Castration Celebration

by Jake Wizner

  JANE (pulling away): Okay, that’s a picture I don’t need to see.

  DICK: You started it.

  JANE: I didn’t think you were going to turn it into some sick pornographic fantasy.

  DICK: Sorry. So what about tonight?

  JANE: I wish I could, but I’ve got to write a history essay and study for a calculus exam. (pressing against him) I’ll make it up to you Saturday night.

  DICK (embracing her): You will, will you? (They start to kiss, and then Dick abruptly pulls away.)

  JANE: What’s wrong?

  DICK (hits his hand to his head): Oh, no, I totally forgot.

  JANE: What?

  DICK: I have this family thing on Saturday. Some stupid dinner party at my cousins’ house in Marksburg. They do it every year. I don’t think I can get out of it.

  JANE (upset): But we were supposed to go out to dinner to celebrate our one-month anniversary.

  DICK: I know. I’d blow off the family thing, but my aunt has cancer, and my mom says this might be the last time she is able to have everybody over. I don’t think she’s going to make it another year.

  JANE: I’m so sorry.

  DICK: Yeah, it’s tough, especially for her kids. (shaking his head) The youngest one’s only fourteen. Listen. Why don’t we go out Sunday instead?

  JANE (sympathetically): Sure. You go and be with your family, and don’t worry about anything else. (giving Dick a hug) You’re a good guy, Dick.

  DICK: Not really.

  (Jane punches him playfully on the arm and walks off.)

  DICK (watches her disappear offstage): I’m going to hell for this one. (exits)

  (Curtain)

  “Okay,” Maxine said, “who can give me an idea for a protagonist?”

  “Bobo the Clown,” Bruce called out.

  Maxine wrote this on the board. “Okay. What’s Bobo’s objective?”

  “To graduate from clown school,” Trish said.

  Maxine finished writing this and turned to the class. “What are all the things that are going to make it difficult for Bobo to achieve his objective?”

  The answers came fast and furious, and Maxine did not even attempt to write them all down.

  “He can’t afford the tuition.”

  “He’s not funny.”

  “Somebody steals his clown shoes.”

  “He develops a severe allergy to clown makeup.”

  “A psychopathic clown killer is on the loose and he has to go into hiding.”

  “He’s an alcoholic.”

  “He’s white, and can’t get into any clown schools because of affirmative action,” Bruce said.

  “Okay,” Maxine said, cutting off the activity. “You have the idea.” She wrote the words STORY ENGINE on the board, and underneath them listed PROTAGONIST, OBJECTIVE, CONFLICT. “This is what drives your story. One or more main characters trying to achieve specific goals and having to overcome all kinds of challenges along the way.”

  “Didn’t we already go over this?” Bruce asked.

  Oh, shut up, Olivia thought.

  “We did, but it’s important enough to go over again. I want you all to go back to your plays and see if you can map out what your story engines are. I think many of you will find that you need to clarify your characters’ objectives and figure out how to increase the amount of conflict.”

  It was true, Olivia realized as she looked over her work. She had two protagonists, but it wasn’t entirely clear what they wanted that they hadn’t already found, and to this point there really hadn’t been any conflict to speak of. Perhaps now was the moment for things to fall apart and for the story really to kick into gear. Maybe the point was not that they had already gotten together, but whether they would be able to sustain what they had. And so the conflict—which she realized she had already set up—could be that Dick wouldn’t be able to keep his dick in his pants, and Jane would become bitter, disillusioned, and hell-bent on castration.

  “I’m going to have you pair up today so you can give each other feedback,” Maxine said. “I want you to focus first on tightening your story engines, and then you can ask for suggestions on anything you’re struggling with.” She looked around the room. “Choose someone you haven’t worked with yet this summer. It’s good to get a fresh set of eyes.”

  Olivia scanned the room, thinking she might ask Clarissa, a tall, glasses-wearing, slightly bucktoothed girl who always came to class alone and rarely spoke, except in response to someone else. Unfortunately, before Olivia could act on this impulse, Bruce came up and asked if she wanted to be partners with him.

  “I was actually about to ask Clarissa,” Olivia said.

  Bruce looked surprised. “Clarissa?” He turned. “Well, it looks like Trish is asking her.”

  “Oh, okay,” Olivia said, deflating a little.

  “So what do you say? You want to go work outside?”

  There was no way to say no without seeming like a total bitch.

  They found a place on the stairs and Olivia willingly agreed to discuss Bruce’s work first. His protagonist was a right-wing conservative college student named George, whose objective was to change the political culture of a radically left-wing university, portrayed as a haven for feminists, Communists, anarchists, and other morally objectionable individuals. The conflict mainly involved George taking on a sadistic, ultraliberal professor with a personal vendetta against him. An additional conflict involved his not getting thrown off-track by the various liberal coeds with whom he became sexually involved. It wasn’t terrible, Olivia thought, if only it weren’t so disgusting and offensive on so many levels.

  Olivia didn’t particularly want Bruce reading her script, so she kept the talk around his work going as long as possible. She asked lots of questions and listened to all of his ideas, offered a few suggestions, and prompted him to talk more, which was not so difficult.

  “Sorry we didn’t get to your play,” he said when time was up and they began walking back to class.

  “It’s okay. I enjoyed just working on yours.”

  “You’re a good partner,” he said. “We should work together again.”

  She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to notice.

  When class ended, Trish stayed behind to talk to Maxine, and Olivia began to walk back to the dorm by herself. She had not gone far when suddenly Bruce came up beside her.

  “Oh, hi,” she said with about as much enthusiasm as someone about to undergo Chinese water torture.

  “You going to lunch?” he asked.

  Oh God, was he serious? “I’m actually headed back to my dorm first.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  She tried to think of a graceful way to tell him to fuck off. Nothing came to mind. “I can just meet you at the dining hall,” she said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  This wasn’t happening. Why was he stalking her?

  They got to the dorm, and he followed her right up the stairs to her suite. Was he for real?

  “I’ll just run in,” she said, preempting him from trying to come inside. She prayed someone was there, so she wouldn’t be stuck going to lunch alone with him. Nobody was. Well, as soon as she got to the dining hall, she would take refuge at a table with people she knew.

  “Okay,” she said, coming back out.

  From across the courtyard, Max saw them leaving the dorm together and wondered who Bruce was. He thought about calling out for them to wait, but he needed to take a very large crap before lunch and figured that this wasn’t a subject he needed to revisit with Olivia.

  The program had movie nights on Fridays, showing films outdoors in the campus courtyard after it got dark. The first two Fridays it had been Annie Hall and North by Northwest. Tonight it was The Blues Brothers, a movie Max had seen many times.

  “But have you ever seen it when you were really high?” Zeke asked.

  And so before coming out, Max and Zeke got fried out of their minds.

  The movie hadn’t started
yet, but it seemed like everybody in the program was already there, and every patch of grass was occupied by groups of students talking, laughing, and scoping each other out.

  “This is crazy,” Max said. “Should we go look for Olivia and Trish and those guys?”

  “Let’s hang back here,” Zeke said. “I can’t deal with that many people.”

  “I’m just going to take a loop and see if they’re here,” Max said. It was a beautiful night, and he was feeling fantastic.

  He began to thread through the crowd and realized as he moved farther and farther into the middle of the mass how incredibly stoned he was. What the hell was he thinking? He should have stayed back and met up with them after the movie. He turned around and suddenly began to feel extremely boxed in. Focusing on the ground right in front of him, he pushed forward slowly, careful not to step on anyone, and managed to get himself back to the outside of the crowd. He felt like everyone was looking at him and realizing how fucked up he was. Why the hell had he smoked so much?

  He was so caught up in trying to keep from bugging out that at first he didn’t fully register the fact that Olivia was standing nearby, scanning the crowd. As he watched her, the boy Max had seen her with earlier that day came up beside her and draped his arm over her shoulders. They talked—Max couldn’t hear their words or see Olivia’s expression—and then the boy took her hand and led her into the mass of people.

  What the fuck? He tried to follow them with his eyes, but he was so thoroughly disoriented that he lost his focus as a group of students walked in front of him, and one of the girls—someone from his acting class—said hi to him.

  He had to get out of there before someone tried to have a conversation with him. Staying to the outside and moving straight back away from the screen, he heard the film projector whirl to life, and raucous applause fill the air around him. Where was Zeke? There, sitting in the back of the crowd where he had left him, eyes fixed on the screen, looking completely unperturbed.

  “That was a huge mistake,” Max said, plopping down next to him.

  Zeke smiled. “I told you.”

  “Your fucking pot,” Max said. “You have to remind me.”

  He tried to concentrate on the movie, but his head was spinning and he couldn’t shake the image of Olivia with that boy. He had put his arm around her and then they had been walking together holding hands. Was she going out with him? When the fuck had that happened? What about the fact that Olivia wasn’t dating this summer? He tried to see if they were sitting together, but it was too crowded and he was too stoned to be able to distinguish them in the mass. And why would he want to, anyway?

  “I’m going to take off,” he said.

  “Huh?” Zeke said, turning to him. “Where are you going?”

  “I just need to get out of here.”

  He headed out the High Street gate and wandered without direction around downtown New Haven, lost in his own thoughts. The situation with Olivia was making him angrier and angrier. If she was going to hook up with some random boy, then he might as well have fucked Mimi in the bathroom the other night when she threw herself on him. Maybe he still would. Maybe he’d start hooking up with lots of girls. He tried to run through all the possibilities when he suddenly remembered the girl he had met on the train. Hadn’t she given him her number? What was her name? He began to scroll through the numbers on his phone. There. Lena Krause. The hot college chick he had flirted with. Should he call her now? He hesitated, wondering if she would even remember him. But then he thought about Olivia with that other boy, and he felt a new wave of anger and sadness wash over him. He had to do something. Taking a deep breath, he dialed, and after several seconds he heard her voice on the other end.

  “Hi, Lena?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Max.”

  Silence.

  “We met on the train a couple weeks ago,” he added quickly. God, he was more stoned than he had realized.

  “Oh, hi,” she said enthusiastically.

  “So, uh, how’s it going?”

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “You know. Nothing much.” He took another deep breath. “I was just wondering if you, uh, wanted to get together or something.”

  “Now?” She seemed surprised.

  “If you’re free.”

  She did not answer right away, and then she said, “Can you hold on?”

  Max waited, his stoned brain turning each second into an eternity.

  “I’m supposed to go to a party at my friend’s house,” she said when she came back on. “Do you want to come?”

  “Okay,” Max said quickly, feeling a surge of excitement.

  “Do you have something to write with? I’ll give you the address.”

  Was he really going to do this? Curfew was in an hour, and you could get in serious trouble if you weren’t back in the dorms on time. But fuck it. She was inviting him to a party, and this was not an opportunity he was going to pass up.

  “Can you text it to me?” he asked.

  Somehow he was able to think clearly enough to realize that if he went back to the dorm and signed in for the night, then maybe he could slip back out and nobody would know he was gone. Granted he would not be able to get back into the dorm until morning, but that was okay. If things worked out the way he hoped they would, he would be out all night anyway.

  The only person on the hall when he returned was his resident advisor, who was sitting in his room with the door open, typing on his computer.

  “Hey, Shakespeare,” Max said, signing the sheet outside his door.

  Shakespeare turned in his chair. “I wouldn’t come in here if I were you. That pork and beans they served at dinner is wreaking havoc on my bowels.”

  Max laughed. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Were you at the movie?”

  “For a little while,” Max said. “I’ve seen it before.”

  Shakespeare nodded. “I’m actually glad you’re here,” he said, his voice taking on a more serious tone. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Okay,” Max said, tensing slightly. It was hard to get too nervous around someone who shared stories about watching a pornographic movie with his grandmother and who claimed to have once masturbated eleven times in one day. Still, if he knew about the drug use, there could be serious trouble.

  “As a fellow Jew, don’t you find it a bit problematic that they serve pork on Shabbos?”

  Max smiled, relieved that this was just another one of Shakespeare’s routines.

  “It’s downright anti-Semitic,” Shakespeare continued. “The next thing you know they’ll be forcing us to go to Sunday Mass.”

  Max shook his head in mock anguish, too stoned to come up with a witty rejoinder on the spot.

  “Yellow stars, Max. Mark my words. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Good night,” Max said with a laugh.

  “Solidarity, brother,” Shakespeare said, thumping his heart with two fingers and then turning back to his computer.

  What a freak, Max thought as he walked down the hall. He popped into his room to get a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a few minutes later slipped out of the dorm en route to his rendezvous with blond-haired, blue-eyed Lena Krause.

  The movie ended. Olivia grabbed Mimi’s hand and said, “Get me upstairs before he comes back.” She had managed to dislodge herself from Bruce before the movie started by spotting her suite mates and squeezing into the space they had saved for her.

  “I still can’t believe he likes you,” Trish said.

  “If he touches me again, I think I’m going to scream.”

  They hurried toward the dorm and ran into Zeke by the entryway.

  “Hey,” Trish said. “Were you at the movie? I was looking around for you.”

  “I was in the back,” he said.

  “Where’s Max?” Mimi asked.

  Zeke shrugged. “He took off when the movie started.”

  Trish hesi
tated at the bottom of the stairs. “What are you up to now?”

  “I’m kind of tired. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” He started down the hall to his room.

  As Zeke drifted off to sleep that night, Max was in an apartment across town drinking tequila shots with Lena Krause, and Olivia was sitting at her computer, her mind buzzing with all the different possible paths her story could take.

  CASTRATION CELEBRATION

  Act 2, scene 3

  (Saturday night, outside Amber’s house)

  AMBER: Okay, top ten movie stars you’d want to sleep with.

  JANE: I doubt there are ten. Most of them are skeevy.

  AMBER: Are you crazy? (counting on fingers) Orlando Bloom, Josh Hartnett, Christian Bale, Ryan Phillippe, Jake Gyllenhaal, Will Smith, Viggo Mortensen, Leonardo DiCaprio—

  JANE: Leonardo DiCaprio? He looks like a rat.

  AMBER: Oh my God, he is so hot. Did you see him at the Oscars?

  JANE: Rat Boy. He looks like he’s about twelve years old.

  AMBER: So who do you like?

  JANE: I don’t know. Jean Reno, Alan Rickman, Ian McShane.

  AMBER: Who?

  JANE: Jean Reno. The Professional? With Natalie Portman? Anyway, he’s been in a million other things. And Alan Rickman. He’s gross in Harry Potter, but didn’t you see Truly, Madly, Deeply? Didn’t we rent that?

  AMBER: The one about the dead guy? That ripped off Ghost?

  JANE: Ripped off Ghost? Ghost was filmed after. Anyway, he’s directed, too—The Winter Guest. Every scene in that film was like an oil painting.

  AMBER: Blah, blah, blah. Who’s the other guy?

  JANE: Ian McShane. From Deadwood.

  AMBER: The guy who played Sheriff Bullock?

  JANE: No, the guy who played Al Swearengen.

  AMBER: Are you kidding? He’s like fifty years old.