Please contact me at your earliest
convenience to arrange a meeting so that we can discuss these issues and, I hope, come to a satisfactory arrangement.
Best wishes,
Thomas Charles Henderson
I put the note in an envelope and put the envelope in my backpack. Then I went into the living room. My mom was sitting on the couch, reading the Chi-Mos zine and looking up words in the American Heritage dictionary.
“Mom, was Dad really in the navy?” I asked.
“Yes, he was,” she replied absently. “For three years.”
And then, since I was on a roll, I dared to add, “and did he really commit suicide?”
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“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. I had a sort of feeling that she meant that as a “yes, but let’s say no more about it.”
But it could just as easily have meant “no” or “maybe,” or perhaps “decline to state.” I tried one more.
“Can I see the note?”
“No.”
Well, that answer seemed to imply that there had been a note, but I remained unsure. I was ready in case she started to flip out, but she didn’t. She looked pretty sad, though, and there may have been tears in her eyes; but there were almost always tears in her eyes. So I just went over and kissed her on the cheek.
I left the room in silence. I was going to leave it at that, but then something came over me, and I reversed course and went back in and approached the couch.
“Why can’t you be straight with anyone?” I said. “You tell everyone different things and you keep the truth to yourself.”
She looked up, surprised: it was a very uncharacteristic outburst from me. Then she said, quietly, “I’m sorry, baby.”
This time I knew what it meant. It meant she didn’t know why she couldn’t be straight with anyone. She touched my arm, and it was the most affectionate thing I’d had from her in a long, long time.
U NC LE TONY
On Monday morning, it was already clear that our performance at the Festival of Lights had had an impact on Hillmont High society. Sam Hellerman’s new version of the lyrics zine was quite popular. He was selling them for two dollars apiece, and he already had over a hundred dollars by the end of first 270
period. It was a good thing, too, because Todd Panchowski’s parents were reportedly planning to sue our parents’ asses over his wrecked drum set: we needed the money. At this rate—well, I couldn’t quite calculate how many we’d have to sell to cover a drum set and legal costs and still maybe have enough left over so that my share would be at least a hundred and fifty dollars so I could schedule my own appointment with Dr. Hexstrom. Because I really wanted to discuss Tit with her, after all that had happened.
Anyway, our band had sucked and had been hated by one and all, but the zine was a hit. A couple of kids in homeroom even asked me to autograph their copies. (I noticed, though, with a slightly guilty pang, that Kyrsten Blakeney was absent. Or I think that’s what that pang was.) It wasn’t like suddenly everyone wanted to be our friends or anything.
Well, Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s fake-hippie boyfriend, did seem to want to be friends. When I passed him in the hall he said, “Chi-Mo!” and put out his fist, which I dodged by force of habit. But he was only trying to do the hipster patty-cake secret-handshake thing, where you touch fists, then touch them again with one on top and then the other on top, and then snap your fingers and say “my brother” or something. I don’t really get how to do it, so I gave him the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign instead, which was just going to have to do.
Other than Shinefield, the general public still gave us a wide berth, and most of them probably wouldn’t have considered being seen doing the hipster handshake with either of us. But it was a bit like when I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs. Somehow we had inched up the scale. We had produced useful materials and provided a needed service.
Laughter at Mr. Teone’s expense was in the end more valuable to society than strict enforcement of the pecking order.
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Speaking of which, after homeroom that morning, Mr.
Teone once again accosted me in the boys’ bathroom. If I still harbored any hope that there was in the offing a Teone-related surprise party in my honor, it quickly sank, killing all on board. His transformation from pudgy, freakish, administrative buffoon to terrifying PE teacher–ogre had reached yet a further stage. I mean, his face was the color of sweet-and-sour sauce and a vein in his neck was throbbing to the beat of a dance track that it alone could hear. I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked like a less flat-chested Ms. Rimbaud.
“God damn it, Henderson!” he whisper-roared. “What in hell you think you’re trying to pull?”
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” I said deliberately, “but I believe my right to satirize you, as a public figure, is protected by the First Amendment.”
He ignored the legal argument. “What we need to establish,” he continued, his damp, vibrating, PE-teacher face a re-volting inch or so from mine, “is where you’re getting your information.”
I reached into my backpack, pulled out my Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, and looked at him meaningfully, sure he would recognize it. But I was wrong.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “A timeless classic. I used to carry one around with me when I was your age and it changed my life and society. Now cut the cute stuff—” I kid you not, he said “cut the cute stuff.” Despite the vibrant, Technicolor facial hue, this was pure black-and-white B-movie dialogue.
“Look,” I said, when it was clear that he hadn’t been able to come up with a way to end that sentence about the cute stuff. “Don’t you think you ought to be a little less unpleasant toward me, considering everything?” It seemed reasonable, given that we were two people separated by a common rela-272
tionship with Charles Evan Henderson’s copy of Catcher in the Rye, and I said it as politely as I could. He didn’t take it that way, though.
“If that’s supposed to be a threat, let me assure you: you are fucking with the wrong guy.”
A weird thing to say. From a deeply weird man.
He didn’t even wait for an interloper before he stormed out. “Keep your nose clean,” I called out helpfully, but I don’t know if he heard.
I walked past his office on my way to first period, then doubled back, took the note I had written on Saturday out of my backpack, and slid it under his door. Maybe he would be more reasonable when he’d had a chance to cool off. And maybe then we could have a more productive discussion, with our pants on, in neutral territory, say at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, rather than in the boys’ bathroom, though it would still be a weird scene. I’d even be willing to apologize for my rude lyrics, given the right conciliatory ges-ture. And he would tell me all about my dad and their carefree youth together, and the turmoil of the Turbulent Sixties, their hopes, their dreams of sailing away to sea to find the answers to their souls’ mysteries. Maybe he’d even reveal his softer, human side, and I’d realize that he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, just misunderstood. The wounds wouldn’t heal instantly. There would have to be time for reflection, for honest soul-searching, for letting go. But bit by bit, we’d learn to laugh again. “You know, you remind me a lot of your old man,” he’d say from time to time, with a twinkle in his eye.
I’d start referring to him as Uncle Tony. And then Mr. Teone would finally explain the whole story behind Timothy J.
Anderson, CEH, the dead bastard, John the Baptist, and The Catcher in the Rye. Not the most solid plan, perhaps, but it was worth a shot, and anyway, I couldn’t think of an alternative.
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N E R D B LO OD
I missed out on a lot of what happened next and had to have it explained to me later, for reasons that will become clear in a minute. I still have some numb spots on my head from the experience, though they tell me that some of the nerve tissue may well end up growing back over time. We’ll see.