Occasional, Serendipitous Vengeance

A few semesters ago I had to do a presentation with in an otherwise enjoyable class. The class was Pop Culture, and I'd picked it hoping that the standard time delay on textbooks would have us all studying Devo lyrics and Twin Peaks. Sadly, this was not to be, but it was still an interesting class. The professor was twice our age and well read, so communicating about pop culture with the callow youth of today proved to be fairly difficult. Good thing I was there to bridge the gap! For once my spotty yet uncanny knowledge of trends of yesteryear came in rather handy.

After writing my paper about the Cthulhu Mythos (which I will tend to do if left alone in a room with a word processor), I had to sign up to put on a presentation on one of the lecture topics. Although the Elvis and the Day of the Dead topics looked promising, I really had my eye on the subject of horror films. The article we were reading stopped in the early 1960s with Dracula and werewolves, and I really wanted to share my theories about the meaning of zombies with the class.

Which I will tend to do anyway.

The professor announced that he would post the signup sheet outside his office door after class, so I rushed there as soon as my other classes were done for the day, hoping against hope that at least one of the good topics would have some room left.

I was the third person to sign up, and the other two had chosen the Barbie article to expound on. I didn't take this as a bad sign and immediately wrote my name under Horror and began thinking about zombies.

Which I will tend to do, but this time it was for academic reasons.

Then I met with my group. It was all female, not a terribly favorable sign under normal circumstances but even less so when the topic is early horror films. To my disbelief, none of them had seen any horror films, and certainly not the old 1960s and earlier movies that the article talked about. Some of them hadn't seen any movies that had been made any earlier than the 1980s.

We gathered in one girl's house to plan the presentation. Due to conflicting schedules, this was the day before the presentation was due. This didn't seem to concern anyone besides me.

The girl who lived there had a rat, a beanbag chair and a big woven Jerry Garcia wall hanging. Two of those three smelled like rat urine and the wall hanging stunk of marijuana smoke. The carpet would have as well if it hadn't been too busy being soggy with beer mold. The air curdled; the stench was as oppressive as it could have been without being visible.

The third girl was late, and I took the opportunity to play with the first girl's rat and wait for olfactory fatigue. The rat crawled behind my neck and started making a nest in my hair. That's when the third girl showed up, wrinkling her nose. As we gathered up our books to discuss the presentation, the rat crawled over to my shoulder. As it turned out, the third girl was terrified of rats.

Things went downhill from there. Not only was I the only person who had ever seen a horror movie (even if you counted Scream), I was also the only person who had gotten around to reading the article. I read my notes - typed! - on the zombie menace and explained how zombies aren't the sex urge or anything but nominally nocturnal; they symbolize crowds and the fear of the mob that can only be put into a symbol by a democratic nation, then adopted by an ex-Fascist one.

I waxed pretty goddamn lyrical, if I do say so myself.

Of course, the other girls didn't want to put forth any effort at all. After trying to prod the group towards a plan of action without becoming the "leader," I ended up gritting my teeth and assigning them to cover certain points of what I guessed would be arguments they could handle. Then I thought that maybe we could do something fun, something that'd be fun for us, fun for the class, and eat up precious minutes of their part of the presentation. Based on the article, we could dramatize the conflict between the id and superego in the terms of horror movies!

They seemed interested, so I ended up dragging my gorilla outfit, a stereo, a flashlight, several books and a cap gun to class for what turned out to be no reason. They told me 5 minutes before we were up that they had decided it was "too hard" to do our little skit. Since they neither of them brought any props to class, I have to assume they decided this as soon as I left and didn't bother to tell me.

The only thing more embarrassing to me than showing up unprepared is showing up overprepared, a bag full of props or project indicating that I stupidly thought my class partners were more reliable than they were and have been left holding the bag. I kept everything except the stereo in my backpack. Let the class think I was packing gym clothes or library books.

As for my partners, screw 'em. One thing I do like about presentations is that even with one person doing all the visual aids and cue cards, you can still tell who held up their end. Their sections were dull and lifeless, while mine was manageable and full of body. I put forth my theory about how zombies aren't sexual, and are thus a more mature horror movie theme than stupid sublimated sex hang-ups dressed like they came from the opera. I presented this at great length and with hand gestures, big hand gestures.

I also had the stereo going with a Horror Sounds of the Night-ripoff playing in the background, which adds a lot more to a presentation than you'd think. It was a CD of people randomly shrieking, moaning, cackling and rattling chains, with assorted wolf, cat and cricket noises. The canned unpredictable interjections created the illusion that I'd somehow timed my speech so shrieks cut in at exactly the right time. It'd probably have worked out the same if I'd been giving my Economics report instead, which isn't such a bad idea.

My part of the speech was also the only section that sparked questions and public debate, as they were all supposed to. I knew my zombie stuff. As was the only member of the group who'd even seen horror movies, after all, I was a little pleased to be defending my adopted genre from such morons. I stood quietly by while they gave their halting paraphrases of the one or two concepts they'd managed to glean from the article. I also left the stereo on, and the constant screams and moans seemed to be rattling them. After a bit, one of the girls slipped off a jelly sandal (of course they wore jelly sandals, dying plastic exposing unwashed feet, pink pearl polish outgrown and cracked over yellow toenails) and tried to surreptitiously turn it off with a grimy toe. I say "tried" because she ended up pressing the "track forward" button instead, and was rewarded with GHOST PIRATES.

Creaking ship, chains, seagulls, chanteys in the distance and lots of people saying ARRR rattled her even more, and to the observer it appeared that she'd chosen this somewhat inappropriate background music on purpose, trying to follow in my (well-prepared, adequately shod) footsteps and failing.

I got a much better grade. I felt a little bad for upstaging my partners, but they did it all themselves and for once, a group project rewarded the dutiful and punished the lazy.

Which, every so often, they will do.