So I went over and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” and doing this little Greg Brady/Jackson Five dance—well, not a dance, exactly. It’s more like genuflecting and using your knees to move your whole body up and down while smiling like an idiot. There is simply no bait that Little Big Tom will leave on the hook. He broke into a big smile as well and faced me and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” and doing the Greg Brady/Jackson Five genuflect dance, too, though I suspect he may not have been aware that it was the G.B./J.F. g. d. So there we were, rising and descending, facing each other, singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’.”
Amanda came through the back door, stared for a few seconds, and then turned on her heel and walked back in. I really couldn’t blame her.
It got old quickly. But Little Big Tom was having such a great time that I hated to pull the plug, so I continued doing it for a while, looking at him with a frozen yet fading smile that gained and lost altitude while I tried to figure out a way 85
to end the baby-loves-love-a-thon gracefully. He couldn’t take a hint, though. Finally, I just had to say:
“Hey, you know: I’ve got some things to do.”
Probably not the best way to handle it, but I was desperate. I went into the house, hearing his trademark sigh and eventually his sledgehammer-on-concrete sound.
WOM E N G ETTI NG I N TH E WAY
Maybe it was more or less predictable that the whole Fiona situation would eventually start to affect the band. It’s well known that that has been the downfall of all the great bands of the world: women getting in the way.
Sam Hellerman had a weird attitude. At first I thought he was mad at me for leaving the party without him, but it turns out he didn’t care about that at all. It was Fiona.
When I told him what had happened, at our first post-Fiona band practice—and then told him again, presumably so he could pay attention once he realized I hadn’t been making it up—he said: “Fucking bitch.”
Now, you have to understand something about Sam Hellerman. He never swears. I don’t swear much, either, out loud, but that’s mostly because I never say more than a couple of words at a time. I keep it to myself, but in my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special. Everyone would be shocked if they had access to a transcript from my head. I don’t know about Sam Hellerman’s head’s transcript, but he talks out loud all the time, and as he’s talking you can almost see him struggling to avoid saying swear words. Like, he’ll always say have sex instead of fuck, or boobies instead of tits.
The first works sometimes, though it can sound awkward; the second is pretty much inexcusable and reflects poorly on 86
him. Once he said crotch instead of nuts when he was describing where Matt Lynch had been trying to kick him during a recess scuffle. That alone was good for a couple more beatings. I think his parents are Seventh-Day Adventists or Mormons or something like that.
That was part of the reason Serenah Tillotsen had to break up with him. Not the having Mormon parents. The swearing thing, I mean. To be dateable at the time, you had to excel in at least two of the following four areas: swearing, bullying, smoking, sports. And to go out with a girl who dressed as slutty as Serenah Tillotsen you probably had to have mastered at least three, and even that might have been pushing it. Sam Hellerman had the smoking down, but he was a disaster at all the others.
Sam Hellerman’s swearing thing had already affected the band a bit, but so far only in a good way. He objected to the song “Normal People Are Fucked Up” in favor of the alternate version “People Who Are Normal People Are the Most Retarded People in the World,” which turned out to be a much, much better song.
So it was shocking to hear those words come out of his mouth. He was taking the whole thing pretty seriously. Now I admit, I may have slightly exaggerated when I told him the story. Just a little, in that I may have managed to imply that things with Fiona might have gone a little further than they actually had. But even considering that, it was still just a stoned teen party grope-a-thon any way you sliced it. He should have been happy for me. Maybe he was jealous; I guess I would have been.
In any case, that’s so not how I saw the situation: for me, Fiona was not, literally or in any other sense, a “fucking bitch.” I had nothing but esteem and admiration for her and her sinful ways. And I had a kind of high-minded reverence 87
for her memory. Sure, there was much I felt remorseful and embarrassed about, and I had had absolutely no luck trying to figure out a way to understand her confusing behavior. But I blamed all the awkwardness and most of my current predicament on my own deficiencies, and I was quite sure I was right about that. So was I bitter and hate filled at the thought that that had probably been my one opportunity to participate in a make-out session in this lifetime? Sure. But I could hardly blame the one girl who had been sporting enough to give me a shot at it: it just made me hate everyone else even more, which automatically made me love Fiona more by comparison. See? It’s all a matter of proper hate calibration. You have to take a balanced view.
I haltingly asked Sam Hellerman if he could ask his CHS
friends about her, try to find out, um, I wasn’t sure exactly what. But could he ask around, find out what her deal was, in some way?
“Her deal?” said Sam Hellerman. He said “deal” mockingly, and did that thing where you put your hands up on either side in front of you palms out and wiggle your fingers sarcastically.
Sometimes it just means “ooh, I’m scared.” But sometimes it means, “the word that I am now quoting back at you is so absurd that the human voice alone is insufficient to convey the appropriate level of sarcasm, and therefore I must use my hands as well, as they used to do in the days of the silent cin-ema and in vaudeville where they had to make sure that everyone way in the back who couldn’t hear the dialogue would still get the point that the person being addressed is a total ass.”
It was in this sense that Sam Hellerman did the sarcastic hands thing on this particular occasion. I thought it was a bit over the top, frankly.
“Her deal?” he repeated. “You mean, other than the whole cock tease thing?” Again with the swearing.
88
Yeah, that’s what I meant, Hellerman. Thanks for breaking it down. I really didn’t get his attitude. So I just stared at him.
But I almost forgot to mention how the Fiona Deal was affecting the band like I said. (See what I mean? Making out with Fiona really seems to have poked permanent holes in my brain that I can feel even now. Plus, well, you don’t know about it yet—it happens toward the end of the year and I’ll explain it all when it comes up because I’m really trying to describe things in the order that they happened—but I’m still recovering from this massive head injury I got from this attempt on my life. What I’m saying is, for a variety of reasons, the Fiona Deal among them, my thinking tends to be a little fuzzy these days.)
Anyway, it wasn’t just that the Fiona Deal made Sam Hellerman act like a total dick. It had to do with the songs.
Sam Hellerman tended to like the topical songs the best.