Earl accompanied by Derrick 2 page

Rachel seemed to be softening up a little bit, although I felt like it was unrelated to the riff. But I decided to keep going with it because it was filling the time. Actually, that’s the best thing about a good riff. It’s not that it’s funny, although usually a good riff is pretty funny. The most important thing is that it fills up the time so you don’t have to talk about anything depressing.

“Yeah. And then you call their admissions office and you’re like, Yale, what’s up with this four point six business, and they’re like, Oh, yeah, you know, if you were a more motivated student, you would have discovered the secret Yale preparation high school that is buried deep beneath your normal high school, and all the teachers are these creepy undead geniuses, and that is the place where you would get a four point six or better, and also where you learn the secrets of time travel. And uh, and creating artificial life out of ordinary household objects. You can bring the blender to li-i-i-i-ife. The blender will become your devoted manservant who gets you the mail, except it accidentally keeps tearing it into tiny pieces because it is a blender. Ya-a-a-a-a-ale.”

“Actually Greg, you can leave the book here.”

There was a pretty good chance she was just saying this to get rid of me, but at least it was a response, and sort of a positive one.

“Seriously?”

“Unless you want to keep it.”

“No. Are you kidding? I hate this book. This is great.”

“Yeah, I want to look at it.”

I fished it out of my backpack. I was really fired up to get rid of it. Also, maybe it was gonna make Rachel feel less like she was dying.

“Here you go.”

“Just put it on the table.”

“Done.”

“OK.”

She had maybe softened up a little bit, but she still wasn’t laughing or responding very much at all and I sort of lost control a little and said, “I’m not cheering you up at all when I come here. I’m being a jackass.”

“You’re not being a jackass.”

“I sort of am.”

“Well, you don’t have to come visit if you don’t want.”

This was kind of a tough thing to hear. Because, honestly, I didn’t want to keep visiting her. It was stressful enough when she was in a good mood. Now that she was super-sick and pissed off all the time, it really stressed me out. It jacked up my heart rate, for example. I was sitting in there and I had that awful fluttery feeling you get in your heart when your heart rate is all jacked up. But I knew I would feel even worse if I didn’t visit her.

So basically my life had been completely fucked up by all of this.

“I’m not coming here because I don’t want to,” I said. Then, because that didn’t make any sense, I clarified: “I’m coming here because I want to. If I didn’t want to come here, why the hell would I come here.”

“Because you feel like you have to.”

Really, the only thing I could do in response to this was lie.

“I don’t feel like I have to. Also, I’m totally irrational and stupid. So sometimes when there are things I have to do, I don’t even do them. I don’t know how to live a normal human life.”

This was a ridiculous direction to go in, so I backed up and started over.

“I want to come here,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

Then I said, “I like you.”

It felt ridiculously awkward saying that. I don’t think I had ever said those words to anyone before, and I probably never will again, because you can’t say them without feeling like a moron.

Anyway, she responded with: “Thanks.” It was unclear how she meant it.

“Don’t thank me.”

“OK.”

“I mean, sorry. This is insane. I’m yelling at you right now.”

I wanted to get out of there. But I knew I’d feel like a dickbag just leaving. I guess she sensed this.

“Greg, I’m sick,” she said. “I’m just not very cheerful right now.”

“Yeah.”

“You can go.”

“OK, yeah.”

“I like when you visit.”

“That’s good.”

“Maybe I’ll feel better next time.”

But as it turned out, she didn’t.

Jesus Christ I hate writing about this.

So I should probably try to explain what leukemia is just in case you are confused about it. I knew extremely little about it before the whole Rachel thing. Now I know a mediocre amount, which frankly is much more than I am actually interested in knowing.

Some cancers are localized in your body, like lung cancer, or butt cancer. You probably think butt cancer doesn’t exist, but it does. Anyway, with those cancers you can sometimes go in and cut them out surgically. But leukemia is cancer of the blood and bone marrow, so it’s spread throughout your entire body, so you can’t just go in and cut it out with knives. I mean, the knife thing obviously is scary and disgusting, but then the other way to treat cancer is to blast it with radiation and/or chemicals, which is worse. And with leukemia, you have to do that to someone’s entire body.

So that definitely sucks.

Mom said it’s like a city that has “bad guys” in it—something about the Rachel situation makes Mom forget that I’m not a toddler—anyway, it’s like a city with bad guys and chemo is like dropping bombs on the city to kill the bad guys. In the process, part of the city gets jacked up. I told Rachel about this, and she was dismissive.

“It’s more like I have cancer,” she said, “and I’m getting chemotherapy.”

Anyway, in the process of bombing the bad guys to death, there was definitely some damage sustained by Rachel City, specifically in the neighborhoods of Hairville, Skinfield, and the Gastrointestinal District. That is why she bought the hat. It was this cute furry pink thing that you normally see on girls running around in shopping malls and not on pale girls lying in bed all the time.

So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don’t feel like lying to you. She didn’t have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn’t fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.

So I would go in there and say some things, and she would sort of smile and sometimes giggle a little bit but mostly just not say anything, and I would run out of things to say, and then we’d put on a Gaines/Jackson film and watch it. First the more recent ones, then the older ones when we got tired of those.

Watching them with her was a strange experience because she was just so focused on them. I know it sounds idiotic, but sitting next to her, I suddenly saw the films the way I think she was seeing them—as this uncritical fan who actually likes all the stupid choices that we were making. I’m not saying I learned to enjoy watching the films. I guess I just saw how you might kind of tolerate all the insane imperfections and fuckups that we had. You might look at the bad lighting or the weird sound design and have your attention taken away from the story we were trying to tell and instead just be thinking about me and Earl, as filmmakers, sort of accidentally drawing attention to ourselves. And if you liked us, you would like that. That’s maybe how Rachel was seeing everything we did.

But she didn’t actually say anything, so maybe I was just making that all up.

And meanwhile, she didn’t seem to be getting any better, and there were a couple of days where she was in a really dark mood and there was nothing I could do to help. Like one day when we were watching something and she had been really quiet and then she said, “Greg, I think you were right.”

“What?”

“I said I think you were right.”

“Oh.”

She was quiet like she expected me to know what that meant.

“I’m, uh, usually right.”

“Don’t you want to know about what?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Or maybe she didn’t expect me to know what she meant. Who knows? Girls are insane, and dying girls are even more insane. Actually, that sounds fucked up. I take that back.

“So I was right about what?”

“I think you were right when you said I was dying.”

I hate complaining about this, but at the same time, this made me feel like shit. I was so pissed off that she said this. I tried to swallow it.

“I never said you were dying.”

“You thought I was dying, though.”

“No I didn’t.”

She was silent and it was infuriating.

“I didn’t,” I said, too loudly.

I mean, this was a lie, and we both knew it.

Finally, Rachel said, “Well, if you had thought it, you would have been right.”

We were silent for a really long time after that. Actually, I wanted to yell at her. Maybe I should have.

JESUS CHRIST I HATE WRITING ABOUT THIS

A person’s life is like a big weird ecosystem, and if there’s one thing science teachers enjoy blathering about, it’s that changes in one part of an ecosystem affect the entire thing. So let’s say my life is a pond. OK. Now let’s say some insane person (Mom) shows up with this nonnative species of depressed fish (Rachel) and puts the fish in the pond. OK. The other organisms in the pond (films, homework) are used to having a certain amount of algae (time that I get to spend on those things) to eat. But now this cancer-stricken fish is eating all that algae. So the pond is sort of jacked up as a result.

(That last paragraph is so stupid that I couldn’t even bring myself to delete it. By the way, for every mind-numbing thing that you have read in this book, there were like four other things that I wrote and then deleted. Most of them are about food or animals. I realize that I probably seem obsessed with food and animals. That’s because they’re the two strangest things in the entire world. Just sit in a room and think about them. Actually, don’t, because you might have a panic attack.)

So that is what was happening in my life. My schoolwork was definitely suffering, for example. Mr. McCarthy even took me aside to talk about it.

“Greg.”

“Hi, Mr. McCarthy.”

“Purvey a fact for me.”

Mr. McCarthy had ambushed me in the hall on the way to class. He was standing squarely in front of me and adopting an inexplicable stance. It was like the stance of a sumo wrestler, except with less stomping.

“Uh . . . any fact?”

“Any fact, but it must be presented with extreme authority.”

I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep for some reason, so I actually had some trouble coming up with a fact.

“Fact: A change in one part of an ecosystem, uh, affects an entire thing.”

Mr. McCarthy clearly wasn’t impressed by this fact, but he let it go. “Greg, I’m gonna waylay you for five minutes. Then I’m gonna give you a note so you can go to class.”

“Sounds good.”

“That’s what’s about to happen, right now.”

“OK.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

We walked into his office. They still hadn’t finished rewiring the teachers’ lounge, so the oracle was on his desk, presumably containing marijuana-infused soup. Seeing it, I immediately started panicking that Mr. McCarthy was going to confront me and Earl about drinking from the oracle. This panicky feeling got worse when Mr. McCarthy said the following thing:

“Greg, do you know why I brought you in here?”

There didn’t seem to be a correct answer to that question. I’m pretty bad in pressure situations, also. This should not surprise you at all. So I tried to say “No,” but my throat was dry from fear and I sort of just made a squeaking noise. I also probably looked like I was going to throw up. Because honestly, it was too stressful to think about what a big crazy tattoo-covered wacko like Mr. McCarthy would do if he knew we had discovered that he was doing something illegal. I was sitting there realizing that while I liked Mr. McCarthy, I was also deeply terrified of him and suspected that he might actually be a psychopath.

This suspicion deepened when, without warning, he tried to crush me with his giant brightly colored arms.

I was too terrified to fight back in any way, so I kind of just went limp. He had closed in on me and was sort of hugging me to death. A lot of thoughts were running through my head at that moment. One of them was: This is exactly the sort of dumb way a stoner would try to kill someone. By fatally hugging them. What is up with stoners? Drugs are asinine.

It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that he was actually just giving me a hug.

“Greg, bud,” he said after a while. “I know how tough things are for you right now. With Rachel in the hospital. We’ve all seen it.”

Then he let go. Because I had gone limp, this caused me to fall most of the way down. Unlike your average high school student, Mr. McCarthy did not find this hilarious. Instead, he became very concerned.

“Greg!” he shouted. “Easy, bud. Do you need to go home?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I got up. We sat down in chairs. Mr. McCarthy had a look on his face of deep concern. It was definitely out of character for him and it was sort of distracting me. It was like when a dog makes a human-style face at you and you’re temporarily thrown off guard by it. You’re like, “Whoa, this dog is feeling a mixture of nostalgic melancholy and proprietary warmth. I was not aware that a dog was capable of an emotion of that complexity.”

That’s what I was like with Mr. McCarthy.

“We’ve all seen how you’ve been affected by Rachel,” said Mr. McCarthy. “And we’ve definitely heard about all this time you’re spending with her. Bud, you’re a great friend. Anyone would be lucky to have a friend like you.”

“I’m really not,” I said. Mr. McCarthy did not seem to hear me, which was probably good.

“And I know school is not your number one priority right now,” added Mr. McCarthy, staring me in the eye in a way that was really nerve-racking. “I get that, bud. I was like you in school. I was smart, and I didn’t apply myself, and I did just enough to get by. And until recently, you’ve been doing enough to get by. But hey.”

He got closer to me. I was trying to imagine Mr. McCarthy as a student. For some reason, in my head he was a ninja. He was sneaking around the cafeteria late at night, preparing to assassinate someone.

“Hey. Your schoolwork is definitely suffering. This is a true fact. I’ve talked to your other teachers. In all of your classes, you’re unfocused, and you’re not participating, and you’re forgetting to do assignments. And in a few classes, bud, you’re pretty deep underwater. Let me unload another fact on you. Rachel . . . doesn’t want you . . . to fail your classes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

To be honest, I was pissed. Partially, I was pissed because Mr. McCarthy and I used to have this casual teacher-student relationship that involved zero earnest annoying talks like this, and that relationship was great. And now apparently it was over. And partially I was pissed because I knew he was right. I was definitely not doing all of my homework. Teachers had been pointing this out. I had been ignoring them, but it was harder to ignore Mr. McCarthy, because despite being an insane stoner, he was the only reasonable teacher in all of Benson.

“Bud, this is it,” Mr. McCarthy said. “This is the last year, and then you’re gone. Let me tell you this: After high school, life only gets better. You’re in a tunnel right now. There’s a light glimmering there at the end of it. You gotta make it to that light. High school is a nightmare, bud. It might be the worst years of your life.”

I didn’t really know what to say to this. The eye contact was giving me a headache.

“So you gotta make it out. You can’t fail. You’ve got the best excuse in the world right now, but you can’t use it. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna do everything I can for you, because you’re a good kid. Greg, you’re a fucking great kid.”

I had never heard Mr. McCarthy use the F-word, so this at least was sort of exciting. Still, my Excessive Modesty reflex would not be denied.

“I’m not that great of a kid.”

“You’re an absolute beast,” said Mr. McCarthy. “That’s all there is to it. Get to class. Here’s a note. We all think you’re a total . . . ferocious . . . beast.”

The note said: “I had to meet with Greg Gaines for five minutes. Please excuse his absence. He is a beast. Mr. McCarthy, 11:12 am.”

Meanwhile, at home, Gretchen was going through this phase where she could not make it through an entire meal if Dad was at the table. This was in part because Dad was going through a phase of his own wherein he couldn’t stop pretending to be a cannibal. If we were eating anything with chicken in it, he would pat his stomach and announce, “Huma-a-a-a-an flesh. TASTE LIKE CHICKEN.” This caused Gretchen to burst into tears and stomp out of the dining room. Things only got worse when Grace started doing it, too, which was insane, because a six-year-old pretending to be a cannibal is one of the greatest things there is.

So that’s what was going on at home. Actually, that’s not even relevant, but I wanted to write about the cannibal thing.

And as for filmmaking, I dunno. Earl and I didn’t really end up doing the Two Poncy Dudes movie. We met up a few times to watch David Lynch films, and we knew that he kicked ass, but for some reason we were having trouble coming up with a script of our own. We’d kind of just sit around staring at the laptop screen. Then Earl would go outside for a cigarette and I would follow him. Then we’d come back and do more wordless staring.

So you’re probably reading all this, and being like, “Wow, Greg was really sad about Rachel, to the point where his entire life was in this tailspin. That is sort of touching.” But honestly, that’s not accurate. It’s not like I was sitting in a room, with tears running down my face, clutching one of Rachel’s bedroom pillows and listening to harp music all the time. I wasn’t wandering any dewy meadows, ruefully meditating on the Happiness We Could Have Had. Because maybe you don’t remember this, but I really didn’t love Rachel at all. If she hadn’t had cancer, would I be spending any time with her at all? Of course not. In fact, if she were to make a miraculous recovery, would we stay friends after that? I’m not even sure if we would. This all obviously sounds terrible, but there’s no point in lying about it.

So I wasn’t sad. I was just exhausted. When I wasn’t at the hospital, I felt guilty for not being at the hospital trying to cheer Rachel up. When I was at the hospital, most of the time I felt ineffective and useless as a friend. So either way, my life was deeply fucked up. But I also felt like a moron feeling sorry for myself, because I was not the one whose life was literally about to end.

At least I had Earl some of the time to cheer me up.

EXT. GAINES BACK PORCH — EVENING

EARL

suddenly

So you can be a heterosexual, or a homosexual, and I feel like I understand that, like you’re a woman in a man’s body or some shit, but I been thinking about it and how the fuck can somebody call theyself a bisexual.

GREG

Uhh . . .

EARL

Man, ain’t nobody like, that fine-ass girl is making me hard right now. Oh wait, my mistake, that dude over there is the one that’s making me hard. That don’t make no goddamn sense.

GREG

I guess sometimes I also wonder about that.

EARL

Goddamn. If you’re seriously like, “For real, I’m a bisexual, any person can get me hard,” man, you must get a hard-on from all kinds of freaky shit.

GREG

I think, uh . . . I mean, some scientists think that everyone’s actually a little bit of both. Homo and hetero.

EARL

Naw. That don’t make any damn sense at all. You tellin me right now, you can look at some titties, get a hard-on, look at some dude’s funky dick, get another hard-on. You gonna tell me that for real.

GREG

I guess I can’t say that, no.

EARL

determinedly

Dog taking a dump: hard-on. Wendy’s double cheeseburger: hard-on. Computer virus that destroy all your shit: hard-on.

GREG

Business section of the Wall Street Journal.

EARL

Big-ass hard-on for that shit.

Contemplative silence.

EARL

Yo, I got a line for you. You wanna get with that girl, with the big-ass titties?

GREG

Yeah, give me a line.

EARL

You walk up to her, say, Girl, you might not a known this about me, but I’m a trisexual.

GREG

uncertainly

OK.

EARL

Girl’s like, What the fuck?

GREG

Yeah.

EARL

You like, Yeah, trisexual.

GREG

OK.

EARL

She like, Whaaaaaat. You with me?

GREG

I’m with you.

EARL

Awright, she all confused. Then you drop the bomb, you’re like: trisexual, girl. Cuz I’ma try to have sex with you.

GREG

Ohhhhhh!

EARL

Try-sexual.

GREG

I’ll definitely use that.

EARL

Mack.

All right. Now we’re reaching the part where my life really started accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. And actually, this part wasn’t even Mom’s fault! It was Madison’s. It’s definitely messed up that they played similar roles in my life. I’m trying not to think about this too hard, lest I never get a boner ever again.

It was the beginning of November, and I was in the part of the hall where they had tacked up a bunch of vaguely terrifying pilgrim-and-turkey paintings by the ninth graders, when Madison appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my arm. Our skin was actually touching, specifically in the hand-to-arm format.

Suddenly, I became terrified that I was going to belch.

“Greg,” she said. “I have a favor to ask you.”

It wasn’t like I felt a belch forming in my stomach. It was just that, in my mind’s eye, I could foresee myself belching at Madison. I saw this extremely vividly. Maybe there would be a small amount of barf in there.

“So I promise I haven’t seen any of your movies,” she said, sort of a little impatiently, “but Rachel has, obviously, and she really likes them. And I just had this idea—you should make a movie for her.”

I wasn’t really sure what this meant. Also, to distract myself from the Belch of Doom that was lurking in my esophagus, I was looking away at a picture of a turkey. It was not all that well drawn. For some reason it seemed to have blood shooting out of all parts of its body. It was probably supposed to be feathers, or rays of the sun, or something.

“Huh,” I said.

Meanwhile, Madison sounded confused by my unenthusiastic reaction to her idea.

“I mean,” she said, and stopped. “Don’t you think she would love that?”

“Hummmm.”

“Greg, what are you looking at?”

“Uh, sorry, I got distracted.”

“By what?”

I really couldn’t think of anything. It was like I was on drugs. In fact, that reminded me of the inexplicable badger picture that showed up in my head after Earl and I ate Mr. McCarthy’s pho. So I said, “Uh, there was just this badger picture in my head for some reason.”

It goes without saying that the moment those words left my lips, I wanted to do serious injury to myself.

“Badger,” Madison repeated. “Like the animal?”

“Yeah, you know,” I said feebly. Then I added: “Just one of those badger head pictures you sometimes get.”

I wanted to eat a power tool. Incredibly, however, Madison was able to ignore this and move on.

“So I think you should make a movie for Rachel. She just really loves your movies so much. She watches them all the time. They make her so happy.”

As if the badger thing weren’t enough, it had suddenly become time for me to say a second stupid thing. Actually, it was time for another episode of everyone’s least favorite show, Excessive Modesty Hour with Greg Gaines.

“They can’t make her that happy.”

“Greg, shut up. I know you have issues with being complimented. Just take a compliment for once, because it’s true.”

Madison had actually observed and remembered one of my personality traits. This was so astonishing that I said, “Word,” completing a personal trifecta of Consecutive Inane Utterances That Will Prevent Sex from Ever Happening.

“Did you just say ‘Word’?”

“Yeah, word.”

“Huh.”

“Word, like, I agree.”

Madison, crafty girl that she is, managed to turn this last one on its head.

“So you agree! To make a movie! For Rachel!”

What the hell could I possibly say to that? Except yes?

“Uh, yeah. Yeah! I think it’s a good idea.”

“Greg,” she said, with a huge lovely smile, “this is going to be amazing.”

“Maybe it’ll be good!”

“I know you are going to make something wonderful.”

So I felt deeply conflicted here. On the one hand, basically the hottest nice girl in the entire school was telling me how great I was and how great of a film I was going to make. So that felt really good and was making me stand funny to hide a partial boner. On the other hand, though, I was agreeing to a project that I had grave doubts about. Actually, I didn’t even know what I was agreeing to.

So I said, “Uh.”

Madison waited for me to continue. The problem was I wasn’t even sure what to say.

“One thing, though,” I said.

“Mmmmm?”

“What, uh. Uhhhmmmmm.”

“What?”

“It’s just, uh.”

There seemed to be no way of asking this question without sounding like a moron.

“What do you think,” I said carefully, “the film should be.”

Madison now had kind of a blank look.

“You should just make a movie,” she said, “that’s specifically for her.”

“Yeah, but, uh.”

“Just make the movie that you would want to get if you were Rachel.”

“But what should it be, uh, about? D’you think.”

“I dunno!” said Madison cheerfully.

“OK.”

“Greg, you’re the director. It’s your movie!”

“I’m the director,” I said. I was really starting to lose focus. I felt the distant rumblings of a major freak-out coming on.

“I have to run. I’m so happy you’re doing this!” she exclaimed.

“Yeahhhh,” I said weakly.

“You’re the best,” she said, hugging me. Then she ran away.

“Burp,” I said, when she was out of earshot.

The exploding turkey had an expression on his face, like: “Goddammit! I’m exploding again?”

Earl had even less of an idea of how to do this project than I did. However, he was much better at articulating that.

“The fuck,” he kept muttering as I was trying to describe the project to him.

“Look,” he finally said. “You agreed to make a film for somebody. Now what the hell do that mean.”

“Uh, I guess . . . It means . . . Huh.”

“Yeah. You got no idea what the hell it mean.”

“I feel like I sort of do.”

“Well, spit it out, son.”

We were in my kitchen and he was rummaging through our food, which put him in at least a neutral mood, if not a good one.

“I mean, if we were painters, we could just paint a picture of something and give it to her as a gift. Right? So let’s just do the film version of that.”

“Where the hell do Pa Gaines keep the salsa at.”

“I think we’re out. Look—what if we just did a one-off film? And gave her the only copy? That works, right?”

“Son, that don’t give oh, hot damn.”

“What?”

“What the hell is this.”

“That’s—lemme look at it.”

“This smell like a donkey’s hairy-ass dick.”

“Ohhhh. This is goose-liver pâté.”

“There ain’t no salsa, I’ma eat this shit.”

As I’ve mentioned before, Earl gets very fired up about the occasionally gross animal-derived foods purchased and refrigerated by Dr. Victor Q. Gaines. I say “purchased and refrigerated” because Dad never eats them right away. He likes for them to spend a lot of time in the fridge, so that the rest of the family has a chance to become aware of them. It’s a habit that Gretchen may hate more than anything else in the world. However, Gretchen’s extreme dislike is balanced by the almost-as-extreme appreciation of Earl. Earl expresses his appreciation by talking about how disgusting the food is while eating it.

“Son. We still have no idea what the film gonna be about.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 655