But that was long after all the stuff that I’m about to explain happened. At the time I just said, “I didn’t mean to hurt Kyrsten Blakeney’s feelings.” Then I couldn’t help adding that 264
the callipygous among us have a certain responsibility as public figures. My mom just stared at me in incomprehension, which I suppose was the reaction I wanted. I don’t even understand what motivates me sometimes. She finally said she thought it might be nice if I apologized. So while she lighted up a Virginia Slims 120, I tore a sheet from my notebook and quickly wrote:
Dear Kyrsten Blakeney,
I apologize for mentioning your
callipygousness in the context of Mr.
Teone, and for immortalizing it in song.
That was inappropriate. I see that now.
But you should probably get used to the
idea that one of your roles in life will always be to inspire devotion and poetry among the dreamers, even though I can
see how in a certain way that can be a
pain.
Anyhow, I am very, very sorry. Please
don’t develop another eating disorder on my account. It’s really not worth it.
Sincerely,
Thomas Charles Henderson
I was folding it up, but my mom was holding out her hand, so I gave it to her. After she read it, she refolded it and put it in the Chi-Mos zine. Then she said, in a wry manner I hadn’t really thought her capable of, “maybe you’d better leave the apologizing to me after all.”
That seemed to wrap it up, but Carol had more to say.
She asked me what Chi-Mo meant. I told her it was a fond 265
name that the other kids had given me just to show how much they loved and cared for me. She didn’t believe me, but she wouldn’t have believed the truth, either.
“Well, I’ve also been on the phone with Tony Teone,” she said, after a brief pause. “He’s also very upset by your little booklet. So . . .”
I almost didn’t realize who she was referring to. Then I did, and I snort-laughed uncontrollably. Tony Teone? Tony Teone? Fully retarded. She misinterpreted the laughter and looked at me sternly. “You really hurt his feelings.”
Now, this was too much.
“Mr. Teone,” I said carefully, “is a devil-head maleficent, depraved, iniquitous, sadistic blackguard.” Except, in excellent Mr. Schtuppe style, I said “mal-efficient.” I was finally getting the hang of the mispronunciation thing. The trick is to make the mispronunciation have a totally different meaning from the correctly pronounced word. My education was finally starting to bear fruit.
She stared at me. “A devil-head, inefficient, black—uh, what?” Okay, I hadn’t intended to say “devil-head” aloud, and I could see why she was confused.
“Look,” I said, trying again in words she would be sure to understand. “Mr. Teone is a bad, bad man. The font of all evil.”
“He has always felt warmly toward you,” she said. “He had a lot of respect for your father.”
The fuck? I told her about Mr. Teone’s constant ridicule and abuse, the sarcastic salutes, and so forth. “Yeah,” I said,
“he’s the devil-head embodiment of warmth and respect. A real swell guy. No way I’m apologizing to him.”
“Well, they were in the navy together,” she said, and I had to admit, though reluctantly, that that kind of could account for the saluting thing. And maybe the “say hi to your father”
had been a retarded attempt to say “pay my respects when 266
you visit the cemetery”? I had to concede that it hadn’t, perhaps, all been sarcastic. When you think about it, it’s kind of hard to pull off Respect without everybody assuming it’s Sarcasm. It just is. But while I was considering this, my mom was still talking. “. . . they were very close, the two of them.
So . . .”
I was trying to fill in that so when a weird thought struck me. “Mom, do you know Mr. Teone’s middle name?” I asked, but I already knew the kind of answer I was going to get.
“Yeah, it’s Isadore,” she said. “And it’s actually kind of funny. Because of his initials, everyone always used to call him Tit.” She giggled, and under other circumstances I would have found that cute.
Tony Isadore Teone. Well, ramone me with a Mosrite.
B EYON D GO OD AN D EVI L
So Mr. Teone was Tit. A middle-aged Tit, rather, just as my dad would have been a middle-aged CEH had he lived. It was really hard to imagine that in 1960 my dad’s best friend had been a twelve-year-old version of Mr. Teone. On the other hand, how did I know what was hard or easy to imagine? I hadn’t known my dad then, and, as was constantly being brought home to me, I hadn’t known him very well even when the two of us had happened to be alive at the same time. Maybe he and Tit were two peas in a pod, just as evil as each other. Or maybe Mr. Teone had once been sweet and delightful, an all-around great guy and a joy to be around as a child, only turning evil later on. But no, Tit was evil by at least 1963. The coded note proved that. I loved my dad and trusted that he hadn’t been evil but had merely associated with at least one guy who happened to be evil, which wasn’t 267
quite so bad. Because you have to believe in something.
Don’t you?
I was also having some trouble squaring the clever young Tit, who could write codes in backward French and manipulate biblical quotations to his own nefarious ends, with the fat, dumb galunk he had apparently become. But people degener-ate as they get older, and anyway, it was possible that Mr.
Teone wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked. He knew Latin, after all, though that could simply reflect the fact that he had gone to school back when they still taught you things other than how to make great collages. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, really. Evil was the common thread here. And maybe the obesity, too. Poor, dear little MT, I thought. Something told me we weren’t talking about top-quality ramoning here.
A thought struck: what if Mr. Teone wasn’t evil after all?
What if he turned out to be a Disney-ish figure, unjustly ma-ligned at the beginning, who would eventually be revealed as a kindly soul with an important message to impart? “Son, your old man wanted you to have this,” he’d say, waving some object or other, a sword or a curious gold coin. “But I had to wait till I knew you were old enough to understand.
Fortunately, you passed the test. Oh, you didn’t realize you are descended from kings? Well, you are, and it’s time to claim your rightful place.” Descended from kings? Oh my God, it all fits. “I’m terribly sorry,” he’d continue, “about the hazing, the mockery, the torture, the permanent psychological and emotional scars. We had to do that so you wouldn’t suspect the big surprise party we’ve been planning for you.”
Somehow, I couldn’t see it. I had to stand by my instinct that Mr. Teone was a bad guy, the apex of a pyramid of des-picable, sadistic normal psychos who wanted me and Sam Hellerman dead. I never really doubted it. The fact that he 268
had known my dad just made his evil a bit more complicated, that’s all.
That said, I realized that Mr. Teone would have answers to many of my questions, if only I could figure out a way to ask them. I was still sitting in the kitchen, thinking things over. My mom got up and I could hear her footsteps as she walked over to the living room. Then I heard some shuffling, followed by another little burst of giggling: and I knew she had just looked up “callipygian” in the dictionary.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote another note: Dear Mr. Teone,
In light of recent events, I feel
there are important matters we need to
discuss. These concern materials among
my deceased father’s effects which you
may be in a position to elucidate.