Feature Article

(June 2003, 104 – 108.)

Now that I've entered my late middle age, there are three things that . . . that thrill me. . . . I'm talking about thrill in the deepest, broadest, most transcendent sense. The first is being with my kids and having the wonderful times we have and feeling that we're true friends. . . .

The second is being friends with animals. As long as I live, I'll never get over the feeling of privilege when an animal allows me to touch him or her. . . .

[T]he third thing that thrills me: touching other people with a story. When another person writes or says face-to-face that a story you wrote touched his or her life, it's like a moment of contact with another species. The truth is that we human beings are enormously separate. We work hard to protect our hearts, as we are wise to do. At moments, though, we touch. And thankfully, there are lots of places where we touch. One of the greatest of these places for me has been the arena of athletic competition. As I've gotten older, though, the way it mostly happens has been through story. The reason story works this way is because stories are intimate. Yes, a book is a public thing, but when a reader reads, an emotional process—transcendent and enormously intimate—takes place. The reader's whole life, held in the conjoined palms of memory and imagination, joins with the experience of the story—which is an extension of the writer's whole life—and the psychic fortifications we raise to protect ourselves are blasted away. One human consciousness joins another. The reader's life is joined with the life of the story, and the world of self-protection—for those ecstatic moments—is dissolved.

There's no form of story where the incongruity between the public nature of the presentation and the intimate nature of the story's effect is broader than when the story is put on film. No story form is more public than a movie, and yet ask yourself whether you felt those other people around you in the theater when Tim Robbins as Andy DeFresne crawls out of Shawshank prison through those five hundred yards of human waste on his way to hope fulfilled in Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption. No, you felt no one around. It was just you and Andy crawling toward the justice he had to earn.

Yes, good heavens, I'd like to sell the rights to my novel, If Rock and Roll Were a Machine, because I could use the dough. Who couldn't? But the truth is that I've got enough money. I can do a lot of stuff; I'll survive. . . . What I don't have enough of—and will never get enough of—is the thrill of touching another soul in the secret dark where hopes and dreams and fears bristle with the desire for connection. There aren't a lot of thrills bigger than seeing characters you created utter words you wrote up there on that gigantic screen. They float through time and space, and sometimes they lodge in your fellow human beings.

It was this kind of transcendent thrill for me when I saw Matthew Modine as Louden Swain, the narrator of my first novel, Vision Quest, on the screen in Harold Becker's 1985 film version of the novel. It's tough not to want to make that happen again.

I'm taking a chance with the untraditional form of this treatment for If Rock and Roll Were a Machine. My hope is that the premise will get a producer's attention, and then he or she will get caught up in the mix of exposition and narrative—and passages from the actual screenplay—that follow. My guess, however, is that most people in the film business won't read it at all because it doesn't appear in the traditional form.

So, Davis, why would you present the treatment this way if you're afraid no one will read it? I'm just a cantankerous old soul, I guess, who puts his stuff out there and hopes a kindred spirit will respond. Also, I like it this way, and I'm proud of it. It's almost like a story form in itself. It touches me intellectually and emotionally. There could be someone else out in the world who will be touched by it, too.

The Film Treatment

Premise:

If we want to know what goes wrong with our teenage boys, we need to consider what we do to them when they're children. Those boys who walk the edges of the high school halls with their eyes on the floor, the ones who sit in the back row in every class and say nothing, the ones who participate in nothing, the ones whose only friends are just like them, the ones who explode and rain their hatred like shrapnel on the world? Those boys are not bad seeds. They've learned to hate others because they learned to hate themselves, and they learned to hate themselves because at some point in their early lives adults showed them they were hateful.

Can such a boy be saved from his self-contempt? Not if it's festered too long. But if it hasn't, and if the boy has been loved at all so that he can recognize love and respond to it when it's offered, he can be saved. Here are the two saving qualities: (1) that an adult—particularly an adult male—treat him as though he were worthy of love and respect; and (2) that the boy begin to act in ways that teach him to respect himself.

Bert Bowden, 17, was an intellectually and physically precocious only child, and he was frequently a pain in the butt to adults, particularly to adults he was smarter and more athletic than. One such adult was his fifth-grade teacher, Gary Lawler. With the approval of Bert's parents, Lawler enlisted Bert's classmates to help him humiliate Bert until he was no longer a pain anywhere to anyone.

Bert's sense of himself has shrunk to nothing by the time we meet him in his junior year of high school. There are a million things Bert wants and fantasizes about, but there's only one thing he wants that he believes he's capable of having—because he's got the money to buy it—the 1966 Harley-Davidson Sportster that sits in the window of Shepard's Classic and Custom Cycles.

Scott Shepard, 50, proprietor of Shepard's Classic and Custom, left his wife and son when the boy was two. His wife, who was French, raised Camille in Paris. Shepard saw his son as much as possible, but visits were hard to arrange because of his job with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The pain of this distance from his son sent Shepard over the edge, and he made a mistake. He was shot working undercover, and there was a good chance the people who almost killed him would keep trying, so his son was no longer allowed to visit. Shepard flew to France often, and they kept in touch through calls, letters, and tapes, especially music tapes. Shepard is a musician, and Camille is, too—he wants to be everything his dad is. Camille drives his mom so nuts that she allows him to spend his senior year of high school in the States.

Shepard is afraid the long-distance relationship has crippled his son's character. But it hasn't. Camille carries his share of pain, but he's about as emotionally healthy as young human beings get. Shepard knows Camille could not have grown up this healthy without the love of his mother and the kindness of his stepfather, teachers, coaches, and other adults. He believes he owes a debt of kindness for his healthy son. When Bert Bowden walks into the shop one day, Shepard sees his chance to repay this debt.

Shepard never learns what happened to Bert as a child. He sees that Bert needs to earn respect and affection for himself, though, and that's enough. After a confrontation with Bert's father, Shepard offers Bert a job at the shop. He teaches Bert motorcycle mechanics, and he introduces him to racquetball, a sport for solitary guys such as he.

Bert repays his debt to Lawler on the racquetball court.

Supporting characters:

. . . .

Rita Dixon, 46, mate-for-life to Scott Shepard. To say these two have a past does not suggest an ounce of their heartache. She carries the greatest load of pain of any of the characters, and she carries it with grace. Owner of the health club where Bert works out and plays racquetball. Teaches yoga, breathing, and aerobics. Treats Bert with tenderness.

Rita examines the scar Bert gave himself when he bashed his head into the edge of a door after losing a racquetball match.

Scott was walking out of the locker room when Bert inflicted this damage on himself. Scott is so close that the blood spatters over his shirt. He grabs Bert by the collar, holds him in the air against the wall.

This is the turning point for Bert's character.

The next scene takes place in the locker room where Scott is bandaging Bert's head.

This moment deepens their friendship right at the time Bert makes the commitment to change. He's able to change because he knows he'll have Scott to help him.

. . . .

Terry Davis is the author of three novels, Vision Quest (1979/VOYA October 1979), Mysterious Ways (1984/VOYA February 1985), and If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (1992/VOYA February 1993), all available from Eastern Washington University Press; plus the critical biography, Presenting Chris Crutcher (Twayne, 1997/VOYA 1998). He teaches narrative writing and screenwriting at Minnesota State University, Mankato. New works in progress: a co-edited anthology, Boy Meets Girl; a long story, The Silk Ball, for Rush Hour, a new magazine for older teens; and a short novel, The Roll.