Immediately Obvious Holes in the Story That I Just Made Up: A Partial List

1. Earl and I have never visited a bathroom together in our entire lives, probably because that would be weird.

2. Stoners do not smoke weed in the bathroom. They smoke weed in old Nissan Altimas about a block and a half from the school. Then they are not seen again for hours, sometimes days.

3. No stoner in the history of the world has ever forced anyone to smoke with them. Indeed, many of them are actually delighted not to share weed with you.

4. There were twenty of them? In one bathroom? Twenty stoners? Why not just say a hundred? Why not say a berjillion? Jesus.

5. What is this “blacking out” business? What would that even mean?

So I said all that, and Earl was silent. Rachel looked at him for confirmation. At length he said: “Yeah, that’s what happened.” He was pissed.

We looked like morons. But at least Rachel wasn’t on the verge of crying anymore. She looked sort of amused.

“I hate drugs,” I said. “I feel like an ass right now. I’m sorry we came over while we were on drugs.”

“Shut your dumb ass up,” said Earl to me. “You think you’re making Rachel feel better? All apologetic and shit? Shut the hell up.”

“OK,” I said.

“Rachel,” continued Earl, who was now in Take-Control Mode, to my vast relief, because when Earl takes control, good things happen. “We came over here to wish you well and cheer you up. So let’s go walk around and get ice cream or something.”

Holy shit, this was such a good idea. I told you Earl always has the best ideas.

Like I said, once Rachel found out we were on drugs, she was more amused than anything else.

“Greg, I didn’t know you were such a bad-ass,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“Oh.”

We were at this ridiculously good ice-cream-and-waffles place in Shadyside where they mix things into your ice cream with a blender or something. The ice cream itself is unbelievable. The list of things that they mix into the ice cream, moreover, is insane. Example: bee pollen. Second example: habanero peppers. Did I get both of those? Yes. Did I have them in the weirdest flavor of ice cream available, namely, Kahlúa? The answer to your question is on board the S.S. Yes. When I ordered bee pollen, was I actually thinking of honey? Perhaps the actress Yessica Alba can answer that for you.

Anyway, I lost all control when I got my ice cream, and I spent five minutes completely oblivious to the outside world, because oh my God was that ice cream delicious. When I emerged, everything had changed, and also a lot of parts of my body were sticky. For example: both ankles. Earl had trouble dealing with this.

“Dude. You gotta learn . . . not to eat . . . like that.”

“Mmmh sorry.”

“That was so nasty,” said Earl, unable to eat his own ice cream. “Dag.”

“Mmmnh kinda want another one,” I said.

“You should get one,” suggested Rachel.

“Naw. He shouldn’t.”

“Mmmngh.”

“We should get back anyway,” said Earl, shouldering his backpack. “If we gonna watch something before dinner.”

“Nnnh yeah? What are we watching?”

Earl and Rachel stared at me.

“Dude.”

“Greg, we were going to watch a few of the films you guys made.” Rachel said this like it wasn’t a big deal.

“Did you not even hear us or some shit?” asked Earl.

“Uh.”

“Dag.”

From nowhere, Earl produced a lit cigarette and angrily started puffing on it. Meanwhile, I think Rachel was sensing that I was freaking out. “Greg, Earl said it would be fine—do you really not want me to see what you’ve worked so hard on?”

The answer to that question was locked in a vault deep within the hull of the Starship Holy Fuck Definitely Not.

Ideally, I would have been able to take Earl aside and make these points:

I. What the hell are you doing.

A. Did you just offer to show Rachel our films?

1. That seems to be what happened, while I was eating ice cream.

2. Correct me if I’m wrong.

B. The films that we long ago agreed never to show anyone?

1. They’re not good enough to show people.

2. Maybe someday we’ll make something worth showing to people.

3. But we’re definitely not there yet.

C. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. Dicksmuggler.

II. Why the hell are you doing this?

A. Is it because she’s dying?

1. That shouldn’t have anything to do with anything.

2. Goddammit! Earl.

B. Or maybe you’ve just changed your mind about whether or not our films are good?

1. Because, they’re not.

2. Right?

3. We don’t have a budget or good lighting or anything.

4. We’re just fucking around in a lot of them!

5. We’re basically morons.

III. Earl, you jackass.

A. You’re really being a douche right now.

B. A huge douche.

C. Please don’t windmill-kick me in the head.

1. OW

2. FUCK

But I wasn’t able to say any of that. Instead, I just sort of nodded and went along with it. It was two against one anyway. I didn’t really have a choice.

We walked home. On the bright side, I was starting to feel like myself again, but it didn’t really compensate for the total betrayal of Earl, and the humiliation that we were both about to endure. I guess it goes to show that being around a dying girl will make some people do anything. Even foul-tempered, height-challenged filmmakers.

Batman versus Spider-Man (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2011). Batman loves bats; Spider-Man loves spiders. Batman is wearing a bunch of extra clothes under his suit so as to appear more muscular; Spider-Man is fast and wiry, or at least, more twitchy. The bat and the spider have never been enemies . . . until now!!! Actually, they’re still not enemies. A movie producer locked them in a room together and won’t let them out until one of them has been vanquished, but they don’t feel like fighting each other. Mostly they sit around having painful weapons malfunctions. ½

Critical response to Batman versus Spider-Man was positive, more so than we expected. Although, to be honest, the reviewer was a total pushover. She laughed pretty much nonstop throughout the entire thing, and wasn’t taking any notes. She probably didn’t notice the mediocre lighting and frequent shadow problems, for example. Or the numerous costuming inconsistencies, like how my copious sweating kept undoing the Batman horns that I made in my hair with mousse.

So, yeah. It was weird watching one of our films with someone else. For the first two or three minutes I was talking nonstop, explaining everything:

“OK, so this is just a shot of some cartoons that we drew, because we were trying to do that thing in comic-book movies where they—wait, it’ll come back into focus—yeah, so they start out by showing pictures from actual comic books—and now, yeah, Earl is chewing on it, because, I dunno. And now he’s freaking out. OK. So the stick figure on the left is Batman, and if you look closely, we sort of screwed it up, but if you look at the right moment you can kind of see that he has, um, stick junk. Uh, junk, like genitalia. OK, and on the right Spider-Man is eating a waffle, which later becomes important becaus—”

Then Earl told me to shut up.

So I was sitting there silently taking note of everything that was going wrong while Rachel emitted a constant stream of giggling and snorting, with occasional eruptions, like a human mud pot. It was a strange experience. I didn’t know what to make of it. I think mainly it confirmed my suspicion that if you’ve made a film, you can’t watch it with anyone you know, because their opinions are going to be biased and worthless. I mean, it was nice to make something that cracked someone else up. But would Rachel have thought the film was hilarious if Earl and I were total strangers? Doubtful.

So really this was just a confirmation that showing our films to people was a mistake. But we ended up paying a pretty heavy price for it.

EARL

You got them steak tips still?

ME

No, I ate those a couple days ago.

EARL

Dammit.

And the next day, Rachel went off to the hospital to get shot full of drugs and radioactive particles and whatnot. Little did I know that I would soon be joining her in the very same hospital.

Actually, what the hell is this “little did I know” business. I didn’t know at all that I would soon be joining her in the very same hospital, because I can’t see into the goddamned future. Why would I be able to know that even a little? “Little did I know.” Jesus.

You can take pretty much any sentence in this book and if you read it enough times, you will probably end up committing a homicide.

So Rachel was in the hospital, and Earl and I were at home watching Withnail and I, an obscure British film about two actors who are constantly drunk and on drugs. They take an insane vacation in the countryside, where they almost starve to death. Then the uncle of one of the actors shows up and basically tries to have sex with the other one. We were just getting ready to do a new film, but we hadn’t gotten Mulholland Drive in the mail yet, so we found Withnail and I in Dad’s collection and it was good enough that we were debating doing a remake of it.

It was actually sort of awesome. The constant alcohol-related freaking out of Withnail reminded us a lot of Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and we were fired up that there were accents that we could try to do. In general, I would say Earl is slightly better than me at accents, but that doesn’t mean he’s actually any good at all.

“How does he say it? The Irish man in the bar? ‘I—Aye cahlled him a ponce.’”

“Naw. He say it like, ‘OI CARLLED HEM A PON—A PORNCE.’”

“Ha!”

“PAWWWWRNCE.”

“Oh man. That’s not it, but that’s a lot funnier.”

The word “ponce” kind of dominated one of the scenes. It turns out it’s British slang for “child molester.” We thought it was a little fucked up that they had a slang word for that, but then Earl pointed out that in America we say “motherfucker” all the time, which is just as disturbing.

“It fyeels like a pyig shat in my head.”

“HOW SHID OI KNOW WHERRRE WE AHRE? ET FEELS LOIKE A PEG SHAT IN ME EDD.”

“I think that’s a different British accent.”

“Yeah. It’s the one from Fish Tank.”

Fish Tank is an obscure recent movie we saw about an insane English girl from the projects. We loved that movie. We gave it an A for accents, A+ for profanity.

“So in this remake—”

“We gotta have ‘ponce’ in the title.”

“Yeah. That’s a good idea. We could call it Poncy Scheme.”

“The fuck’s that mean.”

“It’s like, a play on Ponzi scheme. Like the whole Madoff thing that happened a few years ago.”

“The fuck you talking about right now.”

“It’s fine. Never mind.”

“This title don’t have to be all clever and shit. We could just call it Two Poncy Dudes.”

“Actually that’s not bad!”

“Ponce-Ass Dudes on Vacation. Simple as hell.”

“That’s perfect. So I think you should be Withnail.”

“Withnearl.”

“Yeah. So I think the plot is pretty straightforward. Most of the time you’re drinking and then freaking out.”

“Lighter fluid and shit.”

“Yeah, that scene is going to be awesome.”

“I’m also gonna be that gay uncle. Draw a fake mustache and pretend to be all fat and shit. Be like, Boy, I’m gay as hell. I’ma fuck you.”

At the end of the movie, Withnail is bellowing at some wolves in the zoo. This scene was on our minds for some reason, so we decided to shoot it first. However, we didn’t have access to wolves. Instead, we decided that Earl should try bellowing at Doopie, the Jacksons’ big terrifying dog. This meant we had to go to Earl’s house.

“Maybe when we done with this we should visit Rachel at the hospital,” Earl commented as we got on our bikes.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. I don’t know if today’s OK to visit or when visiting hours are or whatever.”

“I called em,” said Earl. “We can show up anytime before seven.”

This was sort of surprising to me, and I was thinking about it on the ride to Earl’s. I mean, deep down, Earl is obviously a much better person than I am. But I still didn’t expect him to go to the trouble of calling the hospital for visiting hours and stuff. I guess it’s not really that hard to make a five-minute phone call, but it still struck me as something I wouldn’t have done unless someone made me do it.

Then I continued thinking about it and I got kind of depressed that I don’t even have my shit enough together to call the hospital and figure out when I can go visit. I really needed to step it up, or I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls.

Basically I was thinking, thank God for Earl. Because I don’t really have a moral compass and I need to rely on him for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that? Am I even a human? Who the hell knows.

INT. JACKSON LIVING ROOM — LATE AFTERNOON

MAXWELL

Roll your damn pants down.

EARL

I biked over here.

MAXWELL

No one wants to see your weird-ass socks.

EARL

Nobody care about my socks.

MAXWELL

angrily

No one wants to see them nasty socks.

On our way in, we stumbled into Maxwell, one of Earl’s half brothers. Earl had his pant legs rolled up. This caused Maxwell to become enraged.

If you are confused as to why this would cause Maxwell to become enraged, that is totally understandable. I’ve learned over the years that basically anything can get anyone in the Jackson house enraged.

Cause: Madden ’08 disc is scratched

Effect: Maxwell hurls Brandon into the television

Cause: Humidity

Effect: Felix uses Derrick’s forehead to inflict damage on Devin’s face

Cause: There is a bird outside

Effect: Brandon strides around aiming blows indiscriminately at people’s testicles

When a fight breaks out, everyone is fair game, and unfortunately that includes the doughy, slow-moving white kid. As a result, my reflexes at Chez Jackson have become pretty quick. The moment someone takes off their shoe to hit someone else in the face, or someone else has their elbow in another kid’s mouth, I am halfway out the exit. If we’re not near an exit, I try to hide behind some furniture, although then when it gets shoved into a wall, sometimes I become part of that wall.

Anyway, Maxwell put Earl in a headlock and punched his head while Earl thrashed around. The commotion attracted the attention of several brothers, including Brandon, the thirteen-year-old psychopath with the “TRU NIGGA” neck tattoo. He came hurtling down the stairs like a missile with elbows. His teeth were bared, and his eyes were locked on mine. I made a small shrieking noise and turned to run.

Maxwell and Earl were in Brandon’s way, so I actually did make it out of the door before Brandon was able to elbow me in the head. The problem is, I got too excited. When I got to the end of the porch, instead of jumping, I sort of dove, as in, headfirst.

There’s a convention in films where, when someone is flying through the air, time slows down. The person gets to observe all of the various details of their environment, reconsider their course of action, maybe even contemplate the notion of God. Anyway, this convention is a lie. If anything, time sped up. My feet left the porch and immediately I was lying all scraped up on some cement with a broken arm. Almost as immediately, Brandon was standing over me.

“Yeah, nigga,” he piped, in his not-all-the-way-dropped thirteen-year-old voice. “Yeah, clumsy bitch.” He kicked me kind of halfheartedly.

“OW,” I said. This angered him. He kicked me harder.

“Shut the hell up,” he said, but the second kick actually hurt a lot, so I began screaming. This made Brandon slap my face repeatedly. Fortunately, Felix had just arrived on the scene, and according to his own mysterious logic, his reaction to what he saw was to grab Brandon by the head and throw him across the yard.

He turned to me. We stared at each other. His eyes were cold with disgust.

Eventually, he said: “Fuck outta here,” and walked back into the house.

So, that was how I came to be in the same hospital as Rachel. Although it was a completely different wing of the hospital—hers was the chemotherapy area, and mine was the broken-arm-that-had-somehow-become-infected area. No one seemed to know how my broken arm got infected. Pretty quickly I stopped asking about it. I was worried I would find out that there were other basic medical facts that the nurses didn’t know, like where skin comes from, or how surgery works.

But yeah, my broken arm got infected, and I ran a fever, and all of that meant a lengthy stay in the hospital. And that meant visitors. Each of these visitors had various points to make.

Mom

• Poor, poor sweetie.

• We’re gonna get you out of here soon.

• Oh, my poor brave boy.

• You must be so bored.

• Here are some books that I collected at random from your room or the library.

• I’ll just put these books on top of those other books from last time.

• You have to make sure to do your schoolwork.

• You have to make sure to tell the nurses if anything feels funny.

• If you have even the slightest headache, you need to get on the phone and call the nurses right away because it might be meningitis.

• I said it might be meningitis.

• Meningitis is a fatal brain disease, and in hospitals you’re sometimes more vulnerable to—

• You know what, I don’t want to scare you with this.

• Just if you have even the tiniest headache, call the nurses.

• I’m just being crazy, but seriously, call them.

• Does your phone work?

• Let me just see if it works.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 839