On My Way to Hollywood

I'm minoring in English and have to fulfill certain course requirements to accomplish this. Writing fiction is my preferred kind of classwork, but I also wound up in a screenwriting class just for giggles. It's taught by this almost-flaming gay guy named Larson. He teaches the class with the point of getting the screenplays we write into Hollywood someday. Now, I'm not the kind of guy who wants to shatter dreams or anything, but based on what I've seen, the material coming out of undergraduate public college students in the Southeast isn't too hot right now. I guess it's a motivational technique, but still, don't get people's hopes up TOO much. The class is half normals like me and half fat people who want to be Charlie Kaufman.

W'vee started out the class with informal exercises involving two people per group, randomly assigned together. I got paired with a deaf woman. She has an interpreter, and therefore has to sit in the very front of the class so he can set a chair in front of her to sign shit out. He's kind of wierd/artsy and has a strange mullet-like haircut I've never seen before. Since we were paired together and she can't go anywhere else in the room, I'm forced to sit between her and the podium of the gay professor, so I am squeezed way too close to him.

I feel sorry for gay people, so when the poor bastards check me out I just take it as a compliment. This guy isn't much different, except he uses me in examples entirely too much, does little flirty shit, and generally makes things uncomfortable for everybody. Ain't cool. I am forced to keep my eyes away from him and not smile at his jokes, so he'll get some kind of hint that I might be there to learn how to write stuff and nothing else.

One of the first exercises we did with our new partners was a "Trust Walk". For those of you who don't know what a trust walk is, it's where one person has their eyes closed and the other guides them around so they don't hurt themselves (then you instantly develop a rapport with them, becoming best friends who write incredible screenplays, or so the professor wanted it to seem). My partner was missing her sense of hearing, so when he was telling us what we'd be doing, hopefully she didn't read my mouth with I mumbled, "Oh shit."

She started out guiding me around. This part I didn't foresee being so bad because at least I could hear her telling me what to do. But the problem lies in her deaf person manner of speech. Deaf people speak in a loose, shrill, nasal falsetto voice that's pretty goddamned hard to understand if you can't see their mouths. "Stop" sounds like "STHAWPH!" and "Turn right" sounds like "HURR EYET!". I kept running into shit and tripping down stairs the whole time for my fifteen minute half of the Trust Walk. She would laugh, "HI YI YI YI!" while the interpreter would fake laughter mixed with empathetic groaning for me.

For her turn, we came up with a system of arm squeezes and yanks. I had to put her hand on the rails and try really hard to keep her from flipping out. She really didn't like what was going on at all and kept tripping on nothing. Her interpreter got really anxious when the professor first described the exercise too, and when we were doing the whole thing he explained to me, "This shit really sucks for deaf people." He and I had this conversation while guiding the woman around with her eyes closed, so I'm pretty sure she didn't know what we were talking about.

The next time the class met, I went to the back before we got back together with our partners to put off sitting so close to the professor again. When he told us to pair back up, the deaf woman was quizzical as to why I didn't sit down next to her in the first place and said, "I HOUGHT YHOU DIDN'T WIKE MHEE."

"She thinks you didn't like her," said the interpreter.

"NO, I JUST DON'T LIKE SITTING NEXT TO THAT GUY," I said, nodding my head in the direction of the professor who was preoccupied with handing out some brightly colored handouts with a page of the Men in Black screenplay on them. "IT'S NOT YOU I SWEAR TO GOD. YOU ARE NICE."

She just forced a smile at me, then turned and started watching the interpreter who at this point was busy signing the innuendo-filled quips from the professor, who was still distributing materials.

We then started an exercise in which I played a man whose car had broken down in front of the woman's house, and I desperately needed to use her phone. Her objective was to act skeptical and not let me into her house, in other words just make it harder for me, pretty standard conflict type stuff. But instead of giving any room to act this shit out, she just pretended to open the door, said, "HAHT DO YHOU HANT?!" and slammed the door in my face. She didn't do anything else, thus making me do all the work and she just smiled sarcastically at me. What a dumb bitch.

Now she just acts perturbed all the time and we get nothing done. The professor now likes to say stuff like ass or fart or stinky, just to turn and watch the interpreter's sign for the word. Perhaps the moral here is not to piss off the deaf, because in losing their hearing they gain an acute laser mind vision that sees ways to make your life more difficult. Maybe it is act really conscientious as to not piss off any women. Or it could simply be don't take a fucking screenwriting course for christsake.