To shake off my funk over the upcoming dance that I would positively, absolutely not be attending, I decided to focus my energy on recruiting that coveted third member for the Classic Movie Club. My big brainstorm was a pathetic sign-up sheet and pencil-on-a-string that I taped next to the office, labeled with the optimistic headline “JOIN THE CLASSIC MOVIE CLUB AND DISCOVER WORLDS UNKNOWN!”
It hung there for a couple of days.
Every time I checked it, the page was depressingly blank.
Finally, someone stole the pencil.
My literature teacher, Ms. Ishikawa, is also the Fep Prep activities coordinator. She pulled me aside, wrinkled her little hamster nose, and warned that unless I fulfilled the three-member rule for all clubs, funding for movie rentals and use of the theater room would be canceled. All I could think of was how bad it would reflect on my well-roundedness if I couldn’t successfully organize a club where all someone had to do was sit in a dark room, stare at a screen, and eat snacks. Finally, facing the inevitable, I trudged past the office, glanced at the sign-up sheet-and there it was.
max kissberg, printed in red ink.
At first, the name didn’t ring a bell.
After all, it had been three years since Gina’s thirteenth birthday party, when he told me not to pay attention to world-class knuckleheads.
And then, rolling the name around in my mind, I vaguely recalled a tiny kid with monster braces who had moved to the suburbs. If he hadn’t spoken to me at Gina’s birthday party, I wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except for an extra blip of memory that came out of nowhere. We were even younger than at the party, maybe nine or ten, and there had been a school talent show where Max played a part in a scene with some other kids. I remembered his little body swallowed up in a huge pinstripe suit, his hair slicked back, and a little mustache drawn in black pencil under his nose. He was onstage, and I remembered that I knew his lines as he uttered them-they were from a movie I had watched with my parents countless times, with my dad’s running commentary of what, in the film, seemed “legit” and what was “phony.” Max had been playing Vito Corleone from The Godfather; he displayed a sly sense of danger that hushed the audience. As I stared at Max’s name on the sign-up sheet, I recited his lines from memory-
“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I murmured.
“What kind of offer?” a voice said.
I turned and looked up at a face smiling down at me that I found a little familiar and very attractive, and then looked closer at the curly hair and imagined thick glasses covering the warm brown eyes. What threw me off was how tall he was-at least half a foot taller than me-but there was no denying it was him.
“Max?” I said.
“Sara Jane, right? I remember you.”
“I remember you, too,” I said, my throat going dry.
I was suddenly hyperaware of how I looked (or didn’t look), wearing distressed (in a real way, not in a fashionable way) jeans, one of my dad’s beat-up Cubs T-shirts, and a pair of ratty Chuck Taylors. I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I’d last brushed my hair, and I licked my glossless lips trying to think of something cool to say. Max, on the other hand, looked like he could star on a TV show as the hot new guy in school-tan, just muscular enough not to be annoying, wearing a vintage motorcycle T-shirt and jeans that were not distressed, faded, or ripped, but normal and blue. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight since I’d seen him before. Maybe it was love at second look, since we were both older now and I was seeing a different Max, a Max who wasn’t a little boy anymore but with the same confident smile. Finally I said the stupidest, most obvious thing that popped into my brain. “Um, well. . you grew.”
Max laughed a little. “You too.”
“You had glasses,” I said, realizing that I was examining his face as if it were a fascinating work of art. “And braces. .”
“Contacts,” he said, overblinking, and then tapped an index finger on his teeth. “My braces came off last year, finally. It feels like my teeth got out of prison.”
“I’m so jealous,” I said, squeezing my lips over my mouth, hiding my supposedly-but-not-really-invisible braces. “I feel like I was born with these things.”
“It sucks but it’s worth it,” he said, and then I felt him inspecting my face, traveling from my mouth to my nose (how could he miss it?) to my eyes, where he paused and smiled, nodding at the sign-up sheet. “So are you in this thing?”
“The Classic Movie Club? Yeah, well. . I guess so.”
“It’s a cool idea,” he said.
“It was my idea!” I said, hearing my words fly out too fast and too loud. I cleared my throat and held back a blush. “I’m, uh. . I’m the president.”
“You are?” he said, looking at me in a way that gave me good goose bumps. “Hey, have you watched any gangster flicks? I’m into film noir. . the old black-and-white stuff. The dialogue is fast and smart, and there’s always a wiseguy who you know is dead from the first time you see him. He either likes being a criminal too much and wants to be the boss or can’t outrun his criminal past no matter how hard he tries.”
I told him that the club (i.e., Doug and I) had seen several gangster movies, the most recent being The Public Enemy, and how I’d felt that the main character was doomed from the first scene. Max was surprised I even knew about the movie. He told me it was one of his favorites and that it was based on an actual guy, a bad-to-the-bone thug who ran a big criminal operation in Chicago during Prohibition.
I said, “That was the no-alcohol law, right?”
Max nodded, saying how criminal gangs raked in enormous amounts of cash by making and selling illegal alcohol, and then paused, grinning. “You can tell me to shut up anytime you want.”
“What?” I said, staring into his eyes, and then realized I was staring. “No, no! It’s really interesting. How do you know so much about it?”
He shrugged. “I like history. My mom always says, if you don’t understand what happened in the past, how can you understand what’s happening now?” Max was right, and it reminded me of what Willy said about my dad and Uncle Buddy, about their history and making it my business. Before I could reply, his phone buzzed. “My mom,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Since we moved back to the city, she thinks I’m going to be randomly shot or kidnapped.”
“What does your dad think?”
“Hard to tell. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. My parents got divorced a couple of months ago and he took off for California with his girlfriend.”
“Geez. . that. . sucks,” I said, and blushed. The lameness of my reply made me feel like one of the world-class knuckleheads he’d referred to so long ago.
“It does, worse than braces. My mom was determined to move back to the city, even if it meant me transferring to another school with what, only two months left until summer break? But hey, at least I got to escape the suburbs,” he said cheerfully, but fake cheerfully, like he was trying too hard. He put on a half smile and said, “So, when are we getting together?”
“Together?” I tried and failed to get a wild strand of hair behind my ear, and asked, “For what?”
Max’s half smile became a real one. “A classic movie?”
“Oh, right, of course! Uh. . soon,” I said. “Tomorrow?”
“Awesome. What are we watching?”
“Oh, um, well, we’re watching. . we’re watching. .” I scanned my brain for the title of any movie I’d ever seen, and came up blank until Doug’s chubby grin filled my mind. “We’re watching About Face,” I said. “It’s genius. You’ll love it.”
Max nodded and said, “I trust you,” and walked down the hallway. At the exit, he turned and waved.
I waved back casually, like I was the coolest chick in the world.
I waited until he disappeared.
When I was absolutely sure he was gone, I did an excited little Muhammad Ali shuffle move and threw a one-two left hook combination in the air.
Talking to my mom and dad about boys I liked (who usually had no idea I even existed) always made me feel weird. I couldn’t help bringing up the subject, but then felt shy or silly as soon as I had. My parents seemed to sense my anxiety, and would tiptoe to the edge of a question, asking something decidedly neutral like, “What color is his hair?” I wanted to confess my deepest feelings, to discuss my crush like an adult, but then I’d chicken out and become a kid again, settling for something meaningless like, “Brown. He’s got brown hair.”
All of that changed with Max.
I found him endlessly fascinating and had an overwhelming need for the people in my life to know all about him. It was impossible to stop talking about him to my parents, or Lou, or Doug, or, frankly, anyone who would listen.
In fact, talking itself was the best thing about Max.
Besides his smile, and how tall he was, and that he liked all of the old movies I did, he and I talked for hours about everything.
We talked at school before Classic Movie Club, then afterward about the movie we’d just seen, and then later, on the phone, about school and our families, about politics and baseball (he’s a White Sox fan, ugh!), and about the world in general. There were no uncomfortable pauses or goofy utterances or trying to sound cool-the conversation just flowed. I noticed that we both naturally avoided slang, and we agreed that every kid in the world saying exactly the same thing over and over again sounded idiotic. But the best part of talking to Max was the simplest-he made me feel interesting. As someone who had never opened up to many people outside of her family, it was a wonderful, weird sensation to have such close attention paid to my thoughts and opinions. It was as if, in my years of mental and emotional solitude, I’d warehoused a vast array of exotic information, and I’d finally found someone to share it with. Whether it was sports or movies or yeah, even slang (Max informed me that “hipster” was actually from the 1940s; I countered with “geek,” enlightening him on its early-1900s German origins), we usually ended up talking about how something began. In the three weeks leading up to my birthday, if Max didn’t think of me as a girlfriend, then I was definitely a friend who was a girl. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I had to admit that our constant chatter was a good way, maybe the best way, to get to know each other.
And then, when he asked me to the spring dance-something I had wanted so badly-I couldn’t have cared less.
That’s because, a few seconds earlier, he said something even better.
He told me I was gorgeous.
Actually, he didn’t use the word gorgeous and maybe he didn’t realize he was paying me a compliment, but he’d said it, and then he asked me to the dance.
Let me clarify-he kind of asked me.
We were staring at a flickering screen in the theater room at Fep Prep, just me, Max, and Doug, with Doug grazing from a family-size bag of Munchitos, his junk food of choice. He’d recently been on a “great Italian directors” kick-we watched films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Rossellini-and had developed a minor obsession (he was easily obsessed) with the director Vittorio De Sica. First we watched The Bicycle Thief, which was the saddest movie I’d ever seen, and then Marriage Italian Style, which was about a guy cheating on one girlfriend with another girlfriend. It starred Sophia Loren, with whom Doug developed another minor obsession, and we moved on to an old Hollywood film she starred in called Houseboat.
Sophia Loren was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
On-screen, her face glowed and her body shimmered.
It was at that moment-the greatest of my life-that Max whispered, “Hey. . you look like her. Especially your eyes. You have little bits of gold in there.”
I thought I heard him wrong. I was scared to move, scared to breathe, and the seconds that followed felt like hours. Finally I said, “Who?”
“Her,” he said, nodding at Sophia, whose face filled the screen like a sexy angel. I didn’t know what the scene was about and didn’t care-all I knew was that Max told me that I looked like her. I was about to say something witty (i.e., stupid) when he said that his mom was forcing him to go to the dance and that maybe I should suffer too. I said something back like, “Yeah. Whatever. Maybe,” while trying to stifle a smile that, if I’d allowed it to run its course, would’ve dominated my face.
“I mean, we could meet there,” he said, still staring at the screen.
“I guess so.”
“Shh!” Doug hissed.
“If you go and we run into each other, you know, well. . great,” Max whispered.
“Great,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster, even though my heart was almost thumping out of my chest. Maybe it wasn’t the hearts-and-flowers way that I’d hoped he would ask me, but he’d asked me, and it was enough. I was going with, or meeting, or running into Max at the spring dance!
“My mom keeps telling me that I need to meet other kids, and that, quote, it’s not going to happen by spending all of my extracurricular time in a geeky movie club, end quote,” he whispered. “I reminded her that every kid with half a brain is a geek about something. With me it’s motorcycles. I’ve got this vintage Triumph Thunderbird and she promised that if I went to the dance, we’d get it out of storage. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”
“No, but I can drive a car,” I said shyly, and felt a small blush cover my cheeks.
“You can?” Max said, looking at me more closely, giving me the happy shivers.
“Shh. . for the second time!” Doug said.
I leaned in and whispered to Max how I’d sat next to my dad in the Lincoln a thousand times watching him turn the key, put the convertible top down, and drop the long, flat car into drive. One afternoon when I was thirteen, when he was at the bakery and my mom was out with Lou, I grabbed the Lincoln’s keys. Ten minutes later I was stuttering down Ashland Avenue-too much gas, too hard on the brakes, squeal of tires, repeat-until a red light came out of nowhere. I jammed both feet on the brakes as the Lincoln shrieked to a halt, rear wheels smoking and my heart punching my chest.
I looked to my right and a guy in a Mustang shook his head.
I looked to my left and it was my mom in her little Fiat, a red-lipstick slash of disapproval on her mouth.
“And then what?” Max whispered.
“She surprised me.”
After she followed me home and the Lincoln was safely in the garage, I expected a stern speech and punishment. Instead, she told me that normal society would expect her to say that driving at age thirteen was wrong, but that she didn’t agree. She said it was important to play by the rules, but that sometimes it was just as important to know how to break them, too. So the disobeying-the-law part, driving without a license-yeah, obviously that was wrong-but not the learning-to-operate-a-car part. As a teacher, my mom encouraged the accumulation of knowledge. If I wanted to learn to drive, she would teach me.
“That was cool of her,” Max whispered.
“So cool.”
I didn’t tell Max about what happened next because it didn’t seem to have much to do with the story. In fact, I wouldn’t realize until later that what my mom said at the end of our conversation was the real story-that it was best not to tell my dad about my little joyride. I should’ve been relieved that she encouraged me not to tell my dad about taking the Lincoln for a drive, but it surprised me, and I asked why not.
“It might upset him,” she said, looking away. “That old car was presented to your grandpa in 1965 to celebrate the birth of your dad, his first child and oldest son.”
“Presented?” I asked. “You mean like a gift? From who?”
“Just. . friends,” she replied vaguely, and for some reason my mind went immediately to the Men Who Mumbled.
“What about Uncle Buddy?” I asked, thinking of his beater convertible. “Was that a gift for Grandpa too? To celebrate the birth of his second kid?”
“No,” my mom replied. “Buddy bought that car himself.”
Back then, the idea of Uncle Buddy buying a convertible so he could have one just like his older brother made me sad for him. Of course, what I feel now-that he’s a twisted, world-class bullshitter who was jealous of my dad when they were kids and hates him now that they’re adults-is completely different. However, at the moment, telling Max the story in the darkened theater room, all I could really think was, I’m going to the dance with Max! Or at least going to a dance where he would be.
“Listen,” he said, pushing brown curls out of his eyes. “After I get this dance thing out of the way, do you want to go for a ride on my motorcycle? As soon as I get my license, I mean.”
“Yeah, sure. . I guess so,” I said breezily, with my heart about to burst.
“People, please,” Doug said. “There’s rude and there’s pathological. For the last time, and with feeling. . shh!”
I mouthed “sorry” to Doug as he settled back with junk food on the left and a root beer on the right. Watching him, I realized that Max was partly correct. Yeah, most kids with half a brain are geeks about something, but others require no brain at all.
Like Billy Shniper, for example.
Bully the Kid displayed zero evidence of having anything remotely resembling a cerebral cortex, yet he was a geek about teasing Doug.
Over the course of the school year, his bullying had progressed from frequently to constantly in pursuit of the goal he had yet to accomplish-making Doug cry. After Max witnessed one particularly intense display, he told Doug that he was going to intervene the next time it happened, and didn’t care what Bully the Kid said or did to him.
Doug smiled sadly and said, “Did you learn nothing from About Face? The only way to combat violence is with nonviolence. Aggression begets aggression.”
“Yeah?” Max said. “Well, someone needs to beget a fist in Billy’s mouth.”
Doug shook his head. “Dinwiddy turned away from violence. Bully the Kid or no Bully the Kid, I shall do the same.”
I had to admire Doug-his commitment to passivity was rock solid. He had created a set of rules for himself and vowed never to break them. I’d been boxing for years, where physical engagement inside the ring came with a set of hard and fast rules too. You played by them or were disqualified. You respected them or did not compete.
At that point in my life, rules were important to me.
I thought that if I followed them, they would apply order to the universe.
I foolishly believed they kept chaos at bay.
I didn’t know yet that the lesson my mother had taught me-knowing how to break or even ignore the rules-would become the only rule I would follow.