I was bummed, but not terribly surprised, to see Mr.
Schtuppe writing The Catcher in the . . . on the board. There really is no other book they ever want you to read. I had my own copy. It’s standard school equipment.
Everyone is required to carry a copy at all times. Hall monitors stop you on your way to class and won’t let you pass unless you show them your valid Catcher in the Rye. The Salinger Boys kick your ass and you get expelled if you’re caught wandering in the halls without one. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
We don’t actually have hall monitors at our school. But otherwise, that’s pretty much mostly almost exactly how it is.
Anyway, I opened my backpack and pulled out my Catcher.
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Now, the AP English teachers would have smiled an
“aha, one of us” smile and said a silent prayer of thanks to the nonconformist gods. Or they might even have taken me aside to tell me the fond story of how they used to carry around a copy of that book with them everywhere when they were young and how it helped them through troubled times and how their door is always open if I ever need to talk.
But Mr. Schtuppe didn’t have that level of interest. He was waiting to die. Why should he care about instilling a sense of tame rebelliousness in the above-average students? I got two extra credit points for having my own book. But then I got three minus credit points for writing “Beat Noir-ay rules ok” on my desk.
Once again Mr. Schtuppe had his own approach to teaching the joys of literature. The first assignment was to copy out chapter one, highlight the words with three or more syllables, define them, and use them in sentences.
I just sat there staring at page one, wondering if it was even possible to mispronounce “autobiography.”
TH E S P ORTI NG LI F E
PE is probably the most unpleasant fifty minutes of a person’s day-to-day life at HHS. For one thing, they force you to wear this brutal outfit consisting of these gay little blue and white George Michael shorts and a reversible T-shirt that says
“Boogie Knights.” There are many danger zones, but two of the most dangerous are: at the beginning when you take off your street clothes to put on the gay little blue and white shorts and the reversible Boogie Knights T-shirt, and at the end when you take off the g. l. b. & w. shorts and the r. B. K. T. and attempt to put your regular clothes back on.
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There are a few seconds there when you are essentially naked, standing among a bunch of big, mean normal guys who hate you just for existing and who are constantly asking each other “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” (It’s a call-and-response game, the response being: “I ain’t no homo. Who you callin’ homo, faggot?” This is a self-sustaining loop that can literally go on for hours if uninterrupted.) As a rule, they are so absorbed in this game and assorted homoerotic horse-play amongst themselves that they barely notice you. But if your timing is such that you end up being naked at the same moment that they are partially or fully clothed, and one of them happens to notice you, you can be in big trouble. All the usual high school tortures can come into play here, but being naked while they are happening makes them all much worse. Plus there’s something about the PE situation that makes a certain type of socially well-situated psychopath unable to resist issuing threats about how his plans for beating you up include the ambition to stick various things up your butt. Which can be pretty disturbing. Yay, team. What a great bunch of guys.
It’s a little foretaste of our fine prison system, I suppose.
And it doesn’t take much. The lesson is clear: unless you happen to be one of those guys, and if you don’t particularly want to be beaten senseless and raped with a foreign object by one of them eventually, stay as far away from sports as you possibly can. I mean, prison.
So around midweek, the Plasma Nukes (that is, Sam Hellerman and I) were walking away from PE class, on our way to “Brunch,” which is what they call the seventeen-minute gap between second and third period. We were feeling pretty good about PE. I mean, we had timed everything well and hadn’t had any nasty run-ins with any normal psy-35
chopaths while we happened to be naked. You get one of those days every now and then. It’s like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a library book.
So great was the general feeling of relief that I hardly minded when Mr. Teone, waddling by on his way into Area C, yelled, “Henderson!” and saluted with what seemed like a determined attempt to set a new standard in the field of sarcastic greetings and with the air of a man who believed he was auditioning for Head Idiot and really had a shot at it this time. True, Sam Hellerman winced like he always does when Mr. Teone said “Miss Peggy!” But I could tell even Sam Hellerman was feeling relatively carefree as well. We had made it through PE. We were high on life.
But then something happened.
Sam Hellerman had this funny little hat he got at the St.
Vincent de Paul. No one else had a hat like that, which may have been why Sam Hellerman liked it so much. Maybe he liked to imagine people saying to themselves as he walked by,
“There goes that fellow with the unusual hat.” He loved the hat. He wore it all the time. But I knew that hat was trouble the minute I saw it.
And so it proved to be. We were walking past a group of jabbering half-human/half-beast student replicants when a smaller subgroup of what seemed like angry orangutan people broke away and started running toward us, shrieking in that way they have: “Oof, oof, oof !”
As they rushed by, one of them snatched Sam Hellerman’s hat and knocked him into the gravel walkway.
Holding the hat aloft, they disappeared into the nearest boys’
bathroom. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were planning to do with the hat in the boys’ bathroom. But Sam Hellerman had to check. After the orangutan people 36
had burst out and clambered off in search of other victims, he trudged into the bathroom. Then he trudged out again looking hopeless and miserable. The hat was beyond help. He just left it in there.
The look on Sam Hellerman’s face was enough to tell me that he was thinking of a Rolling Stones song, either
“Mother’s Little Helper” or “Sister Morphine.” He had already begun counting the minutes till school was out. As I think I’ve mentioned, Sam Hellerman knows where my mom keeps her Vicodin, which is one reason he always wants to come over my house. In fact, he doesn’t really do it all that often, but when he’s feeling especially depressed, or in the aftermath of a major tragedy like the unjust loss of a favorite hat, he’ll head straight to my mom’s night-table drawer and take some of the pills with a tall glass of bourbon that he swipes from her entertaining area. Then he’ll fall asleep and wake up after a while with a headache and maybe have to throw up. It can’t be too pleasant, but he keeps at it nonethe-less. I can relate to wanting to go away for a while, though that method is really not for me.
Sam Hellerman is as low as I am on the high school social totem pole, which is as low as you can get if you can go to the bathroom by yourself and don’t need machinery to get from one place to another. But it’s worse for him, in a way, because until high school he actually had a sort of social life.
I can merely fantasize about what I might be missing. He has experienced it firsthand.
What I mean is, he had quite a few friends in junior high, and he had enough status that he could theoretically walk into a room without everybody laughing or throwing things at him or threatening to kick his ass and so on. Theoretically.
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I mean, he could hang out with normal people and be reasonably certain that the whole thing wasn’t part of somebody’s master plan that would end up with the joke being on him.