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

by Steven Goldman

  “That wasn’t Amanda?”

  “No, Amanda no longer speaks to me. I didn’t take her to the prom.”

  Dad looks confused. David’s parents hadn’t specified much more than gender before driving the other offending party home, leaving me on the front porch waiting for him. “Weren’t you supposed to take Amanda to the prom?”

  “Originally, yes, but I took Danielle.”

  “Oh, right. Well, what do you think Danielle’s parents would say?”

  “I don’t know. She dumped me.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “About 10:30.”

  The light turns green. “So, who were you in David’s bed with?”

  “M.C.”

  “Our M.C.?”

  I nod.

  “I think maybe you’d better tell me the whole story.”

  So I tell my father most of the story, except for the part about peeing on my pants and David accusing me of stomping on his heart. With these omissions, the story is a lot shorter and makes almost no sense, but my father appears to be happy that I’m confiding in him at all.

  “That would explain why David is sleeping on our couch,” Dad tells me as we pull up to our house.

  It doesn’t, not exactly, but at least I now know where he is.

  I can’t tell whether I wake him up when I come in or whether he was already awake and just lying there with his eyes closed. Either way, when I walk in he opens his eyes. He doesn’t look at me, though. He just stares at the ceiling. I’m not sure what to make of that.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “Since I left the prom. Where have you been?”

  “Your house.”

  “Why?”

  “I was looking for you.”

  “I was here,” David says and sits up. He is dressed in his tuxedo shirt and pants. His hair is matted down on one side and sticking straight up on the other. He reaches over to the coffee table and retrieves his glasses. His face without the glasses looks blank, unfinished. When he puts them on and looks up, he’s the David I know. I realize that I had been waiting to gauge his expression. How angry is he?

  David smiles. A full smile is a rare event, and it catches me off guard.

  “So you were waiting at my house?”

  I nod.

  “Don’t you think that’s funny?”

  Maybe. “David, there’s something else I think you should know.”

  “Can we get coffee first?”

  “Not here. My parents never wash the coffeepot.”

  “Or vacuum the sofa. Is this thing made of dog hair?”

  Not really funny

  We go to the Waffle House since it’s open all night. It isn’t a long drive and we don’t talk much on the way. David spends most of the ride trying to get his neck to crack. We are both in our tuxedo remnants, except I changed into a pair of jeans. I may have to bleach the rentals. We look like we could use some coffee.

  The Waffle House is always half-full anytime you go. Two in the afternoon looks a lot like two in the morning. But you haven’t had a real Waffle House experience unless you’ve slid into one of the vinyl booths at about 4 a.m. It is still only about half-full, but at 4 a.m. it is half-full of the hard core. If you’re there at that time it is because you have been up all night or because you have some reason to wake up while it is still night. It is truck drivers, club closers, insomniacs, medical residents, and some people who look like they might not have a bed they could go to. There are early risers too, the kind of people who have showered, shaved, and read most of the paper before the coffee arrives. They sit on the stools impatiently waiting for the rest of the world to get it together. We choose a booth near the window, since you never voluntarily take one near the bathroom, and order our hash browns, eggs, bacon, and pancakes. And coffee. We both need coffee.

  “Okay. Tell me. What is it that I should know?”

  “I wasn’t by myself when I went to look for you.”

  “Couldn’t have been Danielle, must have been M.C.”

  I nod.

  “So?”

  “Well, we waited for you a long time and we had the light off because we had crawled through the window and we didn’t want to wake up your parents and then we were kissing and then …”

  “You had sex with M.C. in my bed?” Two older guys at the counter turn and look at us. They are up-all-nighters and look a little bleary-eyed, but that caught their attention. The waitress brings our coffee and I wait until she leaves. The counter guys have turned back to their eggs.

  “No. We didn’t get that far,” I whisper. “But your parents found us in your bed and M.C. wasn’t completely in her dress anymore and they freaked out a little and then called our parents …”

  I look up and David is holding his hand under his nose, having some sort of convulsion. “Ouch,” he says. “I just snorted coffee out my nose.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” he says. Then he breaks down and giggles. David has deep giggles, nearly silent. He finally recovers and asks me, “You don’t find any of this funny, do you?”

  “Getting caught with M.C.…”

  “My prom date.”

  “Your prom date in your bed by your parents?”

  “Not funny?”

  “Not funny.”

  “There’s something you should know, too,” David says, taking another sip of his coffee and making a face. “Pass the sugar. Thanks. I took your sister home last night.”

  “You slept with my sister?” I say this a little louder than I meant to and several of the early-morning regulars turn around to look at us. One of the guys at the counter nearly chokes on his toast.

  David smiles and gives me his what-an-idiot headshake. “I’m gay, Mitchell.”

  I will myself not to look around to see the regulars’ reaction to that statement.

  “I know. But I thought maybe something changed.”

  “No, I’m still gay.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I tell him. David actually laughs. Something has changed, and it isn’t his sexual orientation.

  David takes another sip of his coffee and readjusts his glasses. “When I left the prom, I went and picked up the car. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I almost ran over these two people stumbling down the ramp. I looked up and realized it was Seth and Carrie. Did they even make it into the prom? I don’t remember seeing them.”

  “I was a little preoccupied. I didn’t notice.”

  “Anyway, Seth was so stoned he couldn’t stand up and he was leaning heavily on Carrie, who seemed sober but totally pissed off. Well, she had cause. He had puked all over her dress.” I grimace. That’s pretty gross. It wasn’t a great clothing night for the Wells family. “Anyway, she flagged me down and I helped her load Seth into the backseat. Then she looked down at her dress and let loose the longest string of obscenities I have heard someone use in one sentence—male or female. It was something. Usually when someone’s mad, they use the same three cuss words over and over. Carrie emptied out the dictionary. Then she looks up at me, smiles, and asks for my tux jacket. Right there in the parking lot, she puts on the tux jacket, buttons it up, and slides off her dress. She’s not shy, is she?”

  “Never has been.”

  “Well, she takes the dress, balls it up, and throws it at Seth, calls him a few more names. Then she climbs in the passenger’s seat, turns to me sweetly, and asks if I can take her home. So I did. We dropped Seth off on his front porch first—his mother might be a little surprised when she walks out in her bathrobe to fetch the morning paper—and we went home and sat up and talked.”

  “You and Carrie?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t tell me she had read my letter.”

  “Well, it’s not like I showed it to her. She went in my desk.”

  “I know.” David pauses while the waitress lays down our food. I realize that I’m actually pretty hungry.

  “She called me a chickenshit.”
>
  “That sounds like Carrie.”

  “Yeah, your sister has balls. She thinks that I, um … had a thing for you because you’re safe. Saved me from having to really deal with my sexuality by focusing on someone who I knew wasn’t going to do anything anyway. Keeps it all abstract. Asexual.”

  I think I’m offended. “How does she know? I could be gay.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m not. Do you think she’s right?”

  David begins to cut his pancakes. There is a methodology to his pancake slicing, first lengthwise strips and then even crosscuts. Only when they are reduced to little squares does he allow himself a bite. He doesn’t look up, but his voice is steady. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure what I want.”

  “You sound like Danielle.”

  “She knew what she wanted. Sorry, that’s not fair. It sucked what happened last night. I was a sucky friend too. I could have been more … something. Supportive. Laughed harder after you pissed on yourself. Something.”

  “You weren’t much help.”

  “Yeah. I know. So I talked to Carrie and she goes off to bed, not with me, and I go outside and get back in my car. I had decided I was going to go up to find Mariel and hang out at the lake and pretend the prom never happened. But I don’t have the address and, as you know, I don’t have a cell phone. I almost decide to just drive up there anyway and try to find them, since I know what little town they’re in, and it sounds like something you’d be willing to do with me, and only you’d be willing to do with me. I look over at the empty passenger seat and something you said once started going through my mind. I think it was when I was puking in your driveway, but you told me that you needed me to be your friend. You were probably just trying to get me out of your yard, but it didn’t feel like nothing. It felt like something I wasn’t willing to give up on yet.”

  David doesn’t look up as he says this, but I know he’s not talking to his hash browns. When he does look up it’s only to shrug and start forking more food into his mouth. We sit silently for a minute or two, then he asks about how I got out of the bathroom and I tell him. “Only Louis could pull that off,” he says, shaking his head. He then orders a second round of onion-smothered, cheese-covered hash browns and I drink more coffee. The counter guys are still there when we pay our bill, but most of the late-nighters have moved on and the more normal hardworking early-morning types have taken over.

  Not so bad

  David seems more relaxed than I have seen him in a long time as we pull out of the Waffle House parking lot.

  “What is with you this morning?” I have to ask.

  “I don’t know. I got to do some thinking last night. You know, we aren’t paraplegics.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we aren’t homeless and our parents don’t beat us …”

  “And we have all of our teeth.”

  “And we have all of our teeth. We’re going to be seniors next year and then go to college.” I wait, but this appears to be the end of his soliloquy.

  “Okay. So?”

  “So,” David says, smiling again, “we’re not doing so bad.”

  We ponder this for a while. David pulls into my driveway and I open the car door. I feel like I’m supposed to say something now, but for the life of me I can’t think what. David doesn’t help, he just looks at me expectantly, like he also thinks I should say something, but I doubt he knows what it is either. All I actually say is, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” which seems like enough. Statement, not a question. Punctuation matters.

  CHAPTER 32

  Monday, Again

  Curtis returns

  And suddenly Curtis is back. We walk into class and there he is. He doesn’t explain his absence, doesn’t even greet us, although something in his attempt at ruthless normalcy makes me think he is pleased to be back. The desk, moved to the front of the room by Ms. Chimneystack, is back against the side wall, the stool back in front, and he is already lecturing and writing on the board before we even have a chance to sit down.

  “I’m assuming that you have at least begun Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is easily the most accessible novel Joyce wrote—Dubliners doesn’t count because it is a collection of short stories and not a novel—but despite the relative ease with which an even moderately attentive reader would comprehend this work, most of you will no doubt complain that it is much too difficult, and it certainly will be if you don’t bother to read it. I’d also recommend Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which is not Joyce but Dylan Thomas, but it has a wonderful title, it’s not a bad bit of poetry, and it makes a nice companion piece and a wonderful graduation gift.”

  Curtis pauses for a moment and looks at me. It looks like he’s about to smile, but instead he picks up his monologue at the same rapid pace. “Let’s start at the beginning, which is a great place to start for every book, except perhaps Finnegans Wake, where the beginning is the predicate of the last sentence, but you haven’t read that and, in all likelihood, never will. Would you please get settled, class has begun.”

  It certainly has. I’m not sure whether he is nervous or has simply stored up several weeks’ worth of pompous energy. He talks without pausing for forty-five minutes and then dismisses us with “Please come prepared to discuss the first forty pages tomorrow,” which is Curtis code for “Tomorrow we are having a pop quiz.” He then turns back to the board to write his notes for the next class.

  “Welcome back,” Louis grumbles as he leaves. It sounds like sarcasm, but it’s honest in its own way.

  I had been practicing my “I heard about your mother and I’m glad that she’s recovering” line, but I’m not sure I can get it out. Curtis, finished scrawling on the board, turns around and seems to be surprised to find me standing there. He smiles at me and nods. I smile back—at least I think that’s what my face is doing. It is, for a moment, like we’re talking but we aren’t saying anything. He picks up his chalk, like he just thought of something new to write, and I pick up my backpack and move toward the door.

  Dr. VandeNeer

  The man looks so sincere. White hair, cut short with no signs of a creeping forehead or encroaching baldness, early sixties, large, but he carries his weight well. He exudes warmth and trust. An ordained minister and CEO of a successful day school, Dr. VandeNeer has chosen his vocations well.

  With everything that’s happened, I’d almost forgotten that I still hadn’t had my audience with the headmaster so that he could pass judgment on my crimes. His assistant, who is much more polite than Sorrelson’s, casually approached me in the hallway on my way into chemistry to let me know that the doctor had been away and was sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk last week, but if I could come to the office during lunch, he would have time to meet with me. Mariel, in a quiet show of sympathy, does the entire lab by herself without my input while I sit on a chair and try to dredge up some emotion at my impending punishment. I am so burnt out from the weekend that I’m not sure I even care what happens to me next.

  When I go to the office at lunch, David is waiting for me.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “I made half of the film,” he says.

  “But you weren’t the one who turned it in as an English project.”

  “I believe you are in trouble because of the content, not the fact that it was a shitty substitute for a three-to-five-page paper on The Grapes of Wrath. I helped with the content.”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Actually,” he says, “I do.”

  Dr. VandeNeer invites us into his office, three sides of which are covered from floor to ceiling in dark maple bookshelves, filled neatly with books that might have been chosen for the deep, rich colors of their spines, but I suspect that he has actually read most of them. No book jackets, all hardbacks. His desk is just this side of imposing, with enough paper and scattered correspondence to make it acceptably active, a true working space but also spare: solid, oak, no computer
, a plain black phone. I check to make sure the phone has buttons, half expecting a rotary dial.

  He wears a gray cashmere sweater, no stains, no dog hair, over a pale blue oxford shirt tucked neatly into gray slacks. Unscuffed loafers complete the ensemble. Not a hair out of place, no lunch remnants in his teeth. The one flaw in his appearance is a clearly visible booger hanging from the hairs in his left nostril. This commands my attention for the entirety of the interview. It’s hard to concentrate on what he is saying, or at least it would be if what he’s saying weren’t so shocking.

  “Are you here as legal representation or moral support?” he asks David.

  “Neither. I helped make the video. Mitchell didn’t tell anyone that because he didn’t want to get me in trouble. We were supposed to turn it in together, but I chickened out.”

  Dr. VandeNeer looks at David carefully without speaking. He’s not angry and he isn’t accusing David of lying, but his eyes are probing for a truth he knows he hasn’t heard yet. Then he smiles, as if he now has the answer he was looking for.

  “I apologize for not attending to this matter sooner,” he tells us in a smooth Southern drawl. “Mr. Sorrelson gave me the DVD last week. I quite enjoyed your cartoon. Is it easy to make copies?”

  “You enjoyed our film?” David asks.

  “I thought it was hysterical.”

  “You weren’t offended?”

  He smiles warmly and his breath comes out in a half chortle. “Was it meant to be offensive?”

  God, he’s good at this.

  “Not to you. Possibly to Steinbeck,” I volunteer.

  “He’s dead, you know. Makes him an easy target.” Dr. VandeNeer raises his eyebrows and laughs again, making the booger dance a little, but it hangs on. Sensing my discomfort, he continues, “The Adam and Eve sequence is clearly modeled after Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights—quite clever but a mite obscure even for honors English. Not many high-school students are familiar with fourteenth-century medieval painters.”

  “Bosch is Mr. Wallman’s favorite painter,” I find myself explaining. I don’t mention that he uses that painting as an example in his lecture about sex and violence throughout history.