Adam Selzer (10 page)

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. Their idea was to make it so films and life didn’t have to make sense, and things didn’t have to be logical and ordered, and they thought that making weird movies would help tear down all the old rules of society and bring normal people out of their stupor. They sort of thought of themselves as activists, not just artists.”

“It must have worked,” said Anna. “You can put anything you want in a movie nowadays, and hardly anybody would riot.” Well, I could think of a few people who would. Mrs. Smollet was probably always looking for a reason to disapprove of a movie.

“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t know if they made people any less stupid, but the movies must have worked.”

This was just sort of an offhand comment that Anna’s father made, but as far as I was concerned, it was like I was standing below a balcony, hearing a guy in a suit give a rousing speech inspiring me to take action. Suddenly, making the movie wasn’t just a class project. It was a mission. I was going to be like those guys from the twenties. I was going to make a movie that would wake the sixth and seventh graders out of their stupor and change the way they thought about sex and puberty. Mrs. Smollet and the school board could just take a rock to the head if they didn’t like it. And there’d be an explosion, all right. No matter what Mr. Streich said, I was going to end the movie with an explosion scene.

“Sorry about that,” Anna said after her father left.

“About what?” I asked.

“Him,” she said, as if I should have known. “I mean, he’s okay as parents go, but sometimes he’s just…I don’t know.”

“I didn’t see anything wrong with him,” I said.

“Well, you know…. He can be a bit over the top sometimes. And he could have just given us the movie and left us alone. He didn’t have to watch it with us, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was a bit mystified. Mr. Brandenburg was the coolest dad in the whole history of Cornersville. What did she have to be embarrassed about? He wasn’t wearing a lab coat. He didn’t give her the middle name Noside.

But I didn’t think about it very long, because I was too busy getting ideas for the movie. This was going to be the greatest thing any sixth or seventh grader had ever seen.

I walked home that night with a backpack full of art. Anna and I had spent the whole rest of the late afternoon digging through all her parents’ art books, marking off pictures we could put into the video. After a couple of minutes, it had even stopped being embarrassing to be looking at pictures of naked people with her, though I’ll admit that I was pretty turned on the entire time. Before I left I almost felt like I should try to kiss her, the afternoon had gone so well. But I could imagine that whole scene too clearly. I’d lean in for a kiss, and she’d recoil and say, “What are you doing?” and then she wouldn’t even want to talk to me for days and sitting at the same table at lunch would be too awkward to bear.

But all that aside, I had a whole stack of good pictures to use. It was looking like most of the movie could be made up of a whole bunch of still pictures, flashing in and out, with maybe some actual scenes where people moved around. Like the kissing scene, starring Brian and Edie, which would build up to the explosion at the end.

About half of the pictures were from old paintings of naked people, most of which were pretty realistic, though some were pretty weird-looking. That was okay. Weird was good. Besides that, there were a lot of weird-looking paintings that we just thought would look interesting.

The movie didn’t have to make sense; I didn’t even really plan to follow the outline. To keep it educational, I’d just have a voice-over that would make sense but that, next to all the weird pictures, would actually make the movie seem even weirder.

I was starting to confuse myself. But that, too, was okay. Avant-garde art was supposed to be confusing; that was the whole point!

When I got home, my parents were already in the kitchen, cooking, to my delight, nothing more deadly than some regular grilled-cheese sandwiches.

“Hi, Leon,” said my father. “How’s the movie coming?”

“It’s
awesome,”
I said, fighting off the urge to call him Nicholas, since I knew that would just invite them to drill me on why I was calling him by his first name. I didn’t really feel much like explaining to my parents that I had just decided to become a hip activist. “Except that Mr. Streich said I’m not allowed to do an explosion for it.”

“Max Streich said that?” Dad asked. “He loves explosions!”

“Everyone does, except for Mrs. Smollet and the dumbass school board,” I said, daring to use a word that contained the a-word in front of my parents. “They said I could get hurt.”

“Well, that’s probably fair,” said my mother. “And watch your language.”

“But it’s too bad,” said my father. He watched me heaving my backpack onto the kitchen table. “How did that get so heavy?” he asked.

It was no heavier than it normally was; with all the textbooks I had to carry, I was afraid I was going to end up with curvature of the spine. But I’d left all my textbooks in my locker, since I knew that I wouldn’t be bothering to do any homework that wasn’t for the movie.

“I just borrowed a whole bunch of books of art pictures to put into the movie…. Do you have any, like, science books that have weird pictures in them?”

“Well, not really,” said my father. “I always thought that science books with a bunch of pictures were for sissies.” I should have known. I could only imagine the results of him trying to write his own science book. The periodic table probably would have been a mess.

“But you know what we do have?” asked my mother, smiling like an idiot who had just had a glass of idiot juice. And she pointed to her shelf of cookbooks.

I hadn’t thought of that before; the pictures in those books tended to make the food look even more disgusting than it actually was, which was close to impossible. Putting them next to pictures of naked people might not be terribly appealing, but if that wasn’t avant-garde, I didn’t know what was.

I grabbed a stack of cookbooks off of the shelf and started to flip through them; my parents both looked as though they’d waited their whole lives for this day. But I ignored them, and pretty soon I had enough bizarre pictures to pad the video nicely. After seeing
Un Chien Andalou,
I realized that it didn’t really have to make much sense.

That night, I set up the camcorder in my room and started to record still shots of the pictures in the books, in no particular order. I figured I could edit them later using all the gear in the media immersion room. Taking still shots wasn’t exactly challenging, so pretty soon I had about five minutes’ worth of footage, about half of which was of naked paintings. Some of them were full-body images; others were close-ups on the good parts of paintings where there was enough detail. It wasn’t really that bad; none of the shots of women were all that explicit. In fact, the most detailed shot of a woman was a Picasso painting called
Woman Pissing,
and it didn’t look remotely realistic, but it looked hilarious after a picture of what was supposed to be some form of mixed vegetable juice but actually looked like a tall glass of barf. Like the woman in the painting had just had a glass of disgusting juice that made her whole body deformed, and now she was peeing it out. By nine o’clock, I had the basic shots in place for a pretty avant-garde picture. It was missing a few important elements, like actual scenes, not just stills, and the kiss, the explosion, and the narration, but the basics were there.

Thinking about how
Un Chien Andalou
looked a lot like a music video without music, I thought a bit more about what sort of music I should have. I knew I didn’t want the boring, distorted music that you hear in most of documentaries they show in school—this was going to be real music.

Later on, I called Dustin.

“You know how you always said you were going to start a band?” I asked. He was always talking about starting a band called the Ashtrays, in which he’d play keyboards. His mother had been making him take piano lessons since he was five.

“Yeah. I don’t have anyone else for it yet,” he said. He was also making noises that indicated that he was eating a sandwich or something. It was kind of gross.

“I know, but are you pretty good at the piano?”

“I guess so.”

“Could you just sort of jam on it? Like a rocking, bluesy sort of jam, for about five minutes?”

“Sure.”

I told him all about how the project was going, and how I needed a long musical sound track that would play under the whole thing, but nothing with words, because there would also be some voice-overs. Dustin immediately offered to write those, in the form of poetry. I said sure, and gave him a list of all the stuff he had to work in, like how your body changes, and how having various urges and all the stuff that went with them was normal.

“Cool,” he said. “So you want me to put in stuff about how everybody beats off?”

That sort of blindsided me for a second; sure, everybody does that, but I didn’t know a single person who admitted it. I sure as hell didn’t want to be the first. But plenty of kids were probably really getting stressed out thinking no one else did it.

“Okay,” I said. “But don’t go nuts or anything.”

“Very funny,” he said. “Nuts.”

“I didn’t mean that to be a joke,” I said, getting a bit flustered.

“Don’t worry, man. I’ll have something ready for you tomorrow.”

He then asked if I could bring him all the ketchup I could get my hands on for use as blood in his movie, which was about seat belts, and I agreed. My parents still had a whole stockpile from the days when they were working through a book from the eighties called
Ketchup Is a Vegetable, Too!
I hoped I would never taste the stuff again.

When I hung up, I did a little dance around my room. Man, I hadn’t just decided to become hip, I
was
hip. I was a film director. Just like the guys who made
Un Chien Andalou.
Those sixth and seventh graders in advisory classes would never know what had hit them!

No one had ever told us straight up that what was happening to us, what we were thinking, was really normal. We all sort of knew, but the fact that those pamphlets they gave out said so wasn’t very reassuring. These were the sort of pamphlets that made up kids’ letters, in which they would say, “I didn’t mean to look, but when we took showers after gym, I noticed Jonah’s penis was a little bigger than mine. Does that make him more of a man than me?”

People who thought a kid might ask that, even in an anonymous pamphlet, clearly didn’t know a thing about whether we were actually normal. They were just doofuses.

Or is the plural for that “doofi”?

I was on a roll at that point, so I called up Anna to ask her to play cello on the sound track, then had a pretty weird experience calling Jenny Kurosawa to ask if she’d jam along on her clarinet. Her parents really gave me the third degree until I convinced them that I was calling in regards to a school project. They were known to be pretty strict; Jenny was the only person I know who was ever discouraged from reading. She had to hide her science-fiction paperbacks under her bed because her mother was known to throw books that weren’t assigned by a teacher into the trash. But after some arguing, they let her on the phone, and she was more than eager to get involved in the project, provided that I never even hint to her parents what kind of movie it was.

And Brian, who had a lot of recording gear and microphones and stuff, said he could record the music and narration.

Everything was set up for the movie—all I needed was the kissing scene, which Brian and Edie were all set to do, and the explosion.

I didn’t care what Mr. Streich said—one way or another, there was going to be an explosion.

This was not about getting a good grade.

This was about making a film that would wake the kids out of their stupor and tell them once and for all that all the things they were worried about were perfectly normal.

This was about art.

When I got to school the next morning, I was riding high. I bummed my way through the morning scribbling ideas into my notebook, not paying a word of attention to any of the teachers. That was nothing new.

At lunch, Dustin handed me a sheet of paper and said, “How’s this for the narration?”

“You’re done already?” I asked.

“It wasn’t very hard,” he said. “I wrote it during social studies.”

I looked down at it. It was written in the form of a sonnet.

La Dolce Pubert
Narration

by Dustin Eddlebeck

We were weirdos once, and young, Naked against the dawning of our teen years, with thoughts we’d never express with a tongue, about lust, and doubts, and dreams, and fears. But all was normal, everything, every change, every thought that kept us up, feeling like hell, and even though at first it felt strange, all of the whacking was normal, as well. Renegade pituitary glands controlled our minds like the school system only wished it could, but as we grew older, each of us would find that it was totally normal, and generally good. We stood against adulthood’s door, trying to comprehend, and hoping to score.

“That’s totally bizarre,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

“Renegade pituitary glands?” asked Anna. “That’s an odd metaphor.”

“It works,” insisted Dustin. “Wanna hear the second one?

“Of course,” I said.

He cleared his throat and began.

“Everybody lost sleep thinking of size. Hair was growing. Our bodies were growing, sometimes too fast, or too slowly to rise, and it scared us to death, even though knowing that all was quite normal, nothing was wrong with the thoughts in our heads in the night like the chorus and riffs of our favorite songs, which led to the whacking-—it was normal and right. Our bodies slouched toward sweet maturity to be fully grown, developing more with each breath as one day our minds would tip toward senility and finally pull us to the cold night of death. Feel, while you can, the sweet kiss of your youth that brings forth the blissful explosion of truth.”

The entire table was silent for a second while we figured out what to make of the whole thing. Anna spoke first.

“Blissful explosion of truth?” she asked. “How does youth bring forth a blissful explosion of truth? That’s cheesy.”

“It rhymes,” Dustin said defensively.

“I like how you end with a line about a kiss and then one about an explosion,” I said. “I should read those two lines very slowly underneath the kissing scene and the explosion at the end. But it is sort of cheesy.”

“Underlining the creation and destruction dichotomy,” Anna said, nodding. “That works.”

“You know you mentioned that whacking off is normal in both of those, right?” asked Brian.

Dustin snickered. “Some kids probably need to hear that as often as they can, man.”

This was true. I wished I’d heard that from another kid in sixth grade—I just still wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be the one to tell the others. It was sort of a loud admission that I did it myself. But I put that out of my mind for the time being.

“That’s vulgar,” came a voice from behind. I turned around to see that Joe Griffin had been standing behind us, probably the entire time.

“What’s vulgar about it?” I asked.

“All that talk about masturbation. It’s vulgar. Plus you use the h-word.”

Joe Griffin was probably the last kid in the world who thought “hell” was a serious cuss word.

“What’s your point?” asked Anna. “That kids in middle school don’t do it?”

“You shouldn’t be telling them to do it,” he said, shaking his head a little.

“What are you going to do, Joe?” I asked. “Have your dad sue me for spreading pro-whacking-off propaganda in the schools? Get Mrs. Smollet to beat me up?” She probably would.

“It’s sacrilegious,” said Joe.

“This isn’t a Catholic school,” said Anna.

I knew from previous religious arguments with Joe—which was about the only kind of conversation I ever seemed to have with him—that he thought Catholics were sacrilegious, too, for some reason, but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

“You still shouldn’t try to corrupt kids,” he said. “It’s better to be tied to a millstone in the ocean than to turn children against God.”

“So I’ll be going to hell for this, then?” I asked. “You get to decide that?”

He shook his head. “God does,” he said.

“Hell is only for those who believe in it,” said Edie.

“Well,” said Joe, “I believe in it.”

Oh, man,
I thought, just hoping no one would beat me to the joke. Verily, God had delivered him unto my hands.

“Well then, off you go!” I said. “I hope you’ll send us a postcard.”

Everyone laughed, and Brian gave me a high five.

Joe walked away at that point, apparently unable to think of a good comeback for that one. In a way, I almost felt sorry for the guy. His heart was in the right place—you could say that he just didn’t want us to go to hell and was concerned. In reality, though, it always seemed more like he just thought he was going to heaven and assumed that we weren’t, and wanted to rub that in our faces. I wondered how he’d react if he got to heaven and found all of us already there? Maybe he’d apply to move to Valhalla.

“Anyway,” I said, getting back on topic, “those are perfect.” I dug into my backpack and retrieved four plastic bottles of ketchup, which I gave to Dustin, per our agreement.

“I have an idea for something else we could do, a new scene,” said Anna, after he was safely gone. “And I’ll bet we could get out of sixth period to do it.”

“Then I’m game for anything!” I said. I didn’t care if what we were doing was filming ourselves scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush and singing show tunes, if it got me out of sixth period.

So we left lunch early to go to the office, where we explained that we needed permission to leave sixth period for work on a project for the advanced studies class, and got permission right away, as we usually could. You could almost always get permission to get out of a class if you mentioned something to do with the gifted pool. I think they were afraid that if they said no, we’d use our gifted intellects against them or something. And they were right.

Anna and I met back at the office before sixth period and signed out to do “advanced studies work.”

“You still haven’t told me what we’re doing,” I said as we walked out of the office.

“Well, first of all, we’re going to check out a camera from the media immersion room,” Anna said.

“What about after that?”

“You’ll see!”

We checked out the camera in her name; then I followed her down the hall toward the gym, and we walked up to Coach Hunter, whose powers were useless against us, since we weren’t there for gym class.

“We’d like to borrow the CPR dummy,” she said. “It’s for activity period.” She showed him the pass the office had given us.

Old Coach Hunter rolled his eyes a bit; he tended to do that whenever he was confronted with a school issue that didn’t involve throwing balls or doing push-ups. But he led us to a little utility closet and dug around until he found the dummy.

The CPR dummy was a mannequin with no legs that we had used the year before, when we’d all had to take a day-long CPR course. We used it for practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which could hardly have been very sanitary; if one person in the class had had mono, all of us would have gotten it. It seemed to me that a course in something like CPR should be, well, safe, but the whole class had an air of irrationality about it. The people who taught it were always asking us weird worst-case-scenario questions, like “What do you do if you walk into the garage and find that someone has swallowed a bottle of acid, and, in the confusion that followed, cut off one of their arms with a chain saw?”

I really should have paid attention, because, knowing my dad, the idea that that sort of thing might actually happen wasn’t out of the question. But I replied, “Steal their wallet, because they’re probably already dead, and try to get a head start on the cleanup.” I ended up failing that course.

Anna grabbed the dummy from Coach Hunter and thanked him; then we walked off to the room where the gifted pool met. Mrs. Smollet was sitting there, doing paperwork and eating something out of a little cardboard carton.

“Hi, Mrs. Smollet!” Anna greeted her, using all the phony cheer she could muster.

“Oh, hello!” she said, looking surprised to see us. “Can I help you?”

“We’re just doing some work for the movie,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Is that why you need a naked dummy?”

She really said that. I’m not making that up.

“Well,” I said, “they don’t really make CPR dummies that wear clothes.”

“I could take off mine and loan it to the dummy,” Anna offered. I was sure she didn’t mean it and had just said it to see the look of horror on Mrs. Smollet’s face. She couldn’t have been disappointed; Mrs. Smollet looked like she was about to have a coronary.

“Well, you’re not doing anything…untoward…with it, are you?” she asked. “Because I can’t let you do anything obscene.”

“Well,” said Anna, “okay, but we might just have to edit some things out, because this dummy has a really dirty mind.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The poor girl has been choking to death so long she’s forgotten about the power of positive thinking.”

Mrs. Smollet sighed. “Okay. Just be careful,” she said, and she went back to her paperwork and food.

Anna laid the dummy faceup on the couch, arranging the arms as well as she could.

“Okay,” she said. “Now we just have to make it look weird. Help me out.”

We spent the next few minutes digging around the room looking for stuff to put around the dummy. In the end, the dummy had a marker sticking out of its mouth, a pencil stuck in each ear, and a sign on its chest that read
U R NORMAL.
Then I got the idea that we could take a few shots of it, with a different sign each time. So, by the time we were done, we’d filmed the CPR dummy holding signs that said
U R NORMAL, USE A CONDOM, I GROW HAIR,
and
I AM A DOG FROM ANDALUSIA.
None of them really made much sense, except for the one about the condom, which was good advice, but all of them were fairly avant-garde.

The whole time, Mrs. Smollet sat there doing paperwork, though she couldn’t resist turning to stare at us now and then. She never said anything; she was looking at us like we were plotting some sort of raid on the school.

And we were. In a way.