Anyway, looking back, I suppose it hadn’t been the smartest idea to end our set with “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up.” The Paul Krebs–Matt Lynch people had been looking for a discreet, plausibly deniable way to wreak vengeance on me ever since the Brighton Rock incident. What am I saying? They had been looking for d., p. d. ways to w. v. since they first became aware of my existence around the third grade. And finding them, too. But that song, not to mention its inclusion in a bestselling publication—by second period, Sam Hellerman had unloaded another forty copies—had invited immediate retaliation. Sam Hellerman thought the conspiracy went all the way to the top, at least up to Mr. Teone himself, who of course had his own reasons to wish me ill, despite my magnanimous decision to give him the tentative benefit of the barest doubt. I don’t know about that, but Mr.
Donnelly had certainly been in on it to some degree. If we could prove even that, Sam Hellerman promised, the lawsuit could bankrupt the school system, which was a nice thought.
But I doubted it could be proved. Their plan wasn’t particularly brilliant, but it was elaborate and involved several actors, all of whom were responsible only for their individual parts.
It did the job.
Sam Hellerman had just been sent to the nurse’s office, having once again used his magic bleeding nose to end a boxing match before it began. Mr. Donnelly had slated me to box Mark McAlistair next. Mark McAlistair was one of the lower 274
Matt Lynch minions, no more than a gopher, really, but he had clearly committed some transgression because he was the fall guy in the scheme. Soon after our match began and everyone had begun the usual chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,”
someone tripped me, and Mark McAlistair, as instructed, fell on top of me and pinned me down while a couple of accomplices in the “ring” stood on my wrists and knees. Then he removed his right glove and hit me on the back of the head with his ungloved fist repeatedly as hard and fast as he could.
That was really against the rules, but Mr. Donnelly pretended not to notice at first. Then, when I was already seeing stars and starting to fade, he yelled, “What the hell are you doing, McAlistair?” and pulled him off me. Then he sent Rich Zim, another Lynchie, to escort me to the nurse’s office. On our way there, while I was still more or less in a daze, Rich Zim led me past the band room where a person or persons un-known stepped out while we were passing the door and brained me on the back of the head with a brass instrument.
I lost consciousness completely at that point. I think they may have kicked me in the ribs a bit while I was out, judging from the feeling when I came to. At some point, though, Rich Zim and another guy carried me to the nurse’s office, bang-ing my head on lockers and posts and doors and dropping me on the ground all along the way. At least, it felt that way when I assessed the damages after the fact. They did just about everything except beat me with a bag of oranges. And maybe they did that, too, for all I know.
The whole thing could then be blamed on Mark McAlistair’s gloveless punches. That was the plan, anyway, as near as I could figure. At any rate, Mark McAlistair was toast, and was headed to some sort of facility for delinquents that would be even harder to take than Hillmont. I felt a little sorry for him, as he was only a pawn. But he should have 275
known better than to sign up with a pack of depraved normal people, who didn’t care whom they sold out as long as it meant a chance at a couple more drops of nerd blood.
Savages.
So I ended up with a concussion and some skull fractures, and I had to spend the next few days in a hospital so I wouldn’t fall asleep and die. I didn’t die and life went on, but for a while there I wasn’t around to observe much of it. It takes more than a blow from a brass instrument to kill King Dork, apparently. Who knew?
It turned out I needed surgery because of some nerve damage. I was told that the surgeon was very good, but that there was a possibility that I was going to have some permanent numb spots on my scalp. That didn’t seem so bad, though part of me wished there was some way that I could have some numb spots inside my head as well as outside.
They supplied that on a temporary basis, anyway, which was nice. For a while there, I had feared that Hillmont was going to end up with another helmet guy on its hands, but fortunately it wasn’t going to come to that.
I have no recollection of the operation. Afterward, they moved me to a recovery room on a different floor, which I shared with this guy named Mr. Aquino. We were separated by a curtain: my side was by the window, while he had the door side. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but whatever it was, it resulted in a steady stream of moaning from his side of the curtain. After I got used to it, I took it in stride and didn’t really notice it anymore. But when anyone approached the door, the volume would increase, and if someone actually entered our room, he would break into a kind of hysterical wheezing. It was like an alarm system. When Mr. Aquino
“went off,” I knew someone was about to enter, which was 276
useful. I always had a few seconds to compose myself before entertaining guests.
More people came through that door and over to my side than you might imagine. My recollection is fuzzy, partly because of deluxe pain medication that would have quite literally made Sam Hellerman drool and partly because the whole situation was so disorienting. I gradually learned what had happened at Hillmont High in the aftermath of the Festival of Lights by piecing together accounts from various sources. But now I can’t quite recall which parts were explained by visitors, which parts I read about in the paper or saw on TV, and which parts I figured out afterward by putting two and two together.
The school ended up banning the Chi-Mos zine, which only made it more sought after, of course: Sam Hellerman had added a sticker that said “Banned in Hillmont” and had been able to raise the price to three dollars. Some of the punky kids, Sam Hellerman said, had even started showing up to school with “Chi-Mos” written in Wite-Out on their jackets and bags. We were famous.
Mr. Teone had left for lunch on Monday and never came back. After he had been missing for two days, they entered his house to investigate and found—
Well, let me describe how I first heard about it, in a fuzzy hospital conversation with Sam Hellerman. He had just told me about the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Teone and about how the cops had searched his house. Then he fell silent, lost in thought.
“What’s on your mind, Hellerman?” I said, after a while.
“Oh. I was just thinking about whether Budgie really was a part of the new wave of British heavy metal.”
“Really?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Of course Budgie was a part of the new wave of British heavy 277
metal. The question was, what were we doing talking about who may or may not have been a part of the NWOBHM at a time like this? “Now, in the case of Ethel the Frog . . . ,” he began. He was just toying with me, though.
“I suppose you want to hear about Tit’s Satanic Empire?”
Which of course, as I immediately realized, was exactly what I wanted to hear about, though I hadn’t been able to find the words.
What the police had found at Mr. Teone’s house was evidence of this high school–oriented pornography operation.
Much of it had been removed or destroyed, but what was left supposedly included a large number of videos of Hillmont High School students from the past ten years, ramoning each other like crazy and doing God only knows what else.
As usual, Sam Hellerman seemed to know more about the situation, especially at that early stage, than the newspapers, the TV, or anyone else. But word got around pretty quickly, even though the details were murky. As always seems to happen whenever anything scandalous occurs in Hillmont, a group of parents and community leaders had decided that it all had to do with a powerful Satanic cult. Satanists, they believed, were turning Hillmont teens into mixed-up zombies and using them in their pornographic rituals. Parents were already taking their kids to be deprogrammed and hypnotized by therapists who specialized in recovering buried memories of Satanist porn-abuse. Mr. Teone had been smart to skip town; by the end of the week, there would be enough recovered-memory evidence to convict him several times over even without the videotapes. Now, I’d be the last person to deny a Teone-Satan resemblance, but that part of it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, a real Satanic conspiracy could probably have come up with someone better than Mr.