ALWAYS TH E QU I ET ON E S
In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself.
Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know 302
anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more confused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.
But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is.
Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.
As I originally described the King Dork card game, a player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulat-ing cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.
I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:
If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls, even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around 303
saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.
I admit, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an actual Sex Alliance Against Society. Maybe a Sex Alliance Against Society is in the end too much to hope for for some of us. But even though there is a small part of me that reacts with fury and indignation over that fact, another part of me would argue that considering where I was at the beginning of the school year and throughout my entire life previous to it, the current lack of a Sex Alliance Against Society is quite an improvement over the previous lack of a S. A. A. S. This second small part understands where the first small part is coming from, but still, all things considered, it can’t really see the flaw in it. Of course, the huge, hunkin’ part that’s left over has no idea what to think and is still totally confused and melan-choly and bitter. So it’s not like we’re looking at a tremendous change here. My poor, adorable, flimsy character arc: you blink, you miss it, bless its little cotton socks.
Still. I’ve got two slightly less-than-imaginary secret quasi girlfriends whom I can call on Mondays and Thursdays, and on Wednesdays, respectively, when their official boyfriends are temporarily out of the picture because they’re on the late shift at the convenience store.
What you got?
304
epilogue
S H E R LO C K H E LLE R MAN
We were in my room at the beginning of Christmas vacation, listening to
“Once you realize that Timothy J. Anderson was a kid, or a teenager,” he said, tapping on the microfilm printout about the hanged student in the Most Precious Blood gym, “the whole thing starts to make a little more sense.”
He paused to headbang slightly, and to sing “the ace of spades” a couple times under his breath, but stopped when he saw me giving him a rather desperate “mercy, please, I beg of you” look.
“Okay,” he said, after taking a little sip of bourbon.
“Starting with that Bible quote you’re so hung up on. Why did the mountain monk have the same quotation in his book that Timothy J. Anderson had on his funeral card? You had 305
guessed that the connection might be that they were both monks or clergymen. But they had something else in common, too—they were kids. I mean the mountain story guy was writing about his childhood; Timothy J. Anderson died while still a kid. And that quotation really suits a kid’s funeral as much as an I-was-a-teenaged-monk book.”
Clearly, Sam Hellerman hadn’t actually read
The Catholic Church, he added, had had a pretty strict antisuicide policy, especially at that time. Adults who killed themselves weren’t allowed to have Catholic burials. Kids sometimes were, depending on their age, according to his research, though, of course, we didn’t know the hanged kid’s exact age.
“They were changing all the rules around at that time,” he said, pointing to the date, 1963, “including the rules about who got to have funerals and all that.” I hadn’t realized you had to earn the right to have a funeral by dying in the proper manner—it never ends, does it? But of course, a taboo like that doesn’t disappear just because they change the wording of something in Rome. Sam Hellerman thought that might be a reason why, even if there had been a funeral, as there appeared to have been, they might not have been eager to draw attention to it by publishing an obituary. “That’s assuming everyone believed it was a suicide, whether or not it really was.”
