SCHULTZ, MAXIMILIAN HUGO

[MAXIMILIAN HUGO SCHULTZ]

[atrb=style,width: 420px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/0478144b9f16c95a37367d1aca56b45c/tumblr_mkfax8tDxp1s97ldco1_500.png); padding: 5px, bTable] MAXIMILIAN H. SCHULTZ 26 | HETEROSEXUAL | HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER | LOCAL | SAM CLAFLIN THE INTERVIEW WELL, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? SIT DOWN. “What?” Max has just shuffled into the room, head dipped shyly, smiling rather goofily – his usual first impression on people is pretty much exactly this, or the slightly more confident version of this that he portrays in a classroom setting – but the acidic greeting catches him off guard. He looks up startled, eyes wide and doe like, with one hand still resting on the handle of the door he’s just shut behind him. “Oh, sorry. Am I late? I’m – ” He glances at his watch. It’s 8.58am. Two minutes before the scheduled start of the interview. “I’m not late. Um, sorry?” A spasm of mildly offended confusion contorts his brow, before he surmises that it’s okay, not personal, the interviewer has probably just had a bad morning. The traffic was awful, he knows that for a fact, and that is enough to put people not in possession of his sunny demeanour into something of a bad mood. He drops his hand from the door and wanders absently over to the chair he assumes is his. Curious eyes rake over the walls, and then settle politely back on his foul-tempered interviewer. An expectant smile curves at the corners of his mouth as he gets himself comfortable, clasping his hands casually in his lap. WHAT, DO YOU NEVER HAVE A DATE? STOP STARING AT ME LIKE THAT. Max laughs – startled again by the venomous and unwarranted verbal attack, and responding to the hostility the only way he knows how: with good humour. He doesn’t know what kind of qualifications you need to interview people for… what’s this for again? Is it a census thing or… is it a school thing? It might be a school thing. The school board can generally be relied upon to waste people’s time and taxpayer’s money with useless exercises like this, when there are so many more useful endeavours they could be embarking on. Yes, it’s probably a school thing, but… what point was he trying to make again? Oh! Right. He doesn’t know what qualifications one needs to interview people on behalf of the school board, but he’s surprised this woman managed to get accredited. Her manner leaves a little to be desired. “No, I’ve had plenty of dates. Thank you for the concern.” He replies earnestly, so earnestly that it’s rather difficult to tell if he’s being sarcastic or sincere. With Max, it’s usually a mix of both. He is too boyishly enthusiastic to pull off dry wit, but too intelligent to truly let himself appear unironically oblivious. These traits – the boyish humour and good looks, the unbridled enthusiasm, the generous IQ – mix well together, fusing into a fairly potent kind of charm. It’s safe to say Max never has problems getting dates. Paradoxically, however, though he has no trouble getting a woman’s attention, he has always struggled with keeping it. He is too flighty, too absent minded, and just a touch too self-absorbed for most women’s tastes. His usual track record is three or four dates, followed by hooking up periods of varying lengths, followed by losing touch entirely. His relationships always show promise until it comes time for them to deepen even a little bit. He tries to thaw the old sour puss out with a little bit of non-threatening charm, and says with a cheeky smile, “Besides, you’re very pretty, but you’re not my type.” His type is rather… younger, generally. It’s gotten to the point where the women his own age are starting to look for a little more out of their relationships than he knows how to give. Typically, the younger a girl is, the more impressed she is by him, and thus the more interested Max is in her. Max has a lot of good qualities, but he can be very shallow. His type is young and blonde and slim and pretty. In romantic partners at least, the outside has always mattered a little more than the inside. That mentality took him all the way through college and probably would have taken him much further, but he was lucky enough to meet a game changer last summer. He’s been in kind of a relationship for almost a year now, and that has most definitely altered the way he has thought and interacted with women. But that is a whole other story. WHATEVER. WHAT QUALITIES DO YOU LOOK FOR IN OTHER PEOPLE? Whatever? Ugh. The old broad is being very rude, and this kind of ire is not something Max generally inspires in people. Well, it can be… but usually he has to at least open his mouth first. She’s been digging at him since he walked through that door, and already it’s starting to get a little old. “Well, unprovoked hostility is definitely one I don’t look for.” He mentions rather pointedly, with the most indifferent of little shrugs to take the edge off his tone. A short pause, where he lets the reprimand sink in – to apparently little effect – and then he merely huffs a slight sigh, shrugs again and answers, “You know, though, the qualities everyone looks for. Compassion, confidence, intelligence…” Those are the big three, though not necessarily in that order. Intelligence probably comes first in his book. Max was a ‘child prodigy’ – and like all child geniuses, he grew up being excessively bored by the normal people around him. His parents were interesting and stimulating enough until he grew out of their IQ range – at around age eight. He grew up with a certain intellectual smugness, offset by a bizarrely focused approach to education. There are a small smattering of narrow disciplines he is interested in – languages, linguistics, sociolinguistics, geography, anthropology, history – and in those he excels to an intimidating degree, but he was never able to branch out. He was dismissive of all other subjects and fields of study, and so is rather less of an adult genius than he could have been. Max is extremely smart when it comes to what he knows, but ask him to complete some basic mathematics or tell you the chemical formula for water and he’s as clueless as a toddler. At twenty six years old, much of the superiority and arrogance has rubbed off, and Max has learnt to savour and draw comedic attention to his shortcomings as much as he relishes in his own excellence, but some old scraps of conceitedness remain. Even if he has been humbled somewhat, much of the casual modesty of his demeanour is calculated and put on, worn like a mask that he feels ‘helps him blend in with normal people’. He values intelligence in others, but mostly because he values it in himself. Confidence is linked into this. He likes people who know things, but mostly he likes people who know who they are and aren’t afraid to put it out there. Beyond mental competency, Max cares very little what a person is actually like. Happy, sad, funny, sensible, warm, cold… whatever. The key to winning his respect is to be able to own it and not give a flying fig what anybody else thinks. He has little to no patience for people with no self-esteem. If someone believes they have no worth, he will look at them and probably agree. You are what you make yourself to be, what you present yourself as, and that’s why he never has very much patience for the wallflower types. In any room, he will automatically be drawn to the person with the most charisma, the most exuberance, the loudest laugh and the most shameless attitude. But that’s automatic. Instinct. He is like a moth to a flame – always. It’s not to say that he really does think some people are worth more than others – at least not based entirely on their outward persona. Max is fickle. Flighty. He is constantly making judgments and then casually recalling them, and half of the ‘life and soul of the party’ people he immediately gravitates toward turn out to be not worth his time anyway. Though it generally takes him longer to develop interest, some of the more meaningful connections of his lifetime have been made with the shyer kinds of people. He finds it’s often the quietest ones – the boys and girls who huddle over their textbooks in the back of his class and never raise their hands, or his sweet, silent, studious sister who communicates much more effectively with a sharp stare or a soft smile than spoken words – who have the most compassion deep down in their core. He likes that. He likes kind people. Who doesn’t? But automatic compassion is probably the one thing on his list that he himself doesn’t quite embody. He is intelligent, he is confident, but he is not always quite so kind as he would like to be. He is not as selfless as he’d like, and he is too rough and ready, too bouncy and exuberant and all over the place, to always take into account other people’s feelings. Max is always going at a hundred miles an hour, thinking fast and moving fast and living fast, that sometimes people get left behind. Sometimes they get hurt by his carelessness, and it is only when he slows down long enough to think about his actions for a second that all the offense he might have caused and all the missed opportunities to extend a hand to a friend in need catch up with him. HOW MISS AMERICA OF YOU. I SUPPOSE YOU VOLUNTEER EXCESSIVELY, TOO? Oh, well, how emasculating. Max considers taking offense at the ‘Miss America’ comparison, but elects not to. He is not, by the standard definition, a ‘man’s man’. His parents’ emotional absence and poorly masked intolerance of his attitude as a child means he was raised more by his older sister than anybody else. He is probably more comfortable embracing his feminine side than most supposedly ‘modern men’. He gives the interviewer a slightly exaggerated wink. “Miss New York, at your service. And yeah, I volunteer a little. I wouldn’t call it excessive. I guess I’m not as committed to world peace as the rest of the contestants.” His tone again is that touch too earnest – somewhere uncomfortably, immeasurably between doe-eyed sincerity and over the top sarcasm. He exhales a lung-emptying sigh and sinks down in his chair a little, expressing his boredom with the vitriol bodily rather than verbally. “No, I do volunteer a little. I actually do. Social awareness is so lame, I know –” He flicks a contemptuous eyebrow. It’s the first disdainful gesture she has managed to eek from him so far in this interview. “But um, you know those big brother, big sister, mentor kind of programs? Big Brother, Southern Maine division.” He claps a hand gravely over his chest, as if he is talking about some kind of military rank or decoration. “My little brother is Milo. Absentee father. Drunk mother. All kinds of social workers going in and making a mess, I guess it’s kind of distressing. He’s a sweet kid. Smartass, though. I go into Portland two, three times a week and we hang out. As far as volunteering goes…” He removes the hand from his chest and throws her the typical ‘a-okay’ gesture, his thumb and forefinger pinched to make a circle, the rest of his fingers splayed. To indicate that this ‘giving back’ is one activity he finds particularly savoury. He enjoys it. Volunteering is not a chore when it is something you like to do, right? And what does Max like to do more than feel like he’s doing something good while having someone look up to him as though the sun shines out of his ass? His surrogate little brother is an ego boost. But that’s not totally fair. He’s also a sweet, damaged child who Max cares for very much. He’s an extremely important part of his life, even if he downplays the genuine sweetness of the gesture. He only started putting in hours as a big brother because time in a mentorly roll with children counted towards his teaching accreditation, but he’s glad he stuck at it. It’s one of the more fulfilling things in his life, no doubt about it. “I do other stuff.” He says now, as if she accused him of otherwise. He sinks down in his chair, running his hand restlessly through his hair as he thinks on what things he wants to – or ought to – share. Another sigh leaves him. “I do a lot of reading. I do some tutoring outside of school hours. I hang out on skype a lot.” He had a very global childhood, and has friends to show for it in all four corners of the world. The invention of video calling was a god send for maintaining these friendships without boring him, but it also serves some practical use. Max’s main skill set lies in learning and speaking foreign languages – it’s the discipline he now teaches to others, so it’s something he has to keep sharp. An hour or so a day chatting in Spanish or German to foreign friends is fairly useful when it comes to keeping himself competent. “What else? I spend time with my girlfriend. I go to the movies. I grab a cup of coffee with friends. I don’t know what you want here.” There isn’t much excitement to his day to day existence, and this is something he likes. It’s the main reason he decided to take the high school teaching job here in small town Brunswick rather than the other better paid positions he was offered in higher education establishments. His sister thought he was nuts for choosing Brunswick, Maine, over Chicago or Miami or good old New York… but it had made sense to him. He wanted something quiet and settled after their globe-trotting childhood. Just so he knew what it was like, before he inevitably gets bored of it and decides to venture back into the world. YOU ACTUALLY LIKE THAT STUFF? DARE I ASK YOU ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD? “Love it.” He replies quickly, shortly. He is getting tired of her attitude. His tolerance for her hostility is wearing thin. It’s not this easy to get to Max – he has pretty thick skin, when all is said and done – but being a bitch is boring. Who wants to talk to someone like that? Ugh, especially about his past. She wants him to talk but she’s going to continue speaking to him and looking at him like he’s something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe. Max considers shutting up and not letting her get even one more word out of him – but this is immature. Max can very well be immature, but he probably shouldn’t be when this is a job-related interview, right? Besides, he never could resist the temptation to talk about himself. “My childhood, my childhood…” He says slowly, as if mulling it over. “I suppose you want a torrid tale of abuse and neglect? Well, sorry. My family was actually pretty all right, you know. I’m well adjusted.” He beams cheerfully, as it to illustrate the point. “Happy as a clam, y’know.” He pauses thoughtfully a moment after this, the smile still half present and resplendent on his face. “Um… meine mutter, mein vater… they were German.” He starts, then stops with a wry shake of his head. This, the casual switch in language to afford his late parents their German titles, is the first moment in the interview that his American accent has been anything but flawless. To say that his voice now slips into German is not quite accurate, because no German has ever spoken quite like that. Max’s default accent is some bizarre European hybrid that reflects the multinational instability of his childhood – a strong Eastern European base, with hints of Scandinavian in the rising and falling pitch, and a certain casual Mediterranean lilt and drag on his vowels and the ends of his sentences. Max’s natural speaking voice ensures and reflects the fact that he will never quite fit in or feel at home anywhere and amongst any set group of people. He seems to note the tonal slippage, gives a brief, mildly tolerant smile and when he speaks again he has made considerable effort to hoist his put on American accent back into place. “German Jews, actually, which is… whoa, boy, gives you a complex. Myself and meine schwester, Freida, we were born over here. American, thank you. In New York. We had a house there, but um, you took me back to my old street now and I couldn’t pick out our house even if I had to. We spent maybe five, six weeks of every year in the US when I was growing up. The holiday season. So even when we were here, we weren’t much at the house. We were either in Colorado with meine tante Heidi and her family for Thanksgiving, or going upstate to visit meine großeltern, meine mutter’s parents, for Hanukkah. So maybe we would spend two weeks of every year at home.” He shrugs carelessly, and then grins with a sudden reminiscent warmth. “The rest of the year we were in Europe.” “Meine mutter und mein vater were historians. Meine mutter specialised in ancient Mediterranean civilisations. Think Greece, Rome, that kind of thing. Mein vater was nothing if not a nationalist, and his specialisation was… the Holocaust, basically. They were a great team, and what they used to do was divide the year equally between them. We would spend maybe five months in the Peloponnese so meine mutter could study, and then we would spend the next five months in Poland so that mein vater could study. Whoever wasn’t working actively at the time would work on research papers, books, whatever it was that they did, and also would be in charge of myself and meine schwester. We were home schooled. All the moving, it wasn’t conducive to putting us into a stable learning environment. Besides I wasn’t… I wouldn’t have been good in a school. I was fairly disruptive.” He flicks his eyebrows briefly upward, shrugs. “Bored. I had an abnormally high IQ for my age. Child genius, they called it. Normal school wouldn’t have been for me even if it had been an option.” One might think home schooling a genius might be easy. His parents would have begged to differ. Too often schooling Max in something he was interested in would turn into him schooling them. Likewise, too often schooling Max in something he was not interested in would result in disruption, tantrums, reckless aggression, restlessness, extreme boredom, and escape attempts. He’s the first to admit that he was an exceptionally obnoxious child, and even his elevated IQ and the inevitable boredom that resulted was no excuse for that. “I couldn’t tell you when I discovered languages. We’d always been multilingual. We spoke German to each other mostly, but being American citizens – technically – and English being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, we were also all fluent in that. We would often switch between to keep our skills sharp. Mein vater also spoke Hebrew. Jewish, remember? Meine mutter wasn’t so devout and meine schwester didn’t have the same head for language that I did, so she didn’t learn, but I did. On top of English, German and Hebrew, I also speak Italian, because meine mutter did a lot of research in Rome; French, because mein vater spent almost three years studying the nazi occupation of France; Spanish, because it’s one of the most widely spoken languages in the world; Russian, because we spent a lot of time there again with mein vater, but I’m very rusty with that and I never got it quite so well as the others. I think because of the different orthographical base.” He glances at her, checking to see if she’s understood, and then explains slowly, as if talking to a child. “That means they use a different alphabet basically. Different letters. That’s also why I’m struggling with Mandarin. I decided to learn Chinese, because again, it’s one of the most widely spoken languages, but it’s quite difficult.” He grimaces. It’s easy to tell that admitting something is difficult is like a punch in the gut for Max. “Those are just languages I’m fluent in. I also knows bits and pieces of others. My Polish is tolerable, and I can speak and understand some Greek but I can’t read or write it. Any where I lived, I picked up bits and pieces. I’m what you call a polyglot, or a polylinguist, or a hyperpolyglot depending on which academic theory you subscribe to. There is something about foreign languages that just sticks in my brain.” He is gifted and he knows it, but now he offers a shrug – a casual, unaffected gesture that fits with his faux modest persona. In truth he is exceptionally proud of his ability. Who wouldn’t be? It’s remarkable. “That was my childhood, anyway. Then it ended as childhoods are wont to do. Meine schwester decided she was going to go to college in Berlin, to read psychology. That was quite hard, because Freida and I were always very close. I made a lot of friends no matter where we moved, but you can only get so close to someone you know you’ll have to leave in a few months time. Freida was the only consistent peer in my life. She’s two years older than me, though, so even though I wanted to go and live with her in Berlin my parents were adamant that I was only sixteen and so I had to stay with them and finish my schooling.” He rolls his eyes briefly, acknowledging to himself even though it’d be arrogant to do so out loud that at that point in time, he had nothing more to learn from his parents. He had overtaken them in terms of intellect half his life ago. “By the time I turned eighteen, I was over it, and I returned to the US for college.” He suddenly shifts in his seat, a spasm of discomfort flashing across his face. Clearly something unpleasant is coming up. But it never comes. Not verbally, at least. Max thinks it and moves on: while he was away in college, his parents died. Nothing exciting – just a car accident, somewhere in the French Alps. One week he was speaking to his mother on the phone, the next he was calling their boarding house only to find that they’d not returned from a trip into the mountains, and then three days later their car was found with them dead and bloating inside it. Asche zu asche, cenere all cenere, cendres aux cendres. C’est la vie. Brief mental acknowledgment of the fact barely hurts him, but if he thought about it any longer or spoke about it out loud, it would be an entirely different story. He continues. “Graduated four years later – with high honours, thanks. I majored in linguistics and minored in history. I considered full time academia – grad degree, doctorate, a lifetime of research and papers and all that, but…” He shrugs, wrinkling his nose. High academia was never for him. It is too slow and suffocating and dull. Even the fast paced, global adventures of his parents became boring after a time. Entirely too much paper writing and book researching and waiting around and travelling. It is too time consuming. When your life is too exciting, there is not actually that much time left over to live it. “I don’t know. I decided to teach instead. Those who can do, do. Those who can’t do, teach. That’s me all over, right?” The observation draws a mild smile from him. “I can speak a smorgasbord of languages, but what use actually is that? It’s nice to communicate with as many people as I technically have the ability to communicate with, but talking doesn’t pay the bills. I spent a year or so getting qualified to teach, and then took the open French teacher position here in ass end of nowhere, Brunswick.” It seems a grand anti-climax, a squandering of potential, but for now Max is happy. He’s been living here a year, and he is happy, and isn’t that what actually matters? THAT'S IT? NO SKELETONS IN YOUR CLOSET OR ANYTHING? Max starts to laugh, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “Oh no. Oh no no no no no. You don’t get to ask me about my skeletons. Sorry, that’s not gonna fly.” And yikes, he can’t even imagine the shit storm that would kick up if he told her his big secret. She’s from the school board, right? God. No way in hell would it go down well if he admitted he’s been sleeping with a student for the better part of the year. It’s not as sleazy as it sounds – Max met Teagan before he started at the school. She looked and talked and seemed so much older. He hadn’t expected to find her sitting front and centre in his French class at the beginning of the semester. Luckily, she’s a senior now. Soon she’ll graduate, and sooner still she’ll be eighteen and it all won’t be so wrong. But for now, Max’s lips on the matter are sealed. He gives an indifferent little shrug. “Maybe if you were a little nicer to people, they might be willing to tell you more of their personal stuff. Just a thought.” EH, I'VE HEARD WORSE. IS IT GOING TO INTERFERE WITH YOUR TIME IN BRUNSWICK? The question pulls him up short. As always, Max never really wants to consider the consequences of his actions, so he hates to be asked something that directly alludes to the potential ramifications of his careless little underage affair. He glances guiltily from side to side, in an almost comically over-exaggerated kind of way. “Um… maybe, I guess. Maybe not.” He had considered the consequences for his behaviour if he gets caught – of course he has. He could lose his job. He could be blacklisted and never be able to find another teaching gig. He could go to prison. Become a registered sex offender. Ruin his entire fucking life. He knows that. He just avoids thinking about it. And besides, maybe not being able to teach wouldn’t be the worst thing. Max doesn’t have enduring dreams to remain in this field forever. He’s still very much trying to figure out exactly what he wants to do with his life. So maybe being blacklisted wouldn’t be the end of the world. It’s just the… prison and the sex offender register that scares him. “Probably not.” He concedes finally, then gives an irreverent, ironic smile. As if she gives a fuck. “Don’t worry about me, I’m sure I’ll be fine.” IF ALL ELSE FAILS, I'M SURE YOU HAVE A RELATIVE'S BASEMENT YOU CAN LIVE IN. “Mm, nope.” He shakes his head, then delivers a wry eye roll. “I’m all alone.” His parents being… dead has meant he’s rather lost touch with his other relatives. His grandparents are old and decrepit, and Max isn’t as Jewish as they would like, so they don’t have much contact. His Aunt Heidi is so far away, and his cousins are essentially strangers to him considering how infrequently he saw them. He couldn’t even name them. It is only his sister – his lovely Freida – that remains to him and she is still in Berlin, still studying away with an academic fervour that reminds Max of their parents. She has made noises about coming to visit or even to stay with him, to move in, but nothing has ever come to pass on that score. It’s been nearly two years since he saw her in the flesh, and he is starting to think that they’ll drift as well. “Well… practically. Just me, myself and I to fall back on.” He lets out a short laugh. Living dangerously, that’s him. ALRIGHT. THAT'S IT. SHUT THE DOOR ON YOUR WAY OUT, WON'T YOU? Max half makes a move to rise, lapses back into his seat uncertainly, unsure if she’s really done with him or if this is too good to be true. “We’re done? We’re –?” He stands and she doesn’t make a comment to the contrary, so he straightens lazily, casually stretching out a kink in his shoulders. “Great. Thanks for your time. Danke für nichts. Bye now. Auf Wiedersehen, Kuh.” He smiles blithely, and is so light hearted by his sudden freedom that he even tips an imaginary hat on his way to the door. BEHIND THE MASK PUN | 20 | GMT | I'LL NEVER TELL | DA HORDE max is flailing with excitement about being in existence.

[PUN]

[atrb=style,width: 350px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/0478144b9f16c95a37367d1aca56b45c/tumblr_mkfax8tDxp1s97ldco1_500.png); padding: 5px, bTable] ACCEPTED WELCOME TO BACKSEAT SERENADE & DON'T FORGET YOUR CLAIMS Accepting myself because that's how I roll.