THE NEXT LEVEL DOWN: ACT I, SCENE TWO.

Scene Two: A Theatre.

DRAKE: You know the problem with the sexual education in colleges?

JACKSON: Every thing?

DRAKE: Besides that.

JACKSON: That it starts too late?

DRAKE: No.

JACKSON: [puzzled.] That is starts too soon?

DRAKE: No!

JACKSON: Okay geeze.

DRAKE: Sorry I don’t know where that anger and frustration came from.

JACKSON: What would FREUD say?

DRAKE: Okay okay that’s getting old. My point: it is speaking from an ironical position of privilege.

JACKSON: Shocker!

DRAKE: The stereotype is that feminists are predominantly sexually frustrated girls in their late adolescence.

JACKSON: I am well aware of that stereotype.

DRAKE: But in fact that is only MOST feminists.

JACKSON: So the stereotype is true. You said “predominantly”. So MOST.

DRAKE: It is PREDOMINANTLY true, yes.

JACKSON: Or all true.

DRAKE: Shed the semantics. My point remains:

JACKSON: Where?

DRAKE: My POINT is: these virgin Nazis are not the source of the problem. The SOURCE is to be found in the PROFESSORS. All of them have had PLENTY of sex in this lifetime. And probably many lifetimes besides. It’s just one big sewing circle, only the needles are words and the quilt is the end of all male autonomy.

JACKSON: That’s quite the metaphor.

DRAKE: My point continues: Sexual education is a history written by the CONQUERORS. From a very young age we are coerced into seeing women a certain way even before we have fully EXPERIENCED them. And that is VERY un-Zen.

JACKSON: An abstract painting of a fruit you’ve never tasted.

DRAKE: And it happens at EVERY stage of development. If I went to college hoping to escape the trappings of High School, boy! Was I WRONG.

JACKSON: High School really IS the best four years you’ll ever get.

DRAKE: And those years SUCK at EITHER rate if you’ve been raised to be a model student and wind up a Community College fuck-up.

JACKSON: I had some good times in Junior Year. [smiles dopily and nostalgically, reflecting on innocence lost in excitement.]

DRAKE: Just think about it: You are raised to be the model liberal. Feminist. Guilty white male.

JACKSON: Are you white? I thought you emigrated here.

DRAKE: That notwithstanding: You never get a chance to break the rules, because they are so damned DRILLED into you.

JACKSON: Word.

DRAKE: THEN: You reach the age of reason. But now all your PEERS are feminists and social justice warriors.

JACKSON: INCLUDING the rapey Republican ones?

DRAKE: He’s the total antithesis.

JACKSON: Oh okay.

DRAKE: So yes. Just as bad and useless.

JACKSON: I see.

DRAKE: My point continues: You know all the rules all too well. You HATE them. You PROTEST them. But you cannot ESCAPE them. Every one wants you to be this way, and you were never NOT this way. So you don’t know what to do to escape, because you never sinned when you could get away with it.

JACKSON: Like that Republican rapist.

DRAKE: And now it’s too LATE to get away with it. Every one is watching you constantly, and the more degenerate they are beneath the hypocritical veneer the more severe their inclination to scapegoat you. Add to that the secret fury of Pharisees for saints and you have a recipe for disaster.

JACKSON: “Disaster” is a bit of an exaggeration.

DRAKE: Not at all.

JACKSON: I mean: KATRINA was a DISASTER.

DRAKE: [sardonically:] Okay. So it’s not a HURRICANE but STILL.

JACKSON: I mean my ex. Not whatever else you might think I’m referring to.

DRAKE: ANY way: You are conditioned to be hypersensitive to others, but not to yourself, from childhood, dispossessed of your right to envy your deviant peers, promised elusive reward…

JACKSON: [muses downwards.] The cake truly IS a lie.

DRAKE: And then just as you turn the age of legal sex all the girls your age hate you a priori, you have to repress your personality even MORE, you are marginalized and rendered irrelevant by pedestalization, and any attempt you make to own your nature is met with outward scorn and inner turmoil, and probably ends in failure on every level.

JACKSON: A modern Christ. I see it now!

DRAKE: People just WAIT for you to fuck up, delighting in the fall of an angel from grace, and greedy for a scapegoat to tear to shreds and cannibalise for their own hypocritical sins.

JACKSON: Just like a job.

DRAKE: You mean “Job”. It’s pronounced “Jobe”. Like lobe.

JACKSON: So “lobe” is spelled without an “e”?

DRAKE: Wait. What are you looking at?

JACKSON: That poster.

DRAKE: “A Modern Christ. Volunteers required for the Sunday Matinee. Just like a JOB”!?!

JACKSON: Jobe. Like Lobe.

DRAKE: Was this what you were reading the ENTIRE time?

JACKSON: Depends.

DRAKE: On WHAT?

JACKSON: On when the time began and when it ended.

DRAKE: Agh!

JACKSON: And by that I mean the Matinee. I read the starting times and ending times. But I cannot remember what they are now that you’re tearing down the poster.

[Within the theatre:]

DRAKE: Some times I have those moments. When it all seems meaningless.

JACKSON: Wait. Before you rehearse I need to get some Kettle Corn.

DRAKE: I mean it.

JACKSON: KETTLE corn. Not caramel corn. Or candy corn.

DRAKE: I think: What if there’s no plan? Or if there is then it’s one I can’t hope to change? That it’s one that does not favour me one bit but still I cannot use my will to put an other in its place? And that if such a plan exists then it remains ambivalent to me at best, and still at worst I am but a pawn in a game where my role does not involve my getting what I want, and so precludes that possibility.

JACKSON: So if it’s AMBIVALENT, does that remain a possibility…?

DRAKE: [continues.] What if the world goes on without me, and all those passing patrons who had ridiculed me for my failures and my inexperience are just as silly as the pain that I internalize from them, apathetic as both critics and as audience when I return to them with pleas for time to learn the lessons of the World, and that both the judging public and my aching soul are every bit as insignificant as the fleeting, arbitrary, and fundamentally ignorant instinct to bully me in the first place?

JACKSON: So that’s a long analogy, but where’s the absolute? I mean: just HOW insignificant is it all REALLY?

DRAKE: But then I say: no. Because a deep desire for what I deserve then overcomes me. And I am met with the presence of a beneficent entity that says: It is all right. You are loved. You are deserving.

JACKSON: [giddy, pointing airwise.] Probably delayed endorphins honestly.

DRAKE: No. It is GOD. And not the same God of the people who had scorned me. This God does not plot for their happiness at my expense. He does not desire my misery. And nor does He favour me without due cause. He simply aspires towards the Greatest Possible Harmony, which the sovereign wills of hypocrites seek with ultimate futility to sabotage.

JACKSON: Sounds like a dope trip. [eating popcorn.]

DRAKE: This is not the God that they followed when they pursued their joys at my expense. Nor is it He whom they condemn for promoting the same selfishness that they themselves indulged in.

JACKSON: Indulgence. You got that right. [indulges in popcorn.]

DRAKE: This God’s Will is just, and I need only to recognize its symptoms in the heavens and to accord my own Will with it. Thus Spirit and Nature merge in orgiastic bliss. Harmony is restored within both microcosm and macrocosm. And I can patiently await my due, granted that I DO what is awaited of me, when the time to act does come, as I wait for the opportunity of what is meant to be.

JACKSON: So are you waiting while you’re acting or just acting in your mind while you are waiting, or just acting while…?

DRAKE: For the truth is that, arbitrary as both my critics and the products of their criticism might be, fundamentally the sense of longing would remain irrespective of their criticism. Its origin is not conditioned by society; it is rather a birth-right, for it was not man but God that planted this desire in my heart. And God, in his capacity for love, would not tend towards the banality of evil, nor the brutality of power and the base bluntness of hatred, for love would dissolve those instincts as water dissolves sugar cubes.

JACKSON: Deep.

DRAKE: So He who does not make mistakes and neither does He mean ill would have never planted in my heart false hope. And I’m entitled to those deepest of desires, which my adversaries would pretend to but fundamentally they covet those desires that they use only to mask their vainglorious, pagan will to power.

[Jackson claps from audience balcony.]

DRAKE: How did you get up there?

JACKSON: I wandered off about halfway through. You should really check out the backstage here. The catwalk is tight.

[Cat-walk:]

JACKSON: Drake, what are you LOOKING for?

DRAKE: [Pause.] The usual. Salvation. Redemption. Approval.

JACKSON: “Approval” sounds like a markedly WORLDLY goal.

DRAKE: It is. [smiles in spite of self.]

JACKSON: Did you get a lot of approval on the debate team?

DRAKE: For persona, yes. Not for personality.

JACKSON: Is there any difference?

DRAKE: I expected you to say that, somehow.

JACKSON: Well what is it? We are what we appear to be, right?

DRAKE: Rather the opposite.

JACKSON: So as usual: I’m wrong.

DRAKE: Precisely.

JACKSON: But is that the OPPOSITE of my persona?

DRAKE: Only if your persona were that of a genius.

JACKSON: SEE? I am as idiotic as I appear to be!

DRAKE: Only because I am intelligent enough to see through the veneer.

JACKSON: I have a veneer?

DRAKE: The debaters adored me, as much as a passively aggressive person is capable of adoration.

JACKSON: Go on…

DRAKE: But I could not STAND them.

JACKSON: They were annoying?

DRAKE: No. You have to understand: annoying people you can tolerate when you’re not around them. You just ignore them or gossip about them.

JACKSON: Sounds about right.

DRAKE: How would you know? You wouldn’t be there.

JACKSON: Huh?

DRAKE: Nevermind. My point is: THESE people. Debaters. I resented their very EXISTENCE. I could not stand being around them, but I could not tolerate being NOT around them. I STILL struggle with it. Wondering what they are doing to the world while all the while I turn the other cheek.

JACKSON: They really fucked you over that bad, huh?

DRAKE: It wasn’t just the suitcase.

JACKSON: Course not. And may be I should say “fucked you up” instead of “over”.

DRAKE: All of the above. It’s all fucked. I believed in the Buddhist notion of Human Goodness before I did debate in college.

JACKSON: That bad huh?

DRAKE: It wasn’t like I simply hated their presence, nor certainly did I LIKE their presence. But rather I felt an OBLIGATION to be in their presence, just in the off-chance I could prevent total catastrophe or lessen what would otherwise have been more egregious pain.

JACKSON: Hm. Sounds like you’re nostalgic.

DRAKE: HUH??

JACKSON: You miss it. Being the big brother.

DRAKE: Don’t use that term.

JACKSON: Older brother I mean. Bet they really loved you.

DRAKE: [Pause. They both look out over catwalk rail upon theatre.] I do not believe honestly that they were capable of love. But approval: yes.

JACKSON: So why did you leave then?

DRAKE: I could not keep watching them. It was not worth it. I grew disgusted, and the nausea of futility set in.

JACKSON: I know how that is.

DRAKE: It was like – wait. You KNOW how that IS?

JACKSON: The nausea of futility. Yeah. Deep bro.

DRAKE: No. hold up. The only futile nausea that you know is getting up hung over from bed.

JACKSON: That isn’t true, bro. There are plenty things about me you would be surprised by.

DRAKE: But you’ll never tell me?

JACKSON: Not unless you ask.

DRAKE: And I will never ask.

JACKSON: I guess it works.

DRAKE: I would agree.

DRAKE: I wonder how Jennifer is.

JACKSON: Who?

DRAKE: The foxy Aries chick.

JACKSON: I figured somehow.

DRAKE: She was an exception.

JACKSON: Weren’t they all?

DRAKE: I’ll never know.

JACKSON: Why not?

DRAKE: I’m sure plenty of Nazis back in Dresden were swell people.

JACKSON: You mean swollen? Like after we poured hot water on them?

DRAKE: That’s a historic misconception.

JACKSON: Really?? I thought it was just one of my own.

DRAKE: We bombed them. The hot water we used for the schoolgirls, and we dropped them in. We did not drop it on them.

JACKSON: Thank you for the revision.

DRAKE: That reminds me of an other reason I stayed on the team so long.

JACKSON: You hated Germans?

DRAKE: Not that. That was a secondary reason.

JACKSON: Really?

DRAKE: Actually not at all. But I’ll tell you the real reason:

JACKSON: Okay. Story time.

DRAKE: It’s a short one. You see, the more I heard and read the more I clung to the people who would tell me all these stories. I felt I could CHANGE some thing.

JACKSON: That was why you did not care for the approval. You CARED.

DRAKE: But these bastards. These muskrat weasel bastards…

JACKSON: Woah. Let’s leave the rodents out of this.

DRAKE: These P.C. Fascist Pharisees made a SPORT of the sufferings of the world!

JACKSON: Sorry dude.

DRAKE: It took me two semesters to figure out what was going on. I could not believe it. I could not. Fucking. Believe it.

JACKSON: [apprehensively.] Uh, buddy. You sure you don’t want to take my hand and come down now?

DRAKE: What’s it matter? [muses somberly.] I’ll end up buried under ground level any way.

JACKSON: That’s the spirit! Now let’s make our descent here. Very gently. Easy does it now. Slow.

 Dm.A.A.