“You mean the one from the school district,” he said. “It wasn’t from me. Did you get—”
But I had already hung up.
There was no mail from Sam Hellerman in the huge pile of barely opened mail on the mail pileup area of the kitchen counter by the phone, but there was lots and lots of mail. Junk mail, bills, bank statements, threats from collection agencies—my family is not very ept at opening and answering mail. The phone and gas get cut off regularly just because no one bothers to open the delinquent bills and pay them, and Little Big Tom sometimes has to drive down to the gas company’s headquarters to pay in cash at the last minute when it gets critical.
I wasn’t expecting this letter to be anything interesting. And on the outside chance that it turned out to be something interesting, I wasn’t expecting it to be anything good. But as I’ve explained, at this point I just wanted to cross it off my list, and going straight to the source seemed a better approach than trying to tease whatever it was out of a terrified, whispering Sam Hellerman over the phone.
It took some time to find it, but in the end there it was, from the Santa Carla Unified School District, dated a few weeks back. It was a long letter. My eyes scanned it.
“… tragic events … liability … district policy … safety and well-being … students, staff, and administrators … appropriate measures … pending litigation … law enforcement … federal investigation … media scrutiny … counseling available … effective immediately … upon commencement … close its doors … offices to remain … administrative functions … smooth transition … academic excellence …”
Then I read it again, more carefully.
My God, I said, almost out loud. They’re closing Hillmont High School.
Well, what do you know? I thought. There was a lot of babble about the welfare of the students and “academic excellence” and so forth, but the bottom line seemed to be that fears of legal trouble and bad publicity and uncertainty as to what else the various investigations might turn up had led the school district’s administrators to decide that inviting students back into the Hillmont High School buildings after what had happened would only make them look even worse than they already did and would possibly open them up to further liability. Their solution was to close the school down, effective almost immediately.
I had to hand it to Mr. Teone. He and his hidden cameras had finally managed to achieve what forty years of sucking worse than any high school in the history of high school could not. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving school, despite being a decade or three late. I doubted anyone would mourn the demise of Hillmont High School.
The Hillmont students were to be filtered into other schools beginning in the spring semester. The end of the letter informed me that following winter break, after doing “Finals” at the Hillmont “campus” (ha, I inserted mentally), I was expected to show up for registration at Clearview High, with classes to begin officially the following week. That was really soon.
It was difficult to believe. I just stood there turning it over in my mind, getting more and more annoyed. I certainly wasn’t upset that Hillmont High was closing. I had no delusions that Clearview would be much better, but it could hardly be worse, and I hated Hillmont more than life itself. What was bugging me was my stupid, incompetent family, who couldn’t even manage to open the mail every now and then, who showed no interest in participating on my behalf in what appeared to be a considerable orgy of forthcoming litigation against the school, who basically refused to bother to do or know anything about anything. Plus, there was the fact that I was only finding out about it now, when Sam Hellerman and everyone else had already learned of it ages ago.
I was still standing there, letter in hand, when Little Big Tom came up behind me and started giving me one of his trademark unsolicited back rubs, the sort that are supposed to be comforting but actually make your skin crawl.
“Listen, chief,” he said in his soothing therapy voice, the one like thick, gentle, alarming syrup. “I know you have deep, deep concerns and anxieties about Y2K. But the first thing to remember is, this is a safe place.…”
I started to see bubbly colors like I had seen before I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch a baby in the face. Most of all I wanted to get out from under Little Big Tom’s oppressive therapy grip. But what I did was, I tipped up the kitchen table and knocked it all the way over, scattering the mail, dirty dishes, and everything else that was on it in a big clattering crash that made Little Big Tom jump five feet in the air and brought my mom and Amanda rushing into the kitchen at light speed.
“What on earth happened here?” said a Christmas tree who happened also to be my mother.
“The time bomb finally exploded,” said Amanda, even as she was tapping in a number on her phone-baby to report the latest to her bureau chiefs at headquarters. Her shoulders raised slightly as though to say “It was only a matter of time.”
“Never seen someone so darn upset about Y2K,” said a visibly mystified Little Big Tom, dabbing his shirt where a flying open bottle of wine and a tub of butter had landed with satisfying accuracy.
“They’re closing Hillmont High School,” I said when the colors had receded, rattling the letter.
“Oh, yeah,” said my mom. “I heard about that.”
I stared at her. My eyes said: “You heard about it and didn’t bother to mention it? And that’s because why?” And I’m not at all sure that one of my eyebrows didn’t add the word “bitch” somewhere in there.
It was the easiest game of Try to Guess What I’m Mad About in the history of the world, but, well, my family really, really sucks at Try to Guess What I’m Mad About.
“Chief,” said Little Big Tom, still in the therapy voice, taking my hands in his. “Going to a new high school is a challenging time for any teen.…”
I twisted away and left the room, winning.
APLPA-016
So, Queerview High School. It had to be better than Hellmont, it just had to be. And while I couldn’t go so far as to say I was looking forward to it, I could see some definite pros among the cons. One of the cons was that as awful as Hillmont High was, we’d been there for a year and a half and we knew precisely how things failed to function there, while Clearview’s horrors were yet to be discovered. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, they say, but when all’s said and done, it’s still the devil you’re talking about. The devil is bad.
I had no illusions. Closing Hillmont High would do nothing whatsoever to change the senseless, sadistic structure of society and the universe, and I had no doubt that Clearview was crawling with normal people every bit as vicious as those we had known in … the other place. But Sam Hellerman and I were pretty good at navigating the beast-infested seas of normalcy, and Sam Hellerman was actually a genius. With his hand on the tiller of our ramshackle skiff, I had no doubt we’d manage. Plus, no Mr. Schtuppe. No Ms. Rambo. No Mr. Donnelly. In a way, Mr. Teone had given us a great and precious gift. The only possible improvement would have been if the buildings were to be razed, the earth salted, and all the psychotic normal perpetrators led away in chains. But let not the horrible be the enemy of the slightly less than terrible, if I have that saying right. Any way you sliced it, there were definitely pros, no doubt about it.
Now, those of you from the future who have already seen Halls of Innocence will be surprised to learn that Hillmont High was closed down. At the end of the program, Jake dashes up the school steps and says, “It’s great to be back,” and there’s a freeze-frame on his enormous toothy smile, over which there’s a caption that says:
Mr. Cabal fled and has evaded capture.
He is still at large.
Well, of course, no one, not even the worst normal person ever to walk the earth, had ever or would ever actually be glad to be at Hillmont High School, let alone smile at the thought. But the bit about “Mr. Cabal” is true. He was still at large. And that wor
ried me. It worried me a lot.
I didn’t get a chance to speak to Sam Hellerman about the letter and our Clearview strategy till the day after the day after Christmas. When I arrived at Toby’s Record Hut on El Camino to meet him, he was already there looking through the New Arrivals bins.
One of the few great things about the times we live in is that the normal people of the world have recently reached the misguided conclusion that compact discs are better than vinyl LPs. They’re wrong about this, of course, as they are about almost everything. All the great rock and roll recordings were made on analog equipment, and they were specifically engineered to sound right when reproduced on vinyl. Plus, the CDs of those recordings have often been remastered to try to make them match the awful sounds of our contemporary recordings. (For example, go listen to the CD of COC 39105: I promise it will hurt your ears. And not in a good way.) Unless you want, for some reason I can’t fathom, to listen to the terrible stuff they’re putting out now, you’re way better off just putting on the damn Stones record.
But the normal people don’t realize this, and they’ve been buying their dumb CDs, getting rid of their record players, and discarding their vinyl LPs for years and years now. Result: used vinyl is everywhere, and there has never been a cheaper time to acquire it. You can walk into a place like Toby’s with fifteen dollars and come out with six great albums stupidly abandoned by their original normal owners. Sometimes they even leave them out on the street in milk crates. I picked up the entire Alice Cooper catalog on Vista View Terrace Avenue just the other week. Morons.
People from the future: you should have been there. People from now: now’s your chance. You can bet it won’t last forever.
Sam Hellerman had his headphones on, as he always did lately, but he was still flicking through the records calling out albums and their ridiculously low prices, and putting the good ones aside.
“BS 2607, three fifty,” he said. “S CBS 82000, four fifty. ASF 2512, one dollar …”
Now, you’ve probably noticed this thing we’ve been doing of referring to records by their catalog numbers rather than the titles, and maybe I should explain. Except that there isn’t an explanation. It serves no useful purpose. Hence, obviously, it’s a thing worth doing. Sam Hellerman started it one day, saying “You know, Henderson, I think I actually might like EKS 74071 better than EKS 74051.” I was mystified but went along with it, nodding silently in that way I do, till I figured out from the other stuff he was saying that he was talking about the Stooges. I caught on that EKS stood for Elektra Records, and that he was saying he liked Funhouse better than the self-titled debut album. (To which I say: no duh.) So I joined in. It’s like a fun, really dumb secret code. We started out with the obvious ones pretty much everyone knows, like BS 2607 or 2409-218. But some of them are really hard, and you wind up having to do a lot of research after some conversations just to find out what the hell you’ve been talking about. I even take notes sometimes.
Sam Hellerman is way better at this game than I am, of course. The guy seems to know every catalog number of every record by heart. Maybe he prepares a list the night before just to impress me. Either way, it does. Impress me, I mean. Sam Hellerman is like that. He just randomly starts doing something stupid and before too long it becomes a well-established custom and you soon forget that people ever did anything different.
One of the records we found at Toby’s that day was APLPA-016, the Australia-only issue of AC/DC’s second album, T.N.T., which is perhaps the finest hard rock record ever released. This was the first pressing, with the kangaroos on the labels. I’d never actually seen one. It was five dollars rather than fifty cents, because it was an “import,” but it was certainly well worth five dollars of Christmas money. We walked out of there with twenty LPs between us, and we barely spent thirty bucks.
So APLPA-016 got me thinking, and later on the bus I asked Sam Hellerman if he’d ever noticed that Shinefield’s drumming when we covered “Live Wire” was much less retarded than it was when we played our own songs. And of course, he had noticed.
We spent the rest of the bus ride engaged in exaggerated, sarcastic mimicry of Shinefield’s awful drumming, using our hands as sticks on the seats in front of us and augmenting that by making various drum noises with our mouths. When we were asked to leave the bus and had to get out and walk the rest of the way, we had to use our arms to carry the records instead of using them to mimic Shinefield’s eccentric sense of timing and rhythm, but the conversation continued.
Sam Hellerman noted that we had tried to explain the concept of “space,” and beats, and regular tempo, and rests, and eighth notes to Shinefield till we were blue in the face, but it never did any good. Shinefield always agreed enthusiastically that good drumming had to be minimal enough so you could detect, say, where beat one was going to fall, and—though this might be pushing it—where beat one stood in relation to all the other beats. And he would say things like “Totally, dude” and flash us a grin that overflowed with eager camaraderie, if “camaraderie” is the one where you’re all on the same team saying “Okay, boys, let’s get ’em.” But then the song would begin and he would be even worse than before.
“The only way to improve his drumming on our songs would be to kick him out of the band,” said Sam Hellerman, and he added that in his opinion, Shinefield played “Live Wire” better because it was only a cover and he didn’t care enough about it to mess it up by trying to make it all special.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if we could somehow get him to play ‘Live Wire’ while we played our songs?”
Sam Hellerman stopped in his tracks.
“Say that again, Henderson,” he said. Like a scene in a movie where someone says something that turns out to be the key to the big dilemma and another person tells him to say it again so the audience’s attention can be drawn to it without any possibility of missing it. In short, there was evidently something to this idea, in the world of Sam Hellerman.
“What?” I said, playing my assigned role as best I could for the moment.
“What you just said. Say it again.”
“You mean, ‘Fuck you, Hellerman’?”
“You didn’t say that,” said Sam Hellerman woundedly.
My eyes said, “I know, man, I just felt like saying it for some reason. No offense.”
But even though I wouldn’t play along with the “say that again” game, Sam Hellerman is a genius, and I could see that faraway genius look in his eyes. And of course he wouldn’t tell me his specific plan right then. And of course we had to sit for a while at the bus stop in front of Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway pretending not to look at Jeans Skirt Girl. And of course Sam Hellerman was listening to his tape rather than talking to me, making surreptitious notes and swaying from side to side like he was having a fit or something. And of course I sat there too, though I felt like a big idiot, because I was just so curious as to what he was going to propose in the end that I had to stick it out so I’d get to hear it. As with the letter, I was a prisoner of his cockeyed genius, if cockeyed isn’t too strange of a thing to call a person’s genius. Basically, I just had to know.
Jeans Skirt Girl had climbed into the green station wagon, and Sam Hellerman had switched off his tape player, just as the thought struck: the letter! I’d forgotten all about it in the excitement about APLPA-016. I hadn’t yet had a chance to discuss the switch to Clearview High School and compare notes with Sam Hellerman on the pros and cons.
“So,” I said. “Queerview.”
“What?” he said.
“Queerview.”
“What?” he said.
I decided to make my meaning clearer.
“Clearview,” I said.
“Stop saying that,” said Sam Hellerman. “You sound like a lunatic.”
I patiently explained that what I meant was that I’d seen the letter at last and that I had been attempting, using as few audible words as possible, as is my wont, to introduce the topic of how it
looked like we’d be attending Clearview High School in the new year. Is it “wont”? I think it’s “wont,” though that’s weird.
“If we’re not killed by Y2K, that is,” I added with my eyebrows.
Now, I have no idea how astute you, my public, may be. But it occurs to me that some of you possibly will have some idea already of what Sam Hellerman was going to say next. If so, I congratulate you, because I’m obviously not anywhere near as good as you are at astuteness, and it came as a complete surprise to me.
“Clearview?” he said. “I’m not going to Clearview. I’m supposed to go to Mission Hills.”
And again, if the astute among you who saw that coming also already knew that my response to this was to sit on the bench, remaining aloof from reality, my blood running cold and sweat bedewing my brow, wishing desperately that there were a kitchen table next to the bus stop just so I could tip it over? Well, you were right about that, too. You’re good.
Sam Hellerman and I would be going to different high schools.
It was a con. A definite con.
THE BRUTAL CONDITIONS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN KIBBLE MINES
As those of you from the future knew all along, January 1, 2000, dawned on a changed world. Computer irregularities had caused an instant worldwide financial collapse. Huge regions of the western United States were rendered uninhabitable by the failure of the electrical grid and lack of water, while nuclear plants, their automated temperature control systems disabled, quickly melted down and spewed radiation throughout the countryside. The world’s great nations, seeing their security endangered, let loose their missiles simultaneously, wiping out all but ten percent of the earth’s population. Soon mutant creatures roamed the land, most notably a gigantic fire-breathing lizard and an enormous angry moth: together they laid waste to cities, brushing humans aside like they were so many ants. Now we, the surviving remnant of humanity, live a harsh existence in underground caves, enslaved by a mutant race of superintelligent cats and forced to labor for the entirety of our short lives under the brutal conditions of the North American kibble mines. Only the few among us, the Resistance, continue the struggle to preserve our race, quietly gathering the components with which to assemble a giant laser pointer, a vacuum cleaner, and a spray bottle to distract and drive off our feline overlords and reclaim our ruined planet.
King Dork Approximately Page 6
