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It's a good thing that my father is an accountant, because he really sucks at being an inventor. It's not that he hasn't given 110% or any of that crap; it's just that he never quite got the fundamentals right. For one thing, inventions are supposed to work. Further, they're supposed to be things that don't already exist. He really can't get his mind around that.. "Do you know what the world needs?" he asked one night. "A machine that will automatically pour water into a cat's dish." I tried to explain that these already existed, but he didn't listen. Even when I showed him all of the various models that were available at our local pet store, he said that to simply buy something you could invent yourself, using good old American ingenuity, was practically unpatriotic. I tried to explain that buying products was what capitalism was all about, and was therefore perfectly patriotic, which anyone who ever took a sixth grade civics course should have known to begin with, but he didn't listen to that, either. Instead, he worked for three months, and flooded the basement twice, building a machine that I suppose may have worked, but may have also been a dud. There was no way to tell. The cat wouldn't go near the thing. Dad's inventions aren't the only dangerous thing I have to put up with; the cooking at my house is just as deadly, and often even more embarrassing. It isn't that my mother's a bad cook or anything; hell, as far as I know, she could be the best cook in town. But she and my dad are what they call "food disaster hobbyists." It's sort of like being the sort of person who watches bad movies on purpose just to make fun of them, only with food. Their idea of a good time is buying old cookbooks from the 50's and 60's down at the thrift store, ones with titles like The Wonders of Lard and You and Your Artichokes. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those, but some of the pictures and recipes in them look absolutely wretched. Every few weekends, they buy up a stack of them, spend hours laughing at some of the worst recipes, and then, for reasons I never could fathom, once or twice a week they cook them and serve them for dinner. It's one of their many poor, misguided attempts at "quality family time." The inventions can get a bit embarrassing or dangerous, but cooking terrible recipes on purpose and expecting your kid to eat them simply isn't very nice. They insist that they aren't really bad, just different,and even point out that now and then one will turn out to be pretty good, but the odds on that are really pretty dismal. At least orphans in the old days got to eat good old reliable gruel. Nobody tried to make the gruel into an even nastier casserole. On the night after my first day of eighth grade, I really didn't want to go through with the usual family dinner, since t I knew that they'd just bought up another batch of cook books that they probably couldn't wait to try. "So, Leon," said my father, as we sat down, "how was the first day of school?" "Fine," I mumbled, as my mother heaped a much larger pile of some mysterious form of casserole than I would have liked onto my plate. The casserole clashed badly with the dinnerware, which was from what I guess you'd call the "vomitesque" school of household design, like the ugly, paste-colored trays with swirling designs that we used to have at the cafeteria in elementary school. Even harvest gold and avocado green haven't been out of style long enough for my mother to get on the bandwagon. "That's it?" my father asked. "Just fine?" "He's not telling us something," said my mother, talking as if I wasn't present. "What aren't you telling us, Leon?" I shoveled a large spoonful of the casserole into my mouth, and chewed on it long and hard. This was not a particularly pleasant thing to do, but it was worth it to stall having to talk. "Well," I finally said, "when we were all introducing ourselves in math class, they made us all say our middle names." This, of course, is a classic first day of school time waster for teachers who aren't very creative. "What's wrong with that?" my father asked. "I told them my middle name was Harold," I said. They put down their silverware and stared at me for a second, as though they wanted an explanation. "Well?" I asked. "What was I supposed to do? I couldn't very well tell them that my middle name was Noside! That could wreck my reputation clear into high school!" Keeping people from finding out what my middle name is has been a battle as long as I've been in school. When I die, I'm going to come back as a ghost to make sure that it isn't on my tombstone. "That name," said my father, angrily, as he slammed down his glass of water, causing a few drops to splash out onto the table, "is more than just a name, it's a responsibility." In case I haven't properly established this fact, my father is crazy. I'm convinced that no sane person would name their child Leon in this day and age, and I'm further convinced that anyone who would give their child the middle name of Noside is probably a danger to himself and others. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he didn't name me "Eureka," which my uncle once told me he had wanted to do. I'd never get through middle school alive with a name that sounded like "you reek-a." I scooped up more of the casserole and popped it into my mouth to keep myself from groaning. I do a lot of groaning around the house, and I knew that my father was about to start in on the lecture I always get when I bring up the middle name. This particular lecture had been the cause of countless groans over the years. "Noside," he began solemnly, "is 'Edison' spelled backwards. You were given that name as an insult to the late Thomas Edison, who was jerk who took credit for other people's work. Your middle name carries on our responsibility as decent people to expose him as a fraud." My father is practically obsessed with hating Thomas Edison. Personally, I'm convinced that my father's real problem with Thomas Edison is that he's jealous that Edison invented a lot of good stuff before he had the chance. And I'm further convinced that Thomas Edison himself doesn't feel the least bit insulted by my middle name, what with being dead and all. But the lecture made perfect sense to both of my parents, who stared up at the ceiling for the next few minutes, as though they were looking towards God, or, more likely, the spirit of Thomas Edison, to ask what was wrong with me. Why oh why, they were probably thinking, hasn't our only begotten son grown into an Edison-hating inventor who makes intentionally bad meals? He's in eighth grade now, and he'll be in high school next year – can we possibly turn him into a complete loser in time for him to get into accounting school? They did this a lot; I was in second grade before I found out that Thomas Edison was just a regular guy. Before that, I'd thought he was some sort of deity or something, and worried that if anyone found out that my dad hated him, we'd get kicked out of church. When they finally started speaking, they had changed to topic altogether to the quality of the dinner, which, from what I could tell, involved raisins, mayonnaise, and something that might have been tuna, but somehow tasted like ketchup. "This is absolutely bizarre," said my father, grinning from ear to ear. "The flavors just...clash!" "Can you believe that they actually published this recipe, Leon?" asked my mother, who was clearly delighted that they had. I resisted her sly trick to get me into the spirit of the whole meal. I had my pride. "I can just imagine the guy writing the recipes for it," said my dad. He began to speak in a bad French accent. "Aha! What zis mayonnaise needs is....more raisins!" "How shockingly bold!" said my mother, in her own bad French accent. This is pretty much the way every dinner plays out. I'm expected to participate, because, if I don't, it's not "quality family time," but I rarely say a word, and they aren't very good at coming up with funny things to say about the food themselves. It seems to me that, if you're going to make your kid watch you making a complete dork of yourself, you could at least have the courtesy to come up with better jokes. CHAPTER TWO Despite the rough start, I was glad to be back in school, if only just to see my friends again. I'd finally been allowed to take my bike across Venture Street over the summer, which was like busting out of jail, and which meant that I had been able to see more of my friends than I had the last several summers. But we hadn't all been together in a while. Of course, the first week of school wasn't that exciting; they never really have you doing much in class the first week, and there wasn't much in the way of hijinks. We didn't even start our normal schedules until the second week, and, in the classes we had, all was quiet. Everyone was actually well behaved. It seemed like the last year, when things got out of control in class just about every day, had never even happened. But I knew that things would pick up soon. My faith in my fellow students was strong. On Saturday morning, my father asked if I'd like to go to the flea market with him, and, having forgotten all about our latest fight about my middle name, I said I'd love to. I'd found out some time before that you could buy old stereo speakers, often very large ones, for a couple of bucks at a lot of flea markets, and had figured that, if I got enough of them, and enough connectors and splitters to hook them all up to my stereo, I could cover a whole wall of my bedroom with speakers. My very own wall of sound! At the time, I had covered about half the wall, but hadn't had the nerve to try them out yet. As we drove along in the van, my father started to talk about his latest invention. "I'm going to the flea market for parts," he said, as if I couldn't have guessed. "I've decided to invent a single switch that will turn off all of the electricity in the house at once." "They have those," I told him. "They call them circuit boxes. We keep ours in the garage." "Bah," he said, waving a hand that he should probably have kept on the steering wheel. "That's a whole bunch of complicated switches. The other day I was trying to shut off the power so I could install a new light in the living room without getting an electric shock, and I said to myself, 'there has to be a better way.' That's where I come in!" I would have said that I'd be careful to save my work on the computer regularly, because the power would probably be shutting off randomly while he was doing tests, but I didn't. I was convinced that, even if he blew up the entire house in the process of building this invention, the electricity would still be running in the rubble, and I was further convinced that, if I told him that, he would just take that as a vote of confidence that he could make something that was capable of blowing up the house. It was a strong personal rule of mine never to do or say anything that could be construed as encouragement for my dad's inventions. I figured that, the more I encouraged him, the sooner he'd set the garage on fire. He'd come pretty close on several occasions. When we got to the flea market, we went off in separate directions. Before hitting the speakers, I flipped through the boxes of tapes for a bit, and found a couple of old Black Sabbath albums. Liking heavy metal had saved me on several occasions; middle schoolers on the whole did not look kindly on kids who, like me, didn't bother with sports, but, since I liked heavy metal, I was sort of given a pass. It made me just cool enough to avoid getting beaten up. After an hour or so, I met up with Dad at the door, with two Black Sabbath tapes, two very large speakers and a bunch of speaker wire in hand. He was carrying a bunch of cables, some switches, a handful of gears that looked broken, and a test tube. I didn't ask what he was planning to do with the test tube. Frankly, I didn't want to know. "Leon," he said, as we pulled out of the parking lot, "would you like to help me on this project?" "No thanks," I said, as politely as I could. "I like keeping the electricity in the house on." "But you'd be aiding in the creating of an invention that will benefit mankind, possibly for centuries to come!" he said, in his best "patriotic inventor" voice. "Won't that look great on a college application?" "Dad," I said, "if you ever want the electricity turned off, just tell me, and I'll happily do it for you. I have other things to do today." "Leon," he said, sounding annoyed, "I just want to expand your horizons. Obviously you're interested in electronic stuff. You're always buying gear to hook up those speakers." I didn't tell him that I hadn't actually hooked them up yet. "And more to the point," he said, "we need to spend more quality time together." "Dad," I said, "I won't be a party to helping you spend hours tinkering around building something that already exists and is rarely of any use. It's not as though you'll ever get it to work right." I regretted saying that immediately. For one thing, it wasn't very nice. Further, I was under strict orders from my mother never to point out that my dad's shortcomings as an inventor. Dad didn't respond for a long time. But as we were getting close to home, he said "Leon, I know that I've had a lot of setbacks in inventing things, but if inventors just gave up because of setbacks, nothing would ever get invented. You should always keep trying; it's the American way. And I'm going to make this invention work, Leon. And one day, I'll invent something that will set my whole field on fire!" Dad's goal as an inventor was to one day create something that will revolutionize the world of accountants, but, so far, he had failed to come up with right idea. I think that, once the pocket calculator came along, accountants had gone about as far as they could go. Every time he talked about revolutionizing the accounts, I pictured one of those paintings of the French revolution from my history book, only instead of the working class leading people to have their heads chopped off, it was accountants. Nerdy ones. You know how sometimes silence sounds like a lecture? This was one of those times. I really wished that there were some way that I could subtly give him some encouragement, something to make him feel better. I could tell by the fact that he wasn't saying much that I'd really hurt his feelings; if I hadn't, he would have been talking my ear off about his plans for the latest invention. I didn't want to break my personal rule against encouragement, but, well, he was still my dad. I felt bad about saying mean things like that to him. After all, it's not nice to be mean to crazy people. When we got out of the car, he went straight to the garage to start working, and I went up to my room. I had decided that I wanted to try hooking up all of the speakers I had, just to hear how things sounded. And, anyway, keeping busy kept me from feeling guilty. So I hung the new speakers up on the wall, and then spent the better part of two hours hooking all of the speakers I'd collected up to various connectors, ports and splitters, then hooking the whole thing into the stereo. By the end of it, my room was a mess of wires. I'd have to come up with a good way to cover them up sooner or later. I considered getting a rug with some band's logo on it. I'd put a lot of thought into what song I should play first when testing out the wall of sound, and, after narrowing it down to five choices and discussing them with my friends, I'd decided on "Back in Black," by AC/DC. I was originally going to go with "Stairway to Heaven," which seemed like an obvious choice, but "Stairway" starts off pretty slow. "Back in Black" cuts right into the loud electric guitar riff at the very beginning. I had a CD consisting of only that song in my dresser, which I'd made a long time ago just for this occasion. I dug it out, stuck it in the stereo, and hit play. Exactly one note, one unbelieveably loud guitar chord, came out of the all of the speakers on the wall. I swear that the house shook a bit, and I imagine that all of the birds in the trees outside probably flew away in one big flock, like when a gun goes off in the movies but they don't want to show anybody getting shot. But after that one note, there was a big pop and a bunch of sparks. Most of the sparks were little ones around the speakers, but there was a big one by the electrical outlet where the stereo was plugged in. Then the music stopped, and the lights went out, and all of the appliances in the room went dead. Not just the stereo, but the clock radio, the lamp, and the beat up TV I had that only worked for video games. Apparently, I'd blown a fuse or two. All of the electricity in the house appeared to be dead. Five seconds later, through the buzzing in my ears, I heard the voice of my father coming from downstairs. "Eureka!" he shouted.
(from) Weekends in the summer are always lame. The weekdays settle into a nice routine in which all of the regular reruns are on and my parents aren't home, but everything gets messed up on the weekends. The best part about being back in school was that my weekends went back to normal. Well, normal for a kid in a house full of escaped mental patients, anyway. My father got back to normal (for him) right away, too. At first he was really disappointed when he found out that the lights going off had been my doing, not his, but after awhile, he decided that he was proud of me. "My son," he said, in his best "fatherly" voice, "another parent might be furious that his son had blown out a fuse with heavy metal, but I'm not one of those. I'm proud of you. You were trying to invent something, in a way. Even if it didn't work, it's a very noble thing to try to invent something." I would have been happier if he'd just been furious. I'm pretty sure he was just relieved that I hadn't blown up most of the house. In any case, I put the wall of sound project on the backburner for a while. The weekend passed as quickly as most weekends do, and on Monday morning it was time for school to start back up, but it was Tuesday that I was looking forward to. The mid-week mornings were different. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings, starting the second week, instead of homeroom all of the sixth and seventh graders were supposed to go to "advisory," where they would sit around and talk about heavy issues like drugs, drinking, and teen pregnancy. I was convinced, back when I started sixth grade, that advisory would be boring, and further convinced that there wouldn't be anything covered in class that we hadn't seen a hundred times on after-school specials. But there had always been rumors that Junior High sex-ed, which was part of advisory, involved actual photographs, so I couldn't help but look forward to it a little bit. Not that I didn't know what naked people looked like or anything; I had the internet, after all, but that wasn't quite the same as getting to see them in class. But it turned out that I had been right all along; there was nothing in the class we hadn't all heard a thousand times before, and all of the pictures in sex ed were lame diagrams and line drawings. While I understood that they still taught the same class under the name of "health" at the high school, for some reason they gave us a break in eighth grade, and, instead of advisory, we'd be going to "activity period." The first week of school, we'd each signed up for an activity. Most people had signed up for team sports or ping pong or something like that, and a couple of the truly sick had signed up for "good grooming." Personally, I'd gotten my homeroom teacher's permission to sign up for the "advanced studies" activity, which was a fancy way of saying "the smart class." This really should have seemed uncool, but it wasn't, because I knew it would just be all the kids from the "gifted pool" that met with an old bat named Mrs. Smollet once a week. It was kind of fun; we'd sit in the couches that they'd set up, and, while we were supposed to be doing brain teasers or crossword puzzles or something like that, we'd make it our business to try to bug the crap out of Mrs. Smollet, who was kind of a goody-goody religious type, and was a little bit a afraid of us. I'm not sure where they came up with a name like "gifted pool." It's the kind of name only a teacher at the end of his or her rope could have devised. Now, on TV or in the movies, whenever the main character is a boy genius or something, the "smart classes" are made up of dorks who tuck their shirts into their underwear, do math in their heads, and might have actually signed up for the good grooming activity. In reality, our advanced classes and gifted pools were always made up of a bunch of miscreant kids who just happened to read books from the adult section of the library. Many of us even read newspapers. That was all. The real dorks weren't smart enough to get in. My activity group was meeting in the media room, which is what they called the room that used to be called the library. During the previous couple of years, they'd added a whole bunch of new computers and other high tech stuff and changed the name, but it was basically the same place. I saw right away that the advanced studies activity was the usual band of troublemakers, all sitting in chairs that at been arranged in a circle. There was James Cole, who spoke fluent French and was the first kid in school to smoke pot. Next to him was Dustin Eddlebeck, who had graduated from writing naughty limericks on the bathroom walls to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. Then there was Edie Scaduto, the school Communist, and Brian Carlson, her boyfriend, who was really into fire, and a handful of other kids that I didn't know quite as well. If it weren't for the fact that we were the gifted pool kids, I'm sure that the school would have gone to great lengths to keep us far away from each other at all times. I guess you could say that we had a pretty good scam going. My friend, Anna, was already there, too. She had cut her blond hair short, down to her shoulders. It used to be down to her butt, but I decided not to mention it. She hated it when people rambled on about her long hair. "Hey, Anna," I said, sitting down next to her, and enough chairs away from Brian Carlson that I didn't have to worry about getting my shoelaces set on fire. "How was your summer?" "Pleasurable," she said. Anna was the one person in school who had weirder parents than mine. They had been in college for about twenty years each, and knew just about everything in the world. Her dad was a professor of something or other in the city, and her mother occasionally flew to Europe to see if some painting that had turned up at a flea market in Amsterdam was actually a Cezanne or just a fake - I suppose you could say she was like an art detective.The one time I'd been in her house, when I went to deliver Anna's homework to her when she was sick, there were framed prints of weird paintings all over the walls and incense burning on the kitchen table, and she called her parents by their first names. And her father had a bookshelf covering the entire wall with books about the 18th century. There were a whole bunch of musical instruments in the living room, and apparently they played all of them, and had made Anna take cello lessons since she was three. And here's the weird thing: Anna actually liked her parents. She was always showing off cool yoga poses or coming up to me say things like "did you know that most 18th century French literature was originally published outside of France?" I guess I would have liked my parents if they were more like that. They were sort of sophisticated and cool, instead of just plain weird and potentially dangerous, like mine. You could bet that they wouldn't be expecting her to go to accounting school when she finished high school. It goes without saying, of course, that Anna was less than popular. Outside of the advanced classes, spouting off facts about the 18th century and playing the cello aren't the best way to get ahead in middle school. But I liked her. She was cool and really very cute. Naturally, I wouldn't have said that out loud, least of all to her, for anything. The thought of going on a date with my dad giving us a ride was more than enough to keep my mouth shut. My activity period teacher turned out to be Mr. Streich, one of the science teachers that my father knew fairly well; they occasionally went shopping for parts together. I took this to be a bad sign. His named was pronounced like Strike. As in "strike three." He had a moustache on purpose. Moustaches can make certain people look pretty smooth, but most people just look like a dorky sort of plumber. Even my father had refrained from a moustache. I suppose it was better than having Mrs. Smollet, though. "Good morning, students," said Mr. Streich. "You'll notice that I didn't call you 'boys and girls.' You're in eighth grade now." I looked around the room, but didn't notice anyone looking any older than they had the year before. No one had grown a goatee over summer vacation. "Now," he continued, "this class may not actually be called 'advisory,' but we'll still be talking about a lot of the stuff that you talked about for the last two years." Everyone groaned except for Anna, who made more of a low, breathy moaning sound. "We'll be talking about a lot of weighty issues," Mr. Streich continued, "but, since this is the media room and this is a video production class, we're also going to spend a lot of our time working on multimedia projects. I trust that you've all seen plenty of health, safety, and sexual education videos before, right?" We all nodded. I'd seen a lot of school movies, of course. Science movies tended to be the most boring; in seventh grade they showed us one called The Story of Osmosis. They'd tried to make it interesting by sticking a robot in there to tell kids facts about science, but they could've put in a hundred robots, all armed with laser guns, and it still wouldn't have held my interest for ten minutes, let alone an hour and a half. The really sad thing is that the robot sort of reminded me of my father. But the sex-ed videos were the dumbest, even if they were a lot more entertaining than the science stuff. They'd started out by showing us things with names like How You Came to Be and Changes: Coming Soon to a Body Near You! in fifth grade. They were silly cartoons that tried to give us the bare bones facts about sex and adolescence, even though we all already knew them by then. In middle school, the films had gotten more interesting, and we spent a lot of time outside of class making fun of them. We never remembered their real titles, so we made up ones that we thought were more appropriate to describe them, like Johnny's Not a Baldy Anymore, Intrigue in The Locker Room, Looking Awkward, Feeling Awkward, and Billy's Got a Problem. Every now and then you'd hear that the high school kids got to watch more more explicit films with names like The Art of Reproduction and How Susie Got Sick in Florida . That struck me as unlikely. "Now," said Mr. Streich, "instead of just showing you a lot of those, over the course of the next month, each of you is going to make your own advisory video, using all of the equipment that we have right here in the media room." There was a bit of murmuring among the "students." "Now, we won't just be jumping right in on the filming. I know you all learned how to use the cameras and equipment last year in Media Immersion classes, so we're going to spend the first day or two just brainstorming about what kind of movies you'd like to make. Then you'll be spending a day or two discussing your subject, and doing research. These films will be shown to kids in grades six and seven at the end of the quarter, and we want to make sure that you get all of the facts right, whether you're making a movie about eating disorders, alcoholism, or smoking." It sounded to me like the school was just trying to spare the expense of buying a bunch of new videos, but I had to admit that the project sounded like fun. When Mr. Streich passed around the list of possible subjects, I looked over them and was a bit surprised to see that sex ed was on the list. They were actually going to trust an eighth grader to make a sex ed video? Were they drunk when they wrote out the list of topics? It was like being handed a live grenade and being invited to lob it at one of the teachers. "Eating disorders" struck me as a fun-sounding topic, too, because you'd have a great excuse to do a puking scene, but I couldn't say no to the chance to make the sex-ed video that every student really wanted to see. I wrote my name next to "sex ed" on the list right away, before anyone else could get it. I was starting to get ideas before I'd even passed the list of topics to Anna. And the wheels in my head began to turn. No kid in any grade wanted to see some lame video with a bunch of line drawings of private parts. I was convinced that, starting in fifth grade, every kid wants the sex-ed films to be as explicit as possible, and I was further convinced that, if mine was bizarre enough to be considered "artsy," I could get away with putting just about anything in there. I could say "it's not smut, it's art!" According to what I'd heard in Social Studies, I figured that the Supreme Court would probably back me up. And I wouldn't just be explicit, I'd be informative, about real stuff that people actually wondered about, like how old they should be when they started worrying about not developing yet, how big things should be at a certain age. Stuff like that. We'd all heard movie after movie telling us we were normal, but hearing it from the disemodied voice of some weirdo over a goofy cartoon drawing of a sperm cell in a top hat wasn't convincing anyone. Maybe, if they heard it from a more artistic source, they'd be more likely to believe it. I didn't pay much attention to my classes for the rest of the day, because I was coming up with ideas for how I could make just such a video. First of all, I'd give it a French title. Or maybe an Italian one. As soon as you see a title in a foreign language in a movie, you know you're in for something artsy. Instead of boring narration, I'd have boring poetry that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I'd use nudes from classic paintings instead of diagrams. Realistic ones. With close-ups on the good parts.
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