King Dork (32 page)

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 be-

lieved 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

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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 vipers. I mean, the field of rye.

Sound good? I’m sorry, but I’m rooting for the kids and

hoping they get out while they can. And as for you, Holden, old son: if you happen to meet my body coming through the

rye, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just stand aside and get out of my fucking way.

HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TRIED TO KILL ROCK

AND ROLL, AND HOW ROCK AND ROLL

CAME BACK TO BITE THEM ON THE ASS

When the day of the show arrived, I was pretty surprised at how many other rock bands there turned out to be at

Hillmont. We were on last out of four bands, according to the schedule. Everyone who was in the Festival of Lights was allowed to take third period off as well, to set up. So there we were in the auditorium standing around checking each other out while the three sullen drummers were off to the side,

grumbling and swearing under their breath about how no

one was helping them set up, and mumbling that they played percussion, not just drums. There were three rather than four disgruntled percussionists because Todd Panchowski was in

two of the bands, ours and Alter of Blood. Actually, to judge from the retarded flyers they had made, their official name appeared to be Alter of Blood (Formally Black Leviticus). I supposed they were Christian metal, though they could have been just plain old metal. Hard to tell sometimes.

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It was easy to tell, though, who was in either Alter of

Blood or Karmageddon, as they were the heavy-metal stoner

types. By process of elimination, I guessed that the remaining band, Radio Free Atlantis, had to be made up of one stoner drummer, two goths, and two normal people. Everyone had

better amps than us in terms of quality, but Sam Hellerman had them all beat in terms of coolness. He had purchased an old and extremely large nonfunctional Magnavox hi-fi stereo cabinet from the St. Vincent de Paul for twenty bucks and

had replaced the insides with the electronics and speakers from the Fender Bassman. Okay, so Sam Hellerman and I

were the only ones there who realized how cool it was.

We’re used to it. One day they’ll wake up and realize that we were right about everything all along. Now, though,

they were just standing there laughing at my guitar, which was, unbeknownst to them, by far the coolest and most valuable thing in the room. But I admit: it certainly didn’t have uber-super-mega-quadruple-distortion pickups like everybody else’s guitar.

The hippie-ish drama teacher (Mr. Malkoe, but he

wanted you to call him Chet) was in charge, because it was

“his” auditorium we would potentially be trashing. The third-period drama class, those who were still there, including

Celeste Fletcher, Syndie Duffy, and assorted boyfriends and minions, were all sitting in the back, laughing and “getting high,” I suppose. “Chet” had an easygoing manner on the

outside, but inside he was an auditorium Nazi. He immedi-

ately confiscated our Balls Deep banner, just as Amanda had predicted. I tried all the usual tricks (calling him “man,” saying I was glad he stopped the Vietnam War, flashing him the peace sign). But despite his obvious admiration for Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara shirt, he had pretty much seen it all and positively would not be sweet-talked out of his fascist freedom-248

of-expression-crushing banner ban. So the banner was his-

tory. He also forbade everyone from setting anything on fire.

I saw a little light grow and die in Sam Hellerman’s eyes: even if he hadn’t been intending to set anything on fire before, he certainly was indignant at the prohibition now. “What might have been,” his eyes seemed to say.

“Wait till the revolution comes,” he whispered. “Chet

Guevara will be the first against the wall.” And I could see his point, Matt Lynch notwithstanding.

Only Radio Free Atlantis, the first band, got to sound-

check, which they finished doing just as the small chunk of the Hillmont High School student body that hadn’t decided to skip the “festival” and take off began to filter in. I was impressed with how RFA sounded. And when I say impressed, I mean that in the sense of “extremely bummed

out.” How come we couldn’t sound like that? Maybe it was

all in the PA.

So they started playing for real, and as I said, sonically it was relatively awesome, much better than any sound we

were ever able to produce in my living room. The bass player (one of the goths) was even pretty good. They couldn’t play together very well, but it’s not like we could, either. I wasn’t sure what they were going for. At first I thought they were doing a kind of Cocksparrer/Sham 69 sort of football-chant punk rock. Then, to my even greater surprise, I figured out that they were going for a Smiths-y kind of thing. In fact, I soon realized that their whole set list was made up of punky Smiths and Cure and Joy Division covers, though many were

so ineptly executed that it was hard to tell without a great deal of structural analysis. I don’t know if the punkiness was intentional or not, which is a common enough situation.

Now, the irony was that the singer was Dennis Trela, who

was among the most sadistic alpha psychos the normal world 249

had to offer. In other words, he was a major player in the nation of perpetrators: he and his evil superbitch girlfriend had been responsible for half of the suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, and eating disorders in the greater Bay Area. It’s guys like Dennis Trela who made the Smiths and the Cure

and Joy Division necessary in the first place. I had thought normal people and that sort of music were mutually exclusive, but I guess I was wrong. It’s a funny world.

The nonband acts were scheduled to go on during the

setup times, so while Karmageddon were setting up, this guy named Ben was doing an extremely ill-advised tap-dancing

routine to “Singin’ in the Rain.” My guess is that he had lost a bet. But you just can’t tap-dance in front of an auditorium full of normal people and expect them not to take the bait. I heard this sound that was at once familiar and strange, the sound of around a hundred people pretending to cough and

saying the word “homo” at the same time. There was also

some loud fag-oriented heckling, chanting, and whatnot,

which the crowd continued for some time after Ben left the stage. Fortunately, when you have amps and so forth, you can drown out the heckling. That’s what I was counting on. But hell, Ben got more of a response than Radio Free Atlantis

had. You could look at it that way.

Both of the other bands were Black Sabbath–y, whether

they realized it or not. Alter of Blood did their Christian Black Sabbath songs at normal slow speed, while Karmageddon

sped their evil Black Sabbath songs up to a blur, so that they sounded like a malfunctioning piece of machinery. Both lead singers were trying as hard as they could to impersonate the Cookie Monster, and both guitarists played variations on

“Flight of the Bumblebee” during the entire set without stopping, even between “songs.” Fortunately for Alter of Blood, the guitar-o-technics drew attention away from the fact that 250

Todd Panchowski was finding counting to four a bit beyond

his grasp. I envied them for that, at least.

Sam Hellerman pointed to the Alter of Blood guitarist as he let loose volley after volley of hammered-on and pulled-off hemisemidemiquavers. “Go tell him he missed a note,” he whispered. I almost spit my Coke all over my Che Guevara shirt.

I must admit, as our turn approached, I was getting pretty nervous, especially when I noticed Deanna Schumacher,

along with around three or four other girls in IHA-SV uni-

forms, creeping into the auditorium through the side door. I tried to catch her eye and wave to her, but she pretended she didn’t notice. Oops, I realized. I was supposed to act like I didn’t know her, especially in front of her friends. I tried to wink, but I’m no good at winking, so I just mouthed “gotcha,”

but she pretended not to notice that either.

Of course, that “gotcha” was dubious in every sense.

The main reason I was so taken aback by the

Skoomacker factor was that I had recently broken down and

tried to call her on an unauthorized day. I suppose I had been hoping for a little “I’m so glad you called” action and for a feeling that I had more or less made it through the maze after all. As it turned out, though, here’s what happened:

She picked up the phone without screening and, when

she realized it was me, said, “My boyfriend’s here right now, and I’m sure he’s wondering who’s calling me at this hour.

You want to talk to him?” I quickly hung up and went searching for a place to hide till I was done hyperventilating. I guess the Monday/Thursday schedule was there for a reason. I had reached a dead end and was still in the pseudorelationship maze after all. Yet now here she was, cutting class at

Immaculate Heart Academy to see my band play. Or maybe

it was her lunch period and they had open campus.

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Now, if they ever make a TV movie called
The Chi-Mo

Story,
they’ll probably try to present our performance at the Festival of Lights as a grand triumph of the underdog, a tribute to the noble spirit of the alienated and abused. We

shamed and changed society. Because we three claimed our

freedom, all are free. Hooray for us. In fact, our set did have a pretty significant impact on Hillmont High School society, but it was mostly negative, and entirely by accident. And it wasn’t a triumph. In fact, it totally sucked.

The first thing that went wrong was that unlike in movies

and afterschool specials, where the sound would have been

done by sympathetic people from the Math Club or some-

thing, the people in charge of the PA were totally normal

guys, so they were psychotic and hate-filled and wanted us to die. And they wouldn’t let us use the PA. Or rather, they

wanted a hundred dollars for the PA and fifty for the lights.