King Dork (23 page)

horror movies all night, and
Evil Dead II
had just started. I put on
Rattus Norvegicus,
turned the TV sound down, sat down on my bed, and tried to think of something to do.

I turned to the CEH books, which I had arranged on my

desk in a row against the wall, and thought about where to go next with the reading list. I had given it my best shot, but in the end I couldn’t make it through
The Journal of Albion
Moonlight.
I think the most likely explanation for its existence is that some typesetter wanted to demonstrate all the different typefaces and font sizes and layouts his fancy printing press could do. Back in the days before computers, it must have been pretty impressive. As a story, though, it was a

waste of three hundred and thirteen pages. And it told me

nothing about my dad. If he went around pretending he was

into it, I’d have to say he was one (devil-head) pretentious bastard of a kid. But maybe he tried to read it and didn’t get 171

it and gave up on it in frustration just like me. That’s how I’d prefer it to have been, but there was no way to know.

I had had an easier time with
Siddhartha,
CEH 1964. It’s about this freaky Buddha-wannabe kid, a sort of George

Harrison type who wanders the earth looking for enlighten-

ment or whatever. Everybody in the book is all impressed

with him, kind of like how the
Catcher
Cult people just love that Holden Caulfield to pieces. Personally, I couldn’t really see the attraction, but the book wasn’t bad. If
Catcher in the
Rye
were a kung fu movie, and HC went up to a mountain to learn some paradoxical truths and some martial arts techniques named after animals from an eccentric old monk, then you’d pretty much have
Siddhartha.
Except they leave out the part where he flies through the air beating up ninjas and finally kills the guy who murdered his family when he was a

little kid in the flashback at the beginning: maybe that’s in
Siddhartha II.
There were several passages that my dad had marked by drawing lines on the outer margin in pencil, sometimes with question marks and once with a kind of emphatic exclamation point. It made me think of my dad as an intense, yet deep and sensitive, guy.

One corner of a page of
Siddhartha,
CEH 1964, had been folded over to mark the place, which happened to be the best scene in the book, where this sexy girl named Kamala kisses the main guy to reward him for reciting a poem about how

hot she is. It reminded me of how Fiona-Deanna had made

out with me because she was impressed with my powerful

vocabulary, and somehow that felt encouraging. It gave me a feeling of everything coming together.

But there was also, at the top of one page, a spot where

the word “help” had been written heavily in pen over and

over, so that it had almost pierced through the paper and

etched the word into several pages below it. That seemed

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kind of desperate looking and sad, especially as it contrasted starkly with the serene tone of the book itself. In any other situation, this would have struck me as unremarkable. I’d

done the same sort of thing countless times in my notebooks.

But because it had been written by my dad, however long

ago, it was simply excruciating to look at. I would never

know what had caused him that kind of distress, though I

suppose he had found comfort in
Siddhartha,
which was yet another thing I probably would never quite understand all the way. I shook the thought out of my head.

Well, at least
Siddhartha
was short, which was the way to go when choosing books from the CEH library. I decided the next one would be
Slan,
CEH 1965, which was short as well.

Evil Dead II
had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes into
Blood on Satan’s Claw.
I let the last couple of songs on
Pink Flag
play out, and then put on
Black Rose.
I carefully replaced
Siddhartha
in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling

them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while.

Something was bugging me. Something about the books . . .

Many of the titles would make great band names. I had al-

ways thought that one of the best potential band names

among them was
La Peste,
CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system

must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’
Catcher
curriculum.

Now, if this were a murder mystery, and I were a weird

Belgian guy with a big mustache, this is the point where I 173

would suddenly stop dead, drop my tiny glass of chocolate

liqueur, and say something like “But no! But I have been an imbecile!
Imbécile!
” And then you’d have to wait another fifty pages or so to find out exactly what the hell I had been talking about. But I won’t do that to you.

The salutation of Tit’s note had been
mon cher monsieur,

“my dear sir” in French and kind of a standard French way to start a letter. I hadn’t thought too much about it before. But the thought that struck me while I was standing there in front of the books, looking at
La Peste
, CEH 1965, and listening to Thin Lizzy was: what if
mon cher monsieur
hadn’t been a real part of the note, but rather part of the key, like the scratched-out and corrected date?

Well, that was it. Tit had been very, very complicated

about it, though and even with the key from the
Catcher
I almost didn’t realize I had cracked the code. But after a lengthy scribbling session, I pretty much had it. The salutation was indeed an indication to the recipient that the coded message would be in French. Tit had left out the punctuation and

accents, regrouped the characters in strings of fourteen,
and
recopied the resulting coded message backward before

arranging the fourteen-character clumps underneath each

other—man, those boys must have had a lot of time on their hands.

It decoded to:

“J’ai vu MT hier soir et je l’ai ramonée sec. Détails à suivre.

Vas-tu aux funerailles? J’aimerais meiux être ligoté et fouetté.”

At first, though I recognized it as French, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where all the accents and spaces and punctuation went, though it helped that the capital letters had remained in the code-parallelogram. The word
mieux
had been misspelled. As I’ve said, despite three-plus years of study, French wasn’t my strongest suit. But I was highly motivated.

174

In the end I had to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally a few

discreet questions at school the next day, but eventually I was able to punctuate and translate it.

The first line threw me a bit because of the verb
ramoner,
which I’d never seen before but which grabbed my attention as it would any Ramones fan. According to the dictionary, it literally means “to scrub out or vigorously clean a chimney.”

Here, though, it was clearly being used as a sexual metaphor.

To ramone someone dry, as Tit’s sentence had it, is to, well, you know—do I have to draw a diagram, folks? It couldn’t

have had anything to do with the actual Ramones—unless

that’s where they got their name or something?

Anyway, the whole thing translates, roughly, as:

“I saw MT last night and I ramoned her dry. Details to

follow. Are you going to the funeral? I would rather be tied up and whipped.”

I learned more French translating those sentences with a

dictionary and a grammar and a weird conversation with

Madame Jimenez-Macanally than I had in three-plus years of Jean and Claude, I can tell you that.

175

November

TH E F E STIVAL OF LIG HTS

I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was to refrain from mentioning the
Catcher
code to Sam Hellerman on the way to school the next day.

He was in a buoyant mood when I met him at the usual

corner. He wanted to discuss his new theory:

“Just think what a better world we would have,” he said,

“if David Bowie had never met Brian Eno. That was the

worst tragedy of the twentieth century.”

“Really?” I said.

In fact, I disagreed rather strongly with this, but my mind was on other things, and, to be honest, Sam Hellerman was

getting on my nerves. Who wanted to think about Eno and

Bowie when there was a Deanna Schumacher and a
Catcher
code on the menu? I didn’t even bother trying to ask him

where he had been on Halloween night: I knew he’d only lie, which would demean us both. Plus, I still had some questions to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally about the French text before I could be totally sure what the message said, so I was preoccupied. I gave him the silent treatment for most of the way. But I doubt he noticed: it wasn’t too different from how things were when I was not giving him the silent treatment.

I found Madame Jimenez-Macanally in her classroom

during Brunch and asked her my questions about accents,

punctuation, funerals, ramoning, and being tied up and

whipped. She had more questions about my questions than I

thought necessary or polite, and she was giving me a peculiar look the whole time, but I ended up getting what I needed.

Then, when class started, I’d catch her staring at me from time to time with this mystified expression.

“Mack Anally has a crush on you,” said Yasmynne

Schmick, noticing.

179

That was kind of funny, but I had other concerns.

Because Madame J.-M. and I were basically in the same mys-

tified boat. The “solved” puzzle was still a puzzle. What the hell did it mean?

Now, the school calendar for November is dominated by

this thing called “Homecoming.” I’m not all that clear on it, but I know it involves a football game, a “Rally,” and a dance, plus a slew of other pointless and embarrassing activities intended to promote the whole thing. It’s nothing to do with me. They always decorate the Hillmont Knight with flowers

and blue and white ribbons. And this year, they had signs up everywhere trying to stoke excitement over Spirit Week:

“Come See the Spirit Towel!” Even if I knew what the hell the Spirit Towel was, I don’t think I’d tell you: I’m pretty sure we’re all better off not knowing.

I have my doubts as to whether even the full-on normal

people cared very much about Homecoming or Spirit Week,

to be honest. But definitely no one in my world (which I have to concede now included not only Sam Hellerman but

also, by extension, the drama hippies) had the slightest interest in any of this stuff, other than to mock it. Yasmynne

Schmick, who had by now become my regular Advanced

Conversation partner, had said: “I can’t help it, Moe—I’m obsessed with the Spirit Towel.” Which I thought was pretty

funny, actually.

But with the announcement of the Spirit Week activities

came some more interesting and surprising news. The

Hillmont powers that be, for reasons that remain unclear, had decided to hold a “Battle of the Bands” instead of a Pep Rally for December. Well, first they called it a Battle of the Bands, but someone objected to the word “Battle” as being too com-petitive. Which is hilarious, because “Battle” is far too gentle 180

a word to use to describe the game of survival of the most psychotic that is the soul and essence of Hillmont High

School and that would have made Charles Darwin himself

weep and wish he’d never invented a theory to elucidate it.

Some things are better left unelucidated, he would have said, and it would have been hard to disagree with him.

So anyway, they changed the name to “Convergence of

the Bands,” and then to “Convergence!” because they didn’t want to restrict it to bands. Then, and why I’ll never know, they changed the name to “Festival of Lights.” But essentially we were looking at your basic high school talent show. It was going to happen during fourth period–lunch–fifth period at the end of the second week of December, six weeks away.

“Green Sabbath should totally try to get on this,” said Sam Hellerman, during one of his increasingly rare appearances in my presence instead of in the shadow of the Hillmont Knight and Celeste Fletcher’s ass. He was talking about Green

Sabbath, of course, Monsignor Eco-druid on guitar, The Grim Recycler on bass and industrial sabotage, Todd “Percussion”