Adam Selzer (3 page)

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, taking a sip of grape juice. She had brought her lunch, too.

“What topic did you pick for your video?” I had been so wrapped up in my own film that I hadn’t even had a chance to ask Anna about hers.

“Smoking,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing one about how smoking really isn’t all that bad for you.”

“Isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I just figure that maybe it’s time for a new approach. Those movies about how smoking wrecks your lungs aren’t stopping anybody.” This was true. It seemed like half of the kids I knew smoked at least every now and then, even though our teachers had been drilling how bad it was into our heads since kindergarten.

“I’m going to do a sex-ed movie,” I said. “An artsy one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I figure if I make one that’s artsy, I can get away with showing more nudity.”

She grinned. “You looking for models?”

I wondered if she was offering to do it, and started to feel woozy for a second, but I just said, “We can’t do anything with actual nudity, remember?” Dustin Eddlebeck had asked right away, even though his movie was about seat belts, and Mr. Streich very quickly said absolutely not, even if the models were of legal age. No photographs of naked people, either. But he didn’t say anything about paintings, and I knew enough not to ask.

“So what kind of artsy do you mean? Italian realist? German Expressionist? Avant-garde?”

“What exactly is avant-garde?” I asked. I’d heard the term a few times, but never with a definition attached. Anna’s parents probably had a whole room full of avant-garde stuff, whatever it was.

“It’s really weird art,” she said. “The kind where people are painted blue and talk about truth and existence and then run around making noises like barnyard animals. Supposedly John Lennon once said ‘avant-garde’ is French for ‘bullshit.’”

“I could probably make that work,” I said. “I’m going to go for highbrow. Sophisticated, but still interesting. What’s the brainiest movie your parents have?” I had never heard her talk about their movie collection, but I imagined it was probably one of the brainier ones in town.

She paused and took another sip of grape juice. “Probably
La Dolce Vita,”
she said. “It’s an Italian movie directed by a guy named Fellini.”

Fellini. That just
sounded
artsy.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“Well, it’s partly avant-garde and partly realistic. It’s about a guy who wants to be a novelist, but he parties too hard and ends up being a miserable gossip columnist. Some people think it’s the best movie ever made.”

“Is there any nudity in it?”

“Not really. But it does show a girl getting covered with feathers.”

It didn’t sound like the most exciting movie in the world, but it certainly sounded artsy. “Can I borrow it?” I asked. She nodded and said she’d bring it the next day. I spent the rest of the afternoon fantasizing about directing my movie, and maybe even becoming a real artsy filmmaker. I could grow a little goatee, drink straight espresso, and travel all over to film festivals and stuff. I’d live in some loft in a big city, not some little suburban dump like Cornersville Trace. That beat the hell out of growing up to be an accountant.

That night, over a dinner that consisted of nothing I can mention in polite company, I asked my father if he knew anything about avant-garde stuff.

“Sure do,” he said. “I was in college once, you know.”

My mother nodded. “He was, you know, dear.”

“My roommate was into avant-garde performance art,” he continued. “He used to have me do the technical work when he did shows at the coffee shop.”

“What kind of avant-garde stuff did he do?” I asked.

“Well, I remember one time he painted the French flag on his chest and tap-danced while singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ While he did that, I used the slide projector to show his old family photos; then he cussed into a microphone for about ten minutes and stood still for half an hour.”

“And that was avant-garde?”

“As far as I know. Some people thought it was pretty profound. Never did understand it myself, but I loved working that slide projector. Why do you ask?”

“I’m making a video for my activity period at school, and I want it to be really artsy.”

My father’s face lit up, as I’d been afraid it would. “Is that the one Max Streich is teaching?” he asked. I forced myself to nod. “Wow, Leon, you’re really in for an exciting semester. He’s having you guys make health and safety films, right?”

I nodded again, hoping he wouldn’t ask what subject I was doing. My mother tends to get really weird every time I use the word “sex” in front of her.

“That sounds like a very educational class,” she said. “Max Streich is such a good teacher, isn’t he?”

“I guess so,” I said.

Then came the question.

“What’s your film going to be about?” my father asked.

“Health stuff,” I said.

“Like what? Smoking? Hygiene? Wearing safety goggles?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Sex, mostly.”

My mother, who had been drinking a glass of iced tea, spit half of it out. I should have known better to say anything while my mother was drinking something.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate for a boy your age,” she said as she mopped up the tea.

“Nonsense!” said my father. “He’s making an educational film, not a Playboy video!”

I excused myself from the table before I could hear my parents argue about sex any more and ran up to my room. That was about all I wanted my father to know about the project, if I could help it. I knew he would be enthusiastic; he’s enthusiastic about every school project I do. But I didn’t want him to get too excited or it would ruin the project for me. Worse yet, he might come up with his own ideas and expect me to try them. I had enough ideas of my own.

The more I thought about it, the more the movie was starting to seem like the easiest project in history. For one thing, it sounded like you could do pretty much anything and get away with calling it avant-garde. For another, if my father could work on avant-garde stuff, I was sure I could do it, too. I wasn’t necessarily the artsiest guy in town, but I was certainly artsier than he was.

Anna brought
La Dolce Vita
in the next day, and I watched it that night. It was artsy, all right. I could tell it was good, because half the time I had no idea what was going on. It was all in black-and-white, and it opened with a scene where a statue of Jesus is being flown over Rome by a helicopter. Then the main character parties and sleeps with girls who howl at the moon for about three hours, which seems like the sort of life a person would dream of living. Except that he really wants to write a novel, and he keeps getting caught up writing his dumb gossip column, the kind that talks about what movie stars have for lunch, which makes him unhappy, but he keeps doing it because it also makes him rich. Then, at the end, he and all of his famous friends find a giant dead fish on the beach, for some reason. I fast-forwarded through quite a few of the dull parts, but it was still pretty good. And it was exactly what I was looking for.

Right away I started thinking of tons of things I could try to put in the video, but then I got worried that I was letting things get out of hand. I would need a budget of several hundred dollars if I was going to be able to use even half of the scenes I had thought up. And even that wouldn’t cover the costs for the scene I had in mind where a statue of a sperm cell is flown over Rome.

So the next morning I was up at six o’clock and ready to head to school. I arrived way before the first bell rang and went to find Mr. Streich already there, talking with Mrs. Smollet. I hadn’t seen her all summer and hadn’t bumped into her yet that year. I had forgotten just how frightening she could be. She was one of those people who was probably only about forty but looked sixty-five, with a face like an evil nun’s. And she never shut up about moral fiber. She herself, apparently, had moral fiber oozing out of every pore. If it worked like normal fiber, she must have been alarmingly regular.

“It’s not wise, Max,” she was saying. “I know what these kids are like.”

“Oh, come on,” said Mr. Streich, who I was glad to see at least wasn’t falling for her “kids are evil” routine. “They’re good students.”

“I’m just warning you, Max,” she said, “if you aren’t careful, the school could end up getting sued.” This was one of her catch-phrases. She was always on the lookout for reasons the school could get sued.

“I’ll take my chances,” he said, finally looking in my direction. “Hi, Leon,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, plopping my backpack, which weighed about a ton and a half, onto the ground.

“Well, hi, Leon,” said Mrs. Smollet, smiling but sounding about as glad to see me as I was to see her. “How was your summer?”

“Same as any other,” I said.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. And she got up to leave.

“What was that all about?” I asked Mr. Streich as soon as she was out of earshot.

“Well,” he said, stretching out and combing his mustache with his fingers. “You know what she’s like. She’s not too keen on letting you guys make these videos.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “Based on what she has us do in class, she seems to think that the gifted-pool kids should just be using their gifts to solve crossword puzzles.”

He chuckled. “Well, I’m sure she means well.” Teachers are never allowed to bad-mouth each other, but you know that half of them probably hate each other. They’re just regular people once they get into the teachers’ lounge. “I had to do a lot of convincing to get the board to authorize this project in the first place, but I’m sure you’re all mature enough to handle it.”

“So, anyway,” I said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about my video. I have a lot of ideas already.”

“Great!” said Mr. Streich. “I thought you kids…er, students might get excited about this project!”

“It’s going to be a really artistic film,” I said. “I’m thinking of calling it
La Dolce Pubert.”
I pronounced it in such a way as to make it sound as artsy as possible. Like
pyoo-bare.
With the “r” rolling.

He frowned. “Is ‘pubert’ a word?” he asked. He didn’t roll the “r.”

“I’m not sure, but it sounds good.”

“You might want to look that up before you finish the project.”

“I will. Anyway, what I need to know right now,” I asked, “is what kind of budget we have to work with.”

“Budget?” asked Mr. Streich.

“Yeah,” I said. “How much will the school cover?”

“Well,” he said, “none.”

“None?” I asked.

“None. We have plenty of equipment as it is, unless you want to make explosions. And we can probably find a way to do those with stuff from the lab.”

I hadn’t thought of explosions before, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea. I’d known the school wasn’t going to be willing to pay for a helicopter or anything, but I’d figured we’d have some money for expenses! What were they doing with all our parents’ tax dollars? Probably fixing up the stupid gym.

“But I have a lot of ideas for things that we can’t do with just the camera and the editing machine!” I said. “How am I supposed to get them to work without a budget?”

“Well,” he said, “you might have to scale down your plans a bit. Or, if there are scenes that you absolutely can’t do without, I’m sure you can find a way to make it work.”

“So what if I can’t find a way to do some of the stuff?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, smiling, “you’ll just have to invent something.”

The day I turned thirteen, my parents officially began to consider me a rotten teenager.

I had always sort of figured that once I turned thirteen, I’d be treated more like an adult. I mean, I knew I wouldn’t be able to buy beer or vote or anything like that; I just thought people might start taking me a bit more seriously. In reality, it turned out to be just the opposite. People occasionally listen to little kids, because they might say something accidentally wise that can be published in one of those stupid gift books that give idiots a warm, fuzzy feeling. You know the kind. They always have all of the writing done in crayon.

However, once you get past twelve, people just look at you like you’re about to steal something wherever you go. One time I went into a gas station to buy a can of pop, and the jerk behind the counter got it into his head that I was stealing ice cream. He made me turn out my pockets to show that I didn’t have anything frozen in them, like he was a cop in some movie from the thirties and I was a little thief who stole apples from carts. I decided not to buy the pop, and further decided that next time I was out walking around Cedar Avenue with some friends and needed to pee, I’d do it against the wall of the gas station.

Another time, I stopped into a Stationery Limited store in one of the five hundred or so strip malls on Cedar Avenue to buy a pen for some ink drawings I was working on, and the woman gave me the third degree about whether I was using the pen for something legal or for graffiti. I pointed out that I was buying a pen, not a can of spray paint, and that I’d be up there for weeks if I tried to tag a wall with it, but she still took down my name and phone number, which I’m still not sure was even legal. Not that I gave her my real name or anything. I’m nobody’s fool.

At home, my father started worrying even more than before about what sort of TV shows I watched. I took to watching certain shows with the remote pointed at the TV, so I could quickly turn it to some educational program—I always knew exactly which ones were on, just in case—if I heard him coming. I’m not sure he really would have believed that I had been watching a show about penguins instead of soft-core porn in the middle of the night, but it was best not to take any chances.

My mother was even worse. When eighth grade started, she decided that I would no longer be permitted to ride the bus. This could be because she has decided I am responsible enough to walk the half-mile to school, which allows me to leave half an hour later since the bus takes so long. In reality, it’s because she saw some news story saying that kids as young as twelve are having oral sex on the back of school buses, and she doesn’t want me to be a part of it. The whole story was total crap. The worst thing I ever saw happen on the bus was when Ryan Bannon pulled Keith Messersmith’s pants down in third grade, and he didn’t pull down his underwear or anything. Besides, if there is actually any fooling around going on in the buses, which I doubt, I want to be there for it.

I’ve always, however, been allowed to attend major social events, like dances and football games, when I want to. I pass on most of them; the dances are too stupid to bother with, and the food they serve is about as tasty as one of my parents’ food disasters. But events that aren’t supervised by faculty are always worth checking out, and even though there might be some teachers present at football games, their powers are useless there.

Friday night was the first high school football game of the season, and, though I had no desire to attend it, I knew that the first real party of the year would be at Fat Johnny’s Pizza Parlor after the game. Everyone had been making a conscious effort to keep out of trouble the first two weeks of school; it was time for things to start picking up.

Fat Johnny’s Pizza Parlor was a pretty decent place; no pizza joint with the word “parlor” in its name can be all that bad. The pizza itself was mostly grease, but it was the last pizza place in town that still had a little video arcade attached. Not a big one or anything, just five or six games, plus a pinball machine and a Skee-Ball thing, which was more than most restaurants had. I don’t know where the high schoolers went for their parties, but after every football game, people from my class could be counted on to descend on Fat Johnny’s like so many locusts.

The games usually ended around ten o’clock, so when ten-thirty rolled around I had my dad give me a ride to the party.

“This isn’t going to be too crazy a party, is it, Leon?” he asked. “We’re not going to have to pick you up at the police station, are we?”

“It’s a pizza place, Dad, not a bar,” I said. “I’ve been here before and never gotten in any trouble.” This was only partially true; a couple of times my friends and I had gotten rowdy enough that they’d asked us to leave. This was one of those things my parents just didn’t need to know.

“Still, it’s a hangout,” he said. “A lot of times places like that have trouble with, you know…gangs and stuff.”

I laughed. “You worry too much, Dad. There aren’t any gangs in Cornersville.”

Cornersville Trace, which is the official name of our town on all of the maps, though everyone just calls it Cornersville, is a pretty small place. It’s big enough to have a mall and everything, but it’s just a regular suburb of a fairly small city, not the kind of place where there’s a whole lot of gang violence. There are always a handful of kids who seem to
think
they’re in gangs, but as far as I can tell, all they ever do is stand around outside the 7-Eleven trying to look tough by giving the finger to people who drive by. If they ever meet a real gang member, I’m pretty sure they’ll pee themselves.

As a matter of fact, the worst problems Cornersville really ever has are high schoolers drinking and younger kids adding graffiti to the walls in drainage ditches. But my parents and all their friends are constantly afraid; my dad has even gone so far as to try to invent a security system for the house. The day he installed it, I accidentally opened the door without using the special key he’d given me and was greeted by a siren. The alarm also did something to alert the police, who showed up ten minutes later. Dad explained to them what had happened, and they explained to him that they’d feel a lot better if he just bought a security system instead of building his own, something I’d been trying to tell him the whole time. He listened to them, though.

We pulled into the parking lot, and as I was unbuckling my seat belt, he said, “Now, you know what to do if someone offers you drugs, right?”

“Say ‘Thank you very much,’” I said. “Even if it’s a kind of drug I already have.”

He gave me a glare. “It’s just because we love you, Leon.”

“I know, Dad. See ya!”

I climbed out and shut the door. According to recent findings, the classic “It’s just because we love you” excuse has been in use by parents since the Iron Age, and it’s still expected to be the end of the conversation. It doesn’t work both ways, though. If I explained that I lied about my middle name because I love them and don’t want people to think that they were a couple of kooks who should be sent to parenting skills classes, I’m pretty sure it would get me grounded.

I stepped into Fat Johnny’s and saw that it was already full of people from school. A couple of the would-be gang-bangers were playing one of the shootout video games, and Jamie Jenson was cheating at Skee-Ball, standing right at the end of the ramp and putting the balls directly into the fifty hole. Practically every table was full, mostly with people I recognized. I spotted Brian Carlson, the pyro, and Edie Scaduto, the communist, sitting on the same side of a booth, cuddling, which left the other half of the booth open. I took the liberty of sitting there.

“You guys got here fast,” I said.

“We snuck out at halftime,” said Brian, shaking his head to get his hair out of his face. “The Monks were getting creamed.”

“They always get creamed,” I said. “I didn’t have to show up to see that.”

“Smart man,” said Brian.

“I approve of football,” said Edie. “It’s working-class.” She was wearing a black turtleneck that matched her dyed-black hair. All together, she looked as though she might be a pitch-black person who’d just had her face dipped in some peach-colored paint.

The only thing most people in the school know about communism is that they’re against it. The basic idea behind it is that everyone should share everything and no one should be any richer or poorer than anyone else, which seems okay, except that it works about as well as most of my dad’s inventions. As the school’s lone commie, Edie approved of all things “working-class” and disapproved of everything she judged to be for the rich. So far that year, she’d disapproved of lacrosse, the mall, name-brand clothing, and school yearbooks. I’m not really sure what she had against yearbooks.

“I didn’t think you would approve of football,” I said. “It’s sort of violent, and to be good at it you have to be freakishly large.” She shrugged and went back to kissing Brian’s fingers.

A waiter came by and I ordered a Coke. As soon as he was gone, Brian pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I told him.

“He doesn’t,” said Edie. “Smoking is one of the ways big business keeps the working class under control.”

Brian grinned, picking up a sugar packet and holding it to the flame.

“It just comes in handy now and then,” he said. “You never know when you might have to burn something.” He set fire to the packet and put it in the ashtray, and we sat watching it burn. The flame worked its way around the edge of the packet before it started to burn the center, and when it did, all the sugar spilled out at once and started to get caught in the flames. It smelled pretty awful.

At any decent restaurant on a normal night, this sort of thing would have gotten us into all sorts of trouble, but in a room full of hyper eighth graders I was sure it was the least of the manager’s worries. I looked around and saw that no one was having oral sex on the floor, though. My mother would have been greatly relieved.

“Are you really doing a sex-ed movie?” asked Edie.

I nodded. “An artsy one. Something really avant-garde.”

They both nodded; they probably already knew what avante-garde was. Edie probably didn’t support it, though.

I hadn’t really done much work on it, other than the mandatory research and discussions about issues that had taken up most of the class time on Wednesday and Thursday. Hearing Mr. Streich say that I would have to invent something had sort of soured me on the whole project. Inventions were my dad’s turf—not mine. I did still find myself kicking around the idea of having a good explosion to end the whole thing, though. I couldn’t think of a single educational film that wouldn’t have been improved by something blowing up. It might not have saved some of the science movies, but it would have helped. Everyone knows that the real point of science class is to blow things up.

Five minutes later, the waiter came back with my Coke, dropped it off at the table, and immediately ran off, looking as though he wished someone would just blow
him
up and get the night over with.

“That poor guy,” said Edie, turning away from Brian for the first time that evening to watch the server running toward the back room. “His employer is probably screwing him over.” Like most communists, she assumed that just about every worker was getting ripped off somehow.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe a roomful of us is more than they trained the poor bastard to handle.”

“The poor oppressed workers at Fat Johnny’s,” said Brian, not sounding too serious. “They should go on strike.”

“I doubt they’re unionized,” I said. “They can’t go on a strike.”

“Even if they were,” said Brian, “could they go on strike to have all middle schoolers banned from the premises? That’d never fly.”

“Yeah, but we should really lay off the poor guy. That’s probably going to be you or me working that crappy job in three or four years, right?”

“Yeah,” said Edie. “Brian, quit burning stuff, okay? We need to be nicer to him.”

Brian made a whiny puppy noise, but Edie countered with one of her own and he put the lighter back in his pocket. If there’s anything more disgusting than mayonnaise and raisin casserole, it’s listening to couples make puppy noises at each other. Even if they’re doing it as part of a debate on ethics.

Just as I was about ready to get up and see about wasting a few bucks on pinball, I heard a voice saying “Hey” and turned to see Anna standing next to the booth, wearing a dark blue T-shirt with Kermit the Frog on the front that was at least five sizes too large for her. It hung down to her knees; you couldn’t even tell if she was wearing shorts or was naked underneath it or what.

“Have a seat!” I said, sliding down the booth and trying my best not to seem too eager. “This is the best seat in the house if you want to watch Brian and Edie going at it.”

“I’m sure I can offer constructive criticism,” she said, sitting down and helping herself to a sip of my Coke. As she sat down, her shirt moved just enough that I could see that she did have denim shorts on. I immediately went for another drink myself; putting my lips on the straw was kind of like kissing her, in a secondhand sort of way. This made me feel both excited and rather pathetic at the same time.