Henderson puts on the guest list every night?” “No one knows. But she never shows up.” “And Moe is alone and silent with his mysterious pain?” “Yeah, that’s right.”) Now, even I could see how pathetic that was. But it was also kind of random and off-the-wall. Sam Hellerman was starting to develop a nose for the Fiona-related, though, and he could sniff out the vaguest hints of it. And he sure didn’t like how things were smelling lately at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA.
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “The Fionas. You on guitar and Fiona-phone, plus Sammy ‘I Heart Fiona’ on bass and Fiona 90
Reconstruction Therapy, first album
Hmm, I thought . . . but I knew he wasn’t being serious.
He was kind of funny even when he was being a dick, though, I’ll say that for him. I’ll admit also that he may have had just a teensy-weensy point. But it still left something to be desired attitudinally from my point of view.
“The. Name. Is. Ray. Bradbury’s. Love-Camel,” he said firmly, before walking out and slamming the door.
Then he had to come back because he had forgotten to take his clarinet case with him.
He left again silently. But two seconds later he came back again, stuck his head through the door LBT style, and said very quickly: “Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel, you on guitar, Scammy Sammy on bass and calisthenics, first album
Which made me feel a bit better.
JAN E GALLAG H E R AN D AMAN DA
H E N DE RSON
Meanwhile, I still didn’t quite know what to make of the CEH library. I had all but given up trying to interpret the scribbles, the dates, the whole tits/back rubs/dry cleaning puzzle. There was a story there, presumably, or at least an explanation, but there just wasn’t enough information available to figure out what it was. It was lost in the past, for good, probably.
Still, I had developed this crazy idea that by reading the books my dad had read at my age, I could get to know him better retroactively. Maybe reading his books would provide some insight into his character, an indication of the kind of 91
person he had been and the sorts of things he had been interested in and had thought about. Now, in one way, this insight was something I desperately wanted. In another way, though, I wasn’t sure I wanted it badly enough to go through the ordeal of reading
On the other hand,
Of course, while I was reading
This turned out to be a pretty weird setup. Mr. Schtuppe would mispronounce something from
Particularly when the subject was sex, which turns up quite a lot in
Mr. Schtuppe’s tests were always true-false or multiple choice, except for the last question, which was an essay question. An essay question is a multiple-choice question with the multiple choices left off, and three wide- spaced lines where you’re supposed to write the answer.
On one of the tests, the essay question was “What was the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43?” By some entirely characteristic oversight, the identical question had also appeared above in the multiple-choice part of the same test. The answer to the m-c version was (b) Jane Gallagher. The answer Mr. Schtuppe was looking for in the 92
essay question version was Jane Gallagher without the (b), or possibly something like “the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43 was Jane Gallagher.”
The real answer is that Holden Caulfield had the hots for this girl, Jane Gallagher, though he was too scared to try anything. And he was worried that his roommate might have hooked up with her before he got the chance to. But in the quaint world of
Actually, it’s kind of cute.
Just to amuse myself, instead of writing “Jane Gallagher”
in the essay-question space like I was supposed to, I wrote: Jane Gallagher had wanted to know
what time it was, but for some reason
Holden Caulfield hadn’t wanted Stradlater to tell her. When Stradlater refused to
tell Holden Caulfield whether or not he
had told Jane Gallagher what time it
was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and attacked him in a fit of horological
