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I pulled out the guitar case and opened it. There was a great electric guitar in it. I mean, fucking great. Gibson.
Melody Maker. Midsixties. Kind of beat-up. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen or touched with my hands that wasn’t at-tached to someone named Fiona. There was yet another Post-it on the headstock that said “you’re on your own for the amp.”
Okay, so that might have been one Post-it too many.
Even the master of the Post-it communications revolution can overdo it sometimes. But damn. How had he known that that was pretty much my ultimate fantasy guitar? I had no idea. Oh wait, yes I did. Because he had read my notebook.
Little Big Tom had done everything wrong and had broken a great many well-established, TV-dramatized, “Dear Abby”–certified rules about parental conduct with regard to respecting people’s privacy whenever drugs are not involved, but I’ve got to say that in the all-important stage known as Making Amends by Trying to Purchase Affection and Trust with Extravagant Gifts, he had really come through.
Maybe it’s just the lust for worldly possessions talking, but I think this may have been the first time in my life I was this unsuccessful when I tried to make everything disappear in a cloud of cynicism. I admit, I got a little choked up.
I made a silent vow not to ridicule him without his being aware of it for at least a week.
Having the new guitar made me want to play better, to sort of do it justice, and I started to practice a lot more. Little Big Tom had bought it from a friend of his who had been in some old blues-country-jam band and who now had a guitar repair place, which was the reason it was set up so well and played so easily. According to my mom, Little Big Tom had been planning to get me an electric guitar for Christmas even 135
before the Stratego Sex Incident. He had found out from my notebook that I lusted after a Melody Maker and had felt so bad about the snooping that he had decided to expedite matters and try to scare one up.
This was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I couldn’t forget it. I let a lot of prime opportunities for LBT ridicule slide right by because of it. I knew Little Big Tom could tell that the gift had worked and that I was more positively disposed toward him, because he increased the frequency of his trademark pop-in comments. That was the downside. It was annoying. On the other hand, I didn’t mind too much. Why not let him have his fun, too?
Once when I was playing, he stuck his head in and said,
“Spanking the plank?” I stared at him. “Uh, no,” I finally said, since as I mentioned I was trying to be nice.
But it turns out I was wrong. I had been s-ing the p. S-ing the p. used to be a right-on, far-out, with-it expression for playing the guitar, supposedly. I guess when Little Big Tom was a kid, he and his friends used to go around saying “hey, you wanna get together and spank the plank tonight?” and they would be talking about having some kind of opium-den Timothy Leary country-blues-folk-bluegrass-Afro-Caribbean jam session wearing leather vests and velvet pants in an incense-y room that had one poster of Che Guevara and another of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, and beads instead of a door.
Supposedly, they also used to call a guitar a “piece of wood,” as in “hey, that’s a great piece of wood you got there.”
You know, it’s almost like they want you to get the wrong idea when they say stuff like that, but knowing Little Big Tom, I’m pretty sure there was nothing going on at these jam sessions but soft drugs, hard-to-follow conversations, and terrible music.
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* * *
either Sam Hellerman nor I had an amp yet, but we continued to practice using the living room Magnavox stereo console. Sam Hellerman figured out how to plug us both in, so he was in the left speaker and I was in the right. He seemed a little put out, strangely. I think he was beginning to see the enormous fake wood–paneled stereo console as his trademark gear and didn’t like me horning in on it. He wanted to be the only one to say “yeah, I like to use the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi stereo console” to Guitar Player magazine when they interviewed him about his signature thin, burbly, distorted bass sound. “We never expected Oxford English, Moe Bilalabama on guitar, me on bass and lollygagging, first album What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand? to be such a big success,” he’d say. “But in all modesty, I’d have to say it’s that Magnavox magic that always seals the deal. . . .”
In reality, though, Oxford English was off to a pretty terrible start. I mean, the guitar sounded awful through the Magna-V. And it was so hard to distinguish between the bass and guitar that neither of us could tell for sure what we were playing. It was a mess.
Here’s how bad it was. We were doing “Don’t Play Yahtzee with My Heart.” Little Big Tom stuck his head in, tilt-stared at us for a moment as though searching for the right words, gave up, and pulled his head back out. Essentially he had said, in body language, “let’s pretend this pop-in never happened, shall we?” If you can’t even get a resigned “rock and roll” out of LBT, you’re in trouble.
I tried running the guitar through this distortion box I got at Musicville at the mall. The Overlord II. That was a mistake. There was a squeal, and then there was: silence. And I think maybe a smell like smoky toast, though that may have 137
been from something else: it always smells kind of weird around here. The Magnavox was dead.
It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.
TH E STAR-S PANG LE D BAN N E R
S U B STITUTION C I P H E R
Now let me try to explain my thinking about the Tit’s weird code-parallelogram.
Sam Hellerman and I used to have this code hobby. It began in sixth grade, continued sporadically through junior high, and had even hung on slightly through some of ninth grade, though by that time we were mostly just going through the motions. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, more importantly, we didn’t have anything of interest to be all secretive about.
There were different methods, but one we had used pretty frequently was the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher.
What you did was, you chose two words at random from the
“Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics. The first letter of the first word would be your “in” character, and the last letter of the second word would be your “out” character. So say your words were
“dawn’s” and “stripes.” You’d write out the alphabet starting with “D” from “dawn’s,” adding the “A,” “B,” and “C” at the end; and underneath these letters, you’d write it out again, but this time beginning with “S,” the last letter of “stripes.” Like this: D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C
S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
You substituted the letters in the second line for the first line’s letters in your original text. So in the SSBSC dawn’s/stripes 138
cipher, ZNGHITC QAPZTCTN XH RWPGPRITGXOTS
QN GTRTHHTH PCS HWTAITGTS WDAADLH would
mean “Kyrsten Blakeney is characterized by recesses and sheltered hollows.”
All the recipient would need to know to decipher the message was where the alphabet began on each of the two lines. The way we used to do it was by number. “Dawn’s” is the eighth word in the SSB, and “stripes” is the twenty-third word. So the key to the Kyrsten Blakeney message would be SSB-F8-L23. We used “The Star-Spangled Banner” because we both knew the first twenty-six words of the lyrics by heart. The “F” and “L” stood for first and last, because sometimes we would vary what letters we would use, so we could have L/F or F/F, or even midword letters that we would identify by Roman numerals: SSB-8iii-23iv. It could get pretty complicated.
Even though the letters of the coded portion of Tit’s note were arranged in a neat little parallelogram rather than in one line like normal text, I was pretty sure it was some sort of cipher.