“Sup.”
“Hello, Earl.”
Silence.
“I like your room.”
“Thank you. Greg thinks it’s too girly.”
I knew I had to say something here, so I sort of yelled, “I do not!”
“Of course it’s girly,” said Earl. “My room doesn’t have no James Bond in no . . . thong.”
What not-on-drugs Greg would have said: “Yeah, Earl prefers his James Bond posters naked.”
What on-drugs Greg ended up saying: “Huh huh.”
Longer silence.
“So, I’m getting a round of chemo tomorrow.”
“Yeah, that sucks.”
“Dude, what the hell.” Earl shoved me.
“What?”
“Don’t say it sucks.”
“Uh . . . yeah, you’re right.”
“It sucks a little bit,” said Rachel.
“Yeah, but it’s exciting.”
“I guess.”
“If you get it early enough, you’ve got a good chance,” said Earl, staring at the ground.
“Yup.” Rachel was also staring at the ground.
Possibly racist silence.
Rachel and Earl were clearly not hitting it off. I had to do something. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that thing would be. The silence grew. Rachel continued staring at the ground. Earl started sighing. It was the opposite of a party. It was about the least fun social situation imaginable. If terrorists had burst into the room and tried to suffocate us in hummus, it would have been an improvement. This idea got me thinking about hummus. What is hummus, exactly? It’s basically a paste. Who eats paste? Especially a paste that resembles cat barf? You can’t deny the resemblance here. At least, when Cat Stevens barfs, it looks like hummus.
And then a part of me was like: “Why do you keep comparing food to barf? First the alien thing in the cafeteria, and now this. Maybe you have a problem.”
That’s when I realized that I was giggling. But sort of in a nervous scared way, which made it even more obnoxious than just lighthearted giggling.
Earl was pissed: “Stop it with your goddamn giggling.” But Rachel’s reaction was worse: “You guys can go if you want,” she said, and it sounded like she was about to cry. This was terrible. I felt like such a dickhead. It was time to come clean.
“We’re on drugs,” I blurted.
Earl had his head in his hands again.
“What?” said Rachel.
“We accidentally got high.”
“Accidentally?”
It was time to come sort of clean. Actually, it was high time for Lie Time.
“I totally blacked out. I don’t even remember what happened.”
“You did not black out,” snapped Earl.
“No, we both did.”
“The hell are you even talkin about.”
“Why are you guys on drugs?” asked Rachel.
“I don’t know!” I said.
“I don’t know.”
Then Earl started to say something, and I knew it was going to be about Mr. McCarthy. But I really didn’t want to get him fired.
So I just started talking: “Actually, we went into a bathroom, and there were some guys there, you know, some of the stoner guys, and they were like, you want some weed, and at first we were like, no, we don’t want any of your, uh, weed, but then they started getting angry, and were like, yo, you better smoke some of this, or we’ll, uh, beat the hell out of you, and there were like twenty of them, so we were like, OK fine, so we smoked with them, but again, I don’t totally remember what happened because I blacked out.”
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.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Page 10