DELETED SCENES
Dustin Eddlebeck's Metal Song
La Dolce Pubert Early Outline
Very Early Scene: Leon and Allen's Evil Plan
As with most of those deleted scenes from DVDs, you can usually see WHY they were deleted, but some of these are still pretty funny....this first one showed a bit more of Dustin's band, and Dustin's writing at its very worst (he would come into his own as a beatnik poet in Pirates of the Retail Wasteland). This was one of the last scenes deleted - it just didn't really sem necessary in the end. The language in these earlier drafts was a bit harsher; I've added the appropirate -----s to keep yer parents off my back!
I got out and rode my bike around, first around my neighborhood, then I crossed Cedar Avenue and ended up riding around Anna's neighborhood, but I didn't bump into her, so I went back to my side of Cedar and rode around the neighborhoods behind the school for a bit.
While I was riding down the bike trail that went behind the townhouses on 63rd street, I heard someone shouting out "hey, a--hole!" and turned around to see Dustin Eddlebeck sticking his head out of the second story window of one of the houses. I got off my bike and waved at him.
"Hang on!" he shouted, and he climbed out of the window onto the roof, then got onto the wooden porch and climbed down onto the ground. It was a pretty impressive display of athletics – especially considering that I knew for a fact that that wasn't his house. I decided not to ask what he'd been doing there.
"What's happening?" I asked. I got off my bike and just started, so he could walk along next to me.
"Did you go to the game last night?" he asked.
"S--- no," I said.
"You missed it, man. All these high school chicks got coke thrown on them by this one guy, and you could see their junk pointing through their shirts."
"Sweet."
Now I don't wish to imply that I don't care about sex or that I don't think about it; hell, if I spent all of the time I thought thinking about sex working on, say, learning to speak Italian, I'd be fluent by now. Dustin Eddlebeck, however, was just plain sick. In seventh grade, part of sex ed was showing us a video of a baby being born, and, though this was, indeed, seeing actual nudity in classroom, and I'm talking full-on shots of parts you don't normally even see on cable, it was entirely too disgusting to be arousing. However, when they show that sort of thing there's always one kid who sits there grinning and going "whoa mama!" or something like that. Dustin Eddlebeck was that kid in my class. You could've showed him a picture of a shaved camel and it would've turned him on, if he had ever been turned off to begin with. Which I doubted.
We walked along the bike path, talking about music, which was generally a safe topic, except for the fact that he tended to measure the worth of a song by the number of times the words "s---" and "f---" appeared in the lyrics. This was why I sort of cringed when he told me was going to start writing songs.
"I'm starting a band," he said. "I'm gonna call it The Ashtrays."
"What do you play?" I asked.
He scowled. "My mom's made me take piano lessons since I was like five," he said. "So I'll play that. Or keyboards."
"In a metal band?"
He started spouting off a list of various metal bands that had piano players or organ players, and two or three that he named were pretty good. None of them were from the last ten years.
Finally he pulled out a sheet of paper from his pocket. "Check this out," he says. "This'll be our first song."
I knew the kid could write; his poems on the bathroom walls were really quite good, and he wrote a hell of a lot of them. The school had probably had to start buying paint in the bulk-rate, twenty-gallon size just to keep painting over them. They'd tried some sort of permanent ink removing gunk, but that just faded it down, and kids had to look harder at it to read what he'd written. This was just one event in the school's long history of being unable to deal with problems in a way that made them any better. In sixth grade, some kids had found marijuana growing wild in the little forest that covered a space about the size of a backyard behind the school. The janitor came out and cut it down with a Weed-Wacker, which just spread the seeds around. The next year, there was even more than before.
I unfolded the sheet of paper with a bit of caution, since when you got a piece of paper from Dustin Eddlebeck there was no telling where it had been, and checked it out.
Fire in the Hole
by Dustin Eddlebeck
Get me the hell out of this dirty town
come with me, baby, I'll show you around
and maybe later you can just go down
with me
Lie you down in a field of grass
run your hands all over my ass
aren't you glad you didn't go to class
baby
Fire in the hole
fire in the hole
you make me lose control
fire in the hole
"Well," I said, "this is pretty ambitious. I don't think it's up to your usual standard, though." Normally his poems made a point of using vocabulary words that we were given in class. He once rhymed "masturbate" with "perambulate."
"It's not a poem, dingle-dorf," he said. "It's a rock song. They don't have to be all that poetic."
"It couldn't hurt," I said. "But, anyway, who else is in the band?"
He shrugged. "No one yet."
"Well," I said, "if you get it going pretty soon, maybe you can do the music for my movie."
"Oh yeah!" he said. "You got sex ed, you lucky bastard. I wanted to do that one."
"What'd you end up with?"
"Seat belts. I'm going to be using a lot of ketchup for blood. I just need to figure out how to show a car crash and stuff."
Dustin loved nothing much more than sex. But blood and gore came pretty close. He could barely go a single class without mentioning nipples or blood, unless he was talking about his other favorite subject, which was books. And he usually found a way to combine them.
I handed him back the lyrics and was just about to take off when he tapped me on the shoulder.
"Dude..." he said, lowering his voice down to a whisper... "are you doing Anna?"
"No," I said, maybe a little too forcefully. "And if I was, I don't think I'd tell you about it, anyway. See you in class."
Damn it, that pissed me off. I knew that if he went around saying that Anna and I were doing it, we'd have to start denying it, and then we'd have to start saying how we don't even like each other, just to get everyone to leave us the hell alone, and that would probably just about kill my chances with her in the future.
On the other hand, maybe if word got around, she might think we should just go ahead and start going out.
Hell. I know I'll never understand girls if I live to be thirty.
Here's an early version of Leon's outline for his movie
We were all supposed to have rough outlines for what we wanted to do turned in for activity period the next day. I knew I wasn't going to be able to manage the whole "sperm cell flying over Rome" sort of thing, but there was a lot that I could still probably do on no real budget. Pretty soon, I had it together.
- Scene 1: The "your body is growing" scene. Show clip of someone looking like a giant, looking down on the people from below. Then show paintings of large breasts.
- Scene 2: The hair growing scene. Show some hair growing (figure out how to do this), backed by classical music, then more painting scenes of hairy privates. Find some of these.
- Scene 3: Tadpoles swimming around, also backed by classical music.
- Scene 4: Text: "what is happening to you is normal. This movie is not."
- Scene 5: More paintings, this time of people having sex. Close with a shot of people (Brian and Edie?) kissing.
- Scene 6: Explosion! More classical music. End with a closeup on a painting of genitals.
LATER IN THE SCENE
Anna turned to me and said "do you have your outline for the video ready yet?"
"You bet," I said. I dug it out of my backpack at the same time as I dug out my lunch and handed it over to her. She looked at it critically.
"This is a good start," she said. "I especially like the part with the tadpoles. But you should really have some people painting each other with their tongues."
"Can we work that in?"
"Maybe."
One thing that people who don't like the book tend to say is that the book must be autobiographical. It isn't; I wasn't anywhere near as smart as Leon when I was 13, or nearly as gutsy (though I had friends who were). I try to bury anything autobiographical. In fact, that's part of why this scene was cut before the rough draft was even half finished - it WAS almost entirely autobiographical. The plot line turned out to be unnecessary, though, and I didn't think it made any sense for kids to have to scheme to subsrcibe to Playboy if they had the internet. Kids nowadays have it made - back in MY day we had to beg our parents to rent Revenge of the Nerds for us and hope to God they just thought we needed to see it again because we had trouble figuring out the nuances of the plot. The internet was around by then, but the only people I knew who had it were a couple of guys who hung out at the local comic book shop's Magic:The Gathering nights. My family finally got online in my sophomore year of high school.
I tried to put the whole movie out of my mind for the rest of the day.
I got on my bike and high-tailed it over to Allen's house. Allen was probably my best friend in those days. He went to the Catholic school, instead of mine, and looked to me as sort of his source of information about the outside world. It was nice to feel needed.
"I tried out all of my speakers," I told him.
"Did it work?" he asked. Allen wasn't allowed to listen to rock music; when he wanted to listen to some music, he had to do it with a tape player hidden under his pillow. It was hard to headbang to music no one else could hearing. Loud rock music was like a forbidden fruit to him.
"For about two seconds," I said. "Then I blew a fuse."
"But how did it sound for the two seconds?"
"Awesome."
He and I got his parents permission to ride our bikes to McDonalds, which was a life saver for me. No egg salad. We waited until we'd ridden two blocks from either of our houses and began to talk about The Plan.
Allen and I had been spending weeks on a secret plan to subscribe to Playboy. Our plan was solid. We figured that all we needed to subscribe was a checking account, a subscription card, and a post office box. I knew of a kid in school who had offered to acquire a Playboy subscription card for us from his dad's collection for five bucks. Allen was pretty close to talking his parents into letting him get a checking account, so we could send in payment for the subscription. And, when the time came, I had a whole stack of fliers for a fake lawn-mowing business. If anyone at the post office asked why we wanted a post office box, that was our story. If they had asked why a lawn mowing business needed a post office box to begin with, we were in trouble, but we had a few ideas. We'd probably just say it was for "tax reasons."
"Did you see that guy about the card in school yet?" Allen asked.
I shook my head. "Haven't seen him yet." I hoped that Danny hadn't moved away. Even if he was still in school, I hadn't told Allen that banking on him was a bit risky. He told lots of people about his dad's supply of girlie mags, but he might have been making it all up. Danny Nelson was well known for being full of s--.
We took our plan seriously. We never spoke about it anywhere near our houses, or in any public place where we might be overheard. When we got to McDonalds, we stopped talking about the plan and talked about comic books instead. We both had hiding places long-since picked out – mine was under a hidden compartment that I planned to build into my bed, his was at the bottom of his box of comics – a place where his parents dared not tread. If either of us got caught, we'd say we had bought them from someone (Danny Nelson), and hadn't actually looked at them – we were going to sell them at a profit. That seemed more plausible than just reading them for the articles.
"Man, you are so lucky to be going to the regular school," Allen said as we rode our bikes back to his house.
"Why?" I asked. The food at the Catholic school was well known for being much better than the food at the regular school.
"Two words," he said. "Sex Education."
Sex, drugs, and rock n roll were all strictly off limits for Allen, and he was obsessed with all three. I was convinced that he probably already knew everything they were going to tell us in sex ed, and further convinced that no one who had taken that sort of class at school would actually find it enviable.
Copyright 2003-2006 by Adam Selzer, all rights reserved
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