In Mr. McCallister’s ninth period English class, 17-year-old Frank Irvine sleeps.
Of course, mostly everyone else does, especially in the eleventh hour of the 1994-1995 school year at Rollingtown High School on Long Island. But as one of the few African Americans in a predominantly Caucasian district, not only does Frank find himself sitting solo at the cafeteria lunch table most days. He also finds himself routinely called out by the likes of the Colonel Sanders-doppelgänging Mr. McCallister, who never misses a chance to remind you he could have retired three years ago, but the 68-year-old cares that much about educating you. Sigh.
Once upon a time, back before 90210, the Berlin Wall fall and the O.J. trial, Frank was tired of being told he had to be the standout athlete on his pee-wee football, basketball and baseball teams because of his “God-given speed” until he ultimately read the tea leaves: these were not the team sports they were made out to be on paper. Needless to say, when he saw school teams were exclusively coached by similar Peter Pan-syndromed minds with all their worst vicarious projection proclivities dialed up to the highest volume, Frank opted for greener pastures. For him, that meant surrendering to his notebook full of rhythmic dreams – pages upon pages of yet-slammed slam poetry.
While all his classmates still mourn the loss of their voice of their generation, grunge icon Kurt Cobain, who raised a shotgun to his own head and pulled the trigger last Spring, Frank is privately bothered by his voice of their generation, Tupac Shakur, currently being behind bars. He feels this pain privately, because he believes those he longs to freestyle about having “Egg McMuffin egg white skin” will have much to say about the only black kid they’ve ever known worshiping the King of Gangsta Rap. The last thing Frank wants to be is a cliché, and he even sometimes wishes he could have hated Me Against the World. That way, he could have written a letter to the High School newspaper editor disagreeing with her positive review. But, as it stands, it’s the only album on his mind months later, while, as of literally yesterday, the rest of Rollingtown has its Walkmen readying room for Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. “She won’t be around long,” Frank says to no one in particular, as always. Who could blame him for being content with his policy of self-isolation? He rightfully has a bone to pick, at least with the parents, of all his same-age childhood neighbors who were never allowed to invite him to trick-or-treat with them on Halloween because prejudice is still alive, sadly.
Frank has lived his young life singled out in cookie-cutter suburbia as the representation of what parents like these so fear: something different than themselves. This fear extends to the in-your-face about his tenure Mr. McCallister. The educator is Frank and the rest of the bunch’s foremost paternal figure from 7:15 to 2:15 a.m. Monday through Friday ten months a year whether they like it or not. He’s that twofold with the recent staff shortage requiring the Truman presidency-trained English teacher to step up to bat for the History department’s upperclassmen “Government & Politics” class as well. Who could forget the day Mr. McCallister showed his hand and more when he walked the few 18-year-olds in the class during the Clinton/Bush 1992 election chase through the process of registering to vote? “You can register any way you’d like, just as long as you register as a Democrat!” he quipped with not as much jest as one would hope. In hindsight, it’s a good thing Frank was a mere freshman at the time; because if you know Frank, and not many people do, you’d know the thing on this Earth he hates the absolute most is being told what to do.
In fact, that’s exactly why Frank looked ahead to Mr. McCallister’s last day of school agenda bulletin, saw Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was to be the summer reading selection, and chose to instead read every other Hemingway he deemed worth a damn – which meant everything else. It’s not that he doesn’t revere the groundbreaking novelist’s final piece of noteworthy fiction, because he most certainly does; it’s just that he knows the kids that “bop” around these halls, and knows there’s no chance any of them, save for a few of the bright-minded, bright-eyed girls he was too nervous to ask to junior prom, would invest in the assigned text beyond renting its 1958 film adaptation, starring Spencer Tracy, from Blockbuster Video.
Frank is the type of guy who always loves the movie, but doesn’t want to admit it, because he thinks it undermines the author’s original intent. They wanted you to think, not have the thinking spelt out for you. So, as everyone labored in the wake of the Nirvana frontman’s demise last year, Frank spent less time smelling like teen spirit and more time tracing back the haunting connection between America’s latest tormented poet-turned-harrowing headline-maker, and one of the century’s earliest products of quite the same ilk. The latter also happens to be Frank’s all-time favorite author without the same skin color as he.
In the summer of 1994, while others cruise-controlled through their days and raved away their nights, Frank did comprehensive deep-diving at the local library. He was so committed in his quest, that, the second he turned off the investigative switch in his waking life you just knew it would follow him into the dreamscape; a manifest destiny a natural born creator like Frank Irvine of Rollingtown, New York could surely get behind.
On this Wednesday, June 14, 1995, Mr. McCallister prematurely concludes his Hemingway diatribe and ignores a sea of sleepyheads to instead head straight for the strategically-seated back row Frank. The teenaged lone son of a New York City bus-driving mother and a funeral-directing father who has sent biweekly checks from a P.O. Box in the southernmost region of Deep South Missouri since the top of the decade isn’t fazed by “Teach’s” line-stepping taunts, though. Not for a second. Frank, adorned in a slick black Nike hoodie despite the scorching 90-degree heat, may be drifted off in the “fantasyland” McCallister so desires he awaken from at once; but he still hears all, especially when authority has entered the confrontational bubble, because he was raised to always be on such high alert for obvious reasons.
As he’s dreamed with recurring fury for as far back as he could remember, Frank is manning the wheel of a bygone cruise-liner with no patrons in sight through the thick of what feels like a weighty storm, yet doesn’t optically suggest one. Ever the dream researcher when time and all its friends are not as drawn in slow motion as they are now, Frank deducts this as a two-pronged subconscious response to: (1) the subject of Mr. McAllister’s latest lullaby-inducing lecture, and (2) the Hollywood rumor mill that a Titanic film is around the bend, and will star Dazed and Confused breakout Matthew McConaughey. Alright alright alright.
While captaining his personal twilight zone as per usual, Frank’s out-of-place Winter boots are glued to the wooden floorboards. He knows there’s no hope of finding a mirror to discern whether he looks like himself in ways his curiously wrinkled forearms say he won’t for the duration of the latest episode of Frank Irvine’s Plunge into the Dreamland, trademark pending. He encounters runaway planes positively bursting in air high above him, almost on a loop of sorts, promptly connecting the dots that point to the subject of his late-night binge-reads: Ernest Hemingway. The Great American Novelist has just crashed his party, as he was one to do from the Roaring Twenties on through to the Post-World War II tides of the “Baby Boom.”
Hemingway famously survived two plane crashes on consecutive days in 1954 before spending the next seven years in rapidly failing health and as a paranoid defeatist. Speaking of: this pre-modern ship sounds like it may just feature radio transmission, but all Frank can hear past the collision of his own thoughts bum-rushing the gatekeeping control of dream logic is “J. Edgar Hoover, over and out” over and over again. He chalks this up to another Hemingway hallmark, a reference to the bittersweet real-life revelation Hemingway was not as paranoid as they made him out to be.
Between extended care under the watchful eye of psychiatric treatment and several rounds of soul-to-die electroconvulsive therapy, Hemingway could always be relied upon to proclaim the FBI was watching him throughout the 1950s – from Key West, to Cuba, to New York and so forth. Because of his mentally and physically fried state, his fall from regularly published literary grace, and above all, his relentless alcoholism, rarely anyone could imagine the once-wunderkind renegade with an unprecedented imagination and something palpable to say was spewing truths on this front. And people wonder what could have driven an otherworldly gifted artist – and others before him, and plenty more since – to turn the shotgun on himself, with wounds he would fatally succumb to on July 2, 1961.
But, as Frank and the rest of his intoxicated-on-information, “Gen X”-belonging brethren know thanks to the dawning of the age of the Internet, the FBI did have a file on Hemingway. Then again, who didn’t they have a file on while the entertainment world was trading in its zebra stripes for technicolor?
In this dream, similar dreams past and in dreams of the nearby future, Frank confronts a wide-open sea with no set destination, just something not typically a way’s away: an iceberg. In many ways, it’s his own Groundhog Day simulation. A Super Mario-adjacent sendoff to the power found within: when you know you’ll wake up eventually, you can manipulate how events play out, and take comfort in the fact no one in the real world will learn how much of a daredevil you become on those days where you see the iceberg’s head reared, and raise it a full-steam dash into its deeper-than-meets-the-eye structure.
Frank spent most of high school daydreaming and literally dreaming, not because he resists education, but because he finds virtue in reading the books they don’t assign. He holds literature as more enjoyable when it’s not presented as an “or else” chore. The Old Man and the Sea has long provided him quite the adventure, and if he wakes up to give into McCallister’s “Wakey wakey, Frankie Baby!” demands to step before the class and deliver his fiercest Hemingway sales pitch, his nightmare scenario will see the light of day: sharing what he has always considered uniquely his with those he doesn’t deem worthy.
As Frank approaches within striking distance of the dreamland iceberg, McCallister’s voice echoing down from the blue moon like the omnipotent Greek Chorus in Field of Dreams, he thinks about the tightrope he has been walking. All this time, he’s been so wrapped up in himself that he has failed to get to know his fellow Rollingtown Rockets enough, or at all, to soar with them when it’s high time to a year from now. He’s surprised by the melancholy that washes over him like he knows the water soon will, should he be brave enough to let it. Frank is about to enter his senior year, one year away from barely graduating; not because he lacks in intelligence, but because he has so much that he knew precisely how little an effort to put in without Mom getting a phone call from The Colonel; so much untapped talent, that he feels he will intimidate anyone he lets in. He loathes the thought of permanently alienating anyone he makes privy to what he has to offer, and to what’s been going on “upstairs.” From his categorically juvenile but nevertheless metaphorical calculations, it’s been easier to carry himself a vampire trapped in an old film reel, than to admit to the masses just how utterly human he’s been this entire time.
But the thing about dreams: when you’re there, there is no escaping nor denying what you have the knack to feed back to you when everyone else is removed from the equation. So, when Frank finally awakens to correct Mr. McCallister, saying “my name’s not Frankie, it’s Francis” with enough venom to write a Spider-Man comic, McCallister and the rest of the class are aghast. And all ears.
McCallister sits in Frank’s seat while Francis glides to the head of the classroom, a slight amount of overwhelm burgeoning within what’s caged beneath his pectoral muscles. If A Farewell to Arms taught him anything when he read it voluntarily on the first of four total road trips to his dad’s new abode three years before everyone else read it mandatorily, it’s that resisting violence in the pursuit of a much greater defiance is always the path best traveled. For the unwelcome butterflies also daring to fly from his insides to the surface aren’t due to an activity like public speaking being on the prowl. Frank knew it was always going to lead to the pedestal the second he stopped making excuses and definitively conquered the procrastinatory laziness he’s been falsely billing as stage fright.
No, the pit in his stomach he successfully stifles before it can spread throughout his body formed in the first place because he knows, and will probably dream of it one day soon, of the close-by alternate reality where he did wake up swinging at Mr. McCallister. The “slug heard ‘round the world” would have sent Frank screaming into an early exit from high school, best-case via an appeals board’s G.E.D. compromise. Consequently, Frank would have fallen Flat Stanley-flat on his face before he ever could have become Francis.
But not in this timeline.
“So, Francis, what do you know about Hemingway?” Mr. McCallister laughingly asks. The whole class, but especially Francis, hopes and prays being a total arse will be enough grounds for immediate termination decades from now.
“Where do I begin?” Francis replies, as if he doesn’t know where to already.
Editor’s Note: Entertainment Editor Michael J. Reistetter is an LIU Brooklyn (‘19) Master of Fine Arts, Screenwriting Concentration Graduate. Are you a local author with a passion for fiction interested in seeing your short story published? Email us at [email protected]!
