“So,” said Celeste Fletcher at the end of the class. “I guess I’ll be seeing you at Queerview.”
“Really?” I said. I mean, I had already known she was one of the ones going to Clearview with me, but it was the “I’ll be seeing you” part that seemed to offer more than it said. God, she smelled nice.
“Really,” she said, like it was nothing and like I was dumb for asking.
Damn. Shinefield was going to Mission Hills with Sam Hellerman, though he was planning to graduate early and apply to MIT. (Apparently he was some kind of math genius, somewhere in that fuzzy, stoned head of his.) But this whole Clearview thing wasn’t sounding too bad at all, in view of that “really”: just me and Fiona, alone in a strange new school with no competition and only each other to cling to for warmth and protection. It is in such situations that true affection can take root and grow.
As I leaned in for the customary goodbye hug—I don’t know how or when this became standard in our tiny social circle, but, hey, I’ll take it—she stiffened a bit like my mom has recently started doing with Little Big Tom.
“No ass-grabbio,” whispered Celeste Fletcher. Got it, Fiona, I conceded silently. Not in public. Our love, such as it was, would remain a closely guarded secret. That was the deal.
I didn’t know what to think, but that was pretty much par for the course, meaning that if my life were a golf course, not knowing what was really going on, particularly where girls were involved, was equivalent to the number of strokes ordinarily required to make it through to the end of the game and not lose embarrassingly. And that, my dear friends, is called optimism.
THE SWEET FRUIT OF TRUE ROCK AND ROLL
It seemed that whatever coolness Sam Hellerman and I had acquired from our band’s performance at the Battle of the Bands during the last term had mostly dissipated over Christmas vacation. While my centipede and my slightly weird shorter haircut attracted a few looks, people seemed to take little notice of me. Giving the occasional girl a “hey, remember me, I’m in a band” look had no effect at all, if you can believe that. Rock and roll is a proven aphrodisiac, if “aphrodisiac” is the one that makes everybody horny for you, but its effects are fleeting. You’re only as good as your last disastrous performance, and our l. d. p. was quickly fading from public memory.
Well, their minds—I’m referring to the public here—were understandably on other things. But as being seen to be in a rock and roll band was the key—the only key—to what success with girls we were ever likely to have, there was no time to lose: we had to jump-start our career, and fast. In other words, the time was ripe for a comeback.
With this in mind, we put everything we had into our first practice since Sam Hellerman came up with the “Fiona”/“Live Wire” gambit.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this yourself, but playing one song out loud while playing an entirely different song in secret in your head is pretty difficult. Both Sam Hellerman and I made a lot of mistakes, playing bits of “Fiona” out loud by accident, or, in my case, at least, thinking bits of “Live Wire” when I should have been think-playing “Fiona.”
Fortunately, the lyrics didn’t matter too much. I was singing into a cheap microphone plugged into a half-fried channel of the old Hillmont High Jazz Band Polytone amp that I was also using for the guitar. Sam Hellerman was plugged into this amp as well, because he hadn’t yet replaced the Magnavox/Fender Bassman Frankenstein amp that had been wrecked at the Battle of the Bands. Point being, no one could hear what I was singing, not even me, and moreover, Shinefield didn’t seem to care, so I just sang the “Fiona” lyrics, with no one the wiser. However, Shinefield did notice when Sam Hellerman or I would slip into the “Fiona” chords too obviously. When that occurred, he would give us this perplexed yet good-natured “what just happened there?” look, which we would return with shrugs and what we hoped were smiles that said “Whoa, that was weird, but never mind, let us carry on, my good man, you’re doing just fine.”
Nevertheless, one thing was absolutely clear as soon as we did the first verse the first time: it sounded fucking great.
Like, I don’t even have words to describe how great it sounded, other than “fucking,” and I imagine even Sam Hellerman would have agreed. How great was it? Fucking great, that’s how great it was. Even while having to hold the two things in my head at the same time, I could feel the realness of the rock and roll shining through on the important half. It was louder. It was tighter. It was heavier. And that’s despite our terrible equipment—the worst rock and roll had ever seen. Half of it was just in my head, it’s true, but I could tell. I just could.
It was clear from Sam Hellerman’s trembling hands and wild eyes that he had felt it too. During one of Shinefield’s smoke breaks, Sam Hellerman quickly whispered his new plan: we would accidentally on purpose play one full verse and chorus of “Fiona” in the middle of doing “Live Wire” and pass it off as a mistake. If that worked and if Shinefield went along with it, we would, at the very end, during the run-through-the-set-one-last-time part, simply play “Fiona” all the way through, come what may. That was risky, but as Sam Hellerman said, now that we had tasted the sweet fruit of true rock and roll, we could never go back to the way it had been, to the bitter herbs of everything just being lame and kind of stupid. I’m paraphrasing. Anyway, either it worked or it didn’t.
We got the perplexed, smiley look from Shinefield during the one-verse “mistake” experiment, but it was easily shrugged off. The final full “Fiona,” however, was harder to pull off, to say the least.
“What the hell just happened?” he said after it was over. But he was laughing. This is probably the one situation where having a stoned drummer can actually help rather than hinder you. “Wow, that was weird!” he continued, starting to emit a chuckle that verged, if ever so slightly, on out-and-out giggling. “What was that?” It turns out there are more ways to express “What just happened?” than we ever knew, and Shinefield ran through them all, laughing harder and harder all the time, saying we were crazy and asking what had gotten into us.
We started laughing too, saying we didn’t know, that it sure was weird, wasn’t it? But all the while we were looking at each other, gloating. The full “Fiona” had ruled, exceeding every expectation. How much had it ruled? Well, put it this way: it was nearly impossible to believe it was us playing it and not some real band.
Our two pairs of eyes met through the haze and over the semi-stoned what-just-happened laughing and babbling. Come on, the eyes were saying. Feel the noise.
AND THEY SHALL KNOW US BY OUR MONIKERS
So rock and roll was back and, with any luck, here to stay, and it felt pretty good. We had a difficult road ahead, however. Now that we were committed to it, we had to come up with a real list of other songs to tell Shinefield we were covering while playing our own songs to them in our heads. Then we would have to practice them relentlessly on our own, till playing them became something we didn’t have to think about and it would thus be easier to switch “modes” at will. Sam Hellerman said he’d make Shinefield a tape of the final list, and since his dad’s turntable had a vari-speed slide on it, he could even alter the tempos to some of the songs to match ours better, to a very slight degree, anyway.
Now, not that I’m one to talk here, but I could see the clear signs of delusions of grandeur beginning to display themselves in Sam Hellerman’s shining eyes. You have to understand, we’d been used to sucking so bad and so hard for our entire rock and roll lives that the prospect of participating in something that did anything other than suck, or that sucked even just a bit less than usual, was simply intoxicating.
“The publicity campaign starts now,” he said. “But what’s the name going to be? We need a name to stick with for at least a little while.”
This was hard. We’d already gone through three band names since I Hate This Jar, and I was particularly fond of the current one, Buddy of Christ. At the same time, the idea of sticking with one band for a
ny extended length of time felt extraordinarily oppressive, and it was something we’d never been able to manage before.
“How long does publicity last?” I said.
“Long as it takes” was the reply.
That could be a long, long time, I thought.
We spent the next four hours saying names at each other and rejecting them.
“Caring Healing Understanding?” said Sam Hellerman. “We’ve already got the banners.” True to his note to self, Sam Hellerman had managed to swipe the Hillmont High brainwashing banners: they were rolled up neatly in his closet.
“Not much of a band name, though,” I said glumly. I had my standards.
Sam Hellerman suggested simply the Understanding, first album Caring Healing, but with pictures of bloody dismembered corpses on the album cover. Which wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t quite as exciting as you’d want a name that was going to last as long as several weeks to be. Plus, to make it sound like it was as cool as it was, you’d have to take the time to explain the album cover, losing the vital element of surprise. We needed something with a less complex path to greatness.
“Adolf Oliver Nipples?” Sam Hellerman suggested, which was obviously as great as band names come, but unfortunately, as I had to remind him, we’d already used it. You can’t repeat band names: that way lies madness.
I thought of Dr. Elizabeth Gary. There were possibilities in there somewhere: Dr. Elizabeth. Therapy Bomb. The Grief Counselors. The Therapy Counselors from the Planet Stupid, first album Healed, Feeled, and Congealed. Or was that almost too good?
“How about,” I said at last, “the Teenage Brainwashers.”
It was less bad than all the others. So Teenage Brainwashers it was.
HELLERMAN AND HELLERMAN, ATTORNEYS AT LAW
I was over at Sam Hellerman’s house because I believed it was the best place to explain my ideas concerning lawsuits, the sadistic structure of reality, and my General Theory of the Universe. It seemed like a bad idea to discuss such matters when Little Big Tom was liable to break in at any moment saying “Let’s hear some more of that Jesus Proust, boys.”
I had been building what I thought was a pretty good comprehensive case against Matt Lynch, Paul Krebs, Mark McAllister, Rich Zim, Mr. Teone, Mr. Donnelly, the Hillmont High School administration and student body, the Santa Carla Unified School District, the State of California, and the United States of America for conspiracy, murder, grievous assault, violent misuse of a public school band instrument with intent to maim or kill, educational malpractice, extortion, censorship, racketeering, obscenity, torture, discrimination, civil rights violations, human rights violations, and crimes against humanity.
Now, as my friends looking back from the future mists of time will know, Halls of Innocence barely scratched the surface of the greater conspiracy I’ve tried to outline here. According to Halls of Innocence, all “Mr. Cabal” did was put a few pinhole cameras in the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms and walk around saying disturbing things like “Get to class, young lady—I’ll be seeing you later!” Not that that isn’t accurate, or disturbing enough on its own, but it’s the stuff beneath the surface that truly matters in the case.
My apologies to those who already know all this from my previous extremely clear and easy-to-follow explanations. I know I’ve been over it before and you’re all saying, “Yes, yes, we know all that, you’ve already made it abundantly clear and presented the case with utter and complete persuasiveness and coherence, so why bother to rehash it now?” Hey, I said I was sorry, didn’t I?
Anyway, for those who have missed my p. e.’s: the key to the whole sick, twisted affair was the Catcher Code, a creepy encoded square of slanted text, in backwards French, that reveals the remote origins of Mr. “Cabal” Teone’s criminality, as well as his connection to my dad, going back to when they were both students at Most Precious Blood College Preparatory in San Francisco in the sixties. As the code and its associated materials indicate, the young Mr. Teone, known at the time by the acronym Tit, had already been involved in creepy perverted skullduggery at that school. (“Skullduggery” means illicit or underhanded activity. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve digging up any actual skulls, but it could, and in the case of Mr. Teone, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it did.)
For reasons not yet clear, Mr. Teone had also arranged for the fake suicide of a fellow student named Timothy J. Anderson, otherwise known as the Dead Bastard. Later on, when the grown-up Mr. Teone had become the assistant principal at Hillmont High School, he returned to his old perverted tricks. But my dad, now a police detective, had known too much, and Mr. Teone had murdered him, staging the murder as a fake suicide just as he had done with the Dead Bastard so many years before. Then, when the songs we played at the Battle of the Bands seemed to indicate that I knew too much as well, Mr. Teone tried to have me killed too, delegating the task to a group of ultra-normal teenage subhuman replicant thugs. How he would have made a tuba wound seem self-inflicted had this attempt on my life been successful, I cannot say, but I’m confident he would have managed it: Mr. Teone’s depravity and ingenuity had few limits, if d. and i. mean what I must assume they mean.
Mr. Teone had done more than just set up cameras, and he hadn’t acted alone. He had sold his illicit videos on the underground market and had recruited like-minded normal students to help with the operation by setting up their classmates to be unwitting stars of the videos, and enforcing the silence and cooperation of the student body and administration by means of violence, subterfuge, and intimidation. To the extent that this silent cooperation amounted to participation, the conspiracy went right to the top, which was why I ultimately named the United States of America in my indictment.
Underlying it all was the sadistic structure of society and its organizing principle of Normalism, reflecting in turn the sadistic, essentially evil structure of reality itself, i.e., the Survival of the Cruelest and the Dumbest at the Expense of the Nice, the Decent, and the Moderately Intelligent. But I couldn’t very well indict the universe. Or could I? No, I had to draw the line somewhere, and for the purposes of my lawsuit, I had elected to draw the line at the United States of America. The universe could wait.
“You don’t really know what a lawsuit is, do you?” was Sam Hellerman’s response after I had given him this brief outline of my plans.
“Well, no,” I replied to the response, after a brief pause. “I guess I don’t.” But, my eyes implored, you do. Or failing that, somebody does. “That’s why I’m asking.”
Sam Hellerman did seem to know a bit about lawsuits, as I had anticipated, but he was hardly encouraging. I guess I’d thought of it like a court version of a citizen’s arrest, where people do something to you and you catch them, take them to court, get to tell your story about how bad what they did was, and get lots of money from them, and then they go to jail.
“So let me get this straight,” said Sam Hellerman, simply for the sake of reveling in my absurdity rather than from any true desire to get anything straight. “You want to do a citizen’s arrest on the United States of America.” Well, yes, I did. After all, it was largely their fault.
Sam Hellerman wasn’t even sure I could file anything or sue anyone without a parent or guardian doing it on my behalf. They look at your age on the form, and if you’re not at least eighteen, they throw it away without reading it, just like they do with your assignments at school. And according to Sam Hellerman, you can’t bring a lawsuit against someone just because he’s a bad person. If they ever caught Mr. Teone, it’s possible I could be a witness or give some evidence in the criminal trial, and maybe even get money in a separate action if I could prove I had been injured. Which wouldn’t present much of a problem. But to hear Sam Hellerman tell it, the opportunity to put my centipede on the stand was not likely to come about. As there were no criminal charges against the school, or against anyone but Mr. Teone himself, there would be no trial unless they caught Mr. Teone, who was probably safely in South Am
erica by now, living as a gentleman farmer with a new identity, protected by former Nazis and the Venezuelan government and other bad guys like that.
Such was Sam Hellerman’s view. He really made it seem like it wasn’t worth doing at all. Moreover, I got the impression that he didn’t particularly care for the idea of my doing it. Well, his mind was on other matters, like Jeans Skirt Girl and the publicity for the Teenage Brainwashers, it’s true.
But the most disheartening thing of all was Sam Hellerman’s dismissive attitude toward the Catcher Code. This was galling, because my General Theory of the Universe as it applied to Mr. Teone and the Catcher Code was largely based on the analysis of Sam Hellerman himself, presented in the immediate aftermath of my hospitalization. In fact, I had been hoping for a little more clarification from him on certain points that were still extremely fuzzy and confusing. But as I said, he just waved it all away.
“Forget about this,” he said, jabbing a disdainful finger at the Catcher Code and the assorted secondary documents I had neatly assembled in a binder, some of which he himself had produced in his Sherlock Hellerman phase. “It’s all circumstantial. It doesn’t prove anything.”
Well, that’s not what you said when you explained it all to me just a month ago, counselor, I said in my head. But what I said, in words, was: “Well.”
I snatched the polyethylened Catcher Code square and secured it in my jacket pocket, because it looked as if Sam Hellerman might grab hold of it and tear it to pieces before my eyes. Such was his newfound disdain for the Catcher Code. But the Catcher Code meant a lot to me. The least I could do was ensure that it be treated with the reverence it deserved.
“Bathed lately?” I asked in words, when my wrinkled nose and raised eyebrow proved unequal to the task of posing the question in a way Sam Hellerman could understand.
King Dork Approximately Page 11
