No More Dead Dogs (7 page)

But Wallace wasn’t done yet. “Mr. Fogelman, what about one of those little remote-control cars? If we attach the toy dog on top, one of the stagehands can work the remote, and the audience will see Old Shep running out into the road.”

This was the craziest idea of all! Surely even an idiot could see that!

“It’s brilliant!” screeched Trudi.

(Okay, maybe not a truly dedicated idiot.)

“Perfect!” Vito was shaking with excitement. “We can glue on Old Shep so you’ll never see the car underneath.”

Leticia nodded eagerly. “Then he crosses the street, and
bang!
The moped gets him.”

“I love it!” raved Kelly. “What a great beginning! The audience will be hooked!”

I was horrified. Half the actors started volunteering their little brothers’ and sisters’ remote-control cars.

“Hold it, people!” The director tapped for silence, and got none. Excited chatter filled the gym. The stagehands were fighting over who would get to ride the moped; the set designers wanted to build a stop sign for where the accident would take place.

“I’ll work the remote control!”

“No,
I’ll
work the remote control!”

“QUI-ET!!”

Mr. Fogelman ended my brief reign as the loudest yeller in the gym. His voice was a foghorn.

“I don’t want to hear another word of this,” the director said sternly. “We will begin our play where Zack Paris began his book. And that’s final.”

“But Mr. Fogelman!” protested Trudi. “You told us that a play belongs to its actors.”

“Yes,” the teacher replied. “
This
play. But the kind of changes you’re talking about make it some other play.”

“Yeah! A better one!” exclaimed Vito earnestly.

And the babble started up again.

“Mr. Fogelman’s right!” Nathaniel pleaded into the ruckus. “Let’s listen to our director!”

Forget it. The gym was pandemonium. Big, affable Vito was waving his arms and howling. Trudi’s high-pitched, strident voice rang out like a policeman’s whistle. Everton Wu, a tiny, shy fifth-grade stagehand, was right in Mr. Fogelman’s face, registering his protest.

But Mr. Fogelman hadn’t gotten a real play produced in New York by letting himself be pushed around. He put up with the shouting for a while, and then he laid down the law.

“All right, people, listen up,” the teacher commanded. “This is our play, and this is how it’s going to be performed. If anybody is unwilling to do that, let me know, and I’ll begin looking for your replacement.”

In all the time Trudi and I had been friends (forever), I’d never seen her so angry.

I begged her to be reasonable. “The first rule of drama is to listen to the director. The director is like the
president
of the play.”

“That’s not true!” Her response was bitter. “If you don’t like the president, you can vote him out of office. But nobody ever voted for Mr. Fogelman!”

Enter…
MR. FOGELMAN

MEMO: Talk to Coach Wrigley

It was two weeks ago that I approached the coach in the faculty room. I felt he should hear it from me that it didn’t look like Wallace would be writing his review anytime soon.

He raised an eyebrow. “Wallace is a pretty straight kid. Stubborn.”

I rolled my eyes. “Tell me about it.”

The coach poured himself another coffee. “What exactly has he done?”

“He’s pulled a smart-aleck routine over my book review project,” I explained. “I thought an afternoon of detention might make my point. Now I’m getting dirty looks from students in the hall. I ordered a pizza last night, and when I gave my name, the girl on the phone said, ‘You’d better let Wallace Wallace come back to the Giants.’”

Wrigley handed me a cup. “Bedford had never won anything before. Now that they’re champions, they expect to compete every year. Believe me, I’m feeling the heat because we’re losing.”

“What do you do about it?” I asked.

“I don’t order any pizzas, that’s for sure.”

I sat down on the couch. “And Wallace is such a good player that my detention puts you in last place?”

“Nah!” He shook his head. “If Wallace could make the difference for the Giants, I’d be all over you to give the kid a break.”

“But everybody says—” I began.

“Trust me. Our lousy season has nothing to do with Wallace Wallace.”

I liked Coach Wrigley. I was glad there were no hard feelings between us. I stood up. “One last thing. You know Wallace. How long do you think it’ll take before he sees it my way?”

Wrigley pointed ominously out the small window. “That parking lot is paved with the bones of teachers who are still waiting for Wallace to see it their way.”

MEMO: Stay the course. Don’t panic.

Maybe I should have listened to the coach’s warning. But how could I have predicted what Wallace would do to our play? I can barely
describe
it! I tried, to my wife, Jane, and I wound up sounding like a fool:

“Well, at first everybody loved him because he was a football star. Then they hated him because he spray-painted ‘Old Shep, Dead Mutt’ on the Lamont house. Now they love him again because he helped them punch up their lines, but they hate
me
because I won’t let them use a moped to run over a stuffed dog on a toy car.”

“You’re under a lot of stress,” she said soothingly.

“But it’s true!” I insisted.

Trudi Davis summed it up during one of the three visits she made to my office that day. “Wallace showed us how to turn a typical yawn of a school play into something
awesome.
How can we go back to the old way?”

MEMO: You don’t have to explain yourself. You’re the director.

Rehearsals were a nightmare. The actors were depressed and demoralized, and the scenery painters didn’t care anymore. When Kelly showed me the Lamont house, it was nothing but a big, blank backdrop, with two square windows, and a rectangular door drawn in Magic Marker.

I stared at her. “That’s it?”

“Yep.” I could almost feel the arctic blast.

“But what about the bricks?” I persisted. “And the curtains! The shutters! The flowerpots! The trees and the ivy! What happened to the chimney? Your sketches were beautiful! This is—nothing!”

“We all talked it over,” she explained, “and since you won’t let Wallace turn our play into something special, what’s the point of having good scenery?”

“But Wallace isn’t even
in
our play!” I argued. “None of this makes any difference to him!”

MEMO: Reason with the kids.

On my lunch hour, I approached Leticia in the science lab. She got so agitated that she forgot to watch an experiment that had taken her two days to set up. I cornered Vito in the boys’ change room, and he was just as angry. As soon I said Wallace had no authority, he turned on the hand dryer so it was impossible to hear me. It was the same thing with Leo in the gym. When I mentioned rehearsal, he shot up the rope so fast that he set a sixth-grade record for the county. Now Wrigley wants him to quit the play and go out for gymnastics.

MEMO: Never try to reason with kids. You’ll go crazy.

As the week progressed, my cast and crew took to coming in late and, in some cases, not showing up at all. Out of forty-five kids, I had thirty-three on Monday, only twenty-eight on Tuesday. By Wednesday, I was down to nineteen.

The frustration was mind-numbing. During my off-Broadway run in New York, my actors had been waiters and garbage collectors and revolutionaries. I had to take a taxi to Police Plaza at four in the morning to bail my leading lady out of jail. Now I knew the truth: Those were the good old days.

MEMO: Get help from the principal.

I left Nathaniel in charge of rehearsal, and headed for Dr. Chechik’s office.

“Okay, everybody,” announced Nathaniel. “Let’s do Scene Two, where we bring Old Shep home.”

It was an ordinary thing that could have come from any director. But the whiny, obnoxious, self-important way Nathaniel said it got under everyone’s skin. I paused at the door as the actors took their sweet time shuffling up to the stage.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” Nathaniel nagged.

“Let’s go, people,” I added.

“Wallace, I’m not too thrilled with my line here—” Vito complained.

Nathaniel cut him off. “We’re not asking Wallace anymore! He shouldn’t even be here.”

Wallace stood up. “In that case, I’ll be at football practice.”

“No! You’re on detention! If you leave, I’m telling!”

Trudi rolled her eyes. “Spitzner, were you born a dork, or did you have to get a degree?”

MEMO: You don’t put Nathaniel in charge of an anthill. Pretty soon the ants would all be rising up to kill him.

I postponed my trip to the office. “That’s enough.” I clapped my hands. “Places, everybody.”

“Hey, what’s that?” asked Rachel.

I followed her pointing finger to a jump rope that hung down from the top of the tall scenery board, dangling in front of the painting of the house.

“Maybe my character snuck out last night to meet her boyfriend,” said Trudi, flashing Wallace a dazzling smile. “I’m very romantic, you know.”

MEMO: Beware of hormones. You will never defeat them.

“This isn’t supposed to be here,” Nathaniel said in annoyance. He grabbed the end of the jump rope and yanked.

His face radiated pure horror when he realized what was on the other end of the cord. It was a bucket that stood balanced on top of the scenery board. As it fell, it tipped over, releasing a dense cloud of black pepper right onto my actors’ heads.

Trudi was the first to sneeze. But I couldn’t tell who was second, because it was an epidemic of coughing and hacking and sputtering. I ran for the stage, but as soon as I got close, the spicy powder went straight up my nose. My eyes filled with water, and I stopped in my tracks, wheezing.

“Ow!” cried Nathaniel as the bucket bounced off his head. He fell, and his collision with the floor raised up another cloud of pepper. Down there, he was kicked and stepped on by the others in their mad scramble to brush themselves off and escape the airborne powder. And above the symphony of sneezes rose another sound, a deep, hearty laugh that could only have belonged to Wallace Wallace.

I tried to yell, “Can it, Wallace!” But when I opened my mouth, more pepper got in, and I ended up choking and spitting instead.

Through watery eyes, I was aware of a blurry commotion of moving shapes. As my vision cleared, I saw Wallace leading the victims one by one away from the pepper storm.

“If you wanted to help,” came Rachel’s raspy voice, “you could have not done this in the first place!”

After a couple of quiet days, she was back to her old self, except now she had even less patience for Wallace Wallace than I did.

At that moment, Nathaniel, who was still blinded and sneezing, struggled to his feet.

“Careful!” I cried.

He wobbled backward, and then stepped clear off the edge of the stage.

In a flash, Wallace was there. He caught the smaller Nathaniel in outstretched arms. There they were, in the pose of a groom carrying his bride across the threshold.

I was just about to lace into Wallace for planting that bucket of pepper when the entire cast and crew burst into applause and cheers.

“Bravo!”

“Nice catch, Wallace!”

“It’s your best play since the touchdown!”

It dawned on me like a new day.
This
was exactly what was missing from our play! Our cast—happy, laughing, excited, united. It was the kind of enthusiasm that couldn’t be manufactured.

MEMO: Seize that energy and harness it for the good of the production.

Well, I had to do
something.
Otherwise, we might be down to ten people at tomorrow’s rehearsal, and only five on Friday. Next week, I’d have to cancel the play altogether.

I raised my hand for order. “Listen up, people. I’ve got something important to say.”

“Mr. Fogelman,” piped Nathaniel, “make Wallace put me down!”

Obligingly, Wallace dropped his arms, and Nathaniel clattered to the hard floor.

“Ow!”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” I went on. “Since everybody’s so enthusiastic, I’ve decided that we should try the first scene your way.”

There was dead silence, and then Trudi burst out, “You mean
Wallace’s
way?”

MEMO: They always know how to hurt you.

It killed me to
reward
Wallace for vandalizing our play. I reminded myself that I had no proof that this had been his doing. “I mean the proposed new scene with the moped and the remote-control car to move the dog—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish because pandemonium broke out. There was so much backslapping and jumping for joy that yet another cloud of pepper was raised from people’s clothes and hair. That brought on more sneezing, only this time it was happy sneezing. Even Wallace looked sort of pleased, a welcome change from his usual scowl of defiance. At least he was coughing and spitting now, too, caught by his own dirty trick.

Rachel approached me, fanning away pepper with her script. “Why did you do it, Mr. Fogelman?” Her reddened eyes conveyed deep anguish. “Why?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” I replied. “But I really think this is the only way.”

Now who was going to convince
me
?

Enter…
WALLACE WALLACE

“A
ttaway, Giants!”

“Let’s go, team!”

I scrunched down into my hood in the hope that the two noisy fans in the next row wouldn’t call attention to me. I had agonized a lot over whether or not I should go to the Giants’ third game. By this time, everyone in Bedford but the pigeons knew about my detention and my disgrace. But that didn’t stop them from nagging: What went wrong? What are you doing to fix it? And the everlasting Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Parker Schmidt called my house so often these days that he and my mom were turning into phone buddies.

So I was sort of in disguise. The hood of my Windbreaker covered all my hair, a big muffler concealed my mouth and nose, and a headband fixed it so that only my eyes were showing. Trouble was, we were having Indian summer, and it was seventy-six degrees. I thought I was going to melt!