It was disconcerting to find, when R. t. F. R. asked what kind of music it was and I said “Rock and roll,” that neither of them seemed all that familiar with the term. (“Is that like rock?” said Pam Something. My look said, “Yes, it’s a little like rock.”) But I explained that we were going to be doing this big Mountain Dew show coming up and that I was working on some songs for it. And I showed them the logo.
“It used to say ‘Encyclopedia Satanica,’ ” I explained. “Then it said ‘I Hate This Jar.’ But now it says ‘Teenage Brainwashers.’ ”
I think they were more impressed with the Mountain Dew than anything, and I had to concede that it was possible that as powerful as rock and roll may be as an aphrodisiac, adding a lemon-flavored caffeinated beverage seems to make it even more potent. At any rate, the Mountain Dew seal of approval seemed to count heavily in the Teenage Brainwashers’ favor with these two. I guess our imaginary Mountain Dew endorsement deal had, in effect, given us “credit” that the Clearview mind could understand.
Roberta the F. R. wanted me to tell her what the song was about, but I deflected that. I mean, talk about a long story.
“You know what I love?” said Pamela Something.
I looked at her, bracing myself for more varsity talk, while Roberta the F. R. said “What?”
“I love how Thomas is all ‘yeah, whatever’ about pep band when he’s actually a pretty good bone.”
Now, a “good bone” is a good trombone player in band-speak, but while there’s always a possible hint of a sexual meaning in the term, I really couldn’t tell if the one here was intended or not. I couldn’t tell what was intended with this conversation, period. These girls were an unfamiliar breed of nonnormal semidecent fringe varsity “background,” like they were extras for the crowd scenes in a propaganda film that celebrates Sports Normalism. They used to call such people “collaborators” during World War II. I tried not to think too much about Vichy France, however, because even though the system that had earned their misguided support was evil, well, they knew not what they did. And they were pretty nice.
“Well,” R. t. F. R. was saying, “you know what I love? I love how the Hillmont Badgers just don’t give a single fuck about anything.”
I noticed Pamela Something doing a slight but decidedly Hellermanian wince. She hadn’t liked the swearing. You could tell.
“But you know what I really, really love?” continued R. t. F. R. We both looked at her as she grabbed the pen out of my hand and made a motion as if to write something on my notebook cover.
Then she held up the pen and shouted: “This pen!”
Well, I had thoughts that I could express here as comments. But before I could do much thinking about them, Little Big Tom pulled up in his truck, stuck his head out the window at one of his trademark improbable angles, and called:
“Your chariot awaits, my liege.”
The girls started doing the don’t-know-what-to-say laugh again.
“Gotta go,” I said, pretty embarrassed but trying to gather my stuff with a bit of dignity. Little Big Tom means well, no doubt, but a single “Your chariot awaits, my liege” from him can puncture and deflate a person’s hard-won rock and roll credibility in seconds flat.
I was trundling my trombone and backpack into the truck’s behind-the-seat compartment when Little Big Tom called out once again, this time to the girls, who were still on the steps under the overhang:
“Can we give you two a lift?”
My heart sank as Roberta the Female Robert and Pam Something ran down the muddy slope with their hoods up and their instrument cases banging against their legs.
It took some doing to get into the truck, because there wasn’t enough official room for that many people. So Pam Something got the main passenger seat, while I was next to her in the middle, with Roberta the F. R. sitting with her legs splayed, kind of on both our laps.
“A little cozy,” said Little Big Tom with a mustache twitch. “But we’re all friends here. They call me Big Tom.”
“They call her Pam,” I said. “And they call her Roberta.”
“The Female Robert!” shrieked the Female Robert. There was low-level laughing almost all the way to whomever’s house we dropped them off at, up on Santa Carolina Pine Road Terrace, not too far from Hellerman Manor.
It was an awkward position. I didn’t know where to put my hands, though there were lots of interesting possibilities available. And I don’t know if I’ve happened to mention it before, but I am always at least a little bit horny. So a couple of girls practically sitting on me, even if their ratios wouldn’t necessarily get the best grade in the Sam Hellerman ranking system, and even with Little Big Tom sitting right there next to me—well, let’s just say, I’d be kind of surprised if R. t. F. R., at least, wasn’t able to gauge with pretty good accuracy the precise level to which my horniness had elected to express itself underneath my embroidered golden jeans penis, if you see what I’m trying to get across. I just had to hope the laughing wasn’t directed at me or, God help us, at that, but you really couldn’t tell. Ever.
The girls got out of the truck and retrieved their instruments.
“See you in the band room,” said Pam S. before they scampered off.
“I’ll be the one wearing the yellow carnation,” I said, and I was relieved when they laughed. But then, just to make sure, I asked why that was funny.
“That’s a flower, right?” said Pam S.
I sighed. The carnation joke was dead.
As they were leaving, R. t. F. R. had slid a note, a thickly folded little envelope of notepaper, in my front pocket. When girls give you notes, it’s always at the last possible second before they rush off, have you ever noticed that? Like you’re an unpredictable device and they don’t want to be in the vicinity when you read them, just in case of … something? Well, to me that seems precisely backwards: I’m a thoroughly predictable device, as I’ve outlined above.
“Spreading it around, I see,” said Little Big Tom. “The little one, the female … robot?” He raised an eyebrow. “I think she likes you.”
But that is a conversation I was just not going to have with Little Big Tom. As for the note, well, I don’t know what to say about it. I mean, it pretty much had to be seen to be believed.
GODZILLA VS. DEODORANT
“The thing I don’t understand,” Amanda was saying while we were trying to choke down some of Little Big Tom’s vegan slop, “is that you love the eighties. Aren’t you always saying everything sucks now and it was way better back in the good old days before CDs and solid transvestites and the alligator snares?”
She was responding to my complaints about Clearview High School and its strange existence as an alternate Grease sound track/fifties dimension, symbolized by the jackets. She was a little confused, though: to her, anything more than a few years old was “eighties,” and she had evidently absorbed my complaints about solid-state transistors and the awful gated reverb sound of eighties snare drums.
“The music,” I said. “The rock and roll of the fifties was great, obviously. I’m not complaining about that.” Of course the music was great. And the movies and books, too. And the less content-free educational system and the less advanced, less brutal Normalism. And the cars. And, like, bathing beauties or whatever. And Brown v. Board of Education, that was pretty cool. The hats weren’t too bad. But not the jackets and the school spirit and all that stuff.
But I suppose Amanda had a point, in a way. Because maybe you couldn’t have had rock and roll in the first place if you didn’t have all that as the background: you know, all that “Gee whiz, we’re going steady at the soda fountain, Potsie” and “Well, golly, Peggy Ann, our team is just swell this year, I really hope you can come to the game and watch me score the winning points.” There could even be, possibly, a connection between the non-sucky educational system they used to have, the one that actually taught you stuff, and the weird school spirit society that contained it, though if so, Clearview
had managed to retain or re-create the second with no noticeable effect on the absence of the first.
But those battles had been fought long ago, and I didn’t see why we had to relive them. You can appreciate the music without taking it literally. For example, digging the Beach Boys without necessarily being true to your school is totally possible, and preferable. Basically, Sam Phillips recorded Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, and all those other Memphis guys; Chuck Berry played the top two strings; Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show above the waist; the Beatles made all the girls squirm by singing about wanting to hold their “hands”; Ray Davies got lost in a sunset; Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Brian Wilson heard magic in his head and made it come out of a studio; the Rolling Stones urinated on a garage door; and then (skipping a bit) you’ve got Joey Levine and Chapman-Chinn and Mott the Hoople and Iggy and the Runaways and KISS and the Pink Fairies and Rick Nielsen and Jonathan Richman and Johnny Ramone and Lemmy and the Young brothers and Cook and Jones and Pete Shelley and Feargal Sharkey and Rob Halford … and Foghat. You get what I’m saying. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, but it did happen, and now here we are in the aftermath. I see no need to try to re-create the conditions that made it necessary to invent rock and roll in the first place, and I certainly see no earthly reason why we should have to go to school in those conditions. Our forefathers fought and died so we wouldn’t have to, is kind of how I thought about it.
But Amanda had finished her slop and was on her way out before I could get much of this across. At least I believe I managed to explain that the eighties were not the fifties. I mean, I couldn’t have her going around saying I liked the eighties. The eighties were crap, a terrible time to be alive, as far as I could tell.
“Don’t you want to watch Revenge of the Nerds with me?” I called out, because I’d checked it out of the library, along with a few other materials, as part of my quest to understand Clearview High School a little better and to be able to spot the dangerous normal people with greater accuracy. Amanda’s empty chair was an eloquent answer. She had been sitting next to me and conversing, it’s true, but mainly, as it turned out, she was only in it for the slop.
“Great slop … chief,” I said, turning to Little Big Tom, but before he could respond, my mom had drifted in and he did a kind of insta-fade into the background, resuming the walking-on-eggshells posture he had developed in the face of the recent marital strife at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA 94033.
My mom was wearing a big, fuzzy, black and purple striped sweater that came halfway down to her knees, with a shiny belt of enormous sequins around her waist and a—was it a cape? Yeah, it was a kind of cape, nearly floor-length and made of some dark velvetlike fabric, thrown back around her shoulders and secured at her throat with the biggest sequin of them all. She was Super Mom. Or a wicked queen.
She stood before me, balanced her cigarette on the edge of the table, and took my hands in hers.
“Baby,” she said, after a lengthy pause during which she looked into my eyes with unnerving earnestness. “Tom told me about today, and I just want you to know, I am … we are … so, so proud of you. I know you’ve had a tough time at the new school, but it’s just so nice that you’ve been able to make some … normal friends, nice, normal friends at last.…”
Oh, for God’s sake. You’d think a lifetime of embarrassing parental moments would exhaust your embarrassment capacity at some point, but if so, it was a point I hadn’t yet reached. I was conscious of a hot sensation in my face, and my centipede began to twitch up a storm. Why does talking about girls out loud in the presence of parents make you so embarrassed? And these weren’t even particularly noteworthy ones, just some girls from “pep band” who randomly happened to get pulled in by Little Big Tom’s largely indiscriminate tractor beam. But you can’t help your physical reactions, inconvenient as they may be. Your physical reactions just happen, like in the truck with Little Big Tom and … Oh, God.
I felt, somehow, that it was expected that I say a few words, a kind of acceptance speech, so I said:
“I don’t know.” And added, with my eyes, “This is indeed a great day for us all.”
My mom made it clear that if I needed anything in order to cultivate and nurture these tender shoots of a budding, non-unacceptable social life, I had only to ask. This was a little bit different than the standard spiel that goes: “I’m surprised to learn that you’re not gay, though if you were gay, I’d be totally pleased and into it that you are, no judgments here.” Partly, it was directed against Sam Hellerman, who they both thought was a bit of an odd duck, if I have that expression right. (They’re not wrong about that, I concede, but still, I must ask, what business is it of theirs what kind of duck Sam Hellerman is? Oh yeah, it’s not their business at all.)
Sam Hellerman aside, though, I guess Little Big Tom’s report to my mom had left the impression that here could be seen my first dainty steps into normalcy, a prospect that pleased her for some reason. But seriously, if my mom, as currently constituted, were reverse-aged to fifteen years old and tossed into a tank fully stocked with normal people, what did she think would happen? The tank’s waters would churn red with her blood within a few seconds, that’s what. They’d make short work of Little Big Tom as well. I felt like shouting at them: “Hey! Parental units. Don’t you get it? You’re not normal!” I wouldn’t wish the shark tank of Normalcy on them, no matter how irritating they may be, and it was pretty galling that a stint in that tank was their fondest wish for me.
In other words, my parents’ sense of normalcy was in desperate need of recalibration. Pam Something and the Female Robot (to use Little Big Tom’s memorably mistaken term) might not have matched Sam Hellerman’s abnormality, it’s true—who could?—but no one would describe them as normal, though Pam S. could maybe pass for near normal with a bit of a makeover. It was a stretch, though, is what I’m saying.
But Little Big Tom wasn’t done with me yet. After my mom had said “Night, puppy” and drifted off with a heavy emission of exhaust and a bit of a shoulder squeeze, he zoomed in and took his place in the chair formerly occupied by my sister.
“Revenge of the Nerds,” he said, riffling through my library materials. “Good flick. Not quite reality, though, is it?” Well, I thought, you tell me. I’d assumed not, until I’d darkened Clearview High’s doorstep, but now, as I’ve explained, I wasn’t so sure.
“You know, sport,” he continued, “I think you just might find that the modern age does have something to offer, if you know where, and how, to look.” He scooted his chair toward me, getting dangerously close to unsolicited back rub proximity, and as his voice was taking on that therapy tone, I thought it prudent to scoot my chair away from him just as quickly. He had evidently heard my conversation with Amanda and had some wisdom to impart about not living in the past, hanging on to your dreams, and having an open mind but only about certain prearranged topics.
“If you keep an open mind, you just might find that you have more in common with people than you think.” Unable to execute any massage plans he may have had, Little Big Tom resorted instead to a rather gruesome wink. “And it never hurts to try a new thing every now and then. I think you’ll find the results could surprise you.”
I suppose what he was getting at was that maybe, if I were to change my whole personality and replace everything I like and am interested in with stuff that other people like and are interested in, well, then my life would be this wonderful picnic where I had lots in common with everyone and we would all skip merrily down the lane hand in hand. But what if I didn’t want to change my whole personality? Not that I liked it all that much, but at least it was mine. Inconvenient as it was at times, I kind of wanted to keep it. And to be honest, skipping merrily down the lane never held much appeal for me anyway.
“I just prefer Godzilla to deodorant,” I said.
Now, I meant this as a cryptic conversation ender. There was no way Little Big Tom would have any clue what I meant by it, so what coul
d he say in response? But I might as well explain it here.
See, okay: there was once this guy named Kurt who was in this really big popular rock band. A ways back he blew his head off with a shotgun, and it was really sad and everything, et cetera, et cetera. So his band’s big hit song was basically Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla” with the lyrics replaced by this semicoherent, artsy drug poetry about deodorant. Now, it was a fine enough song, and believe me, miles and miles better than most of the other garbage that was popular at that time. Still, I mean, you’ve got to say, when it’s Godzilla vs. deodorant, Godzilla wins, right? Why would I deliberately choose to play the deodorant guy’s version, when there’s Blue Öyster Cult sitting right there on the turntable? The question answers itself. (Though it occurs to me now that it’s possible that the deodorant band might have been using a similar technique on its drummer that we were using on Shinefield, pretending they were playing “Godzilla” till the last second to trick him into playing a steady beat. If so, I’ll say this for them: it seems to have worked. Well done, guys.)
Or there’s this other big group that is pretty much dedicated to rearranging Beatles recordings into their own “new” songs. Again, it’s orders of magnitude better than most of what’s popular. Still, if I want the Beatles, first I go to the Beatles; then I go to all the legitimate Beatles imitators of the sixties and seventies; then I might sing “I Am the Walrus” in the shower or put on a Cheap Trick record or something. Only then, having exhausted all the other possibilities, would I resort to last year’s fake Beatles. The same can be said for all those fake punk bands with suburban guys whining about how hard it is to find a girlfriend. I mean, I get it, and I can obviously relate, and I wish them all the luck in the world. I might even choose to listen to them now and again. But not when I have SA-7528, UAG 30159, SRK 6081, or SEEZ 1 on hand. Would you?
King Dork Approximately Page 16
