Adam Selzer

by How to Get Suspended;Influence People

  My father got back to normal (for him) right away, too. At first he was really disappointed when he found out that the electricity going off had been my doing, not his, but after a while, he decided that he was proud of me.

  “My son,” he said, in his best fatherly voice, “some parents might be furious that their child blew a fuse with heavy metal, but I’m not one of those. I’m proud of you. You were trying to invent something, in a way. Even if it didn’t work, it’s a very noble endeavor to try to invent something.”

  I would have been happier if he’d just been furious. I’m pretty sure he was just relieved that I hadn’t blown up most of the house. In any case, I put the wall of sound project on the back burner for a while.

  The weekend passed as quickly as most weekends do, and on Monday morning it was time for school to start back up, and Monday came and went, but it was Tuesday that I was looking forward to. The midweek mornings were different.

  Starting the second week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings, instead of homeroom, all of the sixth and seventh graders went to “advisory,” where they sat around and talked about heavy issues like drugs, drinking, and teen pregnancy. I had been convinced, back when I started sixth grade, that advisory would be boring, and had been further convinced that there wouldn’t be anything covered in class that we hadn’t seen a hundred times on after-school specials.

  But there had always been rumors that middle school sex ed, which was part of advisory, involved actual photographs, so I couldn’t help looking forward to it a little bit. Not that I didn’t know what naked people looked like or anything—I had the Internet, after all—but that wasn’t quite the same as getting to see them in class. But it turned out that I had been right all along; there was nothing in the class we hadn’t all heard a thousand times before, and all of the pictures in sex ed were lame diagrams and line drawings.

  While I understood that they still taught the same class under the name “health” at the high school, for some reason they gave us a break in eighth grade, and instead of advisory, we’d be going to “activity period.” The first week of school, we’d each signed up for an activity. Most people had signed up for team sports or Ping-Pong, and a couple of the truly sick had signed up for “good grooming.”

  I’d gotten my homeroom teacher’s permission to sign up for the advanced studies activity, which was a fancy way of saying “the smart class.” This really should have seemed un-cool, but it wasn’t, because I knew it would just be all the kids from the gifted pool who met with an old bat named Mrs. Smollet once a week. It was kind of fun; we sat in the couches that had been set up, and while we were supposed to be doing brain teasers or crossword puzzles or something like that, we made it our business to try to bug the crap out of Mrs. Smollet, who was kind of a goody-goody religious type and was a little bit afraid of us. I’m not sure where they came up with a name like “gifted pool.” It’s the kind of name only a teacher at the end of his or her rope could have devised.

  Now, on TV or in the movies, whenever the main character is a boy genius or something, the smart classes are made up of dorks who tuck their shirts into their underwear, do math in their heads, and might actually sign up for the good grooming activity. In reality, our advanced classes and gifted pools were always made up of a bunch of miscreant kids who just happened to read books from the adult section of the library. Many of us even read newspapers. That was all. The real dorks weren’t smart enough to get in.

  My activity group was meeting in the media immersion room, which is what they called the room that used to be called the library. During the previous couple of years, they’d added a whole bunch of new computers and other high-tech stuff and changed the name, but it was basically the same place.

  I saw right away that the advanced studies activity was the usual band of troublemakers, all sitting in chairs that had been arranged in a circle. There was James Cole, who spoke fluent French and was the first kid in school to smoke pot. Next to him was Dustin Eddlebeck, who had graduated from writing naughty limericks on the bathroom walls to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. Then there was Edie Scaduto, the school communist, sitting next to Brian Carlson, her boyfriend, who was really into fire, and a handful of other kids I didn’t know quite as well. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were gifted-pool kids, I’m sure the school would have gone to great lengths to keep us far away from each other at all times. I guess you could say we had a pretty good scam going.

  My friend Anna was already there, too. She had cut her blond hair to her shoulders—it used to be down to her butt—but I decided not to mention it. She hated it when people rambled on about her long hair.

  “Hey, Anna,” I said, sitting down next to her, and enough chairs away from Brian Carlson that I didn’t have to worry about getting my shoelaces set on fire. “How was your summer?”

  “Pleasurable,” she said.

  Anna is the one person in school who has weirder parents than mine. They were in college for about twenty years each and probably know just about everything in the world. Her dad is a professor of something or other in the city, and her mother occasionally flies to Europe to see if some painting that turned up at a flea market in Amsterdam is actually a Cézanne or just a fake—I suppose you could say she’s like an art detective. The one time I’ve been in Anna’s house, when I went to deliver homework to her when she was sick, there were framed prints of weird paintings all over the walls and incense burning on the kitchen table, and she called her parents by their first names. And her father had a bookshelf covering one entire wall, filled with books about the eighteenth century. There were a whole bunch of musical instruments in the living room, and apparently Anna’s parents play all of them and have made Anna take cello lessons since she was three.

  And here’s the weird thing: Anna actually likes them. She’s always showing off cool yoga poses or coming up to me to say things like, “Did you know that most eighteenth-century French literature was originally published outside of France?” I guess I would like my parents if they were more like that. Anna’s mom and dad are sort of sophisticated and cool, instead of just plain weird and potentially dangerous. You can bet that they won’t be expecting her to go to accounting school when she finishes high school.

  It goes without saying, of course, that Anna is less than popular. Outside of the advanced classes, spouting off facts about the eighteenth century and playing the cello aren’t the best ways to get ahead in middle school. But I like her. She’s cool and really very cute. Naturally, I wouldn’t have said that out loud, least of all to her, for anything. The thought of going on a date with my dad giving us a ride was more than enough to keep my mouth shut.

  My activity period teacher turned out to be Mr. Streich, one of the science teachers, who my father knows fairly well; they occasionally go shopping for parts together. I took this to be a bad sign. His named is pronounced like “strike.” As in strike three. He has a mustache on purpose. Mustaches can make certain guys look pretty smooth, but most of them just look like a dorky sort of plumber. Even my father had refrained from growing a mustache. I suppose it was better than having Mrs. Smollet as the teacher, though.

  “Good morning, students,” said Mr. Streich. “You’ll notice that I didn’t call you boys and girls. You’re in eighth grade now.” I looked around the room but didn’t see anyone looking any older than they had the year before. No one had grown a goatee over summer vacation. “Now,” he continued, “this class may not actually be called advisory, but we’ll still be talking about a lot of the stuff you’ve talked about for the last two years.” Everyone groaned except Anna, who made more of a low, breathy moaning sound.

  “We’ll be talking about a lot of weighty issues,” Mr. Streich continued, “but since this is the media immersion room, we’re also going to spend a lot of our time working on multimedia projects as part of our advanced studies. I trust you’ve all seen plenty of health, safety, and sexual education videos before, right?
”

  We all nodded. I’d seen a lot of school movies, of course. Science movies tended to be the most boring; in seventh grade our teacher showed us one called The Story of Osmosis. They tried to make it interesting by sticking a robot in there to tell kids about science, but they could’ve put in a hundred robots, all armed with laser guns, and it still wouldn’t have held my interest for ten minutes, let alone an hour and a half. The really sad thing is that the robot sort of reminded me of my father.

  But the sex-ed videos were the dumbest, even if they were a lot more entertaining than the science stuff. They’d started out with names like How You Came to Be and Changes: Coming Soon to a Body Near You! in fifth-grade science class. They were silly cartoons that tried to give us the bare-bones facts about sex and adolescence, even though we all already knew them by then.

  In middle school, the films got more interesting, and we spent a lot of time outside of class making fun of them. We never remembered their real titles, so we made up ones that we thought were more appropriate to describe them, like Johnny’s Not a Baldy Anymore; Intrigue in the Locker Room; Looking Awkward, Feeling Awkward; and Billy’s Got a Problem. Every now and then you’d hear that the high school kids got to watch more more explicit films with names like The Art of Reproduction and How Susie Got Sick in Florida. That struck me as unlikely.

  “Now,” said Mr. Streich, “instead of just showing you a lot of those, over the course of the next month, each of you is going to make your own advisory video, using the equipment we have right here in the media room.”

  There was a bit of murmuring among the students.

  “Now, we won’t just be jumping right in with the filming. I know you all learned how to use the cameras and equipment last year in media immersion classes, so we’re going to spend the first day or two just brainstorming about what kind of movies you’d like to make. Then you’ll spend a while discussing your subject and doing research. These films will be shown to kids in grades six and seven at the end of the quarter, and we want to make sure you get all the facts right, whether you’re making a movie about eating disorders, alcoholism, or smoking.”

  It sounded to me like the school was just trying to spare the expense of buying a bunch of new videos, but I had to admit that the project sounded like fun. When Mr. Streich passed around the list of possible subjects, I looked them over and was a bit surprised to see that sex ed was on the list. They were actually going to trust an eighth grader to make a sex-ed video? Were they drunk when they wrote out the list of topics? It was like being handed a live grenade and being invited to lob it at one of the teachers. Eating disorders struck me as a good topic, too, because you’d have a great excuse to do a puking scene, but I couldn’t say no to the chance to make a sex-ed video that every student really wanted to see. I wrote my name next to “sex ed” on the list right away, before anyone else could get it. I was starting to get ideas before I’d even passed the sheet to Anna. And the wheels in my head began to turn.

  No kid in any grade wanted to see some lame video with a bunch of line drawings of private parts. Everyone knows that, starting in fifth grade, every kid wants the sex-ed films to be as explicit as possible, and I was sure that if mine was bizarre enough to be considered “artsy,” I could get away with putting just about anything in there. I could say, “It’s not smut, it’s art!” According to what I’d heard in social studies, I figured the Supreme Court would back me up.

  And I wouldn’t just be explicit, I’d be informative, about real stuff that kids actually wondered about, like how old they should be when they started worrying about not developing yet, how big things should be at a certain age. Stuff like that. We’d all seen movie after movie telling us we were normal, but hearing it from the disemodied voice of some weirdo over a goofy cartoon of a sperm cell in a top hat wasn’t convincing anyone. Maybe if they heard it from a more artistic source, they’d believe it.

  I didn’t pay much attention to my classes for the rest of the morning because I was coming up with ideas for how I could make just such a video. First of all, I’d give it a French title. Or maybe an Italian one. As soon as you see a movie title in a foreign language, you know you’re in for something artsy. Instead of boring narration, I’d have boring poetry that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’d use nudes from famous paintings instead of diagrams. Realistic ones. With close-ups on the good parts.

  I mulled the idea over until it was time for lunch, at which I sat with a bunch of people from my activity group, including Anna. I had made my own lunch; the school cooking wasn’t much better than the average homemade food disaster, but I can make a pretty serviceable sandwich myself.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, taking a sip of grape juice. She had brought her lunch, too.

  “What topic did you pick for your video?” I had been so wrapped up in my own film that I hadn’t even had a chance to ask Anna about hers.

  “Smoking,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing one about how smoking really isn’t all that bad for you.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “I just figure that maybe it’s time for a new approach. Those movies about how smoking wrecks your lungs aren’t stopping anybody.” This was true. It seemed like half of the kids I knew smoked at least every now and then, even though our teachers had been drilling how bad it was into our heads since kindergarten.

  “I’m going to do a sex-ed movie,” I said. “An artsy one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I figure if I make one that’s artsy, I can get away with showing more nudity.”

  She grinned. “You looking for models?”

  I wondered if she was offering to do it, and started to feel woozy for a second, but I just said, “We can’t do anything with actual nudity, remember?” Dustin Eddlebeck had asked right away, even though his movie was about seat belts, and Mr. Streich very quickly said absolutely not, even if the models were of legal age. No photographs of naked people, either. But he didn’t say anything about paintings, and I knew enough not to ask.

  “So what kind of artsy do you mean? Italian realist? German Expressionist? Avant-garde?”

  “What exactly is avant-garde?” I asked. I’d heard the term a few times, but never with a definition attached. Anna’s parents probably had a whole room full of avant-garde stuff, whatever it was.

  “It’s really weird art,” she said. “The kind where people are painted blue and talk about truth and existence and then run around making noises like barnyard animals. Supposedly John Lennon once said ‘avant-garde’ is French for ‘bullshit.’”

  “I could probably make that work,” I said. “I’m going to go for highbrow. Sophisticated, but still interesting. What’s the brainiest movie your parents have?” I had never heard her talk about their movie collection, but I imagined it was probably one of the brainier ones in town.

  She paused and took another sip of grape juice. “Probably La Dolce Vita,” she said. “It’s an Italian movie directed by a guy named Fellini.”

  Fellini. That just sounded artsy.

  “What’s it about?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s partly avant-garde and partly realistic. It’s about a guy who wants to be a novelist, but he parties too hard and ends up being a miserable gossip columnist. Some people think it’s the best movie ever made.”

  “Is there any nudity in it?”

  “Not really. But it does show a girl getting covered with feathers.”

  It didn’t sound like the most exciting movie in the world, but it certainly sounded artsy. “Can I borrow it?” I asked. She nodded and said she’d bring it the next day. I spent the rest of the afternoon fantasizing about directing my movie, and maybe even becoming a real artsy filmmaker. I could grow a little goatee, drink straight espresso, and travel all over to film festivals and stuff. I’d live in some loft in a big city, not some little suburban dump like Cornersville Trace. That beat the hell out of growing up to be an
accountant.

  That night, over a dinner that consisted of nothing I can mention in polite company, I asked my father if he knew anything about avant-garde stuff.

  “Sure do,” he said. “I was in college once, you know.”

  My mother nodded. “He was, you know, dear.”

  “My roommate was into avant-garde performance art,” he continued. “He used to have me do the technical work when he did shows at the coffee shop.”

  “What kind of avant-garde stuff did he do?” I asked.

  “Well, I remember one time he painted the French flag on his chest and tap-danced while singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ While he did that, I used the slide projector to show his old family photos; then he cussed into a microphone for about ten minutes and stood still for half an hour.”

  “And that was avant-garde?”

  “As far as I know. Some people thought it was pretty profound. Never did understand it myself, but I loved working that slide projector. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m making a video for my activity period at school, and I want it to be really artsy.”

  My father’s face lit up, as I’d been afraid it would. “Is that the one Max Streich is teaching?” he asked. I forced myself to nod. “Wow, Leon, you’re really in for an exciting semester. He’s having you guys make health and safety films, right?”

  I nodded again, hoping he wouldn’t ask what subject I was doing. My mother tends to get really weird every time I use the word “sex” in front of her.

  “That sounds like a very educational class,” she said. “Max Streich is such a good teacher, isn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Then came the question.

  “What’s your film going to be about?” my father asked.

  “Health stuff,” I said.

  “Like what? Smoking? Hygiene? Wearing safety goggles?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “Sex, mostly.”