A.N. I always come too late for great movies. And for great characters. Thanks God Ben Foster's got an amazing taste in the roles he plays. Anyway, just an attempt to translate a key scene from 'Bang Bang, you're dead' into words. Very subjective take on the scene, of course. Don't own a damn thing.
Sitting there at that table was as tedious and heart-breaking as everybody would expect it to be. Privacy: go to hell, you little bitch. And I wasn't even that bothered that they actually took pride in exploiting their undisputable right to skip the part of asking for permission, as I remained sat there glad to be such an eager student who never waits for the end of a movie to edit the first cut. God, things would have been so much easier if I only liked football.
[Tic, tac, tac. This is the story of the little white arrow. It pinches and pouches and tints all the squares blue. Tac. Tic, tic. The little white arrow loves to fly and thinks it will change the world. It will conquer its four walls and unmask the scripts underneath its existence. The little white arrow knows no limits. It will destroy and rebuild. Tac, tic. Tac. Tac.]
They had been torturing me with a colonoscopy of stares since the moment I had joined the table. I had collected eyes right up to my ass. I kept mine down not to add on the happy bunch, which – really- wasn't happy at all. My parents felt tense. The headteacher felt tense. They all felt tense. They all felt so fucking miserable too, for as much as I knew. Me? I had fun there. Watching them carefully ensure that their frustration wasn't going to miss some of their favourite declarations of high values, mmh, such a blast. I listened as they chased each other's tail and played Scrabble with their words. Bullshits were worth twice. I won out after the first two minutes.
[Hello, my name is Outcast. I could be cured if I came out of my shell, get a cool jacket if I sold my mp3 to hard rock and have the brightest future if I just learnt not to throw up after twelve beers. Movies say I've got things inside everybody is waiting to hear, and if nobody is listening it's okay. I'm just not saying the right things.]
But I suppose it was fair, I had devoted too much of my All-American freedom to a job in archaeology that wasn't mine to take, insolently lowering into the caves of reflected humanity as I made my eyes so big I could not get mistaken by a blind guest anymore. I dug and rasped and wiped the sand along the skeleton of a macabre civilization that was lingering along the cracks of the perfect fairytale. The lost ruins of war emerged from the surface of unlimited shut eyes. One by one. I was going to open them all.
[Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please. I'm gonna ask you to lay down, relax, find a comfortable spot on your buttocks. Switch off the phones, the baby-sitter can handle it. Stop chewing pizza, it only increases cholesterol levels. And let our show begin.]
A waltz of turning chairs leaded the start. The first shot came, waved, said 'hi' and glided away. The second shot came, waved, roared 'houwdy'and faded back.What rang blunt and cold was the empty choir of a confession. I focused on my right thumb and made my cuticles my new favourite sit-come. I guess it must be a little ironic, to say the least. I mean. Allowing vulnerability to be that kind of a weapon.
[And on the seventh day God said 'shut up bitches!' and they all quieted down. Lands, mountains and rivers; birds, rabbits and snakes. Then came the Man and the Man couldn't obey. Men like talking. They talk to shape their own Bible. They talk to refute it too.]
You wouldn't believe me if I said that it felt all foreign to me. The images reminded me of a house I used to go for the summer. Rotten memories: of a lamp here, a rug there, a few of grandma's favourite doilies spread on the kitchen cupboard. I've been here, I thought. I own these words. But the familiar architecture of breaths, pauses and raging rumbles smelled of uncle Bob's tobacco and emotions I just couldn't bring myself to recognize. At every cut I searched for the lonely nights behind the face on the screen, or the hunted days along the laughers bumping from the speakers, impatiently witnessing the room invading the digital corpse of my life, hastily pouting over my own voice as it parroted some of the most obsessive thoughts of my extremely unoriginal youth. I figured they would have laughed if I'd asked them to introduce me to the guy talking.
[Night. Quarter past three. The only light glaring from a camera pointed right at the lips. Wednesday. The warm, pitiful silence of an ignorant home. The guy laying on the bed has got a dim kind of pallor to his cheeks. He's talking dryly, sharply, out of exhaustion. He's angry but never too loud. He's lost, but always so sure. Violated, pushed to the corner. He's a survivor. He's a machine. He's Robinson Crusoe last descendent.]
Hard to say at which point it became real. Something pierced through the uniforms and the air started coagulating to build a scab right underneath the roof. It goes without saying that the codes of modern advertisement allow the picky speaker to speak more clearly than the mass-infecting comedian. With long faces, hard on the edges and dark above the nose, they all went still. The voice on the screen slowly rose from the riot of their certainties and began to heal, little by little, the silent trauma of all those blood-loving TV news and hip hop paranoia that had made everybody so nervous. Psychology, law and education all returned to human form. It wasn't vocabulary anymore, it was people. I call it: 'when the Devil emerges on earth and gets stuck on the self-service checkout'.
[Seung-Hui Cho (January 18, 1984-April 16, 2007), Eric David Harris (April 9, 1981 – April 20, 1999), Dylan Bennet Klebold (September 11, 1981 – April 20, 1999), Sylvia Wynanda Seegrist (July 31, 1960), Michael Carneal (June 1, 1983), Andrew Philip Kehoe (February 1, 1872 – May 18, 1927), Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966). Wikipedia as the Comic-Con of the modern superheroes.]
Martyrdom? Is that my ultimate pay check? I felt more like a naked chicken wing on a KFC buffet, to be honest, bowed in front of my private court of adolescence expertise with my limbs all chopped up on a tape and everything else embalmed on a goddamn chair. Call me martyr then, but shoot that last bullet first. I've never believed myself to be much of a dreamer until I got scared of my own fantasies, and I never wished to advocate much until I confused those fantasies with the reality of being a genetically modified organism wrapped up in glaze of ignorance and offered to a system of demand and supply. So I did advocate something, didn't I. The credo of the naked chicken wing.
[To see, to forge, to conquer. To please, to strive, to anaesthetize. Wandering among the screams to ask yourself: does my fear sound that sad? Stamping all over their blood just to urge the question: does my heart hop at the same speed? But nature never lies. You must be so damn different to be the one clutching the final verdict.]
At one point it was clear.
I tussled inside that truth with few of my pride crumbs, yet I had to give in. During the last military assaults, the agonizing pseudo-excuses, the narcissistic bursts of recognition and all those comprehensive diagnosis about who and when and why Trevor Adams was not Trevor Adams anymore, I just surrendered to the evidence. Chairs screeched and new fists were hold, but it was okay. I had no more silence to keep them from talking. I let the authorities implore some sense of usefulness by collecting the faces of their own mistakes.
I had just found mine.
Go back to that Friday afternoon. Come on, open the door and get in the office. Look for me. Whoever you think I am. The terrorist, the ungrateful son, maybe the promising thinker or even the exotic love interest, have your pick, don't be shy. You think it matters? You wouldn't find me anyway.
Because I was not there.
My chair had always been the only intended guest. It had to serve as a symbol of transparency. My video? A corrosive and freshly-wounded propaganda for teen depression and tight close-ups. I had been manufactured into a tool for social innovation, my humiliation shrunk into one of the asterisks at the bottom of the next Zero Tolerance manifesto. Nobody honestly wanted to see me sitting there and nobody could actually handle it. They hosted their saviour and left the scarred child behind. The price of the irreparable was too high. Besides: who else can better reclaim a fairytale than the one who's threatening to glamorize reality?
[Take my name and wash it, re-wash it, wash it one more time, twirl it around the soap until it smells like lavender and bleach, rub it good on the sink until the letters are just frail enough that you can read shit. Because that's your problem. You think you can.]
"Trevor. Today you've forced us to take a long, hard look at our school. But that does not excuse the fact that you've made a death threat, which triggers our Zero Tolerance policy. I have no choice but to expel you. And you should expect a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. On a more personal note, this is the most difficult decision I had to make in school."
I met a guy that day that I thought I knew by heart. He stood up from his chair shaking, barely breathing, hardly himself and possibly like everybody else. He walked away after shrugging off his parents with few brief instructions and his teacher with a mute grumble that wasn't even meant to be an answer. He dragged his lonely kind of silence with him, bag on one shoulder, handcuffs around the wrists. A sward swinging above the head.
As his steps echoed the many roads unfolding from his current familiar life - mouthy lawyers, new schools, new questions, new screens dissecting the intestines of his mind - he started to draw invisible corpses on the hallway floor while approaching the exit. They grew out of tiles, out of dust. They lined up one after the other at the feet of the long shield of lockers. That's when we met. I didn't ask him why he had refused our faith,didn't complain about the hours spent making excuses for misunderstanding our ambitions or, for what's worth, I didn't correct that frantic search for truth that had reduced him to just another storyteller of his own disillusions. I wanted to know one thing, just one fucking thing.
But he couldn't give me an answer.
Three days later, on an apprehensive school midday filled with expectations and regrets, with his stomach pushed against the floor and one hand crushing the gun that his supposed best friend was about to use for his final wish, he gave me that answer.
And that announced the end of the beginning.
I was not, under no circumstances, going to be the accomplice of my own persecution. My responsibility as a victim was not to whom they made me become, but to whom I wanted to be before I was tricked to believe that that person was already dead. I was neither a punisher nor a surrender, I was not meant to redeem my sensitivity nor to pay for it. I was, by all means, an accident. An indigestive plot hole in my young self's naïve comic book. And I would always have been, no doubt, the mad bomber with his head stuck in the cafeteria trashcan. But the question I asked myself that day wasn't about how long I could hold on to what should have been, but if a gun had still more things to say than my own tongue.
I'm forty-five years old now. Two kids under the roof, two awards for Best Performance in a national theatre on the living room shelters. I started teaching acting because I was tired to be so scared to sit on the other side of that table. I still see corpses piled up on the school floors. I see bullets in people's eyes too, in class, at the morning coffee shop, at the mall. I never been more curious to know what those lives have to say than the moment I allowed mine to be heard. Professor Duncan was wrong: nor morality or fear of punishment saves you from that last step. It's the intimate recognition of your own voice and your own reasons against the scepticism you feel when you need chaos to grant you the privilege to deserve a voice and deserve your reasons.
I've always known the words.
I had to learn how to speak.
But it was my choice to listen.