“You should read the paper, if that’s what you think.”
“I do read the paper.”
“You read that fascist one.”
“It’s funny.”
“Laugh for me when they put you up against the wall.”
“They better give me a cigarette.”
“Thank you for keeping our rape room smoke-free. What are you doing tonight?”
“They’ve got some submarine movies on TV.”
“You still like those, huh?”
“They speak to me.”
“No, I get it,” said Gary. “But what about fighter planes? A jet pilot shot down in the jungle. His hard-ass mentor hops in to extract him. They’ve got to blast their way out.”
“Those are good,” I said. “But I’m talking subs. The panic. The water pressure. Tyranny in a tiny tube.”
“It’s all war,” said Gary. “It all works.”
GOOD PEOPLE, as I peruse this latest update, composed, as you can see, in the face of severe Fontanian repression, it occurs to me that I’ve taken the wrong tack. My aim continues to be an essay into the truth of my condition, and thus, the Catamount condition, but under the current
Notes
regime, which seems willing to support only cheery falsehoods from the Eastern Valley community, the high fives and pom-pom struts of communal denial, it appears I’ve failed to heed an important lesson. Gwendolyn’s foolish comments about symbolism aside, the sole weapon against censorship is guile.
How shameful it’s come to this. Fontana was not always so despotic. Some of him is made of charm. Even the charmless parts, I believe, were acquired in provinces of real human pain. I could tell you some stories, true Fontana arcana, about his master’s thesis on adolescence in postwar American literature, his brief national poker ranking, the handles of White Horse delivered weekly to his house by ex-Catamount sousaphonist and Pittman Liquors scion Randy Pittman. I could delve into the man’s divorce after the teen escort scandal, his estrangement from his prim progeny. A lead is even developing on where he buys those hideous lime green jeans he favors in the springtime.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always had deep affection for Fontana. Back when he roamed the hallways of Eastern Valley there was a sort of compassless majesty about the man you couldn’t help but admire. He’d maybe lit out from one of his busted selves years before, wandered
tundras of indecision, kept himself alive in bleak altitudes, battled the elements within and without, but never found that hidden pass to New Fontana.
I could tell you about the time he pulled me into his office for a private audience. It was late in my junior year. I’d been idling near the juice machine with Gary, watching him brandish his thumb nub to make a point. Gary had a lot of theories in those days. He was a fan of ancient astronauts, especially their work in the entertainment industry. Today’s lecture hinged on Thurman Munson, the great Yankee catcher of our youth. Munson, according to Guano, had not plunged to his death piloting a twin-engine airplane, but was living under an assumed identity, supervising a new secret baseball program in the Soviet Union.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “I sold his widow a spaghetti spoon for our Weebalo fund-raising drive six years ago.”
“Which proves what?”
“She was a widow, man. Munson was dead.”
“Or else he was in fucking Leningrad. Plus, there’s no such thing as a spaghetti spoon. It’s just the name they gave to some piece-of-junk ladle.”
Now Fontana glided by, his usual afternoon rounds. The corridors had a cool empty beauty he must have savored. His polo shirt was nearly the teal of the walls. A pair of golf cleats, slung from his neck, swayed by their laces.
“Boys,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Gary. “We’ll go to the library.”
“No,” said Fontana, “just listen to this.”
He read from a paperback wedged in his hand:
“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’”
Fontana snapped the book shut, stroked his cleats.
“Wallace Stevens. Not bad for an insurance executive.”
“My cousin has a blue guitar,” said Gary. “A Gibson Explorer.”
“Are things changed upon it?” said Fontana.
“Yeah, when he plays it through a Marshall stack.”
“Funny child,” said Fontana, spun himself on the tiles, a clumsy hoofer’s twirl. He was always at his weakest forcing whimsy.
“Miner,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Fontana.”
“Follow me.”
Fontana had a Velcro dartboard in his office, a wire basket full of golf balls. A framed postcard painting of an old-time gunslinger hung on the wall behind his desk. Fontana caught me studying the man, the nickel-plated pistols shoved in gabardine pants, the mournful whiskers.
“That’s Bat Masterson,” he said. “Lawman, quick-draw artist, killer. He was also, in later years, an accomplished sports journalist. Died typing.”
“Well-rounded,” I said.
“Bet your ass,” said Fontana. “Sorry. Language.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “You should hear my father.”
“Take a load off.”
Fontana slid down in his district Naugahyde. I took a swivel stool near the window. A sun-whitened book propped up the heavy sash:
What the Aztecs Knew.
“What did the Aztecs know?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Aztecs.”
“Oh. This old Canadian in Mexico gave me that book a long time ago. He said it would let light in. He wasn’t wrong. Look at that beautiful day.”
Out the window Chip Gallagher’s father Batch mowed the ball field, rode high on his machine, trailed oil smoke. His windbreaker snapped, fluttered, presumably in wind.
“Good old Batch,” said Fontana. “Know what he’s doing?”
“Mowing the ball field?”
“He’s making the smell of fresh-cut grass.”
“Oh.”
“We’ve never really conversed, have we?”
“You’ve told me to go back to class a few times.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay.”
“I should remember. That’s the thing. I want to be involved in your lives. Or I think I do. But then, really, when I look into my heart, I’d rather be on the driving range, or getting drunk, or my wick dipped. Is this shocking you?”
“Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”
“Right,” said Fontana. “I knew I could talk to you. I read your file. You’re one of those not uncommon cases. You don’t really fit into any category. You’re pretty bright, but no student. You hate jocks but you do appreciate a good sporting event. You deplore violence, except against the state. You can probably scrap okay, too. You’re sort of bitter, but beyond the more stupid varieties of rage. You think of pussy all the time. Not just pussy. Breasts. Butts. Even the occasional schlong. It’s all a flesh swarm in your mind. You think you’d like to be some kind of artist, but you have no idea what that means, and you’re afraid you’re too dumb, which could be true.”
“That’s in my file?”
“No, just scores and grades. Extracurriculars, tardies. The rest is extrapolation. Professional guesswork. How am I doing?”
“Perfect score. Were you like me in high school?”
“No, not at all. In fact, I think I’m more like you now.”
“That’s weird.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Our ages are not our ages, you know? Adolescence, post-adolescence, it’s not just a matter of body hair. They’re philosophical positions. I wrote a thesis about this once.
Sort of. Didn’t finish. Should have finished. Goddamnit, Miner, most of these kids at school here, I hate them. They’re all phonies. I want to rebel against them. They don’t understand me. How do I connect with them?”
“You can’t.”
“That’s what I thought. There’s no way, really. And really, it’s not my fucking job. My job is to make sure you go to class. That you don’t blow dope on school grounds. Speaking of which, I know about the maintenance shed. Stay the hell away from there.”
“Copy that.”
“What’s with the jargon? The argot? Are you crestfallen you don’t have a war? A police action? Something muddy and devastating? Some absurd carnage you can hang your disaffection on?”
“Affirmative.”
“Do you know how idiotic that is? How horrible napalm is? Or was? Or is?”
“Sir, I do, sir.”
“Your father, he owns that catering hall, the Moonbeam, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Nice place.”
“We’re proud of it.”
“Oh, are we? That’s good to hear. Now go to class.”
“I have a free.”
“I took you from your free? I’m sorry for that.”
“It’s okay.”
“You can tell people what we talked about. I don’t give a damn. I’d rather you didn’t, but it’s your call.”
“I think I’ll leave it here.”
“A wise and generous decision.”
Gary was still waiting by the juice machine.
“What happened?” he said.
“The maintenance shed is a no go.”
“Shit,” said Gary.
POINT BEING, Catamounts, I could write reams on my former confidant Fontana. But he’s a different man now. He’s not that tender teen trapped in a slack duffer’s body whose misery once spoke to us so. His stewardship of the
Notes
has warped him somehow, and now my updates will languish unread unless I can muster all the cunning muzzled voices require.
Allegory, parable, fable, these are the smuggle ships of freedom, the cigarette boats of daring ideas. I speak of tales too countless to enumerate, about yard dogs, for instance, or independently minded sandpipers, which may appear, at first glance, fanciful, if not a bit opaque, but which upon further reflection reveal themselves to be songs of fierce resistance, or blueprints for revolt.
This being the case, allow me to close my update with a little story. It means nothing, not a damn thing, wink, wink. Don’t read too much into it, Principal Fontana,
capice?
It’s just a simple tale, a mere folk legend, for the kids:
Once there was a little girl who owned a little mouse named Teabag. He lived in a large metal cage in her room. This little girl loved Teabag with all her heart, loved to stroke his tiny head with her finger as she fed him crumbs of Camembert cheese, which is pretty pricey, even in mouse portions, especially for a child on a fixed allowance of seventy-three cents a week.
Then one day the girl got cancer. Her father, a doctor, administered the chemo immediately, but it was too late. She died that day. There was so much to do between all his weeping and grieving, so many arrangements to make—flowers, a titanium casket, a suitable poem—it was a while before the father remembered Teabag at all. The poor mouse had been weeping, too, going hungry in his cage. The girl had left no instructions for his care.
Nothing for it now, the father thought. He was a busy man, this doctor, much in demand. Rich people depended on his barbiturate
prescriptions. He took Teabag’s cage to the sidewalk, raised the metal door.
“Good-bye, little fellow,” he said.
Teabag wandered the neighborhood. The bigness of things was ever so frightening, all those bicycle wheels and curb grates and trash pails, the awful percussion of shoes, those pounding wing tips, high-tops, boots, not to mention the singles bars and how do you talk to women, anyway?
Teabag found an upended paper cup near the minimart, scurried inside. There in the cool dark of the cup he squeaked out the name of the dead girl again and again, licked at flecks of coffee dried on the walls of his ready-made cave. The flecks made him nervous. He had a sad nervous hole in his heart. Now, suddenly, he felt himself being lifted upward. His paper shelter swiveled in midair. Teabag gazed into a pair of eyes the color of stale filberts, slivers of which the little girl had also fed him on occasion. The face around the eyes was bathed in blood.
“I’m Fontaine,” said the face through its viscous red web. “Why do you weep, little mouse?”
Teabag started to tell this creature Fontaine about the little girl, her father, the Camembert, the chemo.
“Stop!” said Fontaine. “I don’t want to hear it!”
“But it’s all true,” said Teabag. “It’s what happened to me.”
“That’s not the point,” said Fontaine. “It’s not celebratory, see? It’s too negative. It’s even kind of sick. Chemo? Camembert? It makes no sense!”
Whereupon Fontaine squeezed the paper cup. Mouse guts squirted to the pavement. Our poor hero was now but a smear of fur, even the grief pinched out of him.