This Book Is Not Yet Rated Page 9

  “No,” said Lucas, pointing ahead, “this is bad.”

  I squinted into the distance and stopped walking for a moment. It was rare that I found myself agreeing with Lucas, but this time he was absolutely right. Nothing about what I was seeing could be called good. Up ahead, in front of an Applebee’s, there was an enormous pile of dirt and geraniums, an overturned Rascal Scooter, and a security guard screaming something into his walkie-talkie.

  “How?” I said. “It’s been like ten minutes . . .”

  Then I ran toward the scene, leaving my small cadre of followers behind me. Sweet Lou was sitting against the brick wall of the restaurant, muttering something to the security guard. Griffin was nowhere to be found. The boom box lay in pieces around the clumps of black potting soil. There were neon pink geraniums all over the sidewalk and the street. In the time it had taken us to get there, a small crowd had formed.

  “But if you’ve never ridden one before,” the security guard was asking, “why did you get on one today? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  Lou rubbed her elbow and winced.

  “You think just because I’m old, I don’t want to have new experiences? Don’t you ever get a wild hair, man?”

  A police car pulled up on the road next to us, lights flashing.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “This is bad,” said Lucas from behind me. “I got to go, Ethan, before these idiots try to deport me.”

  I watched him turn around and head back toward the theater.

  A young baby-faced police officer got out of his car. He looked perplexed and disappointed by what he had been called here to do. He slowly walked over to the security guard, and looked down at Sweet Lou. Then he looked at the busted scooter.

  “Would it surprise you to know,” the police officer asked Lou, “that a scooter just like this was reported stolen from a Costco in Bloomington this morning?”

  Lou was close-lipped. If the officer was hoping for a snitch, he had the wrong person.

  “No, it would not surprise us,” said someone from behind me.

  I turned to see a slim figure coming from the back of the crowd, winding her way between pockets of students taking pictures. I knew who it was, but I was in such a state of heightened anxiety, it didn’t totally sink in until Raina was standing next to me. She held a hand-painted sign that said, EAT THE RICH, with a picture of a fancy burrito on it.

  “Sorry, I’m late,” she said to me.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  She stepped forward toward the cops.

  “Who are you?” asked the guard.

  He looked at her sign in complete puzzlement.

  “I am a member of the Friends of the Green Street Cinema, a group of patrons for the arts. And this is a direct action to protest the destruction of a valuable community resource.”

  “Um, hold on, Raina. I’m not sure . . .”

  Raina shot me a withering look. I went quiet and looked around at everyone. All eyes were on me.

  “Uh,” I said. “What I mean is yes.”

  “Yes what?” said the cop.

  Raina was nodding next to me.

  “Yes we have chosen this . . . Applebee’s to show our displeasure with . . . the corporatization of this campus.”

  I was starting to feel a little adrenaline.

  “We don’t want your chicken fingers!” I said a little too loudly.

  The security guard took a step backward.

  “Or your delicious buffalo sauce!” I continued. “We don’t want the mozzarella sticks of the oppressor! We are a vital part of this neighborhood. We will not be erased. And we will not go down without a fight!”

  The cops looked at us and then back down at Sweet Lou.

  “Ma’am,” said the cop, “is that really why you crashed this stolen scooter into these flowers? Because of what these kids just said about chicken fingers?”

  Lou looked at me then at Raina. Then back at the cops.

  “Yes!” she said. “God Save the Green Street!”

  The cop looked back to Raina and me again.

  “And so you two stole the scooter and planned all of this?”

  I was about to clarify things a bit more. It didn’t seem necessary to take the blame for everything. But then Raina grabbed me and pulled me forward with her. I felt her hand in mine for the first time in years, and it silenced any last doubt that I should have had. I wanted to keep holding it, no matter the cost.

  “That’s right,” Raina said. “It was an act of civil disobedience. Arrest us if you have to, but we will not be swept aside!”

  Then Raina thrust out her arms in front of her and, because we were hand-in-hand, I did the same. And when I felt the cold metal of handcuffs, I wasn’t as scared as I thought I would be. And instead of freaking out, or hyperventilating, or explaining that this was all a big misunderstanding, I turned toward the nearest cell phone and gave what I hoped was the self-righteous sneer of a Parisian revolutionary.

  “How did you even hear about this?” I finally thought to ask Raina as we were led to the cop car.

  She looked at me with an arched brow.

  “I’m on the mailing list, dumbass.”

  18

  The last time Raina and I held hands, it was in the very theater we were trying to save. After that rehearsal in her basement, when she told me about the problems with her mom, she agreed to go see a movie with me, “just as friends.” Which was cool with me. I was just excited to show her something I cared about. So far, our friendship had been 100 percent on her terms. I played her games. I tried out for her play. We rehearsed at her house. I was happy she might see a glimpse of my world, even if that world was a musty movie theater with broken seats.

  Before we went, I had my dad call in a few favors. When he taught his film classes, he often used the Green Street as a screening space. The screenings happened late, after the public had all gone home, but this only added to their allure among undergrads. He even taught a course called Midnight Movies that was all about cult films. Rocky Horror. Evil Dead. Pulp Fiction. A Clockwork Orange. Sometimes, he let me attend, and I still remember seeing the students filing in, bleary-eyed, at various levels of sobriety.

  Because my night with Raina was the closest thing I had ever had to a date, I convinced my dad to set up a screening. He reserved the Green Street on a Tuesday night for a class, but this time, the class would only be two people. Anjo would be the projectionist. He had one of his TAs work concessions. We could watch anything we wanted, but the options of the university’s film archive were so vast, I started to panic as the day got closer.

  If I went too obscure, I risked making the experience alienating and trying too hard to look smart and cultured. But if I went too mainstream, it would defeat the entire purpose of going to the Green Street. My instinct was a quirky romantic comedy, but I also thought that might come on too strong. If I cleared the whole theater for us then turned on a bunch of love scenes, everything might get awkward very quickly. Eventually, I went to the master himself.

  “Hmm,” Dad said. “That’s a tough one. A date that’s not really a date. A love story that’s not really a love story.”

  “It’s a delicate situation,” I said.

  We were in his office at school. The walls were covered in framed movie posters, including his prize possession, a signed movie still of De Niro with gloves raised in Raging Bull. Dad was wearing his usual uniform of a rumpled blazer and jeans. It would maybe have been a stylish look if he didn’t wear his suit jackets two sizes too big to fit his long arms.

  “Well there’s Bonnie and Clyde,” he said. “That’s a classic.”

  “No crime sprees,” I said.

  “Sid and Nancy?”

  “Dad, that movie is about junkies. Maybe something without a tragic ending?”

  “Titan
ic?”

  He smiled. I didn’t.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m taking this very seriously starting now.”

  He walked over to his bookshelves, which were overflowing with DVDs and old VHS rarities that never made the transition to digital. He ambled along, running his finger over the cases, one by one. Eventually, his fingertip came to a halt and he pulled out a DVD and tossed it to me like a Frisbee.

  I trapped it with two hands.

  “Harold and Maude?” I said. “I’ve seen that a hundred times.”

  “It’s charming,” he said, “It’s funny. And the love interest is a seventy-nine-year-old woman, so I don’t think you’re in any danger of life imitating art.”

  I looked down at the case. Bud Cort, the actor who played Harold, had a look of complete bewilderment on his face. It was a fair reflection of the way I felt most days. I set the DVD down on his desk.

  “Does the university have a film print?” I asked.

  “Of course. I ordered it for the collection myself.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When the night arrived, I was nervous until I stepped into the theater. On the bus ride over I couldn’t remember if I had put on deodorant after my shower, and the thought was haunting me. I had been using the same kind for so long that I no longer had the ability to really smell it. Raina caught me sniffing the air on more than one occasion.

  “Do you have allergies or something?” she asked.

  “Um. Yes,” I said, and slumped a little lower in my bus seat.

  Everything changed when I entered the theater. I felt instantly calmer, like that smell of old popcorn and orange-scented cleaning products was a natural antianxiety drug. When I thought about this place, I thought about Saturdays with my dad, sitting in a small dark room, the flutter of the projector barely audible above me, the slow parting of the curtains, then, nothing else to concentrate on but the offbeat stories my father favored.

  I looked over at Raina. She had a sweatshirt on with thumbholes cut in the end of her sleeves so half of her hands were hidden.

  “Don’t we need tickets?” she asked.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let me give you a quick tour.”

  I took her up to the projection booth first. Anjo was in there, opening the canister that held our print. I didn’t know her that well at the time, but my father spoke highly of her taste. In the corner, incense and candles burned beneath her photo of Steve McQueen. She looked at us when we walked in with the trace of a smile on her lips.

  “Today’s his birthday,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She pointed to the candles.

  “Terrence.”

  I looked at the poster. Raina was staring at Anjo.

  “Terrence Steven McQueen,” she said. “The greatest leading man who ever lived. So, I’m practicing some necromancy.”

  Raina took a step back toward the door.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Anjo looked up from the print.

  “Black magic,” she said. “I’m summoning his spirit.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah, so if you feel a strong kind of masculine energy this evening, it’s because Terrence is risen.”

  Anjo looked at me and winked and I felt my cheeks getting hot. She was trying to help me out with a dose of antihero mojo. I had only seen one of McQueen’s movies at that point. It was called The Cincinnati Kid, and I remembered him making sarcastic remarks to this woman until in one moment he kissed her out of the blue and slapped her on the ass. The woman called him a bastard and then smiled as she watched him walk away. Somehow, sexual harassment didn’t seem like a winning strategy for me. Or, you know . . . anyone.

  I decided to cut the tour short and go down to our seats. We picked up some candy and popcorn on the way. Raina was still quiet, which was unusual for her. I couldn’t tell if it was because she hated the Green Street or because she was regretting coming out with me. Or both. She stuck her hand in a box of Dots and tossed a couple in her mouth.

  “So what is it?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the big deal? What is it that you like about this place?”

  “You don’t like it,” I said.

  “I never know what I like until it’s over,” she said. “So, why don’t you save me some time and let me in on the secret.”

  “The secret,” I said.

  She sighed. It was a familiar response.

  “Ethan,” she said, “you’ve clearly been waiting to ask me out for months. Now you did and I said yes, and you brought me to this place. Why?”

  I felt my heart beating in my throat. Was she admitting this was a date? I tried to nudge that thought out of my head. It would do me no good for the moment.

  “Well,” I said. “Okay. Um, so my dad has this thing about rituals.”

  “Satanic rituals? Like that woman upstairs?”

  “No. Just rituals in general. Things we do every week. Things we can count on. He says that they make life more manageable. Because most of the time, things are unpredictable and kind of scary. Everything’s always changing, no matter what we do. But if we have rituals, we can fight that a little bit.”

  “Okay . . .” she said.

  “We used to go to church, but then Dad had a crisis. Our church got kind of conservative. He says he’s an agnostic now, but secretly I think he doesn’t believe in anything; he just doesn’t want to admit it. Anyway, we don’t go to church anymore, but we come here. At church my dad used to tell me that I didn’t have to believe everything in the Bible; it was just good to sit and think about spiritual things sometimes, to get outside of all the little everyday things that fill up our minds. So, now I’m supposed to do that here. After we see a movie, we’re supposed to talk for a little while about ‘what it means to be human.’”

  “Have you figured it out yet?” she asked.

  I looked at her.

  “What it means,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Nah. A few clues maybe.”

  She looked around at the small theater. The speakers, coming unscrewed from the walls. The high ceiling full of decades-old cobwebs.

  “So this place is your church now?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Then, as if on cue, the giant crimson curtains started to open, and Sweet Lou, who I didn’t know would be coming, walked out to her seat and sat down at the antique Wurlitzer organ. It was horseshoe-shaped and lit up like a merry-go-round. Lou raised her hands and jumped right into her signature theme, an old song from a Paramount newsreel. The projector switched on and she played along to some old concession ads that my dad had attached to our film.

  “Whoa,” said Raina, “who the hell is this lady?”

  “The house organist,” I said. “Lou does live film scores every Sunday. I guess she’s been here since the sixties. She’s kind of a legend.”

  She played a whirring song as animated Coke bottles danced across the screen. Then the lights dimmed, and Lou got up and walked back out of the theater. At that point, it was just Raina and me in the darkness. I stuffed some popcorn in my mouth and looked forward, but I felt her eyes on me. Eventually she, too, turned toward the screen. And we sat quietly as the movie started and Harold faked his own death time and again to get under the skin of his controlling mother. I could tell Raina was into that part, probably imagining the way her own mom would freak out.

  We both disappeared into the story.

  It wasn’t until a scene where Maude is walking with Harold in a greenhouse that I fully remembered Raina was there again. It’s a part I really like. Maude asks him what kind of flower he would want to be, and he points to a daisy and says he’d like to be one of those, “because they’re all ali
ke.” But Maude tells him that it’s not true. Each one is different. Some are smaller. Some are bigger. Some have missing petals. And then, suddenly, the film cuts to Harold and Maude in a cemetery of white tombstones and they look like daisy petals!

  The shot rises into the air on a crane and zooms out until it seems like there are thousands of these grave petals in every direction. They all look identical, but now we know the people beneath them were anything but. I’ve seen the movie a lot of times and it always makes me want to cry and laugh at the same time. I’m not sure which I was doing when Raina grabbed my hand. But she held it tight until the scene was over. And even when she took her hand away just a few minutes later, I could still feel her warmth.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #175

  JUMP CUT

  A kind of cut where the subject of the movie seems like they’ve jerked forward in time, almost like a part of the scene is missing.

  They’re jarring, and they make time seem like it has come unspooled.

  Oftentimes, when they occur they’re just moving forward a little bit in time, like Luke Wilson shaving in The Royal Tenenbaums in that beautiful, haunting scene where he eventually tries to kill himself. His hair disappears in cut after cut until he’s nearly clean shaven, staring at the camera.

  I used to think jump cuts were too much. That they pulled you out of the film. But now I know time can feel like that. Not just in the moment.

  Sometimes years can fly by and then there you are with somebody, sharing the frame again like someone has stitched you in.

  19

  Have you ever been to a juvenile detention center?

  It took me until my last official year as a juvenile, but I made it.

  They sat Raina and me in a sad institutional lobby to check us in. There were a few desks in the room, and a dour man with a bad mustache was working on our paperwork. A nearby television with the volume off was playing a commercial for a taco with a shell made of fried chicken. Raina sat across from me in a fake leather chair. Against the drab leather, she looked more childish than revolutionary. She grabbed the back of her blond hair and twisted it into a short ponytail.