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:
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.
37
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.
And he was just at the level where he could talk to a girl or even ask a girl to “go” with him and the very idea wouldn’t automatically have struck everyone as totally outrageous and hilarious.
In fact, he even had a sort of girlfriend for a brief time, Serenah Tillotsen. They used to smoke and make out behind the scout house sometimes, until she suddenly started dressing sexier and realized that dumping Sam Hellerman would be more of a move up in the world than not dumping Sam Hellerman. That sucked, but all in all he still had it pretty good.
In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else. The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.
In teen movies, there is often a guy like Sam Hellerman who is a minor but important member of the “in” group. A glasses-wearing cutup, kind of outrageous, whose sarcastic comments and goofy antics are accepted and appreciated by the others in the group, though they tend to receive his bits of dialogue with a degree of eye-rolling. Sure, he’s the second one to get his chest ripped open by the masked psycho with 38
the garden implement (right after the sluttiest girl in the group has her throat slit while starting to take her clothes off ). But he had his moment.
That’s how it was for Sam Hellerman. His moment was over.
So I met Sam Hellerman at the oak tree, and we walked to my house. He assembled his materials, consumed them, came into my room, and lay down on the floor. I let him slip into the void, and put on
