Frank Portman - King Dork

I put on The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and lay back on the bed, more or less alone with my thoughts, which under the circumstances didn’t have a lot to do with the English countryside of yesteryear.

DU NG EON S I N TH E AI R

Any way you sliced it, I was going to have a lot to think about over the Christmas break.

Despite Sam Hellerman’s confidence, I knew there were other ways to work it out. Presumably there is an actual story, one that really happened, behind the Tit-CEH-TJA nexus revealed by Tit’s note and Matthew 3:9–11, though I’d be willing to bet that if so, it would end up seeming to make even less sense. Life is stupid that way.

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It occurred to me that we had worked it out in much the same way we would have worked out the details of a particularly elaborate band. And the whole story, especially the complicated, multiply deceptive murder scheme, was Hellerman through and through. I mean, if Sam Hellerman were a loopy associate principal–pornographer who wanted to get rid of a cop he had known since childhood, that was exactly the sort of plan he would have come up with. That didn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Teone would have come up with the same plan.

Of course, if Mr. Teone really had murdered my dad, I wanted to know. But I was just starting to realize why I was so unsatisfied with Hellermanian theories on this matter: in the end, I didn’t want my relationship with my dad to be about Mr. Teone, or substitution ciphers, or broods of vipers, or pornography, or police corruption, or any of that stuff. And in reality, it wasn’t about any of those things, though it’s easy to forget that when you’re trying to solve codes and piece together an explanation out of scraps of paper and notes in the margins of books. I’m not a good detective, and I don’t even really want to be one. The only part of it that matters is that I miss my dad and wish he weren’t dead. And that I love making out with Celeste Fletcher and hope to be able to do it again one day. Family values and ramoning. That’s reality.

Now, Sam Hellerman had said I was “hung up on”

Matthew 3:9–11, and he wasn’t wrong, though it took a lot of thinking before I figured out why. It wasn’t only because the passage kind of creeped me out and kept popping up. And it wasn’t only because the brood of vipers kept reminding me of Rye Hell and the Catcher cult. I think it was also because it was something real, a piece of a book people had been reading for thousands of years, a part of the world that existed independ-318

ently from any of our conjectures. It was because my dad had probably read that quote, probably thought about it, probably wondered, as I had done, what it meant and how it applied to his life and the world. And he had read The Seven Storey Mountain and may have wondered why the SSM guy had chosen it for his epigraph. In a way, it put my dad in a picture made up of things that weren’t entirely imaginary or theoretical. It allowed me to imagine myself in his place in the past.

And those opportunities were pretty rare.

Even if every other element of Sam Hellerman’s theory turned out to be right, Timothy J. Anderson’s relationship to my dad and Tit and the Seven Storey Mountain guy could still have been random, unconnected to the rest of the story. And for some reason I found the randomness more satisfying. I imagined my dad, engrossed in The Seven Storey Mountain, perhaps attending church with his family. He notices the memorial card, if that’s what it was, for someone he has never heard of, on a table, in a pew, or in a missal or hymnal. He stops dead, struck by the coincidence that it uses the same quote as his book’s epigraph. He sits there thinking, “Wow, this is spooky and weird,” clips the quote off the rest of the card, and keeps it to use as a bookmark. Or he’s intrigued by it and starts his own little investigation into Timothy J. Anderson, trying to learn who he was and why his card and his book share the same quotation. That’s what I would have done. That’s what I had done. The thought came closer to bringing my dad “back to life” than anything else I had ever thought of.

And that road of reasoning leads to an entirely different way of looking at it, which is that all of these elements are random and not really connected to each other in any particular way, except to the degree that Sam Hellerman and I tried to make them make sense by coming up with a storyline to tie them together.

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Like this: there were two kids in the sixties who were into The Catcher in the Rye and who used to write notes to each other in code, often about weird or off-the-wall things, and boast about how they messed around with girls. And one of their classmates had hanged himself in the gymnasium. And one of them used to read a lot of books, and at some point acquired a memorial card, if that’s what it was, for a totally unrelated guy named Timothy J. Anderson and used it as a bookmark. And when they grew up, one of them became a cop, while the other became a loopy associate principal with a kind of perverted and illegal way of getting his jollies and earning extra cash on the side. These things happen.

Honestly, I can’t decide. One day I look at it one way, and the next I’ll think that’s nuts and start looking at it another way. Maybe I just haven’t hit on the right explanation yet. Or maybe there is no explanation. Around and around, it can drive a person crazy.

There certainly are a lot of avenues for further investigation. I should probably go through my mom’s stuff and try to find the supposed suicide note, despite Amanda’s plausible conclusion that it doesn’t actually exist. Learning a little more about my mom and her relationship with my dad would probably go a long way toward clearing up some of the confusion.

I’m not totally sold on that, however. My mom is sad, distant, goofy, mysterious, and beautiful, and part of me feels like I’d prefer to leave her that way. I’m pretty sure we will always fail to understand each other completely. And I know I wouldn’t like it if investigating her caused her to fade even more from view, which is what basically happened when I tried to investigate my dad. Anyway, you can’t spend all your time digging through other people’s stuff to try to shed light on your own concerns. Sometimes you just want to switch to obsessing about semihot girls and working on your band for a while.

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As I mentioned, Sam Hellerman had written “killed by Tit?” in the margin of the reverse-exposure printout about the hanged kid who may or may not have been Timothy J.

Anderson. Thinking it over, it occurred to me that if, decades from now, some kids were to discover this sheet of paper stuck in a book somewhere, it could lead to a whole new wheel-spinning investigation with God only knows how many twists and turns and coincidences and mistaken assumptions and imposed meanings and ingenious errors and peripheral connections to various episodes involving messing around with a variety of hot and semihot girls. Randomly generated dungeons in the air, passed from generation to generation. In the spirit of continuing this grand tradition, I located Little Big Tom’s most retarded-looking counterculture book, Revolution for the Hell of It (by Free—that’s supposed to be the guy’s name, I kid you not. Jacket photo by Richard Avedon).

Supposedly the author of this book got five years in prison for writing it. Which seems a bit lenient if you ask me. The guy who wrote The Doors of Perception got off way easier, though, especially since the worst band in the history of the world, the Doors, named themselves after it. He has a lot to answer for.