I knew right off the bat that the picture was going to be distorted, but that didn’t prevent me from asking some questions. What kind of things did they encode? It appeared that they were in the habit of discussing more important, meaningful matters than Sam Hellerman and I ever had when we were playing our code games. Our coded messages were entirely trivial. For my dad and Tit, it was all about sexual con-quests and dead people, neither of which had ever figured prominently in my and Sam Hellerman’s lives, though I guess Sam Hellerman was showing some promise in the former category. Moreover, I got the impression that Tit and my dad weren’t doing it just for fun but because they really didn’t want anyone else to read what they were writing.
I could understand why the sexual stuff was coded: in the sixties, everybody was all uptight about sex, and I bet you would have got in trouble for writing about how you had ramoned someone. But there was something odd about the fact 191
that “the bastard is dead” had not been deemed worthy of being encoded, but “are you going to the funeral?” had been. Or maybe the bastard who was dead wasn’t the same dead guy they were having the funeral for? Or maybe “the bastard is dead” is some quotation, like the Superman reference, that I wasn’t aware of. It could have been sex again, though. The being tied up and whipped thing, I mean, though that’s just an expression, too, in a way.
Tit’s question, however, had an answer. I had no doubt that my dad had in fact gone to the funeral. The date on Timothy J. Anderson’s funeral card from The Seven Storey Mountain was March 13, 1963. It didn’t square with the date on the note, but of course that wasn’t a real date; and
“3/[something]/63” had been written in the Catcher. This pretty much had to be the funeral Tit had been asking about.
Funerals don’t come up that often in a fifteen-year-old’s life.
So Timothy J. Anderson was dead, whether or not he had been “the bastard,” and my dad had gone to the funeral.
He had had a book with him at the time, as always, and had put the memorial card in it, and maybe used it as a bookmark.
There wasn’t much information on the card, just the date, a generic-sounding quotation from the Bible, and the location: St. Mary Star of the Sea in San Francisco. The other card in The Seven Storey Mountain, from Happy Day Dry Cleaners with One-Hour Martinizing, had no date, of course, but it happened to be located in roughly the same neighborhood as the church, if I wasn’t mistaken. All that proved was that he attended the funeral and visited the dry cleaners in the same neighborhood during the period when he was reading The Seven Storey Mountain. I knew my dad had grown up in the city, but I didn’t know where—I note-to-selfed that I should find a way to ask my mom discreetly.
I hadn’t quite finished The Doors of Perception yet, but it 192
was clear that The Seven Storey Mountain was the book I should be reading, even though it looked kind of boring. I picked it up to flip through it and almost dropped it in surprise, because the title page had a quote from the Bible, and it was the same one that had been printed on Timothy J.
Anderson’s funeral card: “for I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
It kind of made me shiver like when you’re afraid of something spooky. Coincidences will do that to you.
TH E ART E N S E M B LE OF C H ICAGO
If we were really going to be in this Festival of Lights thing, we had our work cut out for us. We didn’t sound—what’s the word I’m looking for? “Good”? Yes, that’s the one: we didn’t sound good. We had grand ambitions but limited talent and finesse, and we had less than six weeks to get our act together.
Nevertheless, choosing the band name, stage names, credits, and first album title for your first performance during a midday talent exhibition in the high school auditorium are some of the most important decisions in a band’s career, and we gave them a great deal of thought.
Eventually, we settled on Balls Deep, Comrade Gal-hammer on guitar, Our Dear Leader on bass and embroidery, the Lonely Dissident on Real Fancy and Important Percussion, first album We Control the Horizontal. We were going for a kind of communist guerilla/seventies porn vibe. If we had had the time or ability we would have grown mustaches and chest hair. That wasn’t possible, but we did have big medallions and little blue Chinese hats with red stars on them from the surplus store, and these huge white shoulder holsters that looked great with the black mechanic’s jumpsuits 193
we got from the St. Vincent de Paul. I swiped Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara T-shirt, which looked pretty cool when I un-zipped the jumpsuit down to Che’s cute little chin and positioned my medallion over his nose.
Amanda, who has a lot of artistic talent, even painted us a big banner, following Sam Hellerman’s specifications, though I think she put a lot of herself into it, too. It was very seventies, with some silhouetted figures in educational kama sutra poses along the bottom, and a big AK-47 on either side.
“You’ll never get away with this,” she said, and I supposed she was probably right. It did look great, though.
Sam Hellerman’s idea for the audition tape was simple: just make a tape of a real, harmless band and put our name on it. Well, not our full name. We were going to be B.D. till the day of the show. We ended up putting some of Little Big Tom’s bland elevator rock on the tape.
I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I’m only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.
Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get right on it.
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A WE I R D, WE I R D TH I NG
I was scheduled to visit Dr. Hexstrom’s office every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. In our second session, during Spirit Week, she continued to talk to me about books and my dad’s teenage library, never even bringing up the suicide thing. Or rather, I talked about the books. Strangely, I was doing most of the talking. Usually my role in a conversation is just to stare at the other person till they lose track of what they’re trying to say and eventually give up. But with Dr. Hexstrom, it was almost like these roles were reversed. Sometimes her facial expressions would communicate things like “oh, come off it,” or “I see what you’re getting at,” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.” Other times her face would be like that of a blank, unreadable mannequin head.
I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something.
I can be addled, or totally lost, or even feeling crazy, but I usually have at least some confidence in my ability to describe the confusion, even if I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m doing. Out loud, though, it’s a mess. I sound like way more of an idiot than I like to think I am. I’m worse than Little Big Tom. It was only because I liked and trusted Dr.