Teone to handle the teen porn angle.
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Anyway, Mr. Teone had been selling and trading the pictures and videos to similar operations overseas, which made it a very serious offense. His method appeared to be to recruit accomplices from within the student body, who would help to sign up friends and younger siblings to act in the videos; then, when the accomplices had graduated, the younger kids would “move up” and become the recruiters. He managed to keep everybody on board through a combination of rewards, punishments, perks, and intimidation; supposedly he even had a profit-sharing scheme for the “senior” student associates. They had really been raking it in, too, by all accounts. I thought of Mr. Teone’s afterschool programs—it sure gave a new meaning to the word “gifted,” not to mention “talented.”
Once again, I found myself wondering whether Sam Hellerman knew even more than he was telling about the whole situation. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.
The subject of who had been involved was of course a big topic of conversation at school. The Hillmont student body was now divided into two groups: those who desperately wanted to see those tapes and those who claimed they wanted to see the tapes but were secretly hoping the tapes would never leak out because they were in some of them. I also had an inkling of which of the two groups Kyrsten Blakeney probably belonged to, and I felt a bit sad for her.
And also just a bit interested, though I know this doesn’t reflect particularly well on me, in viewing her tapes, just for my own personal information.
I glanced up at Sam Hellerman, and I knew that if anyone could manage to get hold of them, he could, and I was pretty sure he was thinking something similar. If he didn’t already have a complete set, numbered and cross-referenced and neatly displayed in a little cabinet over at Hellerman Manor. You never knew with that guy.
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I suddenly had a weird thought. What if Mr. Teone and company had wanted to make a “Hot Girls Do Geeks” video series for the specialized European fetish market? It wouldn’t have been hard to do with the cooperation of certain key people and some hidden cameras and so forth.
So I asked: “Was Dud Chart part of Tit’s Satanic Empire, too?”
Sam Hellerman looked startled and kind of peeved, as he usually did when the subject of Dud Chart came up.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No—they had nothing to do with each other.”
I wasn’t totally sure I believed him, though. I never am.
According to Sam Hellerman, one of Mr. Teone’s most trusted minions had been Matt Lynch, who had started at the bottom, recruited by his older brother, and had gradually moved up in the organization. I hated to admit it, but Matt Lynch’s promotion to Hillmont High Satanic Pornography Monitor (after his brother had graduated) had occurred around the time I had adopted my gun-freak strategy of Matt Lynch deterrence. Maybe he hadn’t been fazed by the gun stuff after all, as I had thought, but had just had other things on his mind by that point. All I knew was, if I had endured Little Big Tom’s devil-head sanctimony and worn that blessed army coat through the whole hot spring and summer of ninth grade for nothing, I was pissed.
It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened in the aftermath of the Chi-Mos performance. Mr. Teone had jumped to the conclusion that the name “Chi-Mo” was a reference to him and his questionable activities. The content of some of the songs seemed to confirm his suspicions. If he had just ignored it, the matter would certainly have gone away and no one would ever have known. But he had read the 280
band’s performance and the zine as a threat to him. In those circumstances, my note about “materials among my deceased father’s effects” must have seemed a bit like a blackmail message, implying, perhaps, that my dad had had some information on him that I had had access to. I never did figure out what my dad had been working on when he had been killed, but it was just conceivable that it might have had something to do with his old friend Tit. Even if it didn’t, though, Mr.
Teone’s association with my dad went back quite a long way, and it was likely that CEH had known some potentially damaging information that I theoretically could have uncovered.
Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bathroom a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.
At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from kings after all. Rats.
It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs 281
available in stores, we would sell our story and make a million dollars.
C H I-MOS AR E R EAL RO C K AN D ROLL
My mom had come to visit at the hospital briefly during one of my most out-of-it phases. I hardly remember it, but I know I asked her to bring me the CEH library. She had passed the task along to Little Big Tom.
So Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then—well, in a way this was one of the bigger surprises of the whole affair. Little Big Tom and Amanda walked in together, and they seemed to be getting along pretty well. It’s not like they came in holding hands and skipping or anything. But Amanda was acting civil toward him, almost friendly, which was quite something. I mean, her eyes were rolling less than usual, and you’d be surprised at what a difference a small thing like that can make. She even pretended to laugh, just a little, when he said “Calling Dr. Howard!” Now, I have no idea why that was supposed to be funny, but you could tell by the look on his face that it was supposed to be a riot. I had never seen Amanda humor LBT like that. As for him, he was clearly in fake-dad heaven. Say what you will about Little Big Tom: it doesn’t take much. And a hospital visit can really help pull a fake family together.
One thing about being in the hospitaclass="underline" people always feel they should bring you something when they visit. Amanda brought in this impressive series of drawings illustrating the Chi-Mos story, kind of like the Bayeux Tapestry, except instead of William the Conqueror and the Pope and so forth, the main characters were me, Sam Hellerman, and Mr.