Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath (5 page)

1) I could tell Louis, in a shrill voice, that I feel strongly that his use of the word “fag” is derogatory and insensitive. Louis would, of course, immediately apologize and never use the word again. He would also never suspect that one of
us is actually gay or mercilessly make fun of me for the rest of my high-school career.

2) I could respond with some witty comeback. That would require me to think of some witty comeback.

3) I could punch him for calling me a fag. It would be an overreaction and I've never punched anyone before and he outweighs me by a good twenty pounds and if he decided to punch me back I could end up in detention or the hospital, but I wouldn't just be letting it go.

4) I could just let it go.

I just let it go. So does David.

Scenario 2: Say there was this teacher …

There is something strange going on with M.C. First of all, she signed up to do scenery for the play. M.C. has always been theatrical, but never really into theater. She is not a techie. The techies are a small, fiercely independent tribe at White Day, very alternative, well-pierced, dread-locked, clothed in black. M.C. sometimes comes to school wearing a large straw hat.
She is not a techie
.

On Tuesday, David doesn't have practice but M.C. isn't waiting for us with Carrie in the parking lot. Stranded by herself in the backseat of David's car, Carrie looks a little lost.

David is innocent enough to ask, “Where's M.C.?”

“Painting flats.”

“Why?” There is no sarcasm in David's voice. It just isn't one of those things he would ever volunteer to do.

“For the play. They're scenery.” I know that this answer means “Leave me alone.” David, however, doesn't.

“I know what they are, why is M.C. doing it?”

Carrie squirms. She has lost a little of her normal confident swagger. She could say she doesn't know, but we wouldn't believe her.

“She's got it for one of the tech-heads?” David asks with a smile, which is as close as he will get to a wink.

Carrie nods.

“Which one?”

“Curtis.”

David looks at me. I'm trying to make sense out of it too.

“We have a tech-head named Curtis?” I ask, hoping that someone I don't know is working crew. Mr. Curtis, our English teacher, is the faculty advisor for the drama club, but …

“
Mr
. Curtis.”

This shuts both David and me up. We don't mention M.C. again for the rest of the ride home. Once home, however, I corner Carrie in the living room. This requires some explanation.

“She has a crush. You've had crushes on teachers.”

I can't decide whether the “you” is generic or really me, but since for the last two years I have had the same fairly lurid fantasy about Ms. St. Claire, one of the art teachers, posing nude for class, I don't contest the accusation.

“But Curtis?”

“He's young, disheveled, he's got a rugged, intellectual look. Handsome in that sort of way. Nice butt. Sort of M.C.'s type, if you think about it.”

Is Curtis young? Does he really have a nice butt? I have never thought about Curtis's butt. I wonder if I have a nice butt. Has anyone ever noticed my rear end?

“But he's a … a teacher.”

“Very observant, Mitchell. She has a crush on a teacher. He's twenty-eight, she's sixteen. Stranger things have happened.”

“Has something happened?” I am totally disturbed by this idea. I can't even get around the idea that she would think of Curtis in that way. I'm stunned.

“Relax, Cotton Mather, nothing has happened.” Carrie sounds dismissive, but she looks worried. She isn't liking this either.

We don't discuss it, but it is now on my mind. I go to my room and purposefully don't fantasize about naked art teachers, and particularly not about Curtis's butt. M.C. comes over after dinner and I can't look at her. She and Carrie head off to the mall, and for once I want to go
with them so I can listen to the conversation. This would count as the first time I have ever been interested in their conversation.

On Wednesday, I make the mistake of asking David.

I try to just work it into the conversation. Casually, as we walk back from lunch and no one's around, I ask about his German test, what he thought of the speaker at morning assembly, and whether he thought Mr. Curtis was handsome, you know, in that sort of rugged, intellectual kind of way.

David looks at me for a long time, like he's waiting for the punch line. His face remains blank, but I can see what's working behind that look. He knows that I've asked him this because he's gay, and therefore now an expert on male attractiveness. He knows that my asking is my attempt to acknowledge this fact that we haven't mentioned since his lunch announcement last week. This is my way of reassuring him that it's all cool, that we can have conversations like this. Only we can't. It's a little too personal, a little too forced, not something he wants to discuss with me. He licks his lips and tugs at his glasses and says, “No.”

“I don't think so either,” I say, way too quickly. It feels like someone has moved our lockers since yesterday. They aren't usually this far away.

“You know, I was thinking,” I say, trying very hard to change the topic. “I might stay late and work on our film. I had some ideas. Would that be okay?”

“Sure. Knock yourself out.”

“You have baseball today, right?”

“You need a ride home?”

“Just this once.”

Scenario 3: What if two mild-mannered honors students …

David meets me in the editing room after baseball practice. I have spent the last three and a half hours putting our film together. There are a few parts David hasn't seen yet. I am particularly proud of my
Grapes of Wrath
–inspired dust bowl scene. I talked one of the maintenance staff into letting me empty the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag onto the floor. He gave me a look like maybe I was off my meds, but he stayed and watched as I dropped all of the major characters one by one into the pile, which produced wonderful plumes of debris. When I was done he just shook his head sadly while I helped him clean it back up. After I added the screams to the soundtrack, it became one of my favorite sequences.

“You know,” David says, watching it through the second time, “Wallman is going to love this. It has everything he loves about movies: senseless violence, lots of blood, and you even got sex in there—well, not real sex but a good nude scene. They were naked in the opening, right?”

I fast-backward to the opening.

“It was a little hard to get them to look naked.”

“Eve's nipples look like buttons …”

“That's because they are buttons.”

“Oh. That would explain it. What are we using for a title?” David sits in the chair next to me and plays with the dials on the mixer.

“We still need to make a title sequence, but how does ‘Steinbeck Sucks' sound to you?”

“Great—a tribute to your English essay.”

“Which I still haven't written.”

“You know,” David says thoughtfully, “if we called it ‘Biblical Themes in
The Grapes of Wrath
,' we could turn it in to Curtis. We have, like, eight Steinbeck references—nine if you notice that the devil sort of looks like the picture of him on the back of the book.”

“Hey, why not? What's the worst thing that can happen?”

“We fail English. We are forced to endure ridicule and humiliation in front of our peers. Stress-induced hypertension and eventually death.”

“I mean besides that.”

5:32 a.m
.

It is 5:32. In less than two minutes, my alarm will go off. I hate waking up before the alarm.

I feel defeated. Absolutely, unquestionably, utterly, and hopelessly defeated. I do not want to go to school. I do not want to get out of bed. I can't imagine how I will get through the next sixty or so years of my life. I cannot write this paper.

It's just a paper. A stupid standard five-paragraph essay. The same stupid five-paragraph essay I have written approximately every two weeks since fifth grade. My self-esteem does not depend on whether this particular paper is good or bad. I have other sources of self-esteem. Not that I can come up with any right this moment, but I'm sure there is something about me that I can …

Maybe not. Maybe I am really as worthless as I feel right now. Mr. Rogers might have liked me just the way I
am, but I certainly don't. Everybody is special in their own way—how many times did we get that lecture? Followed by the same inane list: some are good at sports, some are artistic, some sing, some can do complicated math equations in their heads and will go on to win Nobel Prizes.

Let's review: I can't play sports, I'm not artistic, I can't sing, and I can barely add single digits in my head. The Nobel committee isn't likely to call. I'm good at this litany of self-pity. Do they give Nobel Prizes for whining? I cannot write this paper.

I can deal with the fact that I'm a hopeless dweeboid and that my grandmother, who is eighty-two and pushes an aluminum walker, has a more active social life than I do, but the one thing dweeboids are supposed to be good at is homework. I'm even a failure at being a dweeboid.

I cannot write this paper.

It is 5:34. The radio clicks, the static starts. I sit up, both feet on the ground. I stare at the offensive plastic cube for a full thirty seconds before turning it off.

I should have read the book over the weekend. And I really tried. At least I sort of tried. I opened it twice. It's not like it was the only assignment I had to finish. And Monday, there was a chem test to study for. What was I going to do, blow that off?

Last night I sat in front of the computer and held my hands over the keys. I typed my name, the date, and the title of the paper, erased it, typed it again. I changed
the font from Times New Roman to Courier to Arial. I considered adding my middle name, added it, changed my mind, deleted it. After several hours of not writing the paper, I set my alarm and went to bed, telling myself I would deal with it in the morning. Now it is morning. To be more specific, it is 5:36.

I pull myself out of bed. Still in my boxer shorts, I sit bare-chested at the computer.

I cannot write this paper.

6:14 a.m
.

“Mitchell—what time is it?”

“6:15.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes.”

There is silence on the other end of the line. It is an unhappy silence. I don't think David is eager to talk to me right now.

“Did I wake you up?” I ask, trying to sound surprised.

“Not directly. My mother just did that. To tell me you were on the phone.”

“Sorry. What time do you usually get up?”

“My alarm goes off in about ten minutes.”

So why are you so grumpy? A lousy ten minutes of sleep. I'm having a crisis here.

“If you had a cell phone, I could have called you without waking up your parents.” David doesn't own a cell
phone because he doesn't want anyone to be able to reach him wherever he is. I've suggested, any number of times, that he could screen his calls, leave it on vibrate or even silent. He has yet to see the utility.

“My parents were already awake. Mitchell, why are you calling me at 6:15 in the morning?”

“It's already 6:25. You'd have been awake now anyway.”

“Mitchell.”

“Have you written your paper?”

“The one that's due today?” As if he didn't know.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Don't turn it in. We'll turn in our film instead.”

David pauses. “You didn't write your paper.”

“Not exactly,” I admit. “Well, not at all. But your idea about turning in the film …”

“Was a joke,” David says slowly. Nothing about the way he says “joke” sounds funny.

“But I've been thinking. It really could work. It's creative, it's different, it's expressive, it's already mostly finished.” I can hear the skepticism in David's silence. “I'm going to talk to Curtis before class. If he says no, I'll admit I didn't write the paper. If he goes for it, we're golden. This has to be better than whatever you wrote about.”

I hear a shuffling noise that sounds like David is getting out of bed. Has he been lying in his bed this whole time?
Maybe sitting. He is on the move now. I just hope he's not going to the bathroom. I will not talk to someone in the bathroom, even if I woke them up. No, it sounds more like the kitchen. He's pouring himself something. Coffee? Juice?

“Mitchell,” he says in his best why-is-your-brain-up your-butt voice. “There are a couple of problems with this plan.” A pause, and I hear him take a slurp of whatever he's poured. “First of all, I wrote a damn good paper on the evolution of Joad's ethical sensibility …”

“Nice title.”

“Thank you.”

“But no colons.”

“You noticed. I'm branching out. Second, our film has almost nothing whatsoever to do with
The Grapes of Wrath
, which you might not have noticed since you haven't read the book …”

“I read some.”

“How much?”

“Three chapters. But I skipped ahead to the end so I know how it turns out. Or at least I read the last two pages where she, um … does that thing.”

“Third,” David continues, unimpressed, “it isn't a three-to-five-page paper about
The Grapes of Wrath
.”

“So does that mean you don't think it's a good idea?”

“Feel free to turn it in, just don't put my name on it. I have to go take a piss now.”

We hang up. I look at the blank page with a heading and no title. I never use the word “piss.” I never “take a piss.” I'm not sure where I would take it to. I pee. I need to learn to piss. I am not writing this paper.