King Dork

research at age ten, I’d had four whole 236

years of being disappointed by my fellow man and having this and that illusion shattered, which had resulted in a firmer, or at least less inaccurate, grasp of reality, presumably.

Maybe I’d read things differently now.

Of course, everything Dr. Hexstrom knew about me and my family history came from my mom and from me, filtered through her own (admittedly impressive) knowledge of the world and corrected by her equally impressive powers of de-duction. I had exaggerated and left out details and tried to make myself look better and/or worse than I actually was all over the place for various personal reasons. Her view of my world based on my account was wildly inaccurate, except in those areas where her own common sense corrected the picture. But she hadn’t gotten the suicide thing from me. So either my mom had lied to her deliberately for some unfath-omable reason, or my mom genuinely believed, rightly or wrongly, that the suicide story was true. Since it was the better explanation for her freak-out over the song, I had to conclude that the latter was the case. She liked to exaggerate and fabricate things for melodramatic purposes, but she wouldn’t do that to someone to whom she was paying a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to cure her son of individuality. Would she?

These thoughts took a lot less time to think than it just took to describe them. When I finally spoke, I was almost incoherent. The questions I was able to get out were, how did my mom know about this when everyone else seemed to think it had been a hit-and-run, and why had Dr. Hexstrom believed her, a known liar.

“She said he left a note,” said Dr. Hexstrom, but then seemed to think better of continuing. “I need to speak to your mother about this. And our time is up.”

She wouldn’t let me leave on my own, though. She in-237

sisted on calling Little Big Tom to pick me up. I spent the ride home in a daze, thinking about my dad’s alleged suicide note and how I’d have to do some Little Big Tom–style snooping to try to locate it amidst Carol’s stuff. If it really existed.

A B ETTE R C LAS S OF LI E

I was starting to wonder how anybody knows anything at all about anything. All sources are suspect.

Even if I were to find this supposed suicide note, chances were it would be inconclusive, too. “Dear Honey, I have decided to end it all,” it would say, and there would be no proof that he was talking about his life as opposed to eating red meat or subscribing to TV Guide. On the other hand, I suppose a wife would know. One thing I knew: asking her about it would serve no purpose. God help Dr. Hexstrom if she really planned to go through with trying to talk to her about it. I was sure the good doctor had encountered quite a few crazy people in her day, but my mom was in a category all her own.

I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they’re trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, in a way, the truth is really just a better class of lie.

And then there was Fiona. She was still at large, whoever she was. The Deanna Schumacher episode, pleasant and mind-blowing as it was, hadn’t changed that. Sam Hellerman had stated categorically that Fiona was Deanna Schumacher dressed up as a fake mod, which was plausible, but which 238

hadn’t been the case. He could have simply been mistaken, misled by his CHS friends. On the other hand, it was possible that he had known and had been lying, for obscure reasons of his own. Had he been trying to help me get over my Fiona-related pain and longing by providing me with a fake fake Fiona to focus on, feeling fairly certain I wouldn’t end up putting his story to the test by tracking her down and going over to her house for some illicit oral sex? (A safe assumption: I still couldn’t quite believe it myself.) Or maybe Sam “the Matchmaker” Hellerman had known all along that I would follow up on the Deanna Schumacher lead and had intended for us to get together? Maybe the Deanna Schumacher blow job had been a gift from Sam Hellerman unto me, in return for my years of faithful service to the Hermetic Order of the Alphabet. Maybe Deanna Schumacher had been in on the scheme, as well.

All I knew was that Sam Hellerman always had something up his sleeve. He had a plan for the band. He had a plan for me. He had a plan for everybody, and he would only let you in on what he felt you needed to know.

I suppressed the urge to point-blank him on it as I had done with Dr. Hexstrom. He would come up with an explanation that would be just as plausible as the others (in other words, just barely—but I would want to believe). Or he would refuse to say anything and subject me to the dread power of his overwhelming, wordless sarcasm. Fearing more Hellerman eye-ray treatment than I felt I could handle in my confused and enfeebled state, I decided to hold off on the point-blanking, at least till after the Festival of Lights. We still had a lot of work to do to get the band ready for the show, and, as I had learned the hard way when the whole Fiona business began, a disgruntled, sarcasm-soaked Hellerman is in many 239

ways worse than no Hellerman at all. I had to keep the band together at least till the show, which was only two weeks away. I was grateful to the school schedule for providing me with a reason to postpone my decisions for just a bit longer.

That’s all a man ever really wants, in any case.

240

December

TH E RODE NT ROLE

The first two weeks of December were a bit surreal and went by in a kind of blur. Mr. Schtuppe was trying to time Catcher in the Rye so that we finished the reading and brain-dead assignments on the last day before the Christmas break began on the twentieth. We were already almost to the end, so the reading had slowed to a crawl. I imagine we copied down and used in sentences and mispronounced practically every word in the book several times, including “the” and “and.” I spent a lot of time, in and out of class, engaged in an unspoken stream of questions that, if spoken aloud, would have been totally incomprehensible to anyone but me: “What’s the deal with Tit? Who was MT? Did Tit really ramone MT?

And what about the Dead Bastard?” On and on.

As for Deanna Schumacher, she and I were engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with me in the rodent role.