Adam Selzer Read online

  On the outside, her house looked about like all the others in the area—just a normal white house. It was when you saw the inside that you realized that the people who owned the house weren’t your average denizens of Cornersville. The first thing you saw was a massive framed print of a skeleton with a cigarette hanging out of its mouth. All along the hallway leading into the kitchen were more weird prints like that. Melting clocks, hairy prostitutes, and all sorts of weird stuff, all by some of the great master painters. The smoking skeleton was a Van Gogh, for example.

  Anna led me into the living room, which was more of a library. There were shelves everywhere, all crammed with books. None of them looked like crappy cookbooks. I checked.

  “This is the best house ever,” I said. “You guys would be perfect for people playing ‘What Do They Have?’”

  “We’re national champs three years running,” she said. “Anyway, we like it.”

  It was the sort of house that made me want to make something of my life. I wanted to know all about the eighteenth century. I wanted art all over my walls, which, at the time, were covered mainly with posters for metal bands. Metal was cool and all, but the stuff around here was a whole different kind of cool. It was hip. It was intellectual. It represented the kind of lifestyle that accounting school would not get me ready for.

  And, just as much, I wanted Anna. I wanted to watch her read. I wanted to hear the noises her throat made when she drank a can of Coke. I wanted to feel her fingers running through my hair. I wanted to know what her teeth tasted like. But the thought of saying that out loud almost made me physically ill.

  “Well,” said Anna while I was looking at all the books on the shelves, “do you want to see how my movie came out?”

  “Of course,” I said. I sat down on the couch while she cued it up, and a large brown tabby cat jumped onto my lap.

  “Why, hello,” I said, stroking its ears.

  “That’s Spinach,” she said, sitting down next to me. “He won’t bite. But he likes watching TV.”

  My cat isn’t that friendly, especially around strangers. I think he’s been spooked by too many loud noises—and flooded basements—over the years.

  So Spinach the cat and I stared at the screen as the movie came up. The title was Smoking, Drugs, and Drinking: Three Ways to End Up Like a Dead Writer. The whole movie consisted of a bunch of pictures of authors with Anna doing voice-overs.

  First there was a picture of Mark Twain holding a pipe, and Anna’s voice said, “Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. He smoked like a chimney.”

  That was followed by a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who “drank like a fish.” Then came Edgar Allan Poe, who “really thought opium was keen.” This went on for a while, until you became quite aware that you were spending most of your English class studying a bunch of junkies. Then there was a shot of that painting of the smoking skeleton, and Anna’s voice said, “All of these people ended up dead. Some ended up dead in the gutter. Many were dirt poor when they died, even though they were famous. Still wanna take drugs?”

  And that was the end.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It was great,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it made me less likely to take up smoking. It didn’t make it more likely, I guess.

  Just about then, the door opened, and Anna’s father walked in. He was dressed in a brown tweed coat, the kind professors on TV always wear. I guess they wear them in real life, too. Not like inventors, who probably don’t really wear lab coats.

  “Hey, Anna,” he said.

  “Hi, Warren,” she replied. I knew she called her parents by their first names, but it still seemed weird.

  “And you must be Leon,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook. “We’ve met before, right?”

  “Just briefly,” I said.

  “How’s the avant-garde movie coming?” he asked. I guessed Anna had told him about it.

  “We were going to work on it today,” said Anna. “Did you get that movie you were talking about?” Her father held up an old videocassette.

  “Sure did,” he said. He turned to me. “I thought you guys should see this movie.”

  “Is it avant-garde?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Are you kidding? This one makes La Dolce Vita look like Bambi. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Sweet,” I said. “What’s it called?”

  “Un Chien Andalou,” he said. “It was made by these guys back in the twenties; one of them was Salvador Dalí, the guy who painted that picture in the hallway with the melting clocks. He was really a bizarre character. You two want some coffee? I’ll get some brewing.”

  Coffee? No one had ever offered me coffee before; most people were still offering me Kool-Aid. I had only had coffee once, after a band concert in fifth grade, during the three or four months that I played the trombone. At the reception after the concert, I’d tried to have a cup, but I accidentally got some out of a pot that had been turned off hours earlier, and the coffee in it was cold and disgusting. Still, I said, “Sure, that sounds good,” not wanting to look like a wimp.

  Anna and I followed him into the kitchen, where he fired up a coffee machine.

  “How was school today?” he asked Anna.

  “The usual bullshit,” she said. I tried to play it cool again, but I’d certainly never seen anyone say “bullshit” in front of her father. I’d always sort of imagined that if you cussed in front of your parents, a SWAT team would suddenly burst in through the windows and take you off to juvenile hall. But no one showed up, and her dad didn’t flinch.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll all be over in a couple of years. If you can get through junior high, you could go off to war and be fine.”

  A minute later he poured three cups of coffee. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I was under the impression that that made it tastier, and figured I could use all the help I could get. The coffee with cream was a light tan color, and it wasn’t bad. I figured I could get used to it.

  We all went into the living room, and Anna’s dad popped the movie into the player and turned on the TV.

  Man, if you’ve never seen Un Chien Andalou, and I really doubt you have, then I’m here to tell you that it is seriously messed up. It’s all black-and-white and silent, because it’s so old, but I don’t think putting it in color or having people talk could have possibly made it stranger.

  It turns out that “un chien andalou” is French for “a dog from Andalusia,” which has nothing to do with the movie. It opens with a shot of this guy sharpening his razor, like he’s going to shave, and then he uses it to slice his girlfriend’s eye open for no particular reason. Then he looks out the window for a long time, and spends a lot of time staring at his hands, which are covered in ants. Then, for some reason, a guy drags a grand piano, which has priests and dead donkeys on top of it, through the living room. Then, suddenly, after about fifteen minutes, it ends. Like I said, it was completely messed up. In a lot of ways, it seemed like a music video, but at least there’s a point to videos—they’re supposed to make you want to buy music. This seemed like it was just being weird for the sake of being weird.

  Anna turned off the TV and I just sort of stared at the blank screen for a while. That seemed like the thing to do.

  “That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “You know,” said Anna’s father, “when they first showed that movie, the guys who made it came with pockets full of rocks, in case the crowd rioted and they had to throw something at them.”

  “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?”