by James Franco
We used to be friends, in fourth grade. He would be the game master when we all played the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game. But that was two years before, and lots had changed.
At rehearsal, waiting to go on for the party scene:
“Hey, Pordge, why don’t you go fuck yourself.”
“It’s Por-hey, and why don’t you go fuck yourself, Harry? You’re stupid enough.”
“Oh, you think I’m stupid, eh?”
“I think you are one of the stupidest guys in class.”
“Oh you do, hungh?”
“Yes, Harry, you’re like a hairy ape.”
“Oh, that’s funny, Pordge, you roly-poly fucking Pordge.”
“It’s Por-hey, hairy idiot.”
When he and Elizabeth kissed, it really killed me because I had hardly kissed anyone except for a game of spin the bottle at summer camp, and Pordge did it with so much feeling. I would stand offstage and watch them do the balcony scene with growing rage. He’d scamper up the little ladder that they disguised with vines and hold her cheek while he pressed his lips to hers. It was a fake kiss, an acting kiss, but it killed me every time. I knew she was acting, but it was like she wanted it: She’d close her eyes and lean into the kiss, blissful and sexual. It was a confusing moment. How could she do that, even if it was pretend, and not feel something? The way she closed her eyes, and leaned over the railing. It did something to me, lit something inside me, made me want to kill.
We did the play once for the school and it was a hit. Elizabeth and Pordge got the largest applause at the end, especially from the parents. It was stupid shit. I mean, so transparent, there is no way that they could have actually liked what Pordge was doing onstage, it was ridiculous. Sure, he said all the words clearly and did it with feeling, but the way he carried himself was all fake, and he spoke in a way that sounded phony. It was like he wanted everyone to know that he knew what he was saying, but it wasn’t how people actually talk, nor was it even poetic talk, it was just a show for a bunch of wimpy teacher types who want to know that they are having some kind of influence on their students.
My friend Adam played Mercutio. After the show we snuck out and walked over behind the school library where there was a wooden bench stuck into the wall. It’s where we used to play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game back when I didn’t mind Pordge.
Adam gave me a cigarette. “Try it.”
“Tastes like shit.” It was my first ever. He got them from his brother.
“Why are you so upset over those two?”
“Because I fucking love her.”
“Gross Lizard?”
“Shut up. She’s not gross, and she’s not a lizard.”
“Whatever, she looks like one, and anyone that wants to go out with Porgy is pretty gross.”
“Wait, what?”
“What?”
“She’s going out with Pordge?”
“Yes, you didn’t know?”
I smoked the whole cigarette with Adam and I felt sick. I walked home because I didn’t live far from the school. I was still in my red and gold tights, the Capulet colors. The air was chilly and my head and throat felt mushy and full of ash. Walking across the bike bridge I thought about murder. There was black water trickling in the darkness underneath, and I imagined Pordge’s body splashing in it and floating down and away. How, how, how? How could she be with that guy? A fucking butt-cut, and he was so phony and so full of himself, and for no good reason because he was a roly-poly slug motherfucker. I walked home alone in the dark. Cats slunk about the dark houses looking for mice.
We took the show to a multischool event called Shake-Fest where each school presented two Shakespeare scenes. Our school decided to do the balcony scene and the sword-fighting scene because our teacher, Mrs. Young, was proud of the sword fighting that we had developed. We had choreographed the whole thing with the fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Aronson. I think I was the best at it—well, maybe Adam was the best, but he played Mercutio, so he couldn’t show off his skills as much because he got killed right away. I’d always let him show off for a bit with a few spinning moves, but then I had to kill him. Then I always had to let Pordge kill me.
At Shake-Fest, the schools met in this auditorium, and each school would take turns doing their two scenes in the middle of all the others. There were five schools, and we went fourth. The first three were pretty bad. They did A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a scene with the donkey head, which I liked, but they could have done it better. Another school did the scene from Hamlet where Hamlet tells Ophelia to get to a nunnery—the Ophelia tried to cry, but it was fake, and Hamlet was in black and stupid—and Taming of the Shrew, ha, well, she was a fucking shrew, that’s for sure.
Then we got to our play. First they did the balcony scene. Because of the setup, Elizabeth had to stand on a ladder with cloth triangle cutouts on the sides with castle designs to disguise that it was a ladder. Elizabeth rested her arms on the top platform and looked out, and Jesse looked up at her and said his stupid lines. Elizabeth’s father was actually the guy that stood in the center of the ladder to hold it steady. He was a supertall guy, with square shoulders and a square head and a brown mustache, and he made me think: American fireman. I think he had played in the NFL when he was younger. When they had been putting everything in place and her father climbed under the ladder, lots of people laughed because it was such a funny setup, and I heard someone whisper, “He’s just standing there, for so long, that’s like seven million years of bad luck.”
Pordge and Elizabeth did their scene. It was pretty much how they had always done it, but a little different, and not just because of the ladder setup. Jesse was doing something else, something more than he usually did. I wasn’t sure what it was until I heard another person whisper, “He’s crying.” I looked at his pig eyes and he was crying, there was wet below his deep-set sockets and a glistening snail trail down the pertly molded bubble of each cheek. The little fucker was showing off, and not the way he usually showed off by articulating and flinging the words about as if he owned them or had a special relationship with Shakespeare. There was something else going on:
Oh that I were a glove [pronounced glow-v] upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek! [He always said this word very quickly, as if he were saying chick, and he’d purse his lips a little.]
His pronunciation and gesticulations made me want to smack him, but the tears on his face did something else to me: It cooked up in my chest a roiling, lustful rage. His tears were my tears, they were the outward signs of everything that I had felt for Elizabeth: her devastating beauty, her unattainability, the frustrations over being so young and not being able to do anything concrete. Once, on a special lunch outing with my mother, I had even asked my mom about getting married early. Elizabeth had been particularly nice to me at that time so I had naturally jumped to the idea of spending the rest of my life with her. My mom said that twelve was a little young to get married, so I cited a couple of young dancers that I had just read about who had been married at age fourteen with their parents’ permission. My mom told me that we could revisit the idea in two years if I was still in love with her. Then she asked if Elizabeth was in love with me.
I cried at that lunch, just like Jesse was crying in the scene; his were my tears, because I knew that she didn’t feel the same way about me, and I would never marry her, and we would grow up and she would live her life and I would live mine, and we would get old and ugly and the universe would die and none of it would matter. And here was Jesse delivering his fucking lines as if he was Romeo and not the pasty, pudgy, longhaired pompous fuck that I knew him to be. And he was fooling everyone. I heard someone whisper, “He’s really good.” I turned slightly and over my evil shoulder I saw that the tall, thin Ichabod Crane–looking woman that taught at one of the other schools was leaning slightly toward her friend Mrs. Young, our stout, powerful, black teacher. Mrs. Young nodded assent to Jesse’s supposed sk
ills in her self-assured way, full of pride for the simpering, overemotional turd in the middle of the crowd.
I could kill. He said everything that I wanted to say, in the way that I wanted to say it. Or so it seemed, but what I realized while watching helpless on the sideline was that it wasn’t even the words themselves that got me worked up; it was the intimacy with which he interacted with Elizabeth and in front of everyone. He was pouring his heart out to her and being applauded for it; her goddamned father was standing underneath them, holding them up, as Jesse climbed the ladder and kissed her, multiple times. And for this performance he didn’t hold back, no elementary school pecks for him, he was pressing himself against her with open lips and probably a froggy tongue hidden between. I was considered a freak whenever I showed affection for Elizabeth in life, but he was allowed to reveal his deepest feelings for her and in such a way that he was applauded for it: The more emotional he got, the more the audience was drawn into his performance. What fucking Romeo cries in the fucking balcony scene anyway?
A short digression: I had told her I loved her. After school one day, she was walking home with a couple friends, Rachel and Maggie: one tall with crossed eyes and blond hair, the other medium height, dark-haired, and tough. They walked home in the same direction as I did, across the bike bridge. When they were halfway across the bridge, I stopped them with my voice. Elizabeth and Jesse had been rehearsing the play for weeks at that point, and all of my desires—until then kept secret in my personal dream world of sunny fields and fluffy clouds—were being forced to the surface by the intimacy between her and Jesse that I was forced to watch. Until the rehearsals began for the play, I could bide my time and savor the unrealized plans I had for us, treating them as a fait accompli, without actually having to do anything to bring them about. It had been a relatively pleasant period when dreams ran free and defined my emotions in the slow moving days of elementary school. But the palpable intimacy developing, even in the early stages of rehearsal, had brought everything to a boil. I knew that if I didn’t act soon, I would lose her to Jesse, and at that time, relationships seemed never-ending; if they did start going out, it would be interminable. She would be lost forever.
“Elizabeth!” The girls stopped like the Three Fates, one lovely, leading the way to paradise, the other two leading to boredom and misery. I was half a block behind them.
“Hi,” Elizabeth said. I walked toward them. I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to her alone. My kneecaps turned to air and the back of my neck was wet and the crotches of my arms were wet. I was entering the scary zone, where physical things sucked away and my dreams came to the fore to be challenged, and everything that had been imagined and decided upon with assuring certainty in my head was now dragged out for inspection and judgment.
“Can I talk to you?” She didn’t answer. “Alone?” Then she smiled and said something to the other two that I was still too far away to hear, and after giving me one more glance they walked on, leaving my beautiful lizard alone, caressed by a blanket of California sun that elevated the vision on the bridge to the heavenly. Once I passed the metal barrier and was on the bridge myself, I could see that the sun was playing a sparkly game in the trickle of green scummy water in the cement creek below, and for a second everything seemed perfect.
“How are you, cousin?” she said.
“Cousin?”
“Yeah, we’re cousins, remember? Tybalt is Juliet’s cousin?”
“Oh, right.” I was standing next to her. She had her hand on the orange rail. There was a bit of graffiti carved into the paint, just by her large finger, but I couldn’t read what it said. Down below, on the cement wall of the creek, there was a large bit of graffiti in spray paint that said LUST. It was suddenly hard to look at her, so I kept looking down at the water and at the mocking sun that jumped from the water into my eyes.
“How are you?” I said.
“Fine.” Her voice… Then she said, “You wanted to talk?” There was really nothing else to say. I could tell her that I fantasized about marrying her, that I knew I would be someone special when I grew up, and that she could be part of that, that I would do anything for her, including fight someone, anyone, almost anyone, and I could tell her that Jesse was an idiot, a phony, and that I was the real Romeo, the Romeo of real life, or that Mrs. Young had turned us into star-crossed lovers, real star-crossed lovers, by forcing Jesse upon her in the play and trying to keep me from her by giving me the role of the cousin, but it didn’t seem like any of that would serve my purposes. So instead I said, “I love you.”
I wasn’t looking at her so I didn’t see her immediate reaction, but as I watched the reflection of the sun pirouette on a large ripple in the water, cable shaped, that was elevated from the normal plane of the water’s surface, caused by a rupture in the cement, I heard a trickle of laughter that fused with the image of the sun-pumping ripple, and it shot terror into my black center, filling it with ripping, sinking meaninglessness. I looked to her; her face was kind but not emotional, not full of the same fervor that was consuming me.
“Harry,” she said, as if she was trying to chide me into seriousness, as if I hadn’t just confessed the most serious thing of my life. “You don’t love me.” She was still smiling, but in a kinder way. I could have jumped off the bridge. I wouldn’t have died, but maybe I’d get a broken leg.
“Yes, I do. I love you, Elizabeth.”
“Harry, stop it.” She wasn’t smiling anymore. The other girls, boring and tough, were a little way down the street, waiting. They were looking back like they could hear what we were saying, even though they couldn’t.
It had happened. I had brought the dream out into reality and it had dissolved. It was just a dream and had found no purchase in the real world where it was dependent on other people for its realization. I wished that I could have sucked my words back inside where they had lived a colorful life of promise, had been nurtured by hope, and had never been tested. Now such sentiments would never be able to live without a forceful inner revision of the facts. Because it felt like someone had just taken a knife to a painting that I had spent three years composing, I decided to chuck the whole thing, and with the flourish of someone tossing a bucket of bloodred paint at a landscape full of lambs and shepherdesses, I said, almost in a yell, “Oh, so you love that motherfucker Pordge? Well, it serves you fucking right, you fucking Gross Lizard. I hope you fucking love each other in a great Gross Porgy lizard fucking mess.”
She registered momentary shock, then said I was an asshole and walked off toward her two waiting maids who yelled back at me and also called me an asshole.
“Go fuck yourself, Harry asshole,” said the tough one.
“You’re a fucking Harry-monster,” said the boring one. Elizabeth didn’t even look back.
That bridge was then the loneliest place in the world.
So there I was in the middle of all those students from all those schools in my yellow and red tights and the stupid skirt they made me wear, full of the bile of jealousy and rage. Adam and I did our Tybalt/Mercutio bit; I killed him and then Romeo hit the scene. I dare say that the little fucker could see his fate in my eyes. We really didn’t have many lines with each other, he said:
Now, Tybalt, take the villain back again,
That late thou gavest me, for Mercutio’s soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company:
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.
And I said:
Thou, wretched boy, that didst consort him here,
Shalt with him hence.
And then he said,
This shall determine that.
And then we were supposed to fight, and he was supposed to kill me. We had worked out the blocking for the sword fight, and had done it many times. He was supposed to thrust and I would parry, we would circle ninety degrees in one direction, I would strike and he would dodge, and then we would circle back in the other
direction a full half circle where I would then strike at him, he would side step, and then bring his rapier up under my arm as if he had thrust it through me and I would act as if I was stabbed and fall. Well, we did all of that, albeit a little more slowly and deliberately that usual: The tension was so tight between us I was worried that someone would step in and stop us. When I made my strikes I did them with extra force, and when we circled, my eyes never broke from his. His eyes were full of weepy blue fear, although he tried to hide it, and I know that my eyes were full of the red fury of a devil scorned.
When we finally got to the death moves, I swung for him, and he sidestepped as he was supposed to do, but when he stepped in for the kill move, I didn’t give him the open target that he expected. Instead I raised my rapier toward his torso as he thrust himself toward me. This move would have been bad enough on its own, but it was compounded by my malicious forethought: While he had been slipping Lizard the tongue at the top of the ladder, over her mustachioed father, I had removed the plastic cap at the tip of the sword. The tip wasn’t pointed, but it was metal, and would do damage. And it did. At first no one knew what had happened, there was always a slight pause at that moment so that the deathblow could register with the audience before I made my dramatic fall backwards. But this time I didn’t fall—he did, with my sword sticking out of his stomach.
STEP 9
Made direct amends to such “actors” whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or other “actors.”
Dear Class
It is James Franco. I have had several conversations with L_____ , other faculty, and some of our classmates, and it seems that my film at the second-year marathon has upset some of you. It was not The Clerk’s Tale, the film I made for my second-year evaluation; it was Masculinity and Me, a project that I collaborated on for a class I took in the film studies department called Film and the Body. In this class, we studied a variety of experimental, avant-garde, and medical films that focused on representations of the human body. I understand that some of the material in my film (e.g., the close up of an old man’s penis in the act of urination) might have been shocking, unpleasant, or distasteful, depending on your perspective.
