“Besides,” he added defensively, “they do it too. Don’t kid yourself.”
Well, if he was talking about ranking and evaluation, he certainly had a point, about which I wouldn’t dream of kidding myself. As I’ve explained in my other explanations, Sam Hellerman and I, along with Hillmont High School’s other socially unsuccessful males, had ourselves been the target of a malicious, elaborately charted Make-out/Fake-out program of ranking and evaluation designed specifically to engineer our humiliation. We had, of course, had extremely low rankings, and hence a high value in the Hillmont High game known as Dud Chart. But as elaborate and sociopathic as Dud Chart had been, I was pretty sure Sam Hellerman’s annotated Camelot had it beat.
During all of this, I hadn’t failed to note that Sam Hellerman had, rather gallantly, I thought, given Celeste Fletcher what amounted to a kind of honorary 10, the only one in the book, and had refrained from analyzing her further as he had with most of the other girls. I mean, I love and admire Celeste Fletcher beyond all reason, but a 10 ranking, if it exists at all, is properly reserved only for stratospheric ideals of womanhood like porn stars and underwear models, that kind of thing. Well, Sam Hellerman’s regard for Celeste Fletcher was evident. The bastard. But I knew what he meant. That girl is dynamite, if not, strictly speaking, an actual 10.
But what’s the other number, the one in 0.x form? I asked. It was less a case of wanting to know than needing to know.
“WHR,” said Sam Hellerman. “Waist-hip ratio. Zero point seven is the ideal of female beauty. It’s the only metric that truly matters, far more accurate and more useful than the highly overrated BWR.” BWR, Sam Hellerman patiently explained, was the bust-waist ratio. The WHR was a standard developed by the World Health Organization, he added, which seemed like it couldn’t possibly be true, but when I looked it up later, it turned out it was.
I said Sam Hellerman had reduced love to math, didn’t I? With a little help from the World Health Organization, it seemed, anything was possible. It was disturbing and, kind of, I don’t know, inspiring at the same time. Because, yes, I could see how the WHR might be more “useful” than the BWR, though I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, as I like big butts and I cannot lie, I’m probably more of a 0.66 man myself. But I digress.
“What’s Celeste Fletcher?” I ventured to ask.
“Zero point seven,” said Sam Hellerman dreamily. “On the dot.”
And Jeans Skirt Girl?
“A solid, respectable, zero point seven three six,” said Sam Hellerman. That’s what I’d have answered too. I was getting the hang of this game. “She’ll get closer to point seven in a year or so,” Sam Hellerman added, defending her honor. He had, he assured me, developed an algorithm for that.
Well, maybe I wasn’t quite getting the hang of the game after all.
In all the excitement, I had lost track of the lawsuit and my yearbook assignment. I looked at Sam Hellerman, who now had an old Mission Hills yearbook and a calculator in hand and was hard at work scribbling.
“Any calls yet?” I asked.
“No,” said Sam Hellerman.
DOIN’ THE HILLMONT RAG
The thing about music is that to get good at it, you have to put in a lot of effort.
But it’s possible to put only a little effort into it and still manage. This is rock and roll’s great advantage. If it’s loud enough and enthusiastic enough, and if it goes by quickly enough, you can be quite awful at playing and nobody will notice all that much. Sometimes people even prefer it that way. But Shinefield’s abhorrent drumming had got me thinking. Truth be told, my guitar playing was rather abhorrent too. Rock and roll depends on a solid, “together” rhythm section, which is a tall order, to be sure. But once you have that, the guitar player can pretty much do whatever he wants, and even sloppiness and ineptitude can sound kind of cool against the competent backdrop. It’s better if you’re good at playing. But it’s not absolutely necessary to be all that good, is what I’m saying.
Much as I love rock and roll, and I do, with everything I’ve got, now that the Teenage Brainwashers were sounding alright—well, it was starting to feel a little bit like cheating, on my part.
There was this guy at Clearview High School lunch period one day who had this fancy nylon-string guitar and was playing this impressive classical music thing, a Bach fugue or something like that. He played it flawlessly, and didn’t seem to be concentrating too hard on it, as he was carrying on a conversation with a couple of other guys about where to score weed all the while. Now, see, you could tell by his conversation that this was a pretty dumb guy, more stoner than normal, though there is certainly such a thing as a normal stoner. It’s so hard to tell these things at Clearview, because, normal or otherwise, this guy was wearing one of the Badgers shirts—that’s right, at Clearview, even the stoners had school spirit. It was nauseating.
But anyway, dumb and quasi-normal as he was, he was light-years better at playing guitar than I could ever be, no matter how hard I tried, especially because, as I hope I’ve explained well enough, I am more or less constitutionally unable to try all that hard, if “constitutionally” means what I think it means. And while tricking your drummer into playing like Phil Rudd certainly has its place, part of me couldn’t help but fantasize about a theoretical world where a guy like me could just pick up a guitar and start playing and it would sound great all on its own, and people would hear it and say “Boy, that kid can really play.” If I just sat down with a guitar, not distorted to cover up the ineptitude, and without a hoodwinked drummer herded by a bespectacled rock and roll mastermind bass player, and played “I Wanna Ramone You” or “Sadistic Masochism,” no one would be impressed. They’d throw tomatoes and cabbages and possibly call the cops. I actually think my lyrics aren’t all that bad, but no one, almost literally no one, cares about that.
Now, playing fugues by Bach wasn’t really my thing, but in my fantasy world where I could actually play guitar, the thing that was my thing, or that I wanted to be my thing, is this kind of music that they used to call ragtime, like, eons and eons ago. It’s played on the piano, mostly, but it can be done on a guitar, and when it is, it’s just mindfuckingly magical. Regular guitar playing like I do in the real world is just: you put your fingers in a chord position and hit the strings with your pick hand as hard as you can and then slide the chord fingers up and down the neck. But with the fantasy-world magical good guitar playing, each finger is, like, playing its own little part, and one guy with one guitar sounds like a whole band.
People back then would gather in a barn and actually dance to one guy playing the guitar standing on a barrel or a wagon. And at the end of the song the girls would bend over and show their underwear, kind of being sassy. So that was legitimately cool, pre–rock and roll music that might as well have been rock and roll, and you didn’t even need to trick a drummer into doing anything. In fact, you could just send him out for burritos, for all it would matter, because your own fingers were the rhythm section.
Back then it was played by cool-looking black guys with bowler hats and, for some reason, hair scrunchies on their arms, and they were playing guitars they had made themselves out of a box and some wire. These days the guys who can play the guitar like that tend to be pudgy white sixties guys with little gray mustaches and maybe a bald-guy ponytail who want you to call them Big Skillet or Rib Eye. “This is an old country blues tune, name of ‘Grandma’s Kitchen,’ ” they’ll say, and then unleash hell on the strings. It’s not the same without the cool black guys and the scrunchies and the wagon and the skinny girls and their underwear, of course, but it’s still impressive.
It occurred to me that maybe Little Big Tom could play the guitar like that. He was from the sixties. And with the “Big” in his name, and the mustache, he was already halfway there.
I had been looking for something to talk to him about that didn’t involve Jesus Proust for some time. The guy needed cheering up.
He didn’t see
m to be around at the moment, but it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t be long before he ambled in, and that when he did he’d head straight for the den, where his Mac lives, to put away his shoulder bag and coat and check his email and message boards before beginning his evening rounds. So I took my Melody Maker and practice amp with me and settled down with my back against the den door to wait for him and read the reckless vow book while I waited.
It was a pretty weird book. The people in it all spoke in this formal, stilted way that was basically so elaborate and polite that it was difficult to tell what they were getting at half the time. Everything they said was like a code, and the point of the code was for everyone to hide what they really felt from everyone else. But the main point, underneath it all, was for the girls to figure out which guys had the most money and then try to marry them. It was easy to tell who the best girl was (the smart, witty one) and it was easy to tell who the best guy was (the guy with “ten thousand a year,” which was apparently a lot in those days), so there didn’t seem to be too much suspense as to how it was going to end. It was odd, not quite like a real story, but more like a dramatization of how these weird old English people organized their finances. Girls seem to see this book as this tender, super-romantic love story, but I sure didn’t get that. There was hardly any emotional content in it at all, and the characters weren’t so much people as personified bank accounts.
I had resigned myself to the fact that it probably wasn’t going to have any sexy parts. It was a bit slow going, but not as slow as The Crying of Lot 49. Now, that one’s really in code. I was fortunate not to have made a reckless vow about that.
PAT O’BRIEN AND HIS HONOLULU LOU
Soon enough, as I’d predicted, Little Big Tom ambled up. He saw me sitting there, mimed as though the surprise of seeing me in such a position was going to knock him over backwards, and said:
“You mind very much if they smoke! Oh, brutal.”
The first sentence was in reference to my little battery-powered practice amp that was made out of a cigarette box; the second was directed at Pride and Prejudice and was accompanied by a hand drawn melodramatically across his brow, expressing sympathy for my having to read it. I suppose he must have thought I was being forced to read it for school rather than just reading it for “fun” because of a reckless vow.
I put down the book and asked Little Big Tom if he, by any possible chance, knew how to fingerpick like all the other hippies in the sixties did, and if so, could he show me how.
I wish 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary had powerful enough words to describe the alarming yet touching smile that blossomed, in slow motion, under Little Big Tom’s mustache as it gradually dawned on him that I had come of my own free will to ask him for a bit of fake fatherly instruction. For a moment there I thought he might actually start to cry. It’s good he didn’t, because if he had, I would have had to do something far more wounding than necessary, just to escape. But in the end, Little Big Tom regained his composure enough to pat me on the shoulder and reach for the guitar.
“I’m a little rusty,” he said, testing the strings and frowning at the brittle, distorted sound coming out of the cigarette-pack amp. “But I think I may know a thing or two.”
A horrifying thought struck me. Please, I prayed, don’t play “Stairway to Heaven,” please don’t play “Stairway to Heaven,” please don’t play—
Would you be at all surprised if I were to tell you that it was at that point that Little Big Tom started to play “Stairway to Heaven”? I didn’t think so.
I made the buzz-alarm sound, signaling that he could stop that right away. My face said: “What else ya got?”
Little Big Tom frowned. It seemed beyond his comprehension that anyone would veto “Stairway to Heaven,” his unofficial anthem. But he regrouped and tried something else. It was hard to make out what it was through the fuzz, but it was clear that whatever it was, he kind of knew what he was doing. Finally, he identified the song as “Dear Prudence.” Okay, that was better, and I’d like to learn how to do that too, but it wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. I explained about the cool black guys with the derby hats and the arm scrunchies and the skinny girls and their underwear. Little Big Tom got a strange, distant look in his eye.
“Well,” he said. “There is something, maybe, that I was taught by a great man long ago. I’m not sure you’ll like it. I don’t know if I can even remember it, but it’s the only other one I really know.…”
Then Little Big Tom started to play, and sing, what was perhaps the stupidest song I had ever heard. He had a surprisingly good voice, and even though he kept forgetting the words and stumbling over the chords, and despite the terrible fake Irish accent he was trying to sing in, I got the gist of it. It was about this Irish guy named Pat O’Brien who goes to Hawaii to try to seduce a hula girl, but because he can’t speak her language he just shouts gibberish at her, things like “begorrah hickey doola” and other nonsense, hoping she’ll understand him and let him ramone her. But of course the poor girl can’t understand a word, though he keeps trying and trying, like a big idiot. In other words, this guy is kind of like Sam Hellerman with Jeans Skirt Girl, or face it, kind of like just about every guy with just about any girl. A tale as old as time, I think it’s called.
“That song is almost a hundred years old,” said Little Big Tom when he had finished, obviously proud that he had been able to remember something so old. And I agree, it was impressive. The oldest song I knew how to play was only from 1955.
Anyway, I hated it, mostly. It wasn’t a song I could imagine the hair scrunchie guys with the underwear girls doing, not at all. It was as uncool as it’s possible for a thing to be. But I found myself inexplicably drawn to it at the same time. It was kind of catchy. And without understanding why, I knew that I wanted to be able to play it. Maybe I could pull a kind of Shinefieldian switcheroo on it, changing the chords around and rewriting the lyrics so they’d be about Sam Hellerman and Jeans Skirt Girl instead of the Irish dude and his Honolulu Lou. It seemed like a pretty good plan to me.
Unfortunately, while Little Big Tom wasn’t all that bad at playing it, he was terrible at teaching it. He would play a bit and then say “You just—” and instead of saying what it was that you do, he would mime it and then do it again. Still, I figured if Little Big Tom could do it, I probably could manage it eventually. I made him do it very slowly and took down the lyrics in my notebook. I’d have those skinny dancing girls showing their underwear if my life depended on it.
GOING STEADY FOR GOOD
Well, that didn’t take long, did it? I’m referring to this: by the end of the second week of classes at Clearview High, Celeste Fletcher could already be seen around the school wearing this jacket with a letter on it that was two sizes too big for her.
“What the hell is that?” I said, when she flounced into Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class, swimming in the Bye Bye Birdie dating symbolism of yesteryear.
But Mrs. Pizzaballa cleared her throat and said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” which, in this context, meant that we weren’t supposed to talk during our vocabulary test and that if we kept it up we’d get Fs and possibly detention. Because at Clearview, they actually do grade the tests and give you failing grades if you talk during them enough to look like you might be cheating.
Celeste Fletcher took advantage of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s test and her warning about it to avoid having to tell me what the hell it, whatever “it” was, was. If you follow me.
I passed her a note that said: “Did you really get pinned?” But she just rolled her eyes at me, not getting or failing to acknowledge the reference and refusing to dignify my sarcastic note with a reply.
Forty-two minutes later, soft piano chords began to play on the intercom—that’s what Clearview has instead of a bell, because we Clearview students are far too precious to have our tender ears assailed with a jarring buzzer while being enfolded in the warm embrace of Learning. At the chords, Celeste Fletcher bounded up with
out a word to me and handed her paper in, rushing out the door, 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio and all.
Now, Mrs. Pizzaballa had this habit of delivering what I had begun to think of as Life Lessons at the end of many class periods. She would introduce them by saying something like “Children, if I can teach you nothing else, I hope at least that you walk away from here understanding that …” (And yes, she always called us “children,” which made me feel kind of, I don’t know, Amish or something. But I preferred it to “men and women,” which was the usual preposterous way of addressing students at Clearview.)
Her Life Lesson on that day was typical.
“Children, please remember that school is hokum,” she said, a sentiment with which I found myself in full agreement once I looked up “hokum,” which is another word for bullshit. “One day you will have to get a job, and whatever that job is, you’ll find you’ll be much better at it if you simply learn what is expected of you and do it with no nonsense.” I believe the implication was that we were to think of her class as a kind of practice run. Then she added: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
You know, it was nice to hear someone being honest about things for a change. I had no doubt that the true objective of education really was to condition people for a future of mindless obedience, and that the attempts to dress it all up with encouragement to “think for yourself” and “draw your own conclusions” were just hokum. No one has ever been rewarded in any way, that I know of, for drawing his own conclusions. Quite the contrary.
King Dork Approximately Page 14
