Calling him had been my first impulse upon finding the note. But of course, he had been out. Later, when I asked him where he had been, he said, “Visiting my grandma,” which I didn’t believe for a minute.
A thought struck me.
“Hey,” I said. “If you ever happened to be somewhere like another party or something and you happened to see Fiona there, you’d—you’d tell me, right?”
He just looked at me like I was the most pathetic creature he had ever seen. Which was well within the realm of possibility, especially since Sam Hellerman didn’t get out much.
He was also evasive when I probed for the story behind the new Hellerman/drama hippie nexus.
The first thing he said was “I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.”
“Nobody,” I said blankly, “expects the Spanish Inquisition,” supplying the required response but continuing to stare 116
at him as though to say “there is a time for quoting Monty Python and a time for choosing another path.”
Then he said: “trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then, after watching me continue to stare at him for some time, he cleared his throat and claimed that, actually, he was considering going out for drama and trying out for The Music Man.
I allowed my expression to change from “your feeble attempt at false jocularity will never succeed in changing this subject” to “who exactly is this moron and why is his Sam Hellerman impression so laughable and unconvincing?” He finally said, lamely: “There is a thing called hanging. It’s not a big deal.” And he asked me what my problem was, though I don’t think he expected me to answer. He added that it
“probably won’t be for much longer anyway.” Which sounded pretty fucking weird to me, but he clammed up after that, and no amount of eye-rolling, sarcasm, or even long, steady, unblinking stares would induce him to say any more.
Look, I never said it was a “big deal.” Just that it was unusual. And the more he tried to make it sound usual, the more unusual it seemed. That’s all I was saying.
We were more or less civil to each other, and still spent a lot of time together working on the band (the Medieval Ages, me on guitar, Samber Waves of Grain on bass and bodywork, first album That Stupid Pope. ) And we were still alphabetical-order friends, and that’s forever. But there were now some topics that were more or less off-limits, and that made me feel self-conscious about bringing up other matters. Rock and roll was okay, but not too much else. Plus, for the first time since the Order of the Alphabet had brought us together back when we were little kids, I was on my own for lunch.
I have to admit, though, that apart from all that, I kind of wanted to keep Tit’s note to myself. Even though it was little 117
more than nonsense, the fact that only I knew about it made it the most intimate thing connecting me and my dad.
Similarly, and rather selfishly, I hadn’t told Amanda about the CEH library, even though I knew she would have been pretty interested in it. I had no clue what the coded message might be, but I had developed this absurd idea that if I did decode it, it would turn out to be a kind of message to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone else to know what that message was. I wasn’t even all that sure I wanted to know it myself.
While it remained unsolved, it retained boundless promise.
Solving it could only disappoint. On the other hand, you can’t just leave an unsolved code kicking around in your life.
LOU R E E D
It was in the midst of all the pod-hippie business that Sam Hellerman’s bass finally arrived. I had to admit, it was sweet. It almost looked like a copy of a Fender Jazz Bass, but it was made in Korea and the fine craftsmen in the Korean bass sweatshop had put their own collective individual stamp on it. And by that I mean the name on the oddly rectangular head stock was not
“Fender Jazz Bass” but rather “Apex Dominator 2.”
He didn’t have an amp yet, but we figured out how to plug it in to the back of the Magnavox stereo console in my living room so the sound would come out of the speakers.
It sounded kind of distant and rumbly and fuzzy, but sort of cool, too. Famous recording engineers and producers spend millions of dollars experimenting with effects and overloading preamps and poking holes in speakers with pencils and even pouring foreign substances over circuitry to achieve the sort of thing Sam Hellerman could accomplish just by being too cheap to buy an amp. We are geniuses.
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He looked cool with it, too. He had it slung so low around his neck that it hung well below his knees, and in order to reach the G string he kind of had to dislocate his right shoulder a little. He appeared to be in considerable pain. Like I said, way cool.
We had just finished working on the band’s signature tune, “Losers Like You,” which goes:
Catcher in the Rye is for losers
Losers, losers,
Catcher in the Rye is for losers
Losers like you
(The Sadly Mistaken, Moe Vittles on guitar, Sam
“Noxious” Fumes on bass and landscaping, band name spelled out in bullet holes on the side of a family station wagon, first album Kill the Boy Wonder. ) It sounded a lot better with bass instead of clarinet, I’ll tell you that right now.
We were playing the next tune when Little Big Tom popped in.
“Nice!” he said. “Lou Reed, right? ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”
“No,” Sam Hellerman said. “ ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven.’ An original.”
Little Big Tom tilted his head in that birdlike way he has and said, “Hmm. I thought it might have been Lou Reed.”
Then he tilted his whole body from one slight angle to the other by raising first the left foot, then the right, but keeping the rest of his body stiff, and stuck his lower lip out slightly while bringing his chin firmly downward, as though to say “I have just performed this little dance to celebrate the fact that I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal with this illuminating discussion.”
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Then he said, “Rock on!” and flitted out.
Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other for a while with the same thought, though he was the one who said it first:
“You know, ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”
“Fuck,” I said.
Sam Hellerman couldn’t believe I wasn’t more pissed off at Little Big Tom for snooping in my room and confiscating all that stuff. I mean, I was pissed off, but not enough to go crazy about it. I was embarrassed about the notebook and resolved to take steps to protect my data more carefully in the future, but practically, it meant nothing. The magazines had already served their purpose. And as it happened, I had another “Kill ’em All” T-shirt as a backup. I didn’t even care too much about the confiscated records: I was at the point in my creative life where listening to other people’s music was just a distraction from my own stuff, and what he confiscated was mostly lame crap anyways. And believe it or not, I was finding I could get along just fine without the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. Just knowing the Talons of Rage fantasy blades existed, somewhere out there, was enough for me. I guess I was growing up.
But the real reason I wasn’t more pissed off is that I’m a sentimental fool, and I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Little Big Tom. I could understand why he and, well, anybody, might be freaked out by me and the Talons of Rage fantasy blades and all the other Guns ’n’
Chi-Mo paraphernalia. Though I still think Stratego is pushing it.
When you stare at people, saying nothing for long periods of time while they try to think of ways to fill in the space, and they know they don’t get you at all, they can get a little 120