Two: She knew no one was watching.
This one almost goes without saying.
80
One: She was totally high.
Well, obviously.
M R. JAN I SC H’S U N DE RG ROU N D B U N KE R
I was mulling over some of these points in Geometry that Monday when I felt an eraser hit me on the forehead.
“Somewhere else you’d rather be, Thomas Charles Henderson?” said Mr. Janisch. He always calls people by their full names as they appear on the roll sheet. Just to be a dick.
“No, of course not, Mr. Janisch. Copying these problems and their proofs from the front and back sections of this book respectively is the realization of a lifelong dream.”
Of course, I didn’t really say that.
What I did was: I gave him a look that was intended to convey the impression that I had been contemplating the mysteries of the world of Pure Geometry and that I had been on the verge of discovering an Important Truth that would have been a boon to humanity and would also have had considerable commercial value had my concentration not been shattered by his supremely ill-timed, inappropriate, and possibly actionable eraser assault.
But at the same time, I was in no mood for Mr. Janisch’s foolishness, so I’m not surprised that my look may also have managed to convey the sentiment “No duh, Einstein.”
Six of one, half dozen of the other, really.
The punishment for this sort of low-level insubordination is usually that you are made to copy out something, typically a dictionary page, onto a sheet of notepaper. This is no big deal. There is little difference between this penalty and the other assignments they give you as part of your “academic”
work. The only difference is the thing you’re copying. A 81
dictionary page is preferable to a chapter from The Catcher in the Rye, even, because, well, at least the chances are good that it will be a page you’ve never copied before and that’s special.
Mr. Janisch, for reasons known only to him, likes to make you fill a page of notepaper, front and back, with zeros, in groups of three like this: 000,000,000, etc. The weird part is that he seems genuinely pleased when you hand him the finished page of zeros. It’s like he gets caught up in the excitement and forgets that it’s supposed to be a disciplinary measure. My theory is that he saves these pages in a series of black binders in a specially designed rebar-and-concrete lead-lined underground bunker. When the bomb drops, or on Judgment Day, or by the time he retires and goes underground to plot his revenge, he’ll have thousands of binders filled with millions upon millions of zeros. Then he’ll add a one to the beginning and suddenly he’ll be in sole possession of the world’s largest number in manuscript form. Or I guess it’d be even better to add a nine. Then he can laugh mania-cally and die happy.
Whatever gets you through the night, big fella.
Anyway, that was my punishment this time. I enjoy it, actually. It’s mindless, routine, repetitive, familiar, and no more pointless than anything else they make you do in school. The hand moves automatically; the pen goes circle-circle-circle-tic, circle-circle-circle-tic, a soothing rhythm; and the mind is free to wander. I started trying to think up some lyrics to
“Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over).”
TH E F LOWE R P OT M E N
One thing that was slightly freaking me out was the thought that even though I felt I couldn’t be more different than the 82
CHS people at the party, we did seem to like a lot of the same music. Because I love the Who. But I’m not a fake mod like the dolphins at the party. Not at all. I don’t dress up like anything. True, I did let my hair grow a little longer and started to wear flared jeans over the summer when I got more into seventies bands and stuff, as a sort of tribute to their fine work; and I’ve got the army coat, though that’s more of a practical tool than a fashion statement. But I don’t “dress punk,” or mod or metal or goth or garage or rockabilly or anything. I don’t wake up every morning and put on a music-genre-oriented youth-culture Halloween costume—that’s what I’m saying.
My tastes do tend to be a bit retro, though. I’m really into the Who, the Kinks, the Merseyside/British Invasion sort of thing. And like I said, I also like a lot of seventies stuff, which I find myself listening to more and more often. 1975 was a great year for rock and roll, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different. But I can find something to appreciate about most pop music—it’s all part of rock and roll history, which I’m trying to know everything about. I have a pretty big record collection of mostly old stuff, and I’m totally proud of how schizophrenic it is. I even kind of like Wishbone Ash.
And I’m not even exaggerating all that much. But for some reason I’m not necessarily too interested in very much of what was recorded after I was born. And, as a matter of prin-ciple, I don’t dig whatever mindless, soulless crap all the normal people are into at any given time, because what would be the point of that?
My personal ultimate in art rock will probably always be, well, either the Who or the Sweet. Or Foghat. But I’m also really into Bubblegum, and that’s probably what confuses people most.
Bubblegum is this music they had in the seventies, created and marketed for little kids, and, apparently, not taken 83
very seriously by anyone involved. But it somehow ended up being brilliant by accident without anyone realizing. I love that. I have a pretty big collection of Bubblegum records.
Now, I admit, maybe I got into it at first because it was so clearly the opposite of what everyone else liked. But whatever: it’s some of the best rock and roll music there ever was.
I think normal people think it sounds corny or wimpy, not realizing that there would have been no Ramones without
“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” But I’m quite confident that when we’re all dead, history will clearly conclude that my retro rock revival was years ahead of everybody else’s retro rock revival.
Sometimes, when I’m trying to cheer up Little Big Tom by finding some interest we can temporarily pretend to share, I’ll ask him about the music of the sixties and seventies, which was his era. Back then, he and all his friends didn’t pay attention to most of my favorite music from the time. They thought it was childish, not serious, meaningful music like, say, Led Zeppelin. Now, Led Zeppelin is all right (good drums and guitar, anyway, though that singer should have been silenced or muzzled or something—frankly, I prefer it in Yardbird form to be honest). But Little Big Tom’s example of how serious and important and adult it all was? “Stairway to Heaven.” I kid you not. Don’t get me wrong: I like hobbits and unicorns and wizards and hemp ice cream as much as the next guy. And I suppose it’s the antimaterialist message that seemed so sophisticated and meaningful to those guys—
no one does antimaterialism better than multigazillionaire rock stars. But my view is that there’s something seriously wrong with a subculture that would prefer “Stairway to Heaven” to “Wig Wam Bam.” Come on: go listen to “Wig Wam Bam” and tell me I’m wrong.
I was thinking about all this, and kind of counting the 84
ways in which the Sweet ruled Led Zeppelin’s relatively sorry ass, when I returned home from the first post-Fiona school day. On my way in through the patio, I noticed Little Big Tom using a sledgehammer to break big pieces of concrete into little pieces that would fit in his wheelbarrow. (He was trying to turn the backyard into Spaceship Earth by reversing the paving process and planting ferns and vegetables so that one day they might be able to film a margarine commercial there.) I heard him whistling a tune I recognized from my own record collection: “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” by White Plains, originally recorded as a demo in their previous incarnation as the arguably superior Flowerpot Men. It is the perfect pop song, more or less. I had just been playing it pretty loudly the previous day. So—here I was, influencing Little Big Tom with an unjustly rejected gem from his own era. Kinda neat.