King Dork

We were okay when we weren’t talking, but practically every conversation was more or less a train wreck. The hardest part for me was her cold-and-distant routine, which she could turn on and off at will. It drove me crazy not to know what she was thinking about me, and there was never any point in asking—that would only spark a contemptuous kind of laughter. I knew the proper strategy was to act just as indifferent as she did, to try to keep her guessing, as well. But it was beyond my capabilities. I always broke down and revealed my anxiety in the end. Then she would pounce.

My third visit to her house, on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, had gone pretty much like the previous episodes. She telephoned shortly after I got home, and I was all excited because that was the first time that had happened, until I heard what she said.

“You know, this really isn’t working out for me. So, be 243

seeing you in all those old familiar places.” And she hung up.

I tried to call back, but her phone was off the hook. Anyway, she would have been with her boyfriend by that time anyway. The bastard.

I spent the rest of the night in a kind of agony, saying to myself over and over, “Don’t call, don’t call, don’t call. . . .”

Then when I would finally break down and call, it was busy anyway. Johnny Thunders was singing “You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory” on the stereo, or rather, I guess I should call it a mono, since it still had one blown channel: for the first time, I really felt I understood what he was getting at.

The next day I was a zombie. I felt the estrangement physically, as though sharp objects were embedded in my chest, slicing me up, and, not coincidentally, making me feel like a total idiot as well. Then when I got home from school, there was a note from Amanda on my door: “phone call, some chick, said don’t worry and everything will be OK.”

I was suddenly ecstatic, till I realized that “everything will be OK” could be read in different ways. And I wasn’t sure I would be all that pleased if things were Deanna Schumacher’s version of okay.

Of course, I had other things to obsess over besides Deanna Schumacher and Timothy J. Anderson. There were just too many explanations for my dad’s death floating around. It couldn’t possibly have been murder and an accident and suicide. Any scenario I could come up with to explain why people seemed to think it could was preposterous.

I didn’t have much to go on, but if the deeply engraved “help”

in Siddhartha, CEH 1964, was any indication, my dad had had something of a history of feeling overwhelmed and desperate. Most kids do. But I guess it can continue when they grow up. The Crying of Lot 49 also had the word “help” written on it. I had thought it referred to the Beatles song, but if 244

it was the same kind of help as the Siddhartha one, maybe there was a pattern there. It didn’t square with my memory of him, but if he had been a habitually depressed person, my mom would have known. Perhaps this knowledge and an ambiguously phrased note had convinced my mom that it had been suicide despite the evidence to the contrary. It certainly wouldn’t have been the only time my mom had believed something illogical or unsupported by the facts. On the other hand, she could just have been lying. I really couldn’t say.

We had been working pretty hard to get the band ready for the Festival of Lights. We weren’t sounding too bad. It was still pretty rough, but in our better moments, we sounded kind of like Buddy Holly meets Thin Lizzy with a punk rock sensibility and a slight psychedelic edge, like UFO playing Velvet Underground songs or something. Or so I told myself.

When I said as much to Sam Hellerman, he sniffed and told me I was “trippin’.” Well, at least we were getting better at playing at the same time as each other for most of the song, which was a big improvement.

RYE H E LL

The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caulfield elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field.

A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really.

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To use HC’s own terminology, it has always seemed pretty goddam phony and all to me. Fantasies about Jane Gallagher’s preppie ass? Check—even I have those. Fantasies about twisting yourself into a tortured symbol of the precious authenticity of youth? I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing you’d make up to impress an AP teacher. And the AP teachers are duly impressed with it, of course. Suckers.

The brilliance of it, though, is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They’re the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they’re also the troubled misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids’ innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they’re also the grown-up moralistic busybody with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don’t realize you can’t root for them all.

Say you’re a kid in this field of rye. You try to find a quiet place where you can be by yourself, to invent a code based on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or to design the first four album covers of your next band, or to write a song about a sad girl, or to read a book once owned by your deceased father.

Or just to stare off into space and be alone with your thoughts. But pretty soon someone comes along and starts throwing gum in your hair, and gluing gay porn to your helmet, and urinating on your funny little hat from the St.

Vincent de Paul, and hiring a psychiatrist to squeeze the individuality out of you, and making you box till first blood, and pouring Coke on your book, and beating you senseless in the boys’ bathroom, and ridiculing your balls, and holding you upside down till you fall out of your pants, and publicly charting your sexual unattractiveness, and confiscating your Stratego, and forcing you to read and copy out pages from 246

the same three books over and over and over. So you think, who needs it? You get up and start walking. And just when you think you’ve found the edge of the field and are about to emerge from Rye Hell, this AP teacher or baby-boomer parent dressed as a beloved literary character scoops you up and throws you back into the pit of