tense, and sometimes how tense they get is proportional to how likely they judge it to be that you might have access to some kind of dangerous weapon. I developed the method to use on Matt Lynch. Little Big Tom just got swept up in the net by accident, a dolphin with the tuna. That had never been my intention.
I think it may have been the image of him as an uncomfortable, flailing, sitcom dad substitute caught in a net suspended from a crane on the port side of a Japanese fishing boat that made me decide to make a peace offering.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:
Dear Big Tom,
My magazines are not a cry for help.
They were only a tool to help deter a
bully. They are not needed now anyway.
I don’t have a girlfriend. Fiona is
an imaginary girl.
I’m glad you stopped the Vietnam War.
Peace and Love,
Thomas Charles Henderson
P.S. ban the bomb
And I left the note on the keyboard of his Mac.
My life hadn’t had a lot of content till this year. And now that it suddenly had some content, it was being turned upside down and slowly shaken, so that everything got a little mixed up with everything else.
As this process continued after the Fiona party, this weird thing started happening.
Whenever I would try to make a word my slave, that is, when I would use a word from 30 Days to a More Powerful 121
Vocabulary, a little image of Mr. Schtuppe’s head would pop up in my mind. Like, I’d say “obsequious” and suddenly I’d see a little shiny pink devil-head with lots of ear hair pop up really quickly, spin around, and pop back down again.
I was pretty sure that the little pop-up devil-head was trying to prompt me to mispronounce the word. I rarely ended up mispronouncing them, as it happened, because when you get right down to it, it’s kind of hard to mispronounce most words. You have to work at it. How would you mispronounce “obsequious,” for example? I guess it would be awb-seh -cue- ee-us. But I had to think about it far too long. I mean, I couldn’t do it intuitively so that it would flow the way it probably would coming from Mr. Schtuppe.
He is a master of his craft and I had a lot to learn. But that’s why we have public education, isn’t it?
I N TH E S HAD OW OF TH E KN IG HT
The Hillmont High School drama hippies always spend lunch period on this little patch of lawn on the northeast corner of Center Court, over by the Hillmont Knight. The Hillmont Knight is this huge god-awful sculpture made of scrap metal and old auto parts, welded together in what is supposed to be the shape of a knight, which is the Hillmont High School team mascot thing. If you squint and use your imagination, you can just about see how it’s supposed to look like a knight, though it’s kind of a stretch. The funniest thing about it, though, is that on what is supposed to be the knight’s shield, in welded-on letters cut from license plates and old metal signs, it says:
122
P R E S E NTATE D TO H H S
BY TH E C LA S S O F ’9 4
Presentated. A more fitting symbol of Hillmont High School would be difficult to imagine.
So the drama hippies sit in the shade of the Hillmont Knight, leaning against its rusty “legs” or just lying on the grass in the general area. Sometimes they hang their coats on it or do something really funny like put a hat on it. And that’s where Sam Hellerman had been when I observed him that first day, “hanging,” as he put it, just a little to the left of the Hillmont Knight.
Now, here’s something I’ve noticed about girls, after years of careful observation. They tend to sort themselves into groups of three. There’s the hottest one, who is the boss.
She dominates and controls the second-hottest one, who is the sidekick and second-in-command, and she instructs her in the art of clothes and sexiness. Then there’s a third one, usually chubby or freakishly tall and skinny or otherwise af-flicted, whom #1 and #2 both boss around. #3 is a sort of gopher, doormat, punching bag, object of loving condescension, and project for improvement rolled into one.
It’s more complicated than it is for guys, where there’s a much clearer line between victim and oppressor, and you always know which one you are, and the victims and oppressors never mingle or feign fraternity. In Girl World, #3 is truly friends with #1 and #2, and they do, in fact, enjoy hanging out together. #1 and #2 will help #3 with makeup and clothes, pretending that that will make a difference, and if either of the dominant girls have a boyfriend, they will try to set up #3 with the least attractive of the boyfriend’s friends, though everybody really knows that that, like so many of 123
their other #3-related activities, is a (devil-head) charade.
Because even though they’re sincere about being kind and helpful, there is an undercurrent of (devil-head) malevolence.
#1 and #2 love #3, but they’re also conscious of how much hotter they are than she is, and they like rubbing it in. #3 resents it deep down but goes along with it because she likes being in a group of friends, which would not otherwise be possible. Eventually, though, the bitterness begins to slip out bit by bit, and #1 and #2 decide #3 is a bitch and that they hate her and end up (devil-head) ostracizing her and replac-ing her with a new #3. Why don’t the #3s all team up and form an anti-1-2 front? I don’t know: they just don’t.
Anyhow, it happened that the #2 in the subgroup of drama people Sam Hellerman had started hanging out with was Née-Née Tagliafero, the girl who was supposedly going with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon. The #1 in that group was Celeste Fletcher, who was, as drama girls go, pretty much at the top level of sexiness. And the #3 was Yasmynne Schmick, who was very short and whose body shape was almost perfectly spherical. She had a slight black-velvety goth thing going on. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between goth and fake hippie, I’ve found.
In fact, this trio, though definitely in drama and thus associated with the whole fake-hippie pretense, was among the least extreme, most tasteful trios of drama girls. They could pass for nonhippies if they wanted to—maybe their hearts weren’t completely in it, though they did listen to that awful jam music. They were on the (devil-head) periphery of the fake-hippie drama movement.
Man, I’ve got to do something about that devil-head situation. Maybe there’s some kind of drug they can give you for it.
Anyhow, the Celeste Fletcher trio was closely associated 124
with the Syndie Duffy trio, which was closer to the center of the drama establishment. Syndie Duffy was quite mean, for a drama hippie. They also had a much looser association, through Née-Née Tagliafero, I imagine, with the Lorra Jaffe group, who were thoroughly normal and thus quite psychotic. It was the #2 of the Lorra Jaffe group who had tried to pull a Make-out/Fake-out on me recently in PE, if I’m not mistaken.
At the lunchtime be-in, Sam Hellerman had been sitting in the shadow of the Knight, roughly in between the Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy trios, and had appeared to be talking to both. I would have given quite a bit to know what the hell they had been discussing. But Sam Hellerman wasn’t talking.
Sam Hellerman had said I was welcome to “hang” on the lawn during lunch period with him on the drama people’s turf if I wanted. I’m sure he said it with solid confidence that I wouldn’t take him up on it. Yet I did in fact give it a shot on the following day, more in the spirit of field research than from a sincere desire to be one with the earth.
It was a weird scene, man. Celeste Fletcher was lying on her stomach on the grass facing away from us, raising her head every now and again to tell Yasmynne Schmick to fetch this or that, or to draw subtle attention to Yasmynne Schmick’s weight, height, or skin condition with less-than-convincing compassion. Syndie Duffy was lying nearby, with her head in her scruff-grunge knit-cap boyfriend’s lap. The boyfriend was half asleep, leaning back between the Hillmont Knight’s legs, and Syndie Duffy was sucking idly on his fingers. You could tell her group’s #3 was on the way out because whenever the #3 would try to say something, Syndie Duffy would roll her eyes or, with a great show of aggrava-125