Muchacho (9 page)

“Hey, that means puke,” Henry Dominguez said. He grabbed his stomach and pretended to chuck.

“You know what I mean,” McElroy said. “I don’t want you to tell me what somebody else thinks. I want you to tell me what you think. The only restrictions are that you cannot present something that is hate-based, pornographic, or violent. And all projects have to be presented to the class.”

“You mean we have to give a speech?” Curtis Coleman practically hollered because he stutters whenever he has to give a speech in front of the class.

“No, you don’t have to give a speech,” McElroy said. He sat down on the top of his desk and looked around at us. “I can’t believe you aren’t excited about this project. This is a chance for you to be creative, show your stuff, get out of the old boring schoolwork rut.”

Teeny White said if you have to present to the class then it’s a speech, isn’t it, and McElroy said not a
speech
speech, like reading off a paper or memorizing something. But you could show how to build a model airplane, or how to cut somebody’s hair, or take care of fish in an aquarium, or you could write a poem and say it to the class, or make your own television commercial, or you could sing a song or play a trumpet or draw a picture or give a dance demonstration.

“Can I do a rap song?” Phillip Finley asked, and everybody laughed because he’s so white he glows in the dark and he’s not Eminem.

McElroy held up his hands to tell us to shut up which we wouldn’t have done before he had that haircut, but this time it worked. “No laughing at other people. That’s an unbreakable rule. You are going to get a grade on your presentation, and you’re going to grade each other’s projects, but you’re also going to get a grade as an audience member. I expect you to show some respect for each other.” He clapped his hands real loud like that would motivate us. “Now, let’s start brain-storming your projects. You have to hand in that contract to get out the door when the bell rings.”

I knew Lupe was going to want to do a dance demonstration because the second McElroy mentioned dancing, she looked over at me real quick. I shook my head but Lupe doesn’t give up that easy. As soon as McElroy said to start planning, she came over to my desk and said, “Come on, Eddie, let’s dance,” and I said, “Come on, Lupe, let’s not.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll be fun,” and I said, “No way,” and she said, “Way,” and then I said, “If you really liked me, you wouldn’t pressure me to do something I don’t want to do.”

Lupe flopped down in the chair next to mine and punched me on the arm. “That’s not fair.”

“Then how come it’s fair for you to say that when I want us to get naked?” I asked her.

“Shh!” Lupe said and looked around to make sure nobody was listening which they weren’t because everybody except the kiss-asses were all busy trying to think of some way to do a presentation where they didn’t have to talk in front of the class too much. “That’s different and you know it.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. I had been kind of pissed when Lupe said the girls’ gym teacher told them to say, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask me to do things I don’t want to do,” because you can’t talk a girl into doing stuff if somebody puts ideas like that into her head. But it turned out to be a pretty good idea for me, too.

“There’s no way I’m going to dance in front of the class, so don’t ask me anymore,” I said, and Lupe said, “Fine,” and I said, “Fine,” and she huffed off to find Lena who is a reasonable person who isn’t afraid of a little peer pressure. That got Jaime off the hook, so he came over and we tried to figure out what kind of intelligence we have that we could show to other people without looking too stupid.

Jaime isn’t shy because he’s an altar boy and he has to sing in front of all the people in church every week. He said we should make a television show and I said how can you make a show with only two people and besides, I didn’t want to talk in front of everybody. He said we could be those movie review guys who talk about thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

“We can show some parts of the movies which will take up most of our time,” Jaime said, “and then we can just say a little bit about the movies. And if we show something sexy, all the guys will give us a good grade and some of the girls will, too.”

We picked the scene in
Blue in the Face
where the sexy girlfriend takes off her dress while she’s singing in front of the mirror and pretending to be a tiger for the boys, and the
beginning of
Finding Nemo
, Jaime’s all-time favorite movie. We named ourselves Garrulous Gabe and Silent Slim.
Garrulous
was one of our vocabulary words, so we knew McElroy would be impressed. And we figured he’d be even more impressed because we used irony in the names. We wrote a script and I played Garrulous Gabe except I hardly talked and Jaime played Silent Slim, who talked and talked and talked.

We acted like we were all cool and not nervous, but when project day came up, me and Jaime were next to last and we were hoping we would run out of time before it was our turn, but McElroy dinged a bell and made people shut up if they were taking too long, so everybody stayed right on schedule.

At first, I got pretty nervous when McElroy announced us, but Jaime just got up and shoved two desks together to make a big desk like on television. Then we put on neckties over our T-shirts and everybody laughed which made me feel better. If you start out with a joke and nobody laughs, then everything goes downhill after that.

We showed the scene from
Finding Nemo
first and Jaime gave it two thumbs up and made up a whole bunch of real convincing stuff about how it was a heartwarming movie that the whole family could enjoy together. I gave it a thumbs-down and just said, “Boring.” Then we showed the
Blue in the Face
scene and Jaime gave it one thumbs-up and one thumbs-down because there was too much talking and too much sex for kids to watch it. I gave it two thumbs up and said, “Check it out.”

We got half a standing ovation from the kids and McElroy gave us an A which was pretty good since I only had to say four words in front of the class.

The last project was Lalo Peña. When McElroy said push all the desks back against the wall because Lalo was going to give us a kung fu demonstration, everybody started laughing because Lalo’s so short and round and wears glasses. Just like Harvey Castro. We all thought it was a big joke that Lalo and Harvey were taking kung fu classes. Harvey’s mother used to ask my mother did I want to sign up for kung fu with Harvey because it might help me get some discipline, but I always said, “No thanks.”

Everybody stopped laughing when Lalo walked into the room in that white uniform with bare feet because he was wearing a black belt and no glasses and his face looked real different. The black belt turned out to be a real black belt. He didn’t say anything, just put his hands together in front of his chest and closed his eyes and breathed real deep and then bowed and said something that sounded like Chinese. Then, boom, he opened his eyes and started punching and kicking all over the place. He could kick higher than his head and when he slapped his hand against his arm it sounded loud enough to make you jump a little bit. We all moved back against the wall so he wouldn’t accidentally kill us.

After a couple minutes, Lalo stopped punching and kicking and bowed again. He kneeled down and put his forehead on the floor and then he sat back and told us about how kung
fu is not about fighting and hitting other people, it’s about not fighting or hitting other people. He said it’s about putting all your power into your brain so you could control your body and your energy and deflect bad energy from coming at you. Then he stood up and did some more punching and kicking and nobody said one word and when he finished, everybody clapped so loud. We would have gave him a giant standing ovation even if we weren’t already standing up.

After that, nobody messed with Lalo anymore, even the kids from other classes who didn’t see his demonstration because when you can do the kind of stuff that Lalo did in front of our class everybody hears about it. And all us guys realized Lalo or Harvey could have kicked our asses so fast if they wanted to which was why they never fight. They don’t have to fight. Like if you’re really really smart, you don’t have to go around showing people how smart you are. Like Beecher. You just know it in your heart and it makes you too strong to care about what other people think.

T
ODAY
M
C
E
LROY GOT IN BIG TROUBLE FOR LETTING US TALK
about God and homosexuals in class except he didn’t let us. He just couldn’t stop us. I didn’t do any talking. But just listening was enough to give me a headache from trying to figure out who was right and who was wrong. We were supposed to be learning how to do analogies but as soon as McElroy said who wants to try number one, T.J. Ritchie said something stupid just to be funny and this kid beside him who is almost as big as T.J. said, “Shut up, you fag,” and Curtis Coleman hollered, “Don’t be so homophobic!” McElroy tapped his ruler on his desk and said, “That’s enough,” but T.J. jumped up and said, “Who you calling homophobic?” and Curtis said, “Just about everybody in this pathetic excuse for a town.” Curtis is a intellectual who moved here from
California last year and he’s always talking about how much better it is in California. Usually we don’t argue with him because we know he’s probably right, except sometimes you get tired of somebody reminding you that your hometown sucks.

The kid who called T.J. a fag said, “Don’t pee your pants, Curtis. I was just kidding,” but Curtis is hard to stop once he starts talking. He said, “Well, it’s not funny. People can’t help it if they’re gay and it’s not right to hate them and call them fags.” Joey Dinwiddie said oh yes it is, because it says in the Bible you shouldn’t be gay or you will burn in hell.

Curtis sighed real loud and then he said, “If you are referring to the passage in Leviticus that says homosexuality is a sin, then you also know that gluttony and sloth are sins, too. So that means if you believe gay people are going to burn in hell, everybody who eats like a pig and lives like a slob is going to hell, too. It’s going to be a very popular place and a lot of you guys will be there.”

McElroy clapped his hands and said, “That’s enough,” but nobody paid attention to him. He didn’t go over and call security, though. He just flopped into his chair and put his head in his hands.

Joey Dinwiddie said, “Yeah, that’s enough out of you, Curtis,” but Curtis said, “I don’t understand why you guys are so interested in other people’s sexual preference. It’s none of your business—unless you are planning to ask them for a date.”

“Because I don’t like fags,” Joey said. “They make me sick.”

McElroy stood up but he didn’t have to clap his hands and tell us to be quiet because Henry Dominguez stood up, too, and he said, “Shut up,” and the way he said “Shut up” made everybody do it. Nobody said anything for a long time and then Henry said, “That’s enough,” and he sat back down and nobody still said anything because then we all remembered that last year Henry’s cousin killed himself after his parents told him they wished he was never born if he was going to be gay.

After Henry’s cousin killed himself, a bunch of people wrote letters to the newspaper and said they were sorry to say it but that boy was better off dead. After that, the library put up a little paper on the wall on Gay Pride Week and they put the names of some books you could read if you were gay so you would get some self-esteem and not kill yourself like Henry’s cousin did. And the church people made a big protest and now a bunch of church people won’t let their kids go to the library anymore which Lupe says is ridiculous.

“They shouldn’t be afraid of ideas,” Lupe says. “The only people who are afraid of ideas are dumb people who don’t know how to think for themselves. Smart people don’t believe everything they read. Just because something is in a book doesn’t mean it’s true.”

After McElroy’s class, I asked Lupe what did she think about being gay and she said she thinks people are probably gay because of their chromosomes. She’s big on biology because she’s going to be a doctor. I said, “I don’t mean how
come people are gay. I mean do you think they are going to hell?” and Lupe said, “I’m not sure there is a hell.”

I said, “For reals?” and she said, “I’m not even sure there is a God.” When she said that, I crossed myself without even planning to. It was automatic. Lupe laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Eddie. If there is a God, he isn’t going to kill you for wondering if he exists. He’d be glad that you were using the magnificent brain he gave you. And if there isn’t a God, then you don’t have to worry about wondering.”

I asked Lupe wasn’t she Catholic and she said yes and I said then how come she could say those kind of things and she said because she doesn’t believe anything unless you can prove it. I said nobody can prove there is a God and she said, “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m researching it.”

I laughed because how can you research God, but Lupe said she Googled God on the Internet and he has so many hits it will take her years to read them all. She said some of the Web sites are just stupid but a lot of them are intellectually stimulating. Like she said there are some historians who say that in the original Bible, God was a man and a woman but later on he got changed to just a man. “I ordered a book about it from
Amazon.com
,” Lupe said, “because they wouldn’t order it for me at the bookstore here. They said it was blasphemous.”

Lupe was impressed that I know what
blasphemous
means, but I learned it last year because a preacher burned a bunch of books right down the street from our house. Before that, I
used to go to church with
mi abuelita
on Sundays because I figured if I got run over by a bus or something sometime and I hadn’t gone to confession, I would still have some good points in my favor for taking a
vieja
to church. But after that preacher burned all the books, I stopped going to church because the whole town knew he was going to do it and they didn’t even stop him. He and some of his church friends went to the store and bought a bunch of Harry Potter and Shakespeare books and burned them up. They didn’t even read them first. They said they didn’t have to read them to know they were full of witchcraft and Satanism. And a whole bunch of other people went and stood by that book-burning preacher. They made a holy bonfire. It was in the newspapers and on TV all over the country, so now Rosablanca is famous for having crazy book-burners living here.