“No, sir, if it isn’t necessary.”
“Brian?”
Brian rose from his chair and said in a low voice that he would. As he went around to the desk to face us, his head was down and he brought it up only after a long pause. “I’ve spoken to some of the sophomores about the Council. They all talk about how much the freshmen were ignored by the Council. It met about thirty times last year to vote on some things that really affect us. Such as how much money is spent on our yearly party and what the setup of our teams is for intramural play.” He opened his mouth to go on and then suddenly closed it. “Oh,” he continued with diffident impatience, “it’s a long list. Anyway, in those thirty meetings, the freshman Councilmen only addressed the Council once.” He looked around at us to emphasize. “Once,” he repeated, but then he lowered his head a little and said quietly, “I think that’s bad. Even if talking wouldn’t have changed any of the decisions.” He smiled. “I’m told their party was really a bore.” We laughed. “I’d like to be able to talk to them about the things we want. That’s all.” He moved quickly back to his seat and we burst into applause. I saw Mr. Lawrence look at Brian in a puzzled, shocked way and I was amused that I understood this phenomenon better than the rest of them.
Mr. Lawrence turned to Joseph and said to him pleasantly, “You’re sure you wouldn’t like to—?”
“Yeah,” he said, and there was laughter that Mr. Lawrence stopped immediately by putting a warning finger to his lips. Joseph went to the desk but he was ill at ease and I didn’t want to watch him speak. I felt horribly embarrassed and I prayed that it would go smoothly. Joseph spoke rapidly without meeting our eyes. “I agree with Brian. Our representatives should address the Council. Also, I think it’s important that the representative check with the home room on every issue by taking a poll and voting accordingly.” He stopped awkwardly and looked blank. “That’s it.” There was polite applause that followed him to his seat and we sat in the silence of school—rustling papers, the slight groans of furniture, and the distant sound of other teachers addressing classes—while Mr. Lawrence cut up strips of paper for voting and distributed them. I was tempted, when it came time to vote, to go with Joseph. It would have been perverse and that was what attracted me about doing it. But I didn’t and neither did eighteen others. I wondered if that would go in some statistic book of Brian’s: 19-6, the Hills High record for single-season election of a Councilman, for that’s what it was.
Our school was big on extracurricular activities and we were told that they were valuable credits for college since they showed initiative, creativity, and the ability to work with others. By the end of the first month, Brian was a member of the chess and bridge clubs, joined me in the half-hour Theater Workshop after school on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and he was being pressured by both the football and basketball coaches to join their freshman squads. He didn’t want to be on both teams, though it could be and had been done, because he was already overloaded with extra work, especially considering his Student Council meetings, which were called during freshman gym class.
It might be expected that our classmates would resent this remorseless grabbing of positions by Brian, but even in that he was clever. I discovered, while chatting with others, that though a few would know about one of his activities, no one was aware of them all. I mentioned this to him while we were on our way to a Thursday Theater Workshop. “Howard,” he answered, “you know more about me than anyone. So do me a favor—don’t talk.”
“They’ll find out eventually.”
“Naturally, at the end of the year. But then they’ll think of it as having been on merit. If you say to just one person, ‘You know, that Brian has joined everything,’ he’ll repeat it and it will end up as, ‘That Brian is an egomaniac and he’s wormed his way into everything.’”
I nodded and walked on, realizing how I hated to think of the other kids objectively. They seemed so easily manipulated.
“Over the next few years, Howard, it’ll be up to you to keep my secret.” I knew, as he looked at me, that my face showed bewilderment, though I was not confused. “You know what I’m talking about. You think I’d do this shit otherwise?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you enjoy any of it?”
He took his left hand, his thumb and pinky tensed, and pulled it through his hair as if it were a rough comb. “Oh, I guess I’m enjoying the chess some. But the Council is made up of assholes. And it’s such a joke.”
I envied that job of his, so this news, I’m afraid, pleased me. “Really? Isn’t it working on anything?”
“They don’t do anything real apart from how strict they are about Robert’s Rules of Order. Want to know what we’re debating? A proposal to change the school colors.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“Are you kidding? Gary Mathewson started to try two years ago as a sophomore and now he’s vice-president of the Council. It’s a constitutional change.”
“What?”
“It’s a constitutional change. You need two thirds of the student body and two thirds of the faculty to do it. First, he had to get a petition of a hundred students and ten faculty to bring up the question. He did that and we formed a committee to work on it.”
“Who’s on the committee?”
“Guess who? One Councilman from each grade, right? Okay, so they ask us to form,” his quick laugh was a shriek, “caucuses in each grade and pick someone for the committee. So I turn to my people and ask who wants to do it.” Brian looked at me and nodded his head. “Get it?”
“None of the freshman Councilmen wanted to do it and they thought you’d be the best at it.”
“Right. We’ve only got a few minutes to choose and the other grades have already picked their committeemen. They’re itching to work on it, but my people are in terror of being alone with the big boys. So if I admitted no freshman wanted to work on it, they’d think we were, I don’t know, un-American. So I agreed.”
We had reached the theater entrance and I lowered my voice to a whisper while holding the door for Brian. “When is the first committee meeting?”
“During home room tomorrow morning.”
I was surprised that Brian stuck with the Theater-Shop because for freshmen it was nothing more than shit work. Building sets, sweeping up, watching our elders rehearse, and then, with luck, fifteen minutes or so of being taught about lighting before our last task: arranging the podium for either Tuesday’s or Friday’s auditorium meetings. He was a very hard worker, finishing his chores so quickly that he could help others with almost half of their work. Mrs. Rosenbloom, our instructor, loved him and, after our first semester, she bestowed on Brian the highest compliment: she began calling him dear, and would occasionally sigh, a hand on her huge battleship breasts, saying, “I’ve never seen a worker like you, dear. It’s a comfort in my old age.”
But she was still her formidable self with him that Thursday. When we were finished and ready to go home, she looked sternly at Brian from over her bifocals when he asked, “Have you heard anything about the Student Council changing the school colors?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, letting her glasses, suspended on a chain around her neck, drop to her breast. “Isn’t that Gary’s idea?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I remember. He tried to get me to sign a petition.”
“Did you?” I asked, and heard my voice crack.
“That changing voice had better go away next year when we’re casting,” she said to me. Most of the boys hated her for this sort of teasing. She seemed fond of embarrassing our manhood. “No,” she said to Brian. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t.”
“I’m on the Council, Mrs. Rosenbloom, and I should like very much to know your candid opinion.”
“Well, I was perfectly open about it, Brian, to, um, Gary, when he asked me. I told him I was fond of our blue and yellow insignia. It seems like an awful bother. I don’t like to belittle the Student Government, but I think there
must be better things to work on.”
“Thank you,” Brian said. “I’ll think about that.” We both made a move to go but she spoke again.
“There are community projects that the students should be involved in. The trees on Fairlane Road, for example, have been horribly treated over the last decade. It used to be a lovely, elegant drive into the school and it would be useful if the students got some money together and did some pruning and perhaps plant a few new trees to replace the dead ones.”
“A lovely elegant drive,” I said in a mincing voice that didn’t resemble hers when we were outside.
“She’s a funny lady,” Brian answered, too nicely to assuage my desire to savage her for the changing voice comment. “I wonder how many of the teachers agree with her. I mean, if we know the colors thing is bullshit, they have to know. I’m not ready to believe they’re as stupid as Vice-president Gary Mathewson.”
Over the weekend Brian showed me the design for the new school colors that Gary had presented to the committee on Friday. “I’ve spoken to six other teachers,” Brian said while I tried to figure out, by staring at it, what possessed Gary Mathewson to work for two years to get red hills with a white background as our new symbol. “Including two who signed the petition. It was obvious they didn’t really care. I asked Mr. Crowder, who’s one of the people who signed it, if the art department had nothing better to do than that and he broke up. And then I talked about Mrs. Rosenbloom’s idea—”
“But she didn’t—”
“I didn’t say it was her idea. I just told him what she suggested and asked if that wouldn’t be a better thing to do with the money.”
“What money?”
Brian smiled knowingly. “You see, that’s what nobody realizes. If you change the school colors and its symbol, that means you have to change all the team uniforms, the flag, the sweat shirts—”
“Oh, my God. That must be a fortune.”
“We don’t know, believe it or not. I asked in the committee and we’ve got that assigned to the treasurer. To determine how much.” Brian nodded at me when I tossed the new design disgustedly towards my desk. He was in the center of my room and he suddenly held himself stiff, his hands waist level, the right hand cupped by the left, staring ahead. He nodded once and immediately brought his hands up over his head while he rocked back on his right foot. His left leg kicked high in the air while he brought his right arm back and then it all cascaded forward, his right foot swinging around to square his body as he released the imagined baseball.
“Strike,” I said.
“I’m gonna blow this plan of Gary’s sky high.” He looked at me questioningly and I smiled in agreement. “Boom,” he said.
On Monday morning, while I chatted with Joseph about a Henry James novel, I noticed that Brian was talking to Mr. Lawrence. There was some laughter toward the end of their conference and then Mr. Lawrence cleared his throat with summoning loudness. “Could I have your attention? Brian has some Council business he’d like to talk over with you.”
Brian told them about the plan to change the school colors, the fact that he was on the committee, and then said, “Now, it all sounds pretty simple so far and I wouldn’t bother you about it except that I found it’s going to cost quite a bit of money to change all the things that have the colors on them. Oh,” he said, with a smile. “I forgot. Here’s the new design.” He held up the paper by one corner very casually.
“I can’t see it,” said one of the girls.
“I’ll pass it around.” He handed it to a student. “Everything about it seems fine to me except for the money. There’s somebody working on that for the committee, so we don’t know yet how much it will cost, but that money will be taken from other things. From the class parties, or, I don’t know, any of the activities that we need money for. And even if it doesn’t take money from those things, it means we’re spending it on changing colors rather than something much more useful.”
“What does he want to change the colors for?” Adam asked.
There was some laughter and Brian nodded with it. “I don’t know. But Gary Mathewson, the vice-president of the Council, has wanted new colors for two years.”
“I don’t like the design,” said the girl who had asked to see it.
“Well, I think there are good reasons to be against it,” Brian said. “I know it may sound like nit-picking, but I think spending money wastefully is something that, as students, we should avoid. It shows immaturity.” There were other comments from the students. All were negative: people either didn’t like the idea or they didn’t care. So when Brian asked for a vote to back up his opposition (he said it would show the faculty that the freshmen were serious about school problems) we gave him a unanimous vote against changing the colors.
In the hall, after home room, Brian said, “I have to wait for the other Councilmen.”
I flattened myself against the wall to avoid the students rushing past. “What for?”
“I called them up over the weekend and told them all about it. All the freshman home rooms were asked the same question today.”
“Aren’t you going too fast?”
“No!” He grabbed my arm. “The Councilmen will present it like I did. They’ll all get negative votes and later, if Mathewson talks to the freshmen and starts changing their minds, they’ll never have the guts to vote themselves down. They would love to overrule us Councilmen, but the kids will never admit they were wrong. The votes will get closer but we’ll hold on. And the freshman class is one fourth of the vote. I’ve got him beat right now.” He was very excited, talking fast, his eyes shining with triumph. And as each of the Councilmen came by, reporting to him earnestly, registering modest pleasure at his compliments, though his body’s thrill had quieted, his eyes were still full of the day’s victory. All the Councilmen had gotten negative votes by wide margins. Only the school cutups had voted for the colors and Brian said that was even better than unanimous decisions.
Indeed, later that day, I overheard one of the girls tease the worst of the school clowns about his vote. This hopelessly incompetent student seemed to survive because of the guilty backlash his teachers felt after throwing a vicious fit at him for joking at exactly the wrong moment. His barely passing grades were acts of mercy. I heard him insist to her that he was a misunderstood genius and she said, “Yes, you alone could see the vital importance of changing the school colors.”
Even he, by his mischievous giggle, seemed to agree that he had gone too far.
Within a week, before the committee had finished its report on the expense and other details, the school colors had found many people who seemingly couldn’t live with a change. Blue and yellow expressed our spirit much better than white and red, said a sophomore in the first edition of that year’s Hills People, the school paper. One of the senior art students also published an opinion that if we were going to change the school colors, something more imaginative than two of the colors of the American flag should be thought of. (However, I heard gossip that the art student was annoyed because Mathewson had passed him over when picking a student to do the new design.) But the most interesting article was by freshman Brian Stoppard. There was an italic lead to the piece telling us that this was the first time Hills People had thought a freshman merited space in the first issue. If Brian’s enthusiasm, it went on, is any indication of the quality of this year’s freshman, Hills’s class of 1970 will indeed be brilliant.
Brian predicted in the article that the treasurer would be unable to give an accurate estimation of the cost of changing the colors because the items that have the symbol on them would be paid for by different departments of the school. (He told me the treasurer had confided this fact to him.) He said the figure given would probably be lower than the ultimate cost. And now his best line: “Apart from dismaying alumni, who might mistakenly root for the wrong team for several years, all we will have accomplished is that wasting of money that might be spent on restoring the roadway our elders enj
oyed driving into. I opt for the reconstruction of our past, rather than the confusion of our future.”
“The brilliance of this whole exercise,” Brian said to me as we sat out on the lawn of his house, “is that I seem courageous and radical while in fact I’m appealing to people to do nothing.”
“What about the roadway?”
“They’ll never do anything about the roadway either.”
“Why not?”
He began to laugh, tried to stop to talk, but was overcome by laughter again. I became irritated—his glee was malicious—and insisted he stop and tell me. “Because if they do, I’ll oppose it.” And he went off into another bout of self-satisfied amusement before continuing, “No, I just mean that if it took them two years to get to this stage about the colors, it would be centuries before they’d get to the road.”
“Not if you handled it. Look, you killed the colors in two weeks.”
He not only ceased to look amused, but he sighed. “Oh, come on.” He stood up and ran his hand through his hair. He looked pale. “I’m tired.”
“So rest and then get to work on the road.” I reached over to tap his foot encouragingly.
“You don’t understand. I had to become known in that school. This gave me an excuse to talk to sophomores, juniors, seniors, all the teachers, everybody. God! I made that pious speech thousands of times.” He looked off at the autumn trees, whose brilliant colors gave the suburbs a fragile beauty they sorely lack. “I don’t want to help them do something.” I watched him press his body with his hands. He grabbed a thigh and squeezed, ran them over the small of his back, stretched, and then flexed an arm muscle: a whole series of movements that didn’t seem so much like a maintenance check, but like an awakening of the spirit. “What a bunch of fools.” He sounded almost sad. “I’m surprised by the teachers, I really am. They’re not smart.”
“Brian.” I had made a decision. “You know something? You’re the one who’s not smart.” I stood up to equal his eye level. “You think you fooled them into making you Student Councilman. But sure enough, you were the best person for it. Joseph would have known it was crap, but he would never have acted with such energy. And your opposition was successful because you were right, not because you outplayed them.”
The Game Player Page 7
