Like Brothers

by Mark Duplass

  JAY: Best friends.

  MARK: Childhood best friends.

  JAY: Uh-huh. Lived on the same street. Six houses down.

  MARK: They made a plan for their eighth birthdays. One would get the drum set.

  JAY: One would get the guitar.

  MARK: But they would learn both.

  JAY: Of course.

  MARK: And they got pretty good.

  JAY: Fast. They started a duo band. All covers. They were called…

  (We think on this for a moment. Gotta get it right.)

  MARK: Doomsday?

  JAY: Flashback?

  (Giggling. Good ones. But not great yet.)

  MARK: Vitality?

  JAY: Blatant Vitality!

  MARK: Yes!

  JAY: Ha! It makes no sense!

  MARK: Exactly! That’s why it’s perfect!

  (We look at the two boys across from us. They are so tired. And their skinny jeans and T-shirts seem stretched out, worn for at least a few days without washing.)

  JAY: They wrote their first original song about the girl who almost came between them.

  MARK: Ooh. Good.

  JAY: And they played it at her friend’s party on dual acoustic guitars.

  MARK: They did not change her name.

  JAY: And they turned from dorks into music legends in their high school.

  MARK: Best friends.

  JAY: Best friends.

  (We look back at the boys now. They are each pulling at their beards in the same manner. And both of their right legs are crossed over their left. And then we look back at each other and panic. Because we know instantly that these are not best friends. These are brothers. Mark accidentally lets it slip….)

  MARK: Fuck.

  (But I am feeling it too. As if we subconsciously set a trap for ourselves by following these two brothers. A trap that would force us into a pit that we would have to fight our way out of. Our fun little game was turning into something else. We both felt it. We didn’t really want to play it anymore but kinda knew we had to.)

  MARK: My guess is they have been on tour.

  JAY: Yeah. They’re flying home from a long tour.

  MARK: Probably not a glamorous one, judging from the state of their eye sockets.

  JAY: Nope. Van tour. Splitting $142 a night. Sleeping on floors.

  MARK: Trying desperately to hang on to that dream of becoming rock stars. The one they built when they were eight years old.

  JAY: Scared shitless that it won’t come true. Knowing they are probably pot committed at this point. No real turning back once you’ve skipped college and gone headlong into your dream.

  (A beat. That was easy enough to do. An objective analysis.)

  MARK: Yeah, they know they’re in it for good. But…there’s another question lingering. One of them has been thinking about…well…

  (Are we doing this?)

  JAY: The solo project?

  MARK: Yeah.

  JAY: It happens. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about it. It’s natural.

  MARK: Absolutely. You work so hard and closely with someone for so long, you inevitably wonder what you can do on your own.

  JAY: Will it be more fun?

  MARK: Maybe. Will the stuff you make be as good without your partner?

  JAY: Scary to think about it. On a bunch of levels.

  MARK: Right? Am I just riding the coattails of the more talented one?

  JAY: Am I carrying dead weight and is this partnership holding me back?

  MARK: Will people even accept me if I’m only half of the partnership they’ve come to know and judge me by?

  (We watch the boys. And they actually catch us looking at them. And they smile the same sad smile that we smile for people who have enjoyed watching us over the years. It’s an incredibly profound moment somehow.)

  JAY: The funny thing is, as they think about all of this stuff—all these confusing elements in their creative partnership—they’ve forgotten one thing.

  (Mark looks at me. He genuinely has no idea what I’m going to say.)

  JAY: Their friendship.

  (Mark looks away. He doesn’t want me to see his face. Like the hikes. We will look forward from this point on.)

  JAY: How the management of all these creative and business partnership dynamics have taken their toll on that pure element of friendship that brought them together in the first place.

  MARK: Like when the older one would come home from college and they would just hole up together for twenty-four hours, playing music, hanging out, watching movies. Not so much about making art and bringing it to the world but just…being together.

  JAY: Or even further back. When they would go to that shitty waterslide park off Veterans Highway and just…ride waterslides all day.

  MARK: You mean the happiest years of their lives?

  JAY: (laughing) Yep.

  (We both laugh for a while. A hard laugh. There’s a lot in it.)

  MARK: Yeah. They both really want to have that conversation.

  JAY: But they’re terrified.

  MARK: It’ll probably happen in the least likely of places.

  JAY: Like in parking lot 3F at the airport after they land.

  MARK: With a loud-ass dump truck in the background interrupting them.

  (We laugh some more, knowing that life’s pivotal moments always happen in these oddly mundane places.)

  JAY: And one of them will just…start spilling it.

  MARK: Yep.

  (Pause. A long one. And as usual when things get hard, we both remember that no matter what, I am still the older brother and I am ultimately willing to run into the burning building first when it really counts.)

  JAY: About how sad they are that they can’t be everything they want to be for each other.

  MARK: That the friendship has changed.

  JAY: That they have changed as people.

  MARK: And that there’s very little they can do to control it.

  JAY: And that the creative partnership will take many different permutations through the years.

  MARK: Some easy, some really fucking hard.

  JAY: And it’ll all feel so confusing and sad. And full of potential love and lost love.

  MARK: A deep, unknowable history that they are fully submerged in.

  (We look up and realize that the two brothers across from us are now gone. And it’s about time for us to head to our gate. But we don’t move. We both know we’re not finished. That we don’t want this story to end just yet. Or like this.)

  JAY: And then…one of them asks the other one to get into his car. He wants him to hear something.

  (Mark thinks on this a bit. I feel that he is uncertain where I am headed. And then, the rest of the story “flops” out before him. And he looks at me. And I can see in his eyes that he hopes like hell his flop is the same as my flop right now. That we can be the same again for this moment.)

  MARK: It’s a new demo.

  JAY: (smiling) Yep.

  MARK: Something he wrote on his own.

  JAY: He’s terrified to show it to his brother.

  MARK: But he desperately needs him to hear it. Because if he can’t share these things with him…

  JAY: It’s like they didn’t happen. So he plays the song.

  MARK: They sit in silence.

  JAY: And the song is really good. And the fact that the song is this good is actually a great and terrible thing.

  MARK: It means they can make art on their own. That they don’t necessarily need each other to make something that’s good. Which is great.

  JAY: And terrible. But…the brother who just heard the song for the first time says to the
other one, “It’s weird. It almost feels like…like I wrote that song too. I can feel myself in it.”

  (This thought changes the air around us. Somehow lifts both of our shoulders. Mark in particular takes great comfort and strength in it.)

  MARK: Right. As if all the time, energy, and love that they have shared have created a truly inextricable link between them. That no matter what happens, they will always exist inside of each other. And for one to make something truly on his own is…kind of…

  JAY: Impossible. Because once you’ve joined souls with someone it’s forever.

  (We sit in this for a bit. Because it’s the greatest place to be. And we want to hang on to it for as long as it will last.)

  SO BACK IN Metairie in the early eighties there was a low-rent waterslide park off Veterans Highway. It only had a few slides, but one of them was (in our eyes) enormous. You had to be at least forty-eight inches tall to ride it. I was maybe forty-four inches. On a good day. So when we reached the top of the stairs, Jay would engage the lifeguard in polite conversation as she tried to make sure I was of proper height. I placed my waterslide mat down in front of my feet to hide the fact that I was on my tippiest of toes. As Jay continued to noisily babble into the lifeguard’s ear, I fixed her with my best “Fuck you, you don’t scare me” face as my tiny head barely crested the forty-eight-inch mark.

  “You’re good.”

  And with that, Jay jumped onto the slide first and took off. He rounded the corner, out of sight, and the lifeguard gave me the cue to go ahead. What she didn’t know was that Jay had not only abandoned his safety mat, he was suspended just around the bend, arms planted firmly on the walls of the tube as the water rushed violently past him, waiting for me to come barreling down toward him.

  The plan was simple: Before I crashed into Jay, I would jettison my own safety mat and lock arms and legs with him, effectively creating a Duplass Transformer. This new beast (now doubled in weight and sans safety mats) shot down the waterslide at a speed with which the insurance companies would not have been pleased. Without the mats, the small crevices where the tubes connected would scratch and scrape our backs, but we didn’t care. We had serious speed. Even the extra sunblock oil on our arms and legs gave us (at least in our minds) a few extra mph.

  We flipped over each other, arms and legs intertwined, hurtling toward the pool below, where most of the time there was another lifeguard waiting for us (holding our forsaken mats, warning us that what we had done was not only against the rules but also dangerous). One more infraction and we would be kicked out of the park for good. But we didn’t care. We made our own rules. This was our way.

  We climbed the stairs and went down the slide again.

  I love you, but less so when you’re punching me in the face.

  THANK YOU TO Pamela Cannon and the fantastic staff at Ballantine Books, without whom this book would be intensely less readable. Actually, it wouldn’t be readable at all. Or even here.

  To Lauren Budd, who at nineteen years old was able to crack the difficult code of how to grammatically voice a personal book authored by two people. And to Lauren’s also-brilliant mother, Mary Budd, for writing down on a yellow sticky pad, during breakfast, three title suggestions, one of which became the title of this book.

  To Sloan Harris, Kristyn Keene, Joanne Wiles, Sydney Fleischmann, Carolyn Craddock, Duncan Birmingham, Alex Lehmann, and Nick Kroll for reading, then feeding back/reading, then feeding back/reading, then feeding back…

  And to Katie, Jen, Ora, Molly, Mimi, Sam, Duckie, and Pups for loving us and letting us give our love to them even though we are not always great at it.

  MARK DUPLASS and JAY DUPLASS are the critically acclaimed filmmakers behind The Puffy Chair, Baghead, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, Cyrus, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home. For HBO, they wrote and directed Togetherness, produced the animated series Animals, and created the anthology series Room 104. Their producer credits also include the feature films Safety Not Guaranteed, The Skeleton Twins, and Tangerine. As an actor, Mark has appeared on the hit comedy The League and in such films as Your Sister’s Sister, The One I Love, and Blue Jay, while Jay has a leading role on the Golden Globe–winning series Transparent and has appeared in such films as Landline, Beatriz at Dinner, and Outside In. Both brothers had recurring roles on The Mindy Project.

  Twitter: @jayduplass

  Twitter: @MarkDuplass

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