Q & A at the Film Festival

Kendra Frorup. One. 2009. Mixed media. 48 × 48 inches.

Photo by J. M. Lennon.

When my brother Maurice and I were kids, we buried Pepsi bottles out in the woods and set off bottle rockets, convincing our sister Selma that they were landmines. Once I set one off too close to Maurice, without warning him, and the rocket struck him just below his right eye. I could have blinded him, but all he got was a raw-edged scar the shape of a star on his cheek. Instead of embracing it—a scar! Girls love scars!—he grew ashamed and shy, forever putting a hand to his face to hide it.

Now Maurice lives in a small city in upstate New York with a girlfriend named Rose and a black-and-white cat that snuck into the guest room my first night there to piss in my sheets. The big event that weekend was the international film fest, which Maurice could not have been more excited about. I’ve never been to a film fest before, international or not, and if the rest of the movies were anything like what we watched earlier this afternoon, I might be better off staying in and chancing the cat piss.

“You ready, Brian?” Maurice slipped into a leather jacket so worn it was practically orange. There were many things I wanted to say to my little brother, not just about his jacket but about his hobbies and his approach to life in general, but this weekend was no time to turn him against me. So instead I followed him mutely out the door and down the street to his car, which by the looks of it had become the target for every bird that had to take a shit in a twentymile radius.

Our first movie of the evening was a Swedish drama. The plot went like this: For seven years, a young girl is sentenced to a kitchen to make the same vat of soup over and over. She never sees who she is feeding, and the ingredients never change: celery, chickpeas, carrots, onion. A little bit of salt. One bay leaf. That’s it. When the girl is released on her sixteenth birthday, she walks outside and an old man hands her an orange. She stands looking at it for a long time, turning it over in her hands. Finally she throws it in a trashcan and walks off into the distance.

The lights came on in the theatre to reveal Maurice wiping his eyes. “Can you believe that?” he asked.

“I know, right? I thought that old man would at least try to hit on her or something.”

Maurice put on his jacket. “No, the orange. She didn’t even recognize it as food. Really got to me.”

What got to me was how my brother turned into this gigantic douchebag without my even noticing.

On our way to the next theater, a film fest volunteer stepped in front of us. He looked exactly like every other volunteer there, male or female—nineteen years old with greasy hair, plastic-framed glasses, tattooed arms, tight jeans with wide cuffs, and a t-shirt with an ironic slogan. This one actually said, “Look at my ironic shirt.” I can’t make this up.

“Can’t go in, fellas. Movie’s been delayed.”

“What?” Maurice frowned. “Start times are never delayed. Ever.”

“I know,” our hipster told us. He leaned in to confide something further, since he clearly recognized Maurice as a kindred spirit. “This is a Director’s Spot movie. And the director? Is so not ready. He’s in the back puking into a trash can.”

“Get the hell out of here.” Maurice started wringing his film fest booklet into a tight tube. “That’s intense.”

“So it’s postponed,” the volunteer concluded. “One hour.”

“Awesome, we can eat.” I grabbed Maurice by his jacket and steered him toward the exit. “Let’s get a beer and burger at that Pear and Fag place or whatever.”

“The Pear and Fig,” Maurice said, struggling to...