BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
So Mr. Teone was Tit. A middle-aged Tit, rather, just as my dad would have been a middle-aged CEH had he lived. It was really hard to imagine that in 1960 my dad’s best friend had been a twelve-year-old version of Mr. Teone. On the other hand, how did I know what was hard or easy to imagine? I hadn’t known my dad then, and, as was constantly being brought home to me, I hadn’t known him very well even when the two of us had happened to be alive at the same time. Maybe he and Tit were two peas in a pod, just as evil as each other. Or maybe Mr. Teone had once been sweet and delightful, an all-around great guy and a joy to be around as a child, only turning evil later on. But no, Tit was evil by at least 1963. The coded note proved that. I loved my dad and trusted that he hadn’t been evil but had merely associated with at least one guy who happened to be evil, which wasn’t quite so bad. Because you have to believe in something. Don’t you?
I was also having some trouble squaring the clever young Tit, who could write codes in backward French and manipulate biblical quotations to his own nefarious ends, with the fat, dumb galunk he had apparently become. But people degenerate as they get older, and anyway, it was possible that Mr. Teone wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked. He knew Latin, after all, though that could simply reflect the fact that he had gone to school back when they still taught you things other than how to make great collages. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, really. Evil was the common thread here. And maybe the obesity, too. Poor, dear little MT, I thought. Something told me we weren’t talking about top-quality ramoning here.
A thought struck: what if Mr. Teone wasn’t evil after all? What if he turned out to be a Disney-ish figure, unjustly maligned at the beginning, who would eventually be revealed as a kindly soul with an important message to impart? “Son, your old man wanted you to have this,” he’d say, waving some object or other, a sword or a curious gold coin. “But I had to wait till I knew you were old enough to understand. Fortunately, you passed the test. Oh, you didn’t realize you are descended from kings? Well, you are, and it’s time to claim your rightful place.” Descended from kings? Oh my God, it all fits. “I’m terribly sorry,” he’d continue, “about the hazing, the mockery, the torture, the permanent psychological and emotional scars. We had to do that so you wouldn’t suspect the big surprise party we’ve been planning for you.”
Somehow, I couldn’t see it. I had to stand by my instinct that Mr. Teone was a bad guy, the apex of a pyramid of despicable, sadistic normal psychos who wanted me and Sam Hellerman dead. I never really doubted it. The fact that he had known my dad just made his evil a bit more complicated, that’s all.
That said, I realized that Mr. Teone would have answers to many of my questions, if only I could figure out a way to ask them. I was still sitting in the kitchen, thinking things over. My mom got up and I could hear her footsteps as she walked over to the living room. Then I heard some shuffling, followed by another little burst of giggling: and I knew she had just looked up “callipygian” in the dictionary.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote another note:
Dear Mr. Teone,
In light of recent events, I feel there are important matters we need to discuss. These concern materials among my deceased father’s effects which you may be in a position to elucidate. Please contact me at your earliest convenience to arrange a meeting so that we can discuss these issues and, I hope, come to a satisfactory arrangement.
Best wishes,
Thomas Charles Henderson
I put the note in an envelope and put the envelope in my backpack. Then I went into the living room. My mom was sitting on the couch, reading the Chi-Mos zine and looking up words in the American Heritage dictionary.
“Mom, was Dad really in the navy?” I asked.
“Yes, he was,” she replied absently. “For three years.”
And then, since I was on a roll, I dared to add, “and did he really commit suicide?”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. I had a sort of feeling that she meant that as a “yes, but let’s say no more about it.” But it could just as easily have meant “no” or “maybe,” or perhaps “decline to state.” I tried one more.
“Can I see the note?”
“No.”
Well, that answer seemed to imply that there had been a note, but I remained unsure. I was ready in case she started to flip out, but she didn’t. She looked pretty sad, though, and there may have been tears in her eyes; but there were almost always tears in her eyes. So I just went over and kissed her on the cheek.
I left the room in silence. I was going to leave it at that, but then something came over me, and I reversed course and went back in and approached the couch.
“Why can’t you be straight with anyone?” I said. “You tell everyone different things and you keep the truth to yourself.”
She looked up, surprised: it was a very uncharacteristic outburst from me. Then she said, quietly, “I’m sorry, baby.” This time I knew what it meant. It meant she didn’t know why she couldn’t be straight with anyone. She touched my arm, and it was the most affectionate thing I’d had from her in a long, long time.
UNCLE TONY
On Monday morning, it was already clear that our performance at the Festival of Lights had had an impact on Hillmont High society. Sam Hellerman’s new version of the lyrics zine was quite popular. He was selling them for two dollars apiece, and he already had over a hundred dollars by the end of first period. It was a good thing, too, because Todd Panchowski’s parents were reportedly planning to sue our parents’ asses over his wrecked drum set: we needed the money. At this rate—well, I couldn’t quite calculate how many we’d have to sell to cover a drum set and legal costs and still maybe have enough left over so that my share would be at least a hundred and fifty dollars so I could schedule my own appointment with Dr. Hexstrom. Because I really wanted to discuss Tit with her, after all that had happened.
Anyway, our band had sucked and had been hated by one and all, but the zine was a hit. A couple of kids in homeroom even asked me to autograph their copies. (I noticed, though, with a slightly guilty pang, that Kyrsten Blakeney was absent. Or I think that’s what that pang was.) It wasn’t like suddenly everyone wanted to be our friends or anything. Well, Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s fake-hippie boyfriend, did seem to want to be friends. When I passed him in the hall he said, “Chi-Mo!” and put out his fist, which I dodged by force of habit. But he was only trying to do the hipster patty-cake secret-handshake thing, where you touch fists, then touch them again with one on top and then the other on top, and then snap your fingers and say “my brother” or something. I don’t really get how to do it, so I gave him the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign instead, which was just going to have to do.
Other than Shinefield, the general public still gave us a wide berth, and most of them probably wouldn’t have considered being seen doing the hipster handshake with either of us. But it was a bit like when I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs. Somehow we had inched up the scale. We had produced useful materials and provided a needed service. Laughter at Mr. Teone’s expense was in the end more valuable to society than strict enforcement of the pecking order.
Speaking of which, after homeroom that morning, Mr. Teone once again accosted me in the boys’ bathroom. If I still harbored any hope that there was in the offing a Teone-related surprise party in my honor, it quickly sank, killing all on board. His transformation from pudgy, freakish, administrative buffoon to terrifying PE teacher–ogre had reached yet a further stage. I mean, his face was the color of sweet-and-sour sauce and a vein in his neck was throbbing to the beat of a dance track that it alone could hear. I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked like a less flat-chested Ms. Rimbaud.
“God damn it, Henderson!” he whisper-roared. “What in hell you think you’re trying to pull?”
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” I said deliberately, “but I believe my right to satirize you, as a public figure, is protected by the First Amendment.”
He ignored the legal argument. “What we need to establish,” he continued, his damp, vibrating, PE-teacher face a revolting inch or so from mine, “is where you’re getting your information.”
I reached into my backpack, pulled out my Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, and looked at him meaningfully, sure he would recognize it. But I was wrong.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “A timeless classic. I used to carry one around with me when I was your age and it changed my life and society. Now cut the cute stuff—” I kid you not, he said “cut the cute stuff.” Despite the vibrant, Technicolor facial hue, this was pure black-and-white B-movie dialogue.
“Look,” I said, when it was clear that he hadn’t been able to come up with a way to end that sentence about the cute stuff. “Don’t you think you ought to be a little less unpleasant toward me, considering everything?” It seemed reasonable, given that we were two people separated by a common relationship with Charles Evan Henderson’s copy of Catcher in the Rye, and I said it as politely as I could. He didn’t take it that way, though.
“If that’s supposed to be a threat, let me assure you: you are fucking with the wrong guy.”
A weird thing to say. From a deeply weird man.
He didn’t even wait for an interloper before he stormed out. “Keep your nose clean,” I called out helpfully, but I don’t know if he heard.
I walked past his office on my way to first period, then doubled back, took the note I had written on Saturday out of my backpack, and slid it under his door. Maybe he would be more reasonable when he’d had a chance to cool off. And maybe then we could have a more productive discussion, with our pants on, in neutral territory, say at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, rather than in the boys’ bathroom, though it would still be a weird scene. I’d even be willing to apologize for my rude lyrics, given the right conciliatory gesture. And he would tell me all about my dad and their carefree youth together, and the turmoil of the Turbulent Sixties, their hopes, their dreams of sailing away to sea to find the answers to their souls’ mysteries. Maybe he’d even reveal his softer, human side, and I’d realize that he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, just misunderstood. The wounds wouldn’t heal instantly. There would have to be time for reflection, for honest soul-searching, for letting go. But bit by bit, we’d learn to laugh again. “You know, you remind me a lot of your old man,” he’d say from time to time, with a twinkle in his eye. I’d start referring to him as Uncle Tony. And then Mr. Teone would finally explain the whole story behind Timothy J. Anderson, CEH, the dead bastard, John the Baptist, and The Catcher in the Rye. Not the most solid plan, perhaps, but it was worth a shot, and anyway, I couldn’t think of an alternative.
NERD BLOOD
I missed out on a lot of what happened next and had to have it explained to me later, for reasons that will become clear in a minute. I still have some numb spots on my head from the experience, though they tell me that some of the nerve tissue may well end up growing back over time. We’ll see.
Anyway, looking back, I suppose it hadn’t been the smartest idea to end our set with “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up.” The Paul Krebs–Matt Lynch people had been looking for a discreet, plausibly deniable way to wreak vengeance on me ever since the Brighton Rock incident. What am I saying? They had been looking for d., p. d. ways to w. v. since they first became aware of my existence around the third grade. And finding them, too. But that song, not to mention its inclusion in a bestselling publication—by second period, Sam Hellerman had unloaded another forty copies—had invited immediate retaliation. Sam Hellerman thought the conspiracy went all the way to the top, at least up to Mr. Teone himself, who of course had his own reasons to wish me ill, despite my magnanimous decision to give him the tentative benefit of the barest doubt. I don’t know about that, but Mr. Donnelly had certainly been in on it to some degree. If we could prove even that, Sam Hellerman promised, the lawsuit could bankrupt the school system, which was a nice thought. But I doubted it could be proved. Their plan wasn’t particularly brilliant, but it was elaborate and involved several actors, all of whom were responsible only for their individual parts. It did the job.
Sam Hellerman had just been sent to the nurse’s office, having once again used his magic bleeding nose to end a boxing match before it began. Mr. Donnelly had slated me to box Mark McAlistair next. Mark McAlistair was one of the lower Matt Lynch minions, no more than a gopher, really, but he had clearly committed some transgression because he was the fall guy in the scheme. Soon after our match began and everyone had begun the usual chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,” someone tripped me, and Mark McAlistair, as instructed, fell on top of me and pinned me down while a couple of accomplices in the “ring” stood on my wrists and knees. Then he removed his right glove and hit me on the back of the head with his ungloved fist repeatedly as hard and fast as he could. That was really against the rules, but Mr. Donnelly pretended not to notice at first. Then, when I was already seeing stars and starting to fade, he yelled, “What the hell are you doing, McAlistair?” and pulled him off me. Then he sent Rich Zim, another Lynchie, to escort me to the nurse’s office. On our way there, while I was still more or less in a daze, Rich Zim led me past the band room where a person or persons unknown stepped out while we were passing the door and brained me on the back of the head with a brass instrument. I lost consciousness completely at that point. I think they may have kicked me in the ribs a bit while I was out, judging from the feeling when I came to. At some point, though, Rich Zim and another guy carried me to the nurse’s office, banging my head on lockers and posts and doors and dropping me on the ground all along the way. At least, it felt that way when I assessed the damages after the fact. They did just about everything except beat me with a bag of oranges. And maybe they did that, too, for all I know.
The whole thing could then be blamed on Mark McAlistair’s gloveless punches. That was the plan, anyway, as near as I could figure. At any rate, Mark McAlistair was toast, and was headed to some sort of facility for delinquents that would be even harder to take than Hillmont. I felt a little sorry for him, as he was only a pawn. But he should have known better than to sign up with a pack of depraved normal people, who didn’t care whom they sold out as long as it meant a chance at a couple more drops of nerd blood. Savages.
So I ended up with a concussion and some skull fractures, and I had to spend the next few days in a hospital so I wouldn’t fall asleep and die. I didn’t die and life went on, but for a while there I wasn’t around to observe much of it. It takes more than a blow from a brass instrument to kill King Dork, apparently. Who knew?
It turned out I needed surgery because of some nerve damage. I was told that the surgeon was very good, but that there was a possibility that I was going to have some permanent numb spots on my scalp. That didn’t seem so bad, though part of me wished there was some way that I could have some numb spots inside my head as well as outside. They supplied that on a temporary basis, anyway, which was nice. For a while there, I had feared that Hillmont was going to end up with another helmet guy on its hands, but fortunately it wasn’t going to come to that.
I have no recollection of the operation. Afterward, they moved me to a recovery room on a different floor, which I shared with this guy named Mr. Aquino. We were separated by a curtain: my side was by the window, while he had the door side. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but whatever it was, it resulted in a steady stream of moaning from his side of the curtain. After I got used to it, I took it in stride and didn’t really notice it anymore. But when anyone approached the door, the volume would increase, and if someone actually entered our room, he would break into a kind of hysterical wheezing. It was like an alarm system. When Mr. Aquino “went off,” I knew someone was about to enter, which was useful. I always had a few seconds to compose myself before entertaining guests.
More people came through that door and over to my side than you might imagine. My recollection is fuzzy, partly because of deluxe pain medication that would have quite literally made Sam Hellerman drool and partly because the whole situation was so disorienting. I gradually learned what had happened at Hillmont High in the aftermath of the Festival of Lights by piecing together accounts from various sources. But now I can’t quite recall which parts were explained by visitors, which parts I read about in the paper or saw on TV, and which parts I figured out afterward by putting two and two together.
The school ended up banning the Chi-Mos zine, which only made it more sought after, of course: Sam Hellerman had added a sticker that said “Banned in Hillmont” and had been able to raise the price to three dollars. Some of the punky kids, Sam Hellerman said, had even started showing up to school with “Chi-Mos” written in Wite-Out on their jackets and bags. We were famous.
Mr. Teone had left for lunch on Monday and never came back. After he had been missing for two days, they entered his house to investigate and found—
Well, let me describe how I first heard about it, in a fuzzy hospital conversation with Sam Hellerman. He had just told me about the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Teone and about how the cops had searched his house. Then he fell silent, lost in thought.
“What’s on your mind, Hellerman?” I said, after a while.
“Oh. I was just thinking about whether Budgie really was a part of the new wave of British heavy metal.”
“Really?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Of course Budgie was a part of the new wave of British heavy metal. The question was, what were we doing talking about who may or may not have been a part of the NWOBHM at a time like this? “Now, in the case of Ethel the Frog…,” he began. He was just toying with me, though.
“I suppose you want to hear about Tit’s Satanic Empire?”
Which of course, as I immediately realized, was exactly what I wanted to hear about, though I hadn’t been able to find the words.
What the police had found at Mr. Teone’s house was evidence of this high school–oriented pornography operation. Much of it had been removed or destroyed, but what was left supposedly included a large number of videos of Hillmont High School students from the past ten years, ramoning each other like crazy and doing God only knows what else.
As usual, Sam Hellerman seemed to know more about the situation, especially at that early stage, than the newspapers, the TV, or anyone else. But word got around pretty quickly, even though the details were murky. As always seems to happen whenever anything scandalous occurs in Hillmont, a group of parents and community leaders had decided that it all had to do with a powerful Satanic cult. Satanists, they believed, were turning Hillmont teens into mixed-up zombies and using them in their pornographic rituals. Parents were already taking their kids to be deprogrammed and hypnotized by therapists who specialized in recovering buried memories of Satanist porn-abuse. Mr. Teone had been smart to skip town; by the end of the week, there would be enough recovered-memory evidence to convict him several times over even without the videotapes. Now, I’d be the last person to deny a Teone-Satan resemblance, but that part of it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, a real Satanic conspiracy could probably have come up with someone better than Mr. Teone to handle the teen porn angle.
Anyway, Mr. Teone had been selling and trading the pictures and videos to similar operations overseas, which made it a very serious offense. His method appeared to be to recruit accomplices from within the student body, who would help to sign up friends and younger siblings to act in the videos; then, when the accomplices had graduated, the younger kids would “move up” and become the recruiters. He managed to keep everybody on board through a combination of rewards, punishments, perks, and intimidation; supposedly he even had a profit-sharing scheme for the “senior” student associates. They had really been raking it in, too, by all accounts. I thought of Mr. Teone’s afterschool programs—it sure gave a new meaning to the word “gifted,” not to mention “talented.” Once again, I found myself wondering whether Sam Hellerman knew even more than he was telling about the whole situation. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.
The subject of who had been involved was of course a big topic of conversation at school. The Hillmont student body was now divided into two groups: those who desperately wanted to see those tapes and those who claimed they wanted to see the tapes but were secretly hoping the tapes would never leak out because they were in some of them. I also had an inkling of which of the two groups Kyrsten Blakeney probably belonged to, and I felt a bit sad for her. And also just a bit interested, though I know this doesn’t reflect particularly well on me, in viewing her tapes, just for my own personal information.
I glanced up at Sam Hellerman, and I knew that if anyone could manage to get hold of them, he could, and I was pretty sure he was thinking something similar. If he didn’t already have a complete set, numbered and cross-referenced and neatly displayed in a little cabinet over at Hellerman Manor. You never knew with that guy.
I suddenly had a weird thought. What if Mr. Teone and company had wanted to make a “Hot Girls Do Geeks” video series for the specialized European fetish market? It wouldn’t have been hard to do with the cooperation of certain key people and some hidden cameras and so forth.
So I asked: “Was Dud Chart part of Tit’s Satanic Empire, too?”
Sam Hellerman looked startled and kind of peeved, as he usually did when the subject of Dud Chart came up.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No—they had nothing to do with each other.”
I wasn’t totally sure I believed him, though. I never am.
According to Sam Hellerman, one of Mr. Teone’s most trusted minions had been Matt Lynch, who had started at the bottom, recruited by his older brother, and had gradually moved up in the organization. I hated to admit it, but Matt Lynch’s promotion to Hillmont High Satanic Pornography Monitor (after his brother had graduated) had occurred around the time I had adopted my gun-freak strategy of Matt Lynch deterrence. Maybe he hadn’t been fazed by the gun stuff after all, as I had thought, but had just had other things on his mind by that point. All I knew was, if I had endured Little Big Tom’s devil-head sanctimony and worn that blessed army coat through the whole hot spring and summer of ninth grade for nothing, I was pissed.
It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened in the aftermath of the Chi-Mos performance. Mr. Teone had jumped to the conclusion that the name “Chi-Mo” was a reference to him and his questionable activities. The content of some of the songs seemed to confirm his suspicions. If he had just ignored it, the matter would certainly have gone away and no one would ever have known. But he had read the band’s performance and the zine as a threat to him. In those circumstances, my note about “materials among my deceased father’s effects” must have seemed a bit like a blackmail message, implying, perhaps, that my dad had had some information on him that I had had access to. I never did figure out what my dad had been working on when he had been killed, but it was just conceivable that it might have had something to do with his old friend Tit. Even if it didn’t, though, Mr. Teone’s association with my dad went back quite a long way, and it was likely that CEH had known some potentially damaging information that I theoretically could have uncovered.
Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bathroom a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.
At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from kings after all. Rats.
It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs available in stores, we would sell our story and make a million dollars.
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