tion, remove the boyfriend’s fingers from her mouth and tell her not to be stupid before putting them back in. That’s normal 1-on-3 behavior, perhaps, but there was something about the way she was saying it that made it clear it was pretty much all over.
There were some dudes a bit farther down, engaged in a philosophical debate about how high they were now as opposed to how high they were going to get at some future point in time. Everyone over by me was idly watching Née-Née Tagliafero and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon make their rounds, and talking amongst themselves about male and female actors, getting high, The Music Man, how LPs sound better than CDs (which I actually agree with), and (did I mention?) getting high. And about Bobby Duboyce, the helmet guy, who, it was claimed, had been seen making out with some unspecified, and grossly implausible, girl in the football-field bleachers. (I was skeptical. Is it even physically possible to do that with a helmet head? But of course I mental-noted the grim fact that, for the sake of argument, even narcoleptic helmet boy was more of a hit with the ladies than I was and filed it away for use in some future flight of self-pity.) I sat next to Sam Hellerman, cross-legged in my army coat, in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only time anyone acknowledged my presence was when Yasmynne Schmick, for some reason, asked me what I played in the band. “Guitar,” I said. Except that I said a few ums and uhs beforehand, stammered a bit during, and had a little coughing fit afterward. I was jumpy. I was doing the ear thing.
For some reason, I felt kind of warmly towards Yasmynne Schmick, maybe because of sympathy for her role in life, which really wasn’t her fault. But I couldn’t talk to these people. My one line in the whole scene, and I had flubbed it.
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As for Sam Hellerman, he said not one word the entire time, and no one said anything to him. He just sat there staring at Celeste Fletcher with a faintly stupid expression. He did manage to leave the impression, though, that he was drooling on the inside.
So it was obvious. I guess. Sam Hellerman had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and for some reason she had decided to tolerate his presence and to allow him to subject her ass to the Hellerman eye-ray treatment for thirty minutes each day.
I couldn’t blame him for that: it’s a nice ass, and I have to admit I was giving it the relatively less dramatic Chi-Mo treatment myself. What she got out of the deal was harder to fathom. It was clear, though, that his deep and tender feelings for her ass were not reciprocated. As to why she decided to tolerate his (devil-head) parasitic presence, who knows?
Maybe she was just one of those people who likes having a large (devil-head) entourage and she felt she needed another extra to make the crowd scene look more believable. Maybe her ass needed the positive reinforcement.
All I knew was, Sam Hellerman was no more a genuine participant in the lunch period Grooviness on the Green than I was. Celeste Fletcher hadn’t even looked back at him the entire time. It made zero sense.
WE CO OL?
I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute-father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting 127
a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.
I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just stick his head in and out without warning.
He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics magazines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.
He set them down on my dresser and said:
“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.
“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—
mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”
He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for reading my notebook, but he used way more words than necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone:
“Some of the things you said the other day have been rat-128
tling around in the old brain box. Young men always think they know everything and that old men know nothing, and old men always think the same thing. But maybe the answer could be somewhere in between.”
Mmm, deep.
That’s what I thought, but what I said was “We’re cool, Big Tom.” Then I added, uncharacteristically, but because I knew he’d like it: “You’re not even that old.” I’m shameless.
He looked at me, still expecting something.
I held up two fingers at about shoulder level in a peace sign with what I hoped was the right attitude, slightly sardonic but good-natured.
His mouth crinkled just a bit at the left corner, and he did this little sniffy laugh while shaking his head. Then he rumpled my hair, which was the real sign that he was more or less satisfied with how things had concluded.
“Rock and roll,” he said as he went out, sighing just a bit, I think.
LADI E S’ WE E K?
I was starting to lose track of all of the mysteries. There was Tit’s code and the cryptic notes and documents associated with my dad’s teen library. There was my adult dad’s death.
There was Sam Hellerman’s unusual behavior. And above all, there was Fiona. I still had the sense that somehow all the puzzles were related and could solve each other if only one were to come undone. I also had the sense that that was crazy. At any rate, I thought about Fiona practically constantly, both as a context within which to experience my horniness and as a puzzle piece. I decided to write down everything I knew about her, imagining that it might be 129
useful one day if I ever gathered my possessions in a satchel, kissed my mom good-bye, and set off on a perilous journey to track her down and discover her secret. Like a hard-boiled detective. Or a hobbit.
I hardly knew anything about Fiona. I sure wished I had paid more attention to what she had been saying while I was ogling her like a sex maniac.
To summarize what I came up with:
Fiona was most likely a junior. She was in drama, acted in plays, made costumes and her own clothes, and was kind of hung up on vocabulary-level feminism but not in any way that mattered practically. She was interested in the occult and the paranormal, though in fact she had no psychokinetic or supernatural powers. She was nearsighted. She liked the Who. She had a boyfriend who was not at the party but who had friends who were. She wouldn’t go past second base with anonymous strangers in dark basements; or, the party had coincided with her period (ladies’ week, as my mom calls it).