Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath

by Steven Goldman

  Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About The Grapes of Wrath

  STEVEN GOLDMAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 Party (a, to, of)

  Chapter 2 Two Guys

  Chapter 3 Dark, Slightly Smelly Places in My Soul (and Elsewhere)

  Chapter 4 Monday

  Chapter 5 Godless, Homosexual, Vegetarian Communists

  Chapter 6 The Masturbation Chapter

  Chapter 7 Hypotheticals

  Chapter 8 Way Too Much Whining and Some Thoughts on Pissing

  Chapter 9 Jerks, Myoclonic and Otherwise

  Chapter 10 Balls, Butts, Puke, and The Grapes of Wrath

  Chapter 11 A Short Dramatic Presentation of a Wells Family Dinner, Followed by a Quick Review of the Entire History of My Love Life

  Chapter 12 Showtime

  Chapter 13 Missing—One English Teacher, Last Seen Wearing a Tie and Carrying a Really Boring Novel

  Chapter 14 Oncoming Trains and a Large Variety of Similarly Strained Metaphors

  Chapter 15 You Know, Guy Stuff

  Chapter 16 Seven Rhetorical Questions I Would Like Answered

  Chapter 17 Letters

  Chapter 18 Two More Theories About Curtis and a Car Ride with Louis

  Chapter 19 Mitchell Gets a Haircut

  Chapter 20 Almost Poetry—A Party in Five Haiku

  Chapter 21 A Catalog of the Basic Emotions of a Seventeen-Year-Old Boy

  Chapter 22 Realities and a Not-Quite Lie or Two

  Chapter 23 The Day the World Changed (Some Observations About Breasts)

  Chapter 24 Life Is Different

  Chapter 25 Words I Thought Were English

  Chapter 26 More Words I Thought Were English

  Chapter 27 Pure Terror

  Chapter 28 WQQD

  Chapter 29 Prom and Punishment

  Chapter 30 Monosyllabic Utterances

  Chapter 31 Regulars

  Chapter 32 Monday, Again

  Acknowledgments

  Imprint

  For Kat and my boys,

  and although he and I aren’t in this book,

  Bert too

  CHAPTER 1

  Party (a, to, of)

  We are …

  We are standing at a party, a still, quiet eddy in the swirl of motion and noise. David is holding a can of Diet Coke as if it could be a beer, but his facial expression and confident stance make it clear that he wants it to be a Diet Coke, and who are you to question that. I am holding a beer, sort of wishing it were a Diet Coke. We aren’t talking, but not because we aren’t talking. We aren’t talking because this is what we do at parties. We stand here. “Here” is always somewhere near the midsection of the party animal. Not on the fringes (basement playroom, upstairs bedrooms, backyard), because that’s where everything happens (drugs, sex, fights). We aren’t really up for any of that kind of stuff and no one really wants us there anyway. Not near the front door either; that would invite too much scrutiny, imply some sort of eagerness. Frontdoor people want to be seen.

  We don’t want to appear to want to be here. Everything we do implies that we might not need to be here long at all. Any moment now, we could head out because there is something better happening somewhere else. There isn’t, but we would like to give that impression. We stand in the den off to one side with our backs near the wall, holding our Diet Coke and our beer, nodding every once in a while at people going by, but not really talking to them any more than we are talking to each other.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask David, after about an hour of this.

  “Mitchell,” David answers after a sufficiently long pause to show that he’s in no hurry to answer the question, “we are partying.”

  I nod.

  We may be here to party, but I am here because David gave me a ride. David always gives me rides. That’s how we talk about it. He called me this afternoon and said, “I think I’m going to this party, need a ride?” I said yes. Listening to us talk, you would guess that our lives are mostly about transportation.

  David gave me a ride because we are friends. We are friends because we have been sitting together at lunch since day one of junior year. We sit together at lunch because we are the only two juniors who signed up for an otherwise freshman-filled art course and therefore we are the only two juniors who have early lunch. Following this logic, I realize that I am standing at this party because I chose to take ancient history rather than art in ninth grade. The sheer randomness impresses me.

  From my post by the wall, I watch Danielle sit in a chair. She is dressed in jeans and a sweater, her hair is pulled back and her lips are shiny. A purposeful, very put-together casualness. Her legs are crossed at the knees and she is leaning just slightly forward, intent but not committed to the conversation. She’s smiling the kind of perfect smile that has to be fake because it looks too natural. Ryan, all six feet and change of him, stands in front of her, animation to her stillness. He’s not dancing, but it is a dance: the way he moves his hands, tilts his head, slowly works her smile into a giggle and then a laugh. They are completely by themselves in a room full of people.

  “Couldn’t you just puke?” Mariel says. I hadn’t realized that she was beside me or that it was so obvious that I was staring at Danielle and Ryan. “True love and all that crap. David.”

  “Mariel,” David answers with a very slight nod.

  “You should be pacing yourself,” Mariel says. “You know what they say about drinking carbonated beverages and driving.”

  “Mitchell’s got my back. He’s just drinking beer.”

  Mariel takes a pull from her bottle of water. I may be holding a beer, but we are the lightweight corner. We stand quietly for a few minutes.

  “I was telling Mitchell here that he should go out for wrestling next year,” David says as if that conversation hadn’t taken place at lunch.

  Mariel makes a face.

  “What’s wrong with wrestling?” he asks.

  “Nothing, as long as you’re naked and in love.” She gives me a quick scan top to bottom. Mariel is a fellow nerd. If she weren’t, her light brown skin, long black curls, and high cheekbones might make her intimidating. “Field hockey,” she says after thinking for a moment.

  “It’s a girl’s sport,” I point out.

  “Trevor plays it.”

  “They make him wear a skirt.”

  “Which he looks great in. He also rides to games on a bus with twenty-four girls who think he’s cool. Beats wrestling.”

  “You can’t play field hockey,” David tells me earnestly after Mariel moves on. “Trevor is the only person in the school who can possibly get away with playing field hockey, because he’s six-two, has an Australian accent, and every female in the school is dying to jump on his stick.”

  I’m five-seven, no accent, and there’s no line of excited females wanting to jump on any of my sports equipment. I’m not Trevor. I assure David that I’m not planning on going out for field hockey.

  We aren’t …

  Two hours later, I follow David to his car. He wonders out loud whether it will be expensive to replace the hedges that someone drove through. I have no opinion on hedge prices.

  David drives me home. My sister is also being dropped off. We sit in the car while she makes out with some guy on our front porch. Neither of us can tell who the guy is from the back. She has to know we are sitting here, but she has chosen to ignore us. Carrie doesn’t embarrass easily. It makes me uncomfortable to watch my littl
e sister kiss whoever it is she’s kissing, although David notes that he is nicely dressed and they are really only kissing, not doing much touching. He guesses that she isn’t convinced about this guy. They finish kissing and Carrie goes inside followed by our dog, which was also watching. The male, who we can now identify as Peter, is in our class, which makes him only a grade ahead of Carrie. For her, that’s slumming. He smiles as he walks past us, like maybe he just won something. Neither of us are convinced that he has a rat’s chance in a trash compactor of ever kissing her again, but I’m guessing he doesn’t know that yet. Peter isn’t the kind of guy who’ll stop and talk to us—not in the hallway at school, not at a party, and certainly not after playing mash-mouth with my sister on our front porch. He pretends he doesn’t see us. We stare at him, in the hopes of making him feel a little self-conscious. Hard to tell if it works.

  David and I don’t play mash-mouth. We aren’t a couple. We’re just two guys coming home from a party.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two Guys

  David is gay

  David is gay. He told me at lunch.

  I think I said something like, “I’m sure they think we’re gay,” about the freshmen who see us always eating lunch together, and he said, “Mitchell, I am gay,” and I laughed because I was sure he was joking. It didn’t sound like a joke, but David never sounds like he’s joking.

  “I don’t think you’re gay,” I said confidently, as if I was reassuring him he wasn’t dying of some horrifying multisyllabic disease.

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re gay.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does everybody know this except me?”

  “No.”

  “Does anyone know this besides me?”

  “No. Just you.”

  And you tell me at lunch? He picks up his apple and holds it in his hand like maybe he’s forgotten what to do with it. His mouth is set with his usual confidence, but his eyes, behind his glasses, don’t seem as sure. He’s testing the waters, waiting for my reaction. Usually I get the feeling that he doesn’t care about what I think, but this is different.

  “I’m not,” I say, trying not to sound defensive.

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. I can tell.”

  “No, you can’t. I couldn’t tell about you.”

  “Well, I can.”

  “Because you’re gay?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, maybe I could be gay.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m not. Are you sure you are?” Maybe there was time to change his mind.

  David rolls his eyes.

  I start to ask why he’s telling me, but he’s telling me because I’m his best friend. He doesn’t look any different to me than he did yesterday, but I guess he was gay then too, so I’m not sure why he should look any different. If anything, he looks more like himself than usual. Only David would make a confession like this at lunch.

  “How long have you known?”

  “I think I’ve always known.”

  “How come you’ve never told anyone?”

  “Would you have?”

  Maybe, but this is not the way I would have chosen to break the news. “Are you going to tell anyone?” I ask. “I mean, besides me.”

  “Do you tell anyone you’re straight?”

  No, I don’t. Should I be telling people I’m straight? Is it wrong to assume that they should assume I am? I try to look like I’m taking all of this in stride. It is the reaction I think David wants. I take a bite of my sandwich and wonder what I’m supposed to say next. I don’t ask him if he has done anything with a guy because I’m not sure I want to know. I’m much happier assuming David’s homosexuality is simply hypothetical—much like my heterosexuality. I am convinced I’m straight, but it remains largely untested.

  “Is there some reason you’re bringing this up now?” I ask.

  “You brought it up.”

  Did I? We’re three-quarters of the way through our junior year of high school. For the last eight months, we’ve sat at this same table for lunch. We’ve seen on average a movie a week, hung out at each other’s houses, gone to maybe seven parties together, and once drove to Thomasville to see the giant chair that sits on Main Street. Had I not noticed my best friend was gay all of that time? It just never came up?

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dark, Slightly Smelly Places in My Soul (and Elsewhere)

  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. M
aybe 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?”