinking of Dr. Hexstrom, I added: “And how do we know that the TJA card was even from a funeral? It could have been from just about anything.”
“It could have been,” said Sam Hellerman. “But it wasn’t. It was a funeral, or at least a memorial service. Even if not, though, it doesn’t really matter: a kid, a classmate of Tit’s and your dad’s at Most Precious Blood College Prep, was found hanging in the gym. And there was a funeral, which Tit, according to his own note, refused to go to.” He conceded that it was possible that this kid was someone other than Timothy J. Anderson, but that it “worked out better” if they were the same person. How well it “worked out” seemed like a funny way to decide whether something really happened or not. But we both knew that this was the sort of game we were playing.
“So it’s just a coincidence that my dad happened to be reading a book with the same quotation as the one used at the funeral of a classmate?” I asked, still a little dubious.
“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “it was a popular book.”
“The Seven Storey Mountain?”
“No,” he said. “The Bible.”
It was hard to argue with that.
I got up to turn the record over, and when I came back I noticed that Sam Hellerman had only one painkiller left on his knee.
“For crying out loud, Hellerman.”
He pointed to the remaining pill knee. “This stuff isn’t at all bad,” he said. Lemmy was singing “Jailbait.”
I coughed. “So you were talking about TJA be
ing a kid….”
“Oh. Right,” he said, breathing a little more heavily. “Think about all the stuff that happened this year. Our songs freaked people out because they reminded them of real stuff that happened in the past, even though we didn’t mean it that way. So your mom freaked out about ‘Thinking of Suicide?’ Mr. Teone thought the Chi-Mos’ songs were about him and his Satanic Empire. And the same kind of thing happened with Kyrsten Blakeney.” He took another gulp of bourbon.
“It was unintentional,” he continued. “The connections happened in their heads. But in another way, Mr. Teone’s reaction to the Chi-Mos wasn’t at all an accident.”
I went: “?”
“I mean, there’s a nonrandom reason you have the nickname Chi-Mo. The kids in seventh grade gave you the name because they associated ‘clergy’ with ‘child molester.’ And the reason for that is that there really were situations, especially in schools like the one Tit attended with CEH, where kids were molested. It’s in the news all the time. That’s why I think there may have been a pattern….” His voice trailed off.
A pattern. “Really?” I said.
“A pattern from the past re-created in the present,” he said, after staring into space for a while. That sounded like a poorly translated fortune cookie. He was losing me. We were halfway through the final guitar solo in “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch.”
He looked a little zoned. I punched him in the arm, which seemed to wake him up a bit.
It took some prodding and a bit of patience, but I was eventually able to get it out of him. Sam Hellerman’s idea was that Mr. Teone’s teen porn operation had been based on a similarly structured system at Most Precious Blood, which he had encountered as a young Tit. When he finally became a shop teacher, and later a principal, he had set up his own organization at Hillmont along the same lines.
“So there was a retro-porn thing going on at Most Precious Blood, too?” I asked, finding it kind of hard to picture, given what I knew about the technology of 1963: homemade secret photography would have been more difficult back then.
“It could have been anything illicit,” replied Sam Hellerman. “But I’d guess it would have been sex-related in some way.” Check, I thought. It always comes back to ramoning, doesn’t it? And it squared, in a general way, with the contents of Tit’s note. If Tit had been involved, as a participant or even as a student organizer, in some kind of perverted ramoning situation at Most Precious Blood, what had my dad’s role been? I couldn’t get my mind around that question, so I shook it out of my head.
Anyhow, I could see the logic, sort of, assuming Timothy J. Anderson was Tit’s dead bastard. It could account for why Tit had hated “the bastard,” and rejoiced in his death. Say Tit had been a Matt Lynch figure, and TJA one of his minions. Tit was infuriated when TJA killed himself in shame and remorse, because it endangered the operation and risked sparking some kind of investigation. Or TJA was going to expose the operation and had to be eliminated, and, as Sam Hellerman had suggested, Tit had killed him and, somehow, made it look like suicide. Or TJA had been the Matt Lynch figure, and Tit a recruit who had turned on him. Or he could have been “talent” like Kyrsten Blakeney. Mr. Teone was clearly deranged, and he’d had to get there somehow. So, long ago, in the depraved halls of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory, a sociopath was born? I guess that was the idea.
But even if that was true in a general way, it seemed like there were a lot of possible variations. I gave Sam Hellerman another “?” look, and said: “So why are you so sure TJA was killed by Tit?”
“It’s the patterns again,” he said, staring intently and with what seemed like loving devotion at the pill on his knee. “Patterns. I think Tit probably murdered TJA and disguised it as suicide. Because I’m pretty sure that’s basically how he killed your dad, and also kind of how he tried to kill you.”
He was talking about the old “knock me on the head with a tuba and blame it on the boxing” plan—I guess the connection there was the elaborate fake explanation for a murder attempt. That was a stretch, and in fact, I didn’t believe that the brass instrument scheme had been a true murder attempt. It was just ordinary revenge, and maybe intimidation, as well. But as for Mr. Teone’s being involved in my dad’s murder—well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t considered this possibility. One of Amanda’s Chi-Mos panels had even depicted a devilish Mr. Teone driving the car that had hit my dad—it was kind of obvious, in a way, if hard to fathom. But somehow, hearing Sam Hellerman say it really creeped me out. And I still couldn’t quite see how a fake suicide would fit in to the whole hit-and-run scenario, though I was sure Sam Hellerman was going to tell me, provided he could stay conscious long enough. It was a race against time.
“Could you turn that Funkadelic off?” he said irritably. “It’s giving me a headache.” I had put on One Nation Under a Groove after the Motorhead was finished.
I wanted to use our time wisely, so I refrained from mentioning his lack of good taste and took the Funkadelic record off. I was reaching for the Isley Brothers, but Sam Hellerman made a little cross with his index fingers, so I put on Young Loud and Snotty instead. He looked up at me with this TV-commercial “headache gone!” expression. Which I thought was kind of funny.
“See,” he finally said, slurring a little after I had shaken his shoulder to wake him up, “the problem with your dad’s death was never a lack of information. It was that there were too many explanations. It was a murder, it was an accident, it was a suicide. It can’t have been all of those. And the one consistent element, the car crash, is the least likely part.”
“But the car crash definitely happened,” I said. “It was in the paper.”
“Yeah, but if you really wanted to kill someone, crashing into their parked car would be just about the worst plan possible.”
Okay, that was actually a good point. People get killed in car crashes when both cars are moving at high speed, and even then there can be survivors. You certainly couldn’t be sure that a hit-and-run on a parked car would lead to sudden death, though it happens. Plus the damage to your own car would be hard to disguise or explain. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.
Sam Hellerman then began to deliver a rambling, semi-drugged analysis of the inadequacies of the car crash as a murder method, which once again I found kind of creepy at those moments when it hit me that it was my dad’s death he was retroactively strategizing about.
“So are you saying it was an accident, then,” I said, “as per the official story? I thought your idea was that Mr. Teone did murder him.”
“See, it’s not a believable way to die in an accident, either,” said Sam Hellerman with a deep, semitranquilized sigh as Stiv Bators sang “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth.” “There would still be all the same problems. And suicide by hit-and-run makes even less sense. And haven’t you ever wondered why your dad happened to be parked in the middle of nowhere at three a.m.?” In perfect hit-and-run position. Yeah, I’d wondered about that.
“None of it seems like it could possibly be accidental,” he said. “That’s why I figure your dad was already dead when his car was rammed, and that the person who rammed him had set it up that way.”
I’ll spare you the details of the retarded slurred Q&A whereby I finally arrived at a basic understanding of it, but Sam Hellerman’s hit-and-run scenario went more or less like this: Mr. Teone had started up the Satanic Empire operation almost as soon as he started teaching at Hillmont. For some reason, he had seen my dad as a threat and decided he had to get him out of the way. It may have been because of an official investigation my dad had been working on. Or it may have been a private matter between them. There was certainly no one better situated to cause trouble for Tit’s fledgling teen porn operation than a cop who had known him all his life and who had at least some knowledge of the shady activities of the past at Most Precious Blood. So he arranged to meet my dad on the Sky Vista frontage road at three a.m. under some pretense. Sam Hellerman wasn�
�t sure how he had actually killed him, but he “liked” the idea that he had rendered him unconscious somehow and rigged up a tailpipe/ hose/window apparatus—which is how people do commit suicide in cars on occasion. Then he had rammed the car and driven away. Sam Hellerman also speculated that perhaps Mr. Teone had written the suicide note my mom claimed to have or to have seen, leaving it in the car, or possibly arranging for it to get to my mom directly.
“But why would he go to such trouble to make it look like suicide and then confuse the issue with a faked accident? And wouldn’t the cops have been suspicious, and wouldn’t they have been able to tell what had really happened?”
To my slight dismay, Sam Hellerman quickly popped the other pill in his mouth, gulped some bourbon, and smiled at me impishly. I knew we didn’t have long. He still seemed lucid enough but very tired and uninterested in focusing—I knew the feeling pretty well by now. He picked up the computer printout about the Santa Carla corruption scandal.
“Didn’t you read this?” he said.
SHERLOCK HENDERSON
Now, I’ve got to interrupt Sam Hellerman’s explanation with my own explanation. There was something I had to know, and under the circumstances it just wasn’t possible to ask it directly. So I had a plan. Fortunately, he was on drugs, which would help. That’s one of the reasons I had agreed to let him have some painkillers, in fact.
I reached over, tapped the printout, and said: “so Fiona is back in the picture.”
His facial expression and body language were easy to read. He sighed and slumped, looking exasperated and dismayed, like he always did whenever the name Fiona was mentioned. He liked to think he’d taken care of that situation, thrown me off the track, and he was bummed when the subject would still pop up now and again. But it was also obvious that my bringing up Fiona in the context of the newspaper article was puzzling to him. That told me something, but there was still a piece missing.
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