Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath (2 page)

I can't think of anything else to say about the topic. David finishes his apple. He can't think of anything else either.

“So now you know,” he says.

So, now I know, but I don't know what I should do now that I know.

And I have my own issues

Sometimes a man got to do what he got to do. At seventeen, your mother can no longer choose your deodorant for you. I make my stand in the personal care aisle at Walgreens, ready to decide what kind of male I really am. There are so many choices. There are at least twenty-five different brands of deodorant at Walgreens. Even after eliminating the ones that are clearly marketed to women, there are still too many to choose from. I am paralyzed staring at the gels, powders, roll-ons, and sprays. I have spent more time standing here today than I have on my calculus homework.

I make the bold decision to go for direct application over spray. That eliminates some but brings me no closer to self-definition. I can't use something called “Eau de Toilette,” even if it is made by a shoe company. I can't buy anything that sounds like my dad might use it, or anything sailor-like—way too hokey. And “powder fresh” doesn't sound like what I want people to think when they smell me. So I'm down to innocuous ones with names that
imply dryness and protection, but even these are divided into mind-boggling subcategories. Cool Fusion? Energy Ultra? Wild Rain? Are these things I want in my armpits?

I take a deep breath and choose a high-endurance gel that sounds masculine and yet hygienic, with a promise of effectiveness. I then put it back on the shelf and instead take the same spray that my mother bought me last time, but I only buy the smallest possible size in case I change my mind when I get home. I don't want to be stuck with months of the wrong deodorant. I'm too embarrassed to have this be my only purchase, so I also buy two candy bars and a poker deck, even though I have never played poker. I do not look the cashier in the eye as she scans my purchases.

The Mushroom Club

Deep in the basement, in the very bowels of Richard White Day School, at the end of a long hall that runs behind the cafeteria, is a plain brown door. On the wall beside this door is a small brass plaque that seems out of place on the mustard-colored plaster. It reads:

FILM LAB
EQUIPMENT PROVIDED BY AN ANONYMOUS DONOR
1994

This is the fiefdom of Sydney Wallman, AV maven, film club sponsor, and the oldest true geek I've ever met. If he has ever set foot outside this room, I've never seen it. His desk, piled high with papers, DVDs, partially disassembled computers, and random pieces of electrical equipment, sits in the middle of the enormous space
surrounded by an actual working television studio with separate workspaces for film or audio projects. It is an impressive amount of stuff and would probably be the kind of thing that would attract students if Wallman himself weren't so completely frightening. He has a small following of very dedicated trolls who spend most of their time immersed in role-playing games among the squalor of the film lab (Wallman sponsors several versions of geek clubs), but almost no one else ever ventures this far down the hall. Except, starting last semester, David and me.

We had to fulfill the art requirement somehow. Neither of us can draw or wanted to paint. We got closed out of photography and couldn't imagine doing pottery. I think the course we signed up for was called digital animation, but Wallman was not sufficiently impressed with David's or my computer skills, so he laughingly, or I guess cacklingly, suggested we use the stop-motion camera and do a Claymation project. Maybe he was joking. We said sure and he seemed intrigued by our agreement. The next day he provided us with Plasticine (which is like shiny clay), odd materials for sets, a caliper, and a documentary on some English guy we had never heard of. We then spent two weeks watching all of the Wallace and Gromit movies,
Chicken Run
, and episodes of an old demented children's show called
Pee-wee's Playhouse
. This soon became our favorite class.

“What kind of movie should we make?” David asked Wallman after we had finished watching everything Nick Park had ever made.

“Don't much care,” Wallman said, chewing on his beard. “But it should have lots of blood. I usually recommend sex and violence, but sex with little clay figures is just sick, so I'd stick to violence. You guys are probably too young, but did you ever see any Mr. Bill?”

We spent most of the next week watching vintage
Saturday Night Live
clips. The true geeks, sitting hunched over their computer monitors translating pixels, began to resent us.

Our first film was a two-and-a-half-minute feature that David titled “Everything Wrong with the World.” It consisted mostly of a giant dog peeing on various historical figures: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Julius Caesar. Wallman made us do storyboards for every scene and repetition turned out to be the easiest way to get to actual shooting. Thank God for Xerox machines. I think we had a vague idea that we were making some kind of good-versus-evil statement, but mostly we discovered that making anything recognizable out of Plasticine was tricky and Lincoln was about as good as we could do. For some reason, we also found the Bill-Gates-melting-in-dog-pee bit way too funny.

And then somehow we found ourselves signing up for Digital Animation 2, rather than Foundations of Economic
Theory, which was the elective we had been told to take by our academic advisors. We weren't Wallmanites, but we were willing to tolerate another semester of lunch with freshmen and sophomores for a chance to make another film.

“I don't get it,” Mariel says when she searches us out one study hall. The trolls stare at her as she walks through the gloom toward the back of the lab where all of our Claymation stuff is set up. The lab is lit mostly by glowing computer screens. The overhead fluorescent lights give Wallman a headache, and the few scattered lamps don't do much in a room with zero natural light. Maybe Wallman is a vampire. Mariel avoids touching anything she passes, as if she's concerned that something might pop out and bite her. Given the number of times females enter the film lab, she might actually have something to fear from the trolls. She watches us set up the scenery and place our favorite little Plasticine guy in the center of a giant table surrounded by four floor lamps. “What is so fascinating about filming squashed clay?”

It's hard to explain. The process is unbelievably slow. First you have to plan the whole scene, frame by frame. You then have to build sets and the actual characters. We spent four days trying to get our figures to stand up
before Wallman explained what an armature was. It turns out that clay men need a little frame or they fall over. When you finally get to the actual filming, you set up the scene, position the clay figures, set the camera, take a shot, reposition the figures in the tiniest, most subtle of steps, and repeat. You have to have some time to spend. It isn't really a spectator sport.

“Exercising your OCD?” Mariel asks.

“More like playing with dolls in extreme slow motion,” David says, using the caliper to measure the position of the figure's left hand. We are working on a wave.

Mariel looks around the lab. “Where did all this equipment come from?”

“Someone donated it,” David explains, motioning for me to take the shot. “An anonymous donor. The prevailing theory is that Wallman bought it all himself with the money he saved by not having a house and sleeping in his office. There's some pretty cool stuff down here.”

“Can I try?”

I look at David. He shrugs and shows Mariel how to manipulate the little figure. We get most of the wave done.

Wallman wanders over, eating a sandwich. “You should be using a green screen behind that,” he says, then wanders away again.

“Do you know what a green screen is?” I ask David. I don't know why I ask. I can tell he has no idea from the look on his face.

“Does this mean we have to do all of that over again?” Mariel sounds stricken. We've been down here for the better part of a forty-minute period.

“Only if we want him to wave,” David says, rubbing his nose with the palm of his hand. “So, Mariel, what are you doing tomorrow in study hall?”

Fourteen screens, each with its own sticky floor

The only actual homework for any of Wallman's courses is that you have to go see movies. Wallman shows some himself using a digital projector and a portable screen. His choices tend to be obscure or disgusting, sometimes both obscure and disgusting. Afterward he leads a discussion of the film's technical qualities. Content is irrelevant to Wallman. Sometimes he requires us to attend specific films in actual theaters. Last semester he sent David and me to watch an animation festival that was showing only at an arts theater in Charlotte. It was a two-hour drive each way on a school night, but it was worth it. Some weeks he just tells us to go see a movie.

“Movie?” David asks. It's a Thursday, but it does count as homework.

“Yeah,” I answer.

“7:23?” he asks.

“Great,” I answer.

But here's the deal. It is 7:15. I am waiting to be picked up by my friend David. What makes this not a date?

Okay. For starters, he's not paying. But would he pay
even if it was a date? Do people take each other to the movies? It sounds like something my parents would have done when they dated. My mother has this story she always tells about my dad being really late for their first date and how she sat, all dressed and made up, waiting for him. They never made it to the movie. Wait, what did they do if they didn't make it to the movie? Is that a story about my parents having sex? Why does my mother tell this story? Am I the girl here, waiting for David to come pick me up? No. Things are different, and this isn't a date.

Two. David and I have been going out for months. Going out to movies and parties and things, not
going out
. But if he was always gay, is it possible that we were
going out
going out and I didn't know about it? Can someone be accidentally dating?

Three. No kissing. No sex. No touching at all. Can't be a date, can it?

David picks me up. We go to see the movie and sit side by side in the nearly empty theater. I eat popcorn and stay well within the limits of my seat space. David doesn't seem any different. On the way home we talk a little about what we want to do with our film. We're just friends seeing a movie. What is wrong with me?

My bedroom

When I get home, waiting for me on the floor of my bedroom on a pile of fetid escapees from the laundry hamper
is a small paperback book. It looks gray and cold, almost lonely. The cover is a black-and-white photograph of a guy in overalls with his mouth slightly open, his hair standing up in the wind. He does not look happy. A white box bisected by a thin black line sits two-thirds of the way down the page and contains only six words written in some odd, asymmetrical type. Above the line: John Steinbeck. Below the line:
The Grapes of Wrath
. There is nothing on the cover of this book that makes me want to open it.

I do not pick up the book. I do not want to read this book. I feel a surge of anger at having been asked to read this book. Isn't wrath a kind of anger? Do I have to read the book? I have to write a paper on this book, but does that mean I actually have to read it first?

I call David. He can't have been home for long. Does David wear pajamas?

“I don't want to read
The Grapes of Wrath
,” I tell him.

“That would make writing the paper harder.” He is being so unnecessarily rational. After all, I took really good notes in class; surely I could just fake this one through. Maybe my notes weren't that good, but I took notes; that has to be enough. Okay, my notes suck, but I wrote down words in my notebook and mostly listened. How much do I need to know to write this paper? I'm pretty sure I remember most of the characters' names.

“Come on,” I say confidently, “how hard can it be to fake a paper?” He wouldn't know. Neither would I. We're the good kids. We work hard at school. We sit up in class and take notes. We read the syllabus and study for tests. What is wrong with us?

School

There are six conversations. It helps to memorize the proper responses.

Most frequent:

“How did you do on the (test, paper, project, lab report, SATs)?”

“Okay, I guess.” (Vague, never say, “Really good!”)

Regular:

“You got an extra (pen, pencil, piece of paper, copy of your math homework)?”

No verbal response required. Nod and hand over. If the request is for a cigarette, smile weakly and shake your head.