Mama's Boy

by Dustin Lance Black

  The 4-Ds and the other eleven students in this class convened to discuss what might be done to remedy this calamity. First, we needed an explanation; some understanding of what had gone wrong so that we might right it. As the “quiet, sweet one” who had never made waves, and who had far less riding on the professor’s inexplicable Bs and Cs, I was elected to show up for her office hours and extract any information that might help us rectify the situation.

  I arrived early for her office hours, expecting to take a seat on the 1950s linoleum floor outside her small office on the second floor of the theater building. Instead, she was already inside, and a bit bewildered to have a visitor. It seems I was the first student to have ever stopped by. Initially, her youthful appearance—her untamed blond hair and baggy, relaxed dress—eased my nerves. She seemed like the type of person who would prove flexible and understanding. I thought I could help her see these grades from our perspective, and find a path forward that wouldn’t jeopardize anyone’s future.

  I sat down in the plastic chair beside the leather one that she’d pulled up close in front of her cluttered desk. She said she was working on a project of her own, a documentary. I was genuinely interested, but she wasn’t in the mood to share details. Small talk dispensed with, and thinking I had little to fear, I dove in, explaining that without reviews of our work, we had been surprised by the grades she’d posted and were left wondering what it was we’d done to deserve such marks. Then, of course, I asked if there was anything that might help our edits earn better grades.

  My words likely came out more stilted than that. I was just a kid, nowhere near becoming a speech-maker or debater. And before I could even complete my thought, I saw her transform. Her lovely, youthful face began to turn red. Lines appeared where none had been moments before as she furrowed her brow and pressed her lips together tight. I was in trouble.

  She opened her mouth, and raged. According to her, the 4-Ds-plus-eleven were untalented, entitled, petulant children who should have considered themselves lucky to have gotten the grades she’d assigned. She didn’t want a discussion—she wanted me out of her office immediately—but she made it clear that this wasn’t over. “Your behavior in this meeting violates the rules of this university, so now you’ll face the consequences.” Nowhere in my usually adept worst-case-scenario imagination had I seen this coming. She was threatening a hearing that could end in my expulsion on the grounds of grade coercion, and she didn’t want to hear another word about it. “You can leave now.”

  I left her there alone in her office, still red-faced and raging. She had never had a film succeed in the real world, and it seemed to me that her insecurity had bred contempt for her students, students who showed real promise and had their entire lives and careers ahead of them. It’s a tough thing to say, but she was a terrible teacher—a mountain of anxiety and self-loathing she chose to aim our way, and now I was enemy number one.

  On the long walk back to my car, I kept rewinding the tape of that conversation. Where had I gone wrong? What had I said to spark such a reaction? How could I fix this? I’d risked so much to get here, I’d worked so hard to stay here, and now I might be expelled for poorly chosen words in a meeting I had been sure would be healing, not inflammatory. Perhaps I could apologize, but I couldn’t figure out what I might apologize for and mean it. What if my fake apology was unmasked and it only angered her more?

  I was so lost in thought that I hadn’t bothered to pay my car any attention. When I lifted the door handle, the door wouldn’t open. I looked down to see that the entire side of my red/orange beauty had been bashed in so severely that my door would never open again. Someone had run into it at high speed, leaving streaks of white paint up and down her side. I checked under the wipers for a note explaining who had done this and how they intended to make it right. Nothing. I could barely afford the legal minimum of insurance. I knew that didn’t cover hit-and-run situations. I walked around to open the passenger door and climbed over the hand brake to the driver’s seat. Tears fell, and I gave swearing a try: “Fucking fuck off!” Who were these people who didn’t give a damn how they affected others? I sat there raging, wrapping every offender into one: my half-rate professor threatening the only thing I had left of meaning, my education, and the big white monster truck that had plowed into the only thing I had of earthly value, my crappy Geo Metro.

  My mother had once described this city as filled with more ambitions than care, more aspirations than morals, and more ego than love—charges I fiercely decried in my first years in Los Angeles. Now it seemed that despite so much talk about helping this or that charitable cause, my mom was mostly right, the overriding care in Hollywood was to get ahead of everyone else, with little mind to who got clobbered while getting there. The brand of compassion often peddled here suddenly felt like cheap talk, and despite their own faults, I hungered for the neighborly love of my old church and neighborhood—where if a family went broke, anonymous envelopes of cash appeared in the mailbox, and if a kid wrecked his bike, the neighbors all ran out to help patch him up. An America where you’d walk on broken legs to give others hope.

  I stopped crying. I stopped trying to find the right words to apologize with, and I told myself I would meet that young professor at her damned hearing if she was bold enough to call one. With the school’s esteemed dean acting as judge and executioner, I would hear her out, and then do my best to take her self-serving pseudo-justice down.

  III

  A hearing date was set, and a painful week crept by. The 4-Ds felt for me, as did the other eleven editing students, but I didn’t want their pity or advice. Like my mom, when I get angry, I get quiet, so I kept to myself.

  When the big day came, I made my way to the dean’s office. He had taught my favorite class to date: the Stylistic Study of the Moving Image. He knew every film that had ever reached a darkened hall. In addition to being dean, he ran UCLA’s film archive, its only rival being the Library of Congress. When he had generously invited all of his students to a Q&A with a “couple of his filmmaking pals” at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, we were all bowled over that his pals were guys named Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Our dean was our hero; now I was here to defend myself against being kicked out of his film school.

  A handful of other teachers joined this meeting, which quickly took on the feel of a court proceeding. I had arrived first and sat with my back to the wall. The professor walked in last, looking smug, and laid out booklets, manuals, lists of rules, and stacks of supporting materials. She’d come armed with evidence but refused anyone eye contact. I got the sense this wasn’t the first time she had created such a dramatic scene, and she knew well how to slay it. I won’t lie: my palms were sweaty, and I had to remind myself to breathe. I had passed out a year before during a routine doctor’s visit when I’d forgotten to breathe, and I didn’t want that to happen here…or did I? Might that garner enough pity from these professors that they would keep me on? I had never faced anything like this. I was reeling.

  With a wizardly old huff, the dean got right to it, letting the professor go first. She explained that she had entered her grades into the computer system and they had been printed up by a staff member and posted on the bulletin board outside the equipment room like every other professor’s for every other class. She then described how I showed up without having scheduled a meeting and proceeded to object to how she ran her class and the grades she had handed out. Her death blow: that I had demanded explanations of her grades, grades that UCLA’s policy plainly stated were hers and hers alone to choose, and that I had made it clear that I felt the grade I had earned ought to be changed. It was obvious that she had practiced this presentation. She was determined not to lose this fight.

  The dean was as impressed as I was. He turned to me and said, “Well, that doesn’t sound so good, Dustin. Is there anything you’d like
to add?”

  This was it. If I screwed the next minute and a half sideways, everything I’d worked for over the past half decade or more would be out the window. So I took a deep breath and asked the professor the two questions I’d been practicing all week.

  Question one: “What grade do you believe I wanted?”

  It was clear she hated the sound of my voice. In a tone I can best describe as the devil’s after smoking two packs a day, she said to me, “You think you deserved an A.”

  I steeled myself and met her eyes.

  Question two: “And what grade did you give me?”

  I’ll never forget the next few moments. Her raging, confident glare turned inward. Her eyes were still looking my way, but they had lost all focus; she was too busy searching her mind for an answer. Silence. More silence. Then, a few awkward moments later, the dean cleared his voice to snap her back into the present.

  The professor finally looked down, then started digging through the mountain of evidence she had painstakingly prepared to have me reprimanded if not expelled, but she struggled to find the answer to this simple second question. When she finally did, she went as white as that lily I’d destroyed in my experimental film.

  She began gathering her things, then launched up out of her chair and declared to the room, “You are all a pack of hungry jackals!” With that, she stormed out.

  She had given me an A.

  I wisely held my tongue. I’d known all week what the dean was now realizing: that I could have gone back to her office a week earlier and fixed this problem in private, but I had chosen this very public path instead. Now I wondered if this little show would also earn me some form of censure. The first hint to the contrary was a bit of laughter that escaped from under the dean’s beard. His final ruling quickly followed: he gripped me by the shoulders and said, “I like you…You’re a real troublemaker.”

  I had never been called such a thing in my life! I had always been the easy kid, the well-behaved kid, the quiet kid, the kid who would far prefer to disappear than to cause trouble. Now, according to the most powerful man in this esteemed institution—a man who I would later learn had toiled in the antiwar movement, had put himself on the line to defend his peace-loving views—I was a bona fide “troublemaker”! Coming from him, and given these circumstances, I didn’t mind the sound of that one bit. On the contrary—I loved it.

  Not wanting to push my luck, I hightailed it out of there. As I walked to my car, I considered this new label. It wasn’t Los Angeles or the film business that had turned me into a troublemaking twenty-year-old. No. It was my mom, who had often told me to “stand up straight and tall.” Her conservative values, and even the lessons from her Mormon Church, had taught me that you don’t hang an innocent man at high noon, and that good folks stick up for themselves. Now I wanted more than anything to call my mom and share this win, to let her know that I had finally fought back and in tough Texan fashion, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too afraid I’d be met with the sound of disappointment and the silence of unasked questions.

  Instead, I opened the passenger door of my Geo, crawled over the hand brake, and settled into the driver’s seat. I sat there very still for some time. I began to imagine a line, drawn from a shy child quietly standing up for his mother in shopping malls to a young man learning to stand up for himself, and I then imagined that perhaps one day I might grow bolder, and answer a call to stand up for more than just myself and my mom. Because I now understood that good things could come from making the right kind of trouble. And from this moment on, I knew I had it in me to embody the noble title of “troublemaker.”

  Later that year, when all of the faculty—that young editing professor among them—were required to watch and review our senior thesis films, the 4-Ds decided we’d build a logo that looked a lot like a drooling jackal. And we wrapped up all of our closing credits with this image and a title card that read: “Hungry Jackal Productions.” Thanks to that editing professor, we were now and forever a pack of hungry troublemakers.

  CHAPTER 17

  Spinning Yarn

  Where I grew up, spinning yarn, or telling stories—with or without two shots of whiskey (but often better with)—held the power to entertain, illuminate, bring families together, to give us poor kids some pride in our own, and maybe even a much-needed dose of courage. My Sunday school teachers had spun stories of Mormon pioneers making their way to Salt Lake City in covered wagons, chased by murdering militias wielding skin-scalding tar and feathers. At family reunions, my uncle James told the tale of my young mom making her way up a mountainside on crutches and braces. Each time, the mountain got steeper, and my mom moved up it a bit faster. Those storytelling lessons were reinforced when I shadowed playwrights at the Western Stage in my teens, studied English and Russian literature at community college, and fought my way into one of the best schools for stories told on screen. Since discovering the theater in junior high in San Antonio, I had begun to hope that “spinning yarn” might one day even pay my bills.

  But entering my senior year at UCLA, I still wasn’t sure what kind of stories I might tell. I was drawn to the likes of Fellini, Bertolucci, Scorsese, and Truffaut, but I wasn’t Italian or French, or from any sort of gangster background. The films I had directed so far could best be described as experimental, impressionistic, and a touch too retro. After all, the French New Wave hadn’t been “new” for nearly half a century now. When I showed my short films to friends, family, and professors, the most common response was, “Well, that was…wow.” They never said “good” or “moving” or “funny” or even “special”—just “wow.”

  And thanks to that young professor who’d tried to get me kicked out of film school and had now made her way onto the scholarship committee, I wasn’t going to see a dime from the long list of finishing grants when my diploma came. I was dead broke. I was a film-splicing yarn spinner from Texas with a week to go in film school and no hope of turning my interests into a paycheck.

  But as troubling as it was to be dead broke, there was one more pressing concern on my mind. It sounded like this: click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.

  Even with an apartment full of rowdy twentysomethings, and standing in the far corner of our second-story kitchen, I could hear that sound coming up from the street. My mom had bought a ticket, boarded a plane in Virginia, and flown to L.A. to attend my college graduation the next day. We had shared a few careful phone calls over the last six months, but this would be the first time I’d seen her since Christmas.

  I wiped the crumbs and butter from our garlic bread assembly line off my hands and rushed to open the door before anyone beat me to it. There were now three of us living together: me, Ryan, and a dashing, openly gay Spanish theater major named Javier. His nickname was Javi. Javi and Ryan had organized a little dinner party—a tame one compared to the kind Ryan normally threw, because he had specifically designed this one for my mom. Since the morning of our sullen post-Christmas breakfast, Ryan had worried that something dire had gone down over the holiday, and since he adored my mother, he hoped this warm reception might help mend things. Javi had heard many a story about my mom and was excited to finally meet her. If it seems as if my friends saw nothing challenging about my mom’s arrival, it’s because they didn’t. To deny them this dinner party would have given them reason to press for the whole truth, and I didn’t want to tell them that my own mom didn’t accept me for who I was, mostly because I didn’t want that to be true. So I copped out. I never told them how my mom had reacted when she’d discovered my secret. Ryan had no clue that she was privately pointing a bit of blame his way. And there was one other complication: I also hadn’t told my mom that most of Javi’s, Ryan’s, and my own close friends were gay or lesbian.

  So the moment before I opened the door for her, I could almost hear my big brother, Marcus, say to me, “Hey, chickenshit. Say goodbye right this fu
ckin’ second to the last bit of love you’ll ever get from yer mom. ’Cause she’s gonna disown your ass after this.”

  I opened the door, and all of my many gay and lesbian friends laid eyes on the woman who, unbeknownst to them, thought they lived somewhere along a sliding scale of sick, wrong, and evil. Your lack of courage built this moment, and now you must live it, I thought.

  What we called a dinner party was actually just a mess of teen and twentysomething college kids, dropouts, and party gays sitting on the floor with paper plates mounded high with overboiled spaghetti, canned pasta sauce, white bread with butter and garlic salt, and a surprisingly delicious salad Ryan had pulled together. I gave my mom a hug, put her bag in my room, and cleared a spot for her on the futon. She was quick to compliment Ryan on the weight he’d lost, but she willfully ignored his new tattoos, and completely missed that I had obviously (to me at least) spent a great deal of time in the gym since December. It was forgivable, I suppose. Jason—who was also in our apartment that fateful night—hadn’t noticed either.

  Instead of sitting with my mom, I retreated to the kitchen to help cook. That way I could keep a safe distance as it dawned on my mom that her queer son now surrounded himself with countless other homosexuals, and not just straight-acting ones—vibrant, colorful, pink-triangle-wearing, rainbow-flag-waving queens with proud lisps, and a handful of lesbians in Doc Martens. I tried to look as believably busy as I could, checking the spaghetti that had passed al dente many minutes ago, and stirring a pot as if it would make any difference to the dented can of sauce I’d picked up off the clearance shelf.