Adam Selzer
Authors: How to Get Suspended,Influence People
Tags: #General, #Motion Pictures, #Special Education, #Humorous Stories, #Middle Schools, #Special Needs, #Humorous, #Juvenile Fiction, #Gifted, #Performing Arts, #Motion Pictures - Production and Direction, #Education, #Social Issues, #Gifted Children, #Schools, #Production and Direction, #Fiction, #School & Education, #Film
To my fellow veterans of Urbandale Middle School.
I came, I sat, I departed.
Acknowledgments
First of all, thanks to my family, who never even suggested that I go to accounting school. Also thanks to Nadia, my fantastic agent. Finally, thanks to Sean, Merideth, Cindy, Abbie, David, Seth, Tanner, Brian, Mike, et al., from my middle school years. I never would have survived without you guys.
It’s a good thing my father is an accountant, because he really sucks at being an inventor. It’s not that he hasn’t given 110 percent or any of that crap; it’s just that he never quite got the fundamentals right. For one thing, inventions are supposed to work. Furthermore, they’re supposed to be things that don’t already exist. He really can’t get his mind around that.
“Do you know what the world needs?” he asked one night. “A machine that will automatically pour water into a cat’s dish.”
I tried to explain that such a machine already existed, but he didn’t listen. Even when I showed him the various models that were available at our local pet store, he said that to simply buy something you could invent yourself, using good old American ingenuity, is practically unpatriotic. I tried to explain that buying products is what capitalism is all about, and that it’s therefore perfectly patriotic, which anyone who ever took a sixth-grade civics class should have known to begin with, but he didn’t listen to that, either. Instead, he worked for three months, and flooded the basement twice, building a machine that I suppose might have worked but that might also have been a dud. There was no way to tell. The cat wouldn’t go near the thing.
Dad’s inventions aren’t the only dangerous things I have to put up with; the meals at my house are just as deadly, and often frankly embarrassing. It isn’t that my mother’s a bad cook or anything; hell, as far as I know, she could be the best cook in town. But she and my dad are what they call “food disaster hobbyists.” It’s like being the sort of person who watches bad movies on purpose just to make fun of them, only with food.
My parents’ idea of a good time is going down to the thrift store and buying old cookbooks from the fifties and sixties, ones with titles like
The Wonders of Lard
and
You and Your Artichokes.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those, but some of the pictures and recipes in them look absolutely wretched. Every few weekends, my parents buy up a stack of them and spend hours laughing at some of the worst recipes, and then, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, once or twice a week they cook them and serve them for dinner. It’s one of their many poor, misguided attempts at “quality family time.” Dad’s inventions can get a bit embarrassing or dangerous, but cooking terrible recipes on purpose and expecting your kid to eat them simply isn’t very nice. Mom and Dad insist that the recipes aren’t really bad, just different, and even point out that now and then one turns out to be pretty good, but the odds on that are really pretty dismal. Even orphans in the old days got to eat good old reliable gruel. Nobody tried to make the gruel into an even nastier casserole.
On the night after my first day of eighth grade, I really didn’t want to go through with the usual family dinner, since I knew that they’d just bought up another batch of cookbooks they probably couldn’t wait to try.
“So, Leon,” said my father as we sat down, “how was the first day of school?”
“Fine,” I mumbled as my mother heaped a much larger pile of some mysterious form of casserole than I would have liked onto my plate. The casserole clashed badly with the dinnerware, which was from what I guess you’d call the 1950s Vomitesque school of household design, like the ugly, paste-colored trays with swirling designs that we used to have at the cafeteria in elementary school. Even the harvest gold and avocado green of the 1970s haven’t been out of style long enough for my mother to get on the bandwagon.
“That’s it?” my father asked. “Just fine?”
“He’s not telling us something,” said my mother, as if I wasn’t present. “What aren’t you telling us, Leon?”
I shoveled a large spoonful of the casserole into my mouth and chewed it long and hard. This was not a particularly pleasant thing to do, but it was worth it to stall having to talk.
“Well,” I finally said, “when we were all introducing ourselves in math class, they made us all say our middle names.” This, of course, is a classic first-day-of-school time waster for teachers who aren’t very creative.
“What’s wrong with that?” my father asked.
“I told them my middle name was Harold,” I said.
They put down their silverware and stared at me for a second, as though they wanted an explanation. “Well?” I asked. “What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t very well tell them that my middle name is Noside! That could wreck my reputation clear into high school!”
Keeping people from finding out what my middle name is has been a battle as long as I’ve been in school. When I die, I’m going to come back as a ghost to make sure it isn’t on my tombstone.
“That name,” said my father angrily as he slammed down his glass of water, causing a few drops to splash onto the table, “is more than just a name, it’s a responsibility.”
In case I haven’t properly established this fact, my father is crazy. I’m convinced that no sane person would name his child Leon in this day and age, and I’m further convinced that anyone who would give his child the middle name Noside is probably a danger to himself and others. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he didn’t name me Eureka, which my uncle once told me Dad had wanted to do. I’d never get through middle school alive with a name that sounds like “you reek-a.”
I scooped up more of the casserole and popped it into my mouth to keep myself from groaning. I do a lot of groaning around the house, and I knew that my father was about to start in on the lecture I always get when I bring up the middle name. This particular lecture had been the cause of countless groans over the years.
“Noside,” he began solemnly, “is Edison spelled backwards. You were given that name as an insult to the late Thomas Edison, who was a jerk who took credit for other people’s work. Your middle name carries on our responsibility as decent people to expose him as a fraud.”
My father is practically obsessed with hating Thomas Edison. Personally, I’m convinced that my father’s real problem with Thomas Edison is that he’s jealous that Edison invented a lot of good stuff before he had the chance. And I’m further convinced that Thomas Edison himself doesn’t feel the least bit insulted by my middle name, what with being dead and all.
But the lecture made perfect sense to both of my parents, who stared up at the ceiling for the next few minutes, as though they were looking toward God, or, more likely, the spirit of Thomas Edison, to ask what was wrong with me.
Why oh why,
they were probably thinking,
hasn’t our only begotten son grown into an Edison-hating inventor who makes intentionally bad meals? He’s in eighth grade now, and he’ll be in high school next year—can we possibly turn him into a complete loser in time for him to get into accounting school?
They stared at the ceiling like this a lot; I was in second grade before I found out that Thomas Edison was just a regular guy. Before then, I’d thought he was some sort of deity or something and worried that if anyone found out that my dad hated him, we’d get kicked out of church.
When Mom and Dad finally started speaking, they changed the topic altogether to the quality of the dinner, which, from what I could tell, involved raisins, mayonnaise, and something that might have been tuna but somehow tasted like ketchup.
“This is absolutely bizarre,” said my father, grinning from ear to ear. “The flavors just…clash!”
“Can you believe they actually published this recipe, Leon?” asked my mother, who was clearly delighted that they had. I resisted her sly trick to get me into the spirit of the whole meal. I had my pride.
“I can just imagine the guy writing it,” said my dad. He began to speak in a bad French accent. “Aha! What zis mayonnaise needs is…more raisins!”
“How shockingly bold!” said my mother, in her own bad French accent.
This is pretty much the way every food disaster dinner plays out. I’m expected to participate, because if I don’t, it’s not “quality family time,” but I rarely say a word, and they aren’t very good at coming up with funny things to say about the food themselves. It seems to me that if you’re going to make your kid watch you make a complete dork of yourself, you could at least have the courtesy to come up with better jokes.
Despite the rough start, I was glad to be back in school, if only to see my friends again. I’d finally been allowed to take my bike across Venture Street over the summer, which was like busting out of jail, and which meant that I had been able to see more of my friends than I had the last several summers. But we hadn’t all been together in a while.
Of course, the first week of school wasn’t that exciting; they never really have you doing much in class those first few days, and there wasn’t much in the way of hijinks. We didn’t even start our normal schedules until the second week, and in the classes we did have, all was quiet. Everyone was actually well behaved. It seemed like the year before, when things had gotten out of control in class just about every day, had never even happened. But I knew things would pick up soon. My faith in my fellow students was strong.
On Saturday morning, my father asked if I’d like to go to the flea market with him, and, having forgotten all about our latest fight about my middle name, I said I’d love to. I’d found out some time before that you could buy old stereo speakers, often very large ones, for a couple of bucks at a lot of flea markets, and had figured that if I got enough of them, and enough connectors and splitters to hook them all up to my stereo, I could cover a whole wall of my bedroom with speakers. My very own wall of sound! As of that Saturday, I had covered about half the wall but hadn’t had the nerve to try them out yet.
As we drove along in the van, my father started to talk about his latest invention.
“I’m going to the flea market for parts,” he said, as if I couldn’t have guessed. “I’ve decided to invent a single switch that will turn off all the electricity in the house at once.”
“They have those,” I told him. “They’re called circuit boxes. We keep ours in the garage.”
“Bah,” he said, waving a hand that he should probably have kept on the steering wheel. “That’s a whole bunch of complicated switches. The other day I was trying to shut off the power so I could install a new light in the living room without getting an electric shock, and I said to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’ That’s where I come in!”
I would have said that I’d need to be careful to save my work on the computer regularly because the power would probably be shutting off randomly while he was doing tests, but I was convinced that even if he blew up the entire house in the process of building this invention, the electricity would still be running in the rubble. Of course, if I told him that, he would just take it as a vote of confidence that he could make something capable of blowing up the house. It was a strict rule of mine never to do or say anything that could be construed as encouragement for my dad’s inventions. I figured that the more I encouraged him, the sooner he’d set the garage on fire. He’d come pretty close on several occasions.
When we got to the flea market, we went off in separate directions. Before hitting the speakers, I flipped through the boxes of tapes for a bit and found a couple of old Black Sabbath albums. Liking heavy metal had saved me on several occasions; middle schoolers on the whole did not look kindly on kids who, like me, didn’t bother with sports, but since I liked heavy metal, I was sort of given a pass. It made me just cool enough to avoid getting beaten up.
After an hour or so, I met up with Dad at the door, with two Black Sabbath tapes, two very large speakers, and a bunch of speaker wire in hand. He was carrying a bunch of cables, some switches, a handful of gears that looked broken, and a test tube. I didn’t ask what he was planning to do with the test tube. Frankly, I didn’t want to know.
“Leon,” he said as we pulled out of the parking lot, “would you like to help me on this project?”
“No thanks,” I said as politely as I could. “I like keeping the electricity in the house
on.
”
“But you’d be aiding in the creating of an invention that will benefit mankind, possibly for centuries to come!” he said in his best patriotic inventor voice. “Won’t that look great on a college application?”
“Dad,” I said, “if you ever want the electricity turned off, just tell me, and I’ll happily do it for you. I have other things to do today.”
“Leon,” he said, sounding annoyed, “I just want to expand your horizons. Obviously you’re interested in electronics. You’re always buying gear to hook up those speakers.”
I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t actually hooked them up yet.
“And more to the point,” he said, “we need to spend more quality time together.”
“Dad,” I said, “I won’t be a party to helping you spend hours tinkering around building something that already exists and is rarely of any use. It’s not as though you’ll ever get it to work right.”
I regretted saying that immediately. For one thing, it wasn’t very nice. Furthermore, I was under strict orders from my mother never to point out my dad’s inability to invent things that worked.
Dad didn’t respond for a long time. But as we were getting close to home, he said, “Leon, I know that I’ve had a lot of setbacks, but if inventors just gave up because of setbacks, nothing would ever get invented. You should always keep trying; it’s the American way. I’m going to make this work, Leon. And one day, I’ll invent something that will set my whole field on fire!”
Dad’s goal as an inventor is to one day create something that will revolutionize the world of accounting, but so far, he’s failed to come up with right idea. I think that once the pocket calculator came along, accountants had gone about as far as they could go. Every time he talks about revolutionizing the accountant, I picture one of those paintings of the French Revolution from my history book, only instead of the working class leading people to have their heads chopped off, it was accountants. Nerdy ones.
You know how sometimes silence sounds like a lecture? This was one of those times. I really wished there was some way I could subtly give him some encouragement, something to make him feel better. I could tell by the fact that he wasn’t saying much that I’d really hurt his feelings; if I hadn’t, he would have been talking my ear off about his plans for the latest invention. I didn’t want to break my personal rule against encouragement, but, well, he’s my dad. I felt bad about saying mean things like that to him. After all, it’s not nice to be mean to crazy people.
When we got out of the car, he went straight to the garage to start working, and I went up to my room. I had decided that I wanted to try hooking up all my speakers, just to hear how things sounded. And anyway, staying busy kept me from feeling guilty.
So I hung the new speakers on the wall with the others I’d collected, then spent the better part of two hours hooking them all up to various connectors, ports, and splitters and hooking the whole thing into the stereo. By the time I was finished, my room was a mess of wires. I’d have to think of a good way to cover them up sooner or later. I considered getting a rug with some band’s logo on it.
I’d put a lot of thought into what song I should play first when testing the wall of sound, and after narrowing it down to five choices and discussing them with my friends, I’d decided on “Back in Black,” by AC/DC. I was originally going to go with “Stairway to Heaven,” which seemed like an obvious choice, but “Stairway” starts off pretty slow. “Back in Black” cuts right into the loud electric guitar riff at the very beginning.
I had a CD consisting of only that song in my dresser, which I’d made a long time before just for this occasion. I dug it out, stuck it in the stereo, and hit Play.
Exactly one unbelievably loud guitar chord came out of all of the speakers on the wall. I swear the house shook a bit, and I imagine that all the birds in the trees probably flew away in one big flock, like they do when a gun goes off in the movies but the director doesn’t want to show anybody getting shot. But after that one chord, there was a big pop and a bunch of sparks. Most of the sparks were little ones around the speakers, but there was a big one by the electrical outlet where the stereo was plugged in. Then the music stopped, and the lights went out, and all the appliances in the room went dead. Not just the stereo, but the clock radio, the lamp, and the beat-up TV I had that only worked for video games. Apparently I’d blown a fuse or two. All the electricity in the house appeared to be out.
Five seconds later, through the buzzing in my ears, I heard the voice of my father downstairs.
“Eureka!” he shouted.
