The Assembly

By Guest Contributor Bushra Rehman, cross-posted from The Feminist Wire

SLAAAP!!! Poster by Chitra Ganesh. Image via The Feminist Wire.

Queens, NY, 1984.

Nothing in P.S. 19 was ever heated enough. The auditorium, the cafeteria, the large windows with their pull-down plastic vinyl drapes rattled in another winter storm.

Ms. Cooperman, our teacher, frowned as she saw us shiver. “Bring your coats,” she said. “We’re having an assembly.”

It had snowed heavily the day before, and not many students or teachers had come to school. It would be another day spent smelling each other’s winter coats and feeling trapped, watching The Red Balloon, a silent film which seemed to be the only film the school owned.

But we did as Ms. Cooperman said because we adored her. It was clear she cared for all of us, even those who spilled over, out of our seats and into the hallways. We used to ask Ms. Cooperman why she had never gotten married. She always laughed and said, “I’m not married because I don’t want to be.”

On this snowy day, the entire fifth grade piled into the auditorium. I was lucky to get a wooden seat without gum glued to the bottom. Mr. Nichols, the vice principal stood in front of the stage. He was skinny, pale, fidgety, and always dressed in a tie and jacket.

“All right, boys and girls. Today we’re going to show a movie about a very important topic. I want everyone to pay attention.” We didn’t listen to him, of course. The teachers tried to shush us as he continued, “This is a movie about AIDS.”

Everyone got quiet. We’d been hearing about this new illness in whispers. We were children living in the middle of an epidemic, but no one ever told us anything. We were only taught to be afraid. Someone turned off the lights, and I had an apprehension this would be nothing like The Red Balloon.

In the opening scene, there were three men in hospital beds, thin as skeletons. They were all white with blue eyes, some with blonde or brown moustaches. Their skeletal faces reached up and out towards us.

The movie followed their lives as they became sicker and thinner, as they struggled to do everyday tasks, to drink a glass of water, their Adam’s apples bumping up against the skin. Their cheeks grew more sunken and their eyes shone out with light–the light of death.

In between the time in the hospital, there were pictures and home movies of them from when they were healthy. They were some of the most handsome men we’d ever seen. Their hair was perfectly groomed. Their skin was soft, their smiles open. These men were dying.

By the end of the movie, we were glued to our seats, paralyzed. In what we thought was the last scene, there was a movie still of one of the men. Underneath his name was written: Died, December 13, 1983. He was frozen in his hospital bed–the man who had been laughing with his friends just a few minutes before. We were stunned, and then there were girls crying in the audience.

We thought the movie was over, so we started clapping. Something we had stopped doing for The Red Balloon. But no–another picture came of a man from the movie. This man had died, too, only a few months later. And then the other, and the others. After each picture, after each man died, we clapped, wanting the movie to be over, wanting to do something with our fidgety hands.

After the lights came on, Ms. Cooperman was furious. She took us back to the room and held us during lunch. We tried to explain to her that we thought the movie was over.

“Again and again? You’re smarter than that.” She looked like she was going to scream or cry. Two things we never imagined her doing.

Page 1 of 2 | Next page