“Well, first of all,” said Todd Panchowski, “I play percussion instruments, not ‘drums.’ ” Second of all, he added, he didn’t want to jam with a band with the word “occult” in it.
There was some Fellowship rule against it. So he happened to be wearing an I, Cannibal T-shirt depicting a skeletal grim reaper cutting off a nun’s head with his scythe. Maybe they hadn’t given him the “be nice to nuns” talk yet.
It didn’t matter because halfway through the practice I had already decided that the new band name was going to be The Mordor Apes, Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron on bass and necrology, Dim Todd on drums-oops-I-mean-percussion and stupefaction, first album Elven Tail.
MY P O OR I N E PT PAR E NTAL U N ITS
It seemed as though the smoke from the Sex-Vietnam-Stratego Incident had only just cleared when out of the blue I got called into the kitchen for another family conference. It was the Thursday before Halloween, not too long after our second practice with Todd Panchowski. I passed Amanda on my way in, and she gave me the look that said “you’ll never get out of this one, boy.” Dear God, what now?
This time my mom was officiating rather than Little Big Tom, though he was hovering in the background. She looked terrible. Her hair was all wild, like it was when she was going through one of her crazy episodes. She was smoking with tremendous ferocity even for her. She looked up at me through her hair with this unreadable but distressed expression on her face. What on earth was wrong?
157
We stared at each other.
Finally she said, her voice distant and depressed sounding, though also with a little sob, “A lot of kids your age are experimenting with drugs.”
I went: “?”
And I’ll tell you why I went “?” The first thing my mom did every single morning was to reach to the bedside table for her weed. She couldn’t function without it, like some people are with coffee. And even now she had her afternoon low-ball, bourbon and soda, no ice, in her hand. And coursing through her veins at this and any given time was a constant stream of about a dozen orally administered tranquilizers and psychotropics and God knows what else—Xanax, Prozac, lith-ium, Vicodin, Halcion, you name it. The irony was that I was the only person in that room, and probably the only member of the Hillmont High student body, who wasn’t experimenting with anything. Other than love, literature, rock and roll, and cryptography, I mean.
The notion of these teen drug “experiments” always cracks me up. Like they’re in a secret laboratory conducting research on a government grant. As opposed to being in a public lavatory doing lines of crank and holding some poor bastard’s head in the toilet till he drowns or till the bell rings, whichever comes first. Well, in a way that’s on a government grant, too. What a world we’ve got here.
My assumption was, of course, that my mom had finally noticed that Sam Hellerman had been raiding her Vicodin supply and had assumed that I was the culprit. Now, if that had been the case, here’s what would have happened: I would have looked up and seen Little Big Tom tilting to one side and holding, maybe even rattling, a half-empty medicine bottle, with a concerned yet wry expression. In fact, though, when I looked up, it turned out that Little Big Tom was hold-158
ing not a bottle, but rather a piece of paper and a little booklet.
It was my lyric sheet to “Thinking of Suicide?” and a copy of the school pamphlet of the same name. I had stupidly left the lyric sheet out after band practice. We had broken out the pamphlet as a visual aid to try to explain to Todd Panchowski why the song was cool. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, but never mind about that.
My poor inept parental units. Once again, their opening line wasn’t the topic sentence, and everyone ended up confused. They were trying to have the suicide talk and somehow got it mixed up with the drug talk.
TH I N KI NG OF S U IC I DE?
You can put your straightjacket away I don’t plan to kill myself today
Maybe tomorrow, maybe not at all
I’m not ready to make that call
But don’t assume that I’m all right
I won’t be with my baby tonight
There’s no baby, there’s nothing there What baby? I don’t care—
Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right.
It’s a Thinking of Suicide Saturday night It’s not funny but it’s true
I think about suicide when I think about you So put your E back where you got it from I don’t plan on going to the prom
159
I know I add up to a figure of fun
But I don’t want to be the only one
And there’s only one of me
And no one else that I can see
And I’m so tired of trying to
Make believe I’m not dying to, so—
Thinking of Suicide? Yes, I am.
Thinking of Suicide? Hell, goddamn.
It’s not funny, but it’s free
Do you think about suicide when you think about me?
And if I’m suddenly gone
Then you’ll know what’s been going on I’m always thinking
And I never do anything
But,
Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right Thinking of Suicide with all my might I have got a history of
Thinking of Suicide when I think about love.
Well, it was a bit better with the music. Not the music as played by me and Sam Hellerman and Todd Panchowski, which was pure (devil-head) cacophony. I mean how it sounded in my head. Maybe you’ll have to trust me on that.
Anyway, I just thought you should see what my mom had been reading when she flipped out. Plus I’m kind of proud of that song and I’m showing off a little, even though you have to sing “from” a little weird to make it sound like it 160
rhymes with “prom.” But actually, that’s kind of like my favorite part.
I totally couldn’t see what the big deal was. It’s a pretty ordinary topic. Not too shocking or unusual. They make a pamphlet about it, for Christ’s sake. In fact, it wasn’t even me in the song. The song had been inspired by the pamphlet girl, as I’ve explained; and as for those specific lyrics, I had in fact been feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Yasmynne Schmick when I came up with most of them. But I couldn’t figure out a way to explain that to my mom and Little Big Tom without causing even more confusion.
When my mom is in crazy mode it’s just not possible to talk to her reasonably. Still, I gave it a shot, trying to make it as simple as possible.
“I’m not on drugs and I’m not going to kill myself,” I said.
And it was true. I really wasn’t. Though I couldn’t tell you why not.
No one knew what to say. Then Little Big Tom cleared his throat and filled in some of the background.
My own cleverness had tripped me up. Way back, I had needed to find an excuse for why I never spent much time at home, particularly after school. The real reason was that LBT
kind of freaked me out back then, and I felt so uncomfortable with the whole vibe of the Henderson-Tucci household that even the ghastly pall of Hellerman Manor seemed preferable to it. So I invented a series of clubs I was supposed to be in, plausible ones like the Chess Club, Rocketry Club, Monty Python Club, The Middle-earthlings, or the Trekster Gods, and sometimes crazy ones I would make up for my own amusement, like the Caulking and Stripping Club, or the Doorknob Appreciators Society, otherwise known as the Knob-heads. Not that they ever paid much attention to what the clubs were called. My brilliant humor, once again wasted.