Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (15 page)

“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.