ently from any of our conjectures. It was because my dad had probably read that quote, probably thought about it, probably wondered, as I had done, what it meant and how it applied to his life and the world. And he had read The Seven Storey Mountain and may have wondered why the SSM guy had chosen it for his epigraph. In a way, it put my dad in a picture made up of things that weren’t entirely imaginary or theoretical. It allowed me to imagine myself in his place in the past.
And those opportunities were pretty rare.
Even if every other element of Sam Hellerman’s theory turned out to be right, Timothy J. Anderson’s relationship to my dad and Tit and the Seven Storey Mountain guy could still have been random, unconnected to the rest of the story. And for some reason I found the randomness more satisfying. I imagined my dad, engrossed in The Seven Storey Mountain, perhaps attending church with his family. He notices the memorial card, if that’s what it was, for someone he has never heard of, on a table, in a pew, or in a missal or hymnal. He stops dead, struck by the coincidence that it uses the same quote as his book’s epigraph. He sits there thinking, “Wow, this is spooky and weird,” clips the quote off the rest of the card, and keeps it to use as a bookmark. Or he’s intrigued by it and starts his own little investigation into Timothy J. Anderson, trying to learn who he was and why his card and his book share the same quotation. That’s what I would have done. That’s what I had done. The thought came closer to bringing my dad “back to life” than anything else I had ever thought of.
And that road of reasoning leads to an entirely different way of looking at it, which is that all of these elements are random and not really connected to each other in any particular way, except to the degree that Sam Hellerman and I tried to make them make sense by coming up with a storyline to tie them together.
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Like this: there were two kids in the sixties who were into The Catcher in the Rye and who used to write notes to each other in code, often about weird or off-the-wall things, and boast about how they messed around with girls. And one of their classmates had hanged himself in the gymnasium. And one of them used to read a lot of books, and at some point acquired a memorial card, if that’s what it was, for a totally unrelated guy named Timothy J. Anderson and used it as a bookmark. And when they grew up, one of them became a cop, while the other became a loopy associate principal with a kind of perverted and illegal way of getting his jollies and earning extra cash on the side. These things happen.
Honestly, I can’t decide. One day I look at it one way, and the next I’ll think that’s nuts and start looking at it another way. Maybe I just haven’t hit on the right explanation yet. Or maybe there is no explanation. Around and around, it can drive a person crazy.
There certainly are a lot of avenues for further investigation. I should probably go through my mom’s stuff and try to find the supposed suicide note, despite Amanda’s plausible conclusion that it doesn’t actually exist. Learning a little more about my mom and her relationship with my dad would probably go a long way toward clearing up some of the confusion.
I’m not totally sold on that, however. My mom is sad, distant, goofy, mysterious, and beautiful, and part of me feels like I’d prefer to leave her that way. I’m pretty sure we will always fail to understand each other completely. And I know I wouldn’t like it if investigating her caused her to fade even more from view, which is what basically happened when I tried to investigate my dad. Anyway, you can’t spend all your time digging through other people’s stuff to try to shed light on your own concerns. Sometimes you just want to switch to obsessing about semihot girls and working on your band for a while.
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As I mentioned, Sam Hellerman had written “killed by Tit?” in the margin of the reverse-exposure printout about the hanged kid who may or may not have been Timothy J.
Anderson. Thinking it over, it occurred to me that if, decades from now, some kids were to discover this sheet of paper stuck in a book somewhere, it could lead to a whole new wheel-spinning investigation with God only knows how many twists and turns and coincidences and mistaken assumptions and imposed meanings and ingenious errors and peripheral connections to various episodes involving messing around with a variety of hot and semihot girls. Randomly generated dungeons in the air, passed from generation to generation. In the spirit of continuing this grand tradition, I located Little Big Tom’s most retarded-looking counterculture book, Revolution for the Hell of It (by Free—that’s supposed to be the guy’s name, I kid you not. Jacket photo by Richard Avedon).
Supposedly the author of this book got five years in prison for writing it. Which seems a bit lenient if you ask me. The guy who wrote The Doors of Perception got off way easier, though, especially since the worst band in the history of the world, the Doors, named themselves after it. He has a lot to answer for.
I picked up a pen, intending to underline a suitably bizarre section, and maybe compose an off-the-wall message in code based upon it. I found, however, that the book was all marked up already. There was one underlined passage, near the beginning, that said that five-sided objects were evil and proposed measuring the Pentagon to figure out how many hippies it would take to make it less evil by forming a big, smelly circle around it. And in the margin someone, presumably a young, idealistic, right-on Little Big Tom, had pa-thetically written “Yes!” I kid you not. Well, there was nothing I could add—you can’t improve on perfection. I put my pen down, folded up the “killed by Tit?” printout, and placed it in 321
the book between the pages containing this Deep Thought.
That oughta confuse the hell out of them, I thought with in-calculable satisfaction. All we had to do now was wait.
I glanced over at Sam Hellerman, sleeping peacefully in the corner. Then I got up and went down to the basement and put the book near the bottom of one of the book boxes, feeling as though I were burying the sixties. Even though I guess I really wasn’t.
G R EAT B O OK, C HANG E D MY LI F E, YOU
KNOW
It’s rather ironic, wouldn’t you say, that things ended up arranging themselves so that I spent a considerable chunk of my sophomore year carrying around a copy of The Catcher in the Rye everywhere I went? In a sense, I suppose you could even say that The Catcher in the Rye changed my life, though I’m not about to commemorate that fact by joining a cult or anything.
It set in motion a process by which I learned so much about some stuff that I ended up not knowing anything at all about it. And it indirectly influenced the fact that my rock band accidentally brought down a perverted high school sexploita-tion empire and freed the little children from the devil-head predations of an evil associate principal. And it happened to coincide with my clumsy venture from pure fantasy to impure reality in the girl arena. Not bad for a sucky book you read only to suck up to teachers holding a gun to your head.
Look, it’s not even that bad of a book. I admit it. I can feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Holden Caulfield. I can. And I can see why the powers that be have decided to adopt it as their semiofficial alterna-bible. Things were really, really bad in the sixties. You were always getting kicked out 322
of your prep school, or getting into fights at your prep school, or getting marooned on deserted islands on the way to your fancy English boarding school. And when you finally got off the island, your “old man” was always on your “case,” and Vietnam just drove you crazy, plus you were constantly high on drugs and out of touch with reality and it was sometimes a little more difficult than it should have been to get everyone to admit how much better you were than everybody else.