A couple of my notebooks. (Uh-oh.) My “Kill ’em All and Let God Sort ’em Out” T-shirt. And a big stack of my weapons-and-tactics magazines, fanned out like cards on a blackjack table.
“What is this shit?” said Little Big Tom, eventually.
“The entire contents of my room?” I said.
Well, it wasn’t quite everything, but that was essentially the correct answer. See, in real life parents raid their children’s rooms and confiscate the porno magazines and drugs; in the back-assward world of Partner and Mrs. Progressive at 98
507 Cedarview Circle, they leave the porn alone and confiscate everything else.
There was another bumpy stretch of awkwardness, during which all you could hear was the rhythm of my mom’s sucked-and-blown Virginia Slims 120s. Short, hissing intake.
Pause. Long, exasperated release. It sounded like a factory in a cartoon, or in an educational film on how they make steel tools. Ordinarily, it can be very soothing.
“Why,” Little Big Tom finally said, “do you feel the need to read this garbage?”
Why, I thought, do you feel the need to try to impersonate Jimmy Buffett and wear shorts and sandals with black socks and eat tofu loaf on Thanksgiving? Some questions have no answers.
“I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to set an example so you would respect and share our values.”
Now that was funny. I just looked at him. The look that says: “what are you, high?”
Then he said something that totally threw me.
“It’s very important to have respect for women.”
I stared at him.
Well, now I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I ended up figuring out what the hell Little Big Tom was getting at.
It was hard to piece together because very little of what he was saying made much sense, but here’s my best guess as to what had happened. Little Big Tom, making his rounds, had overheard the conversation about the Fiona Deal and had found it disturbing. He hadn’t liked the way Sam Hellerman had referred to Fiona (I hadn’t, either, though I doubt we had exactly the same reasons). I don’t know how 99
much of the rest of the conversation he heard, but if he missed anything, he could have read all about it in my notebook. I’m ashamed to say that one of my notebooks contained, among other embarrassing items, some tortured “letters to Fiona”
I had scribbled out during a stretch of maudlin, sleepless nights. And I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about the lyrics to
“She Likes It When I Pinch Her Hard.” And many of my other songs, I’m sure, like “Gooey Glasses.”
He must have read the notebook. Otherwise, how would he have reached the conclusion that my “relationship” with
“my girlfriend” was undermining his generation’s sacred achievement of the institution of easygoing touchy-feely ouchless deodorant-optional crunchy-granola Hair– sound track butterflies-and-unicorns sexuality?
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. After overhearing the conversation, and in the throes of a full-blown paranoid, sex-obsessed, politically correct midlife-crisis meltdown, he had decided to search my room for evidence of more disturbing-ness and had basically freaked out over what he’d found.
He was much, much more bothered by the war stuff, the magazines, the nunchakus, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, and the Stratego than he had been by the cock tease conversation.
And there’s where he made his mistake. He tried to combine two discussions, the one where you tell your stepson it isn’t nice to call girls bitches and the one where you express your inner turmoil over the fact that being into war and weapons betrays the deeply held values of the generation that stopped the Vietnam War. The result was incoherence, confusion, and the least successful attempt at Family Conflict Resolution since the White Album told Charles Manson to give the world a big hug.
For Little Big Tom, these issues were like two sides of the 100
same coin. He could jump from Stratego to Respect for Women without realizing he had changed topics, but he was the only one who had any idea what he was talking about.
Even my mom, smoking in the corner, seemed confused.
I’m just speculating here as to his state of mind, but I think he looked at everything in my room, along with his very mistaken imaginative reconstruction of my “relationship” with
“my girlfriend,” as a kind of personal attack on him and his fabulous generation. And he saw everything in my world only as it related to his own self-image and personal style, which he held in pretty high regard. He wasn’t too interested in hearing where he had things wrong, either. The theory confirmed his suspicions and he liked it that way. My first make-out session was all about him. So were the Talons of Rage fantasy blades.
And so was Stratego from Milton Bradley. Plus, I think he was embarrassed, worried that some of his PC friends might see me wearing the wrong shirt or something.
His version of my life was pretty hilarious, at any rate. I wasn’t treating “my girlfriend” with enough respect. I didn’t understand how sex was spiritual as well as physical. “My friends” and I were in a “space” of negativity and aggression, which wasn’t healthy. The music he had confiscated was mostly metal, since those were the album covers and song titles that fed into his theory. But he left the Rolling Stones alone: see, they stopped the Vietnam war, too.
All the references to “my friends” threw me at first. Had he really failed to notice that I had no friends other than Sam Hellerman? Then it hit me that he was assuming that some of the band members in the Sam ’n’ Moe bands I’d written about in my notebook were actually real people. (What tipped me off: he mentioned a Debbie, and I was like “who’s Debbie,”
until I realized he was talking about Li’l Miss Debbie, the imaginary nurse-slut vocalist of Tennis with Guitars. It’s a 101
good thing he didn’t realize that some of “my friends” were really me: it might have turned his mind into a pretzel.) All this from Stratego and a few fantasy blades? Un. Real.
At one point my mom chimed in: “Baby, all we’re saying is you have to try to find harmony between your masculine and your feminine natures.” I heard a tremendous guffaw from Amanda in the other room. Thanks for that, Mom. I knew I’d be hearing about my feminine nature from Amanda, and till the end of time.
The one bit of reality in the whole scene did come from my mom, however, though it was the kind of connection to reality that reveals an even deeper disconnection from it.
“Are you having trouble with the kids in school?” she asked.
Bingo. Well spotted. Give the lady a cookie. But on the other hand, how could anyone who knew me or anything about me even have to ask that question? The mind reels.
The whole sorry affair wrapped up like this: we wheeled and dealed for the stuff. Little Big Tom kept the magazines, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, some of the albums, and the throwing stars, nunchakus, and decorative weapons (all except for the bowie knife, which I was allowed to keep for sentimental reasons). I got the books, the coat, most of the videos, the notebooks, some of the albums, and the games. He agreed to respect my privacy and I to respect his values from that point forward. If you’re thinking that that sounds like a joke, well, you’re right, but one of the unspoken terms of the truce was that we couldn’t actually laugh at it till we were out of the room.
My mom said, “Baby, if you ever need to talk, we’re always here.” I gave her a little “right back at ya, babe” salute.
102
Little Big Tom, under the impression that he had achieved something by accusing me of being criminally insane and taking half my stuff, rumpled my hair and said,