The first film Earl and I remade was Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Obviously. It couldn’t have been any other one. We were eleven, and we had seen it approximately thirty times, to the point where we had memorized all of the subtitles and even some of the dialogue in German. We sometimes repeated it in class, when the teacher asked us questions. Earl especially did this a lot, if he didn’t know the answer.
INT. MRS. WOZNIEWSKI’S FIFTH GRADE CLASS — DAY
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, can you name some layers of the earth?
EARL’s eyes bug out. He breathes hard through his nose.
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Let’s start with the one on the inside. What’s another word for—
EARL
Ich bin der große Verräter. [subtitle: I am the great traitor.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Hmmm.
EARL
Die Erde über die ich gehe sieht mich und bebt. [subtitle: The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, do you want to tell us what that means?
EARL
glowering at classmates
grrrrrhh
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl.
EARL
standing up, pointing to MRS. WOZNIEWSKI, addressing class
Der Mann ist einen Kopf größer als ich. DAS KANN SICH ÄNDERN. [subtitle: That man is a head taller than me. THAT CAN CHANGE.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, please go sit in the hall.
And then one day Dad bought a video camera and some editing software for his computer. It was to videotape his lectures or something. We didn’t know the specifics; we knew only that the specifics were boring. We knew also that this technology had come into our lives for a reason: We had to re-create every single shot in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
We figured it would take about an afternoon. Instead, it took three months, and when I say “it,” I mean, “re-creating the first ten minutes and then giving up.” Like Werner Herzog in the South American jungle, we faced almost unimaginable setbacks and difficulties. We kept taping over our own footage, or not hitting record, or running out of camera battery. We didn’t really know how the lighting or sound was supposed to work. Some of the cast members—mostly Gretchen—proved incapable of delivering their lines properly, or staying in character, or not picking their nose. Also, we usually had a cast of just three people, or two if someone needed to hold the camera. The location we used was Frick Park, and joggers and dog walkers kept entering the shot, and then they would make things even worse by trying to start a conversation.
Q: Are you guys shooting a movie?
A: No. We’re opening a mid-priced Italian restaurant.
Q: Huh?
A: Yes of course we’re shooting a movie.
Q: What’s the movie about?
A: It’s a documentary about human stupidity.
Q: Can I be in your movie?
A: We’d be stupid not to put you in it.
Moreover, props and costumes were impossible to replicate. Earl wore a pot on his head, and it looked ridiculous. Nothing we had looked like cannons, or swords. Mom said we weren’t allowed to bring furniture from the house to the park, and then when we did, we had Suspended Camera Privileges for a week.
Also, our process was dumb as all hell. We’d get to the forest and then completely forget what shot we were working on, or if we remembered it, we couldn’t remember the lines, and how the camera moved, and where the characters started and where they ended; we’d struggle for a while to shoot something that we thought was correct, without success. Finally, we’d go back to the house to try to write down what we were supposed to do, but then we’d end up having lunch or watching a movie or something; at the end of the day we’d try to get everything on the computer, but there was always some footage missing, and the scenes that survived looked like crap—bad lighting, inaudible dialogue, shaky camerawork.
So we did this for months, eventually realized how slow we were working, and gave up after creating ten minutes of footage.
Then Mom and Dad insisted on watching what we had done.
It was a nightmare. For ten minutes, Earl and I watched with horror as, on the screen, we wandered around waving cardboard tubes and Super Soakers, mumbling in fake German, ignoring cheerful joggers and families and senior citizens with beagles. We had already known it was bad, but somehow, with Mom and Dad there watching, it seemed ten times worse. We became aware of new ways in which it was crappy: how there wasn’t really a plot, for example, and how we forgot to put in music, and how you couldn’t see anything half the time and Gretchen pretty much just stared at the camera like a house pet and Earl obviously hadn’t memorized his lines and I always always always had this stupid expression on my face like I had just had a lobotomy. And the worst part was, Mom and Dad were pretending to like it. They kept telling us how impressive it was, how well we had acted in it, how they couldn’t believe we had made something so good. They were literally oohing and ahhing at the stupid garbage on the screen.
Basically, they were dealing with us as though we were toddlers. I wanted to murder myself. Earl did, too. Instead, we just sat there and didn’t say anything.
Afterward we retreated to my room, utterly bummed out.
INT. MY ROOM — DAY
EARL
Damn. That sucked.
GREG
We suck.
EARL
I fuckin suck worse than you do.
GREG
attempting to match the casualness with which eleven-year-old Earl can say words like “fuck”
Uh, shit.
EARL
Fuck.
DAD
offscreen, through the door
Guys, dinner’s in ten minutes.
after we do not reply
Guys? That was really pretty amazing. Mom and I are very impressed. You both should be really proud of yourselves.
a shorter pause
You guys all right? Can I come in there?
EARL
immediately
Hell no.
GREG
We’re OK, Dad.
EARL
If he come in here and talk about that stupid movie, I’ma kick myself in the head.
DAD
OK then!
Footsteps indicate that DAD has left.
GREG
That sucked so bad.
EARL
I’ma get that tape and burn it.
GREG
still having trouble swearing convincingly
Yeah, uh, fuck. Shit.
GREG and EARL are silent. CLOSE-UP of Earl. Earl is realizing something.
EARL
Werner Herzog can lick my ass-cheek.
GREG
What?
EARL
Man, fuck Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Werner Herzog can stick his face all up in my butthole.
GREG
uncertainly
OK.
EARL
We gotta make our own movie.
gaining momentum
We can’t try to make someone else’s movie. We’re gonna make our own movie.
now excited
We’re gonna make a movie called The Wrath of God II.
GREG
Earl, the Wrath of God II.
EARL
HELL YEAH.
In our creative partnership, Earl has always had the best ideas, and Earl, the Wrath of God II was one of his best. It never would have occurred to me, even though it wasn’t that complicated or crazy of an idea: Basically, it was to remake Aguirre again, but this time, to change all the parts that we couldn’t do, or even just the parts that we didn’t feel like doing. If there was a scene we didn’t like, in our version, it was gone. A character we couldn’t recreate: sayonara. A jungle that we couldn’t reproduce: converted into a living room, or the inside of a car. The best ideas are always the simplest.
So Earl, the Wrath of God II ended up being about a crazy guy named Earl and his search for the city of Earl Dorado in a normal family house in Pittsburgh. We shot it on location in the Gaines residence in Point Breeze, and we ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue, and Cat Stevens made some awesome cameos, and we set the whole thing to a funk CD Dad had lying around, and it took another month or two. At the end of it, we burned it to a DVD and had a secret viewing of the movie in the TV room.
It sucked. But it didn’t suck nearly as bad as our first film.
Our careers were born.
So by October things were weird. I had a person, at school, that I was being especially nice to and spending time with and stuff. Could we use the word “friend”? I guess. Rachel was my friend. You should know that writing that sentence didn’t feel good. It just didn’t. Having friends is how your life gets fucked up.
Anyway, I couldn’t keep ignoring her in school when we were spending all this time together outside of school, so all of a sudden, in school, I was seen having a friend. I was seen by everyone talking to Rachel before and after class, and often this resulted in her laughing kind of loud, and that got people’s attention. And when it was time to work in groups, we were almost always in the same group. And people notice stuff like that.
So probably some people thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and perhaps even having sex. And how can you fight that impression without seeming like a dick? You can’t go around making remarks like, “There’s certainly nothing going on between me and Rachel! Especially nothing sexual. I don’t even know what her genital area looks like, or if it’s in a different place than normal or something.”
At the very least, people thought we were casually dating. And here’s the thing: Most people, especially girls, seemed to get fired up about that. I have a theory about that, and the theory is depressing.
Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl and an unattractive dude are dating each other.
No one came out and said anything to this effect, but I feel like it’s probably true. When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, “Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That’s so sweet.” Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, “That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”
And, inevitably, spending time with Rachel meant being at least partially absorbed by her group, Upper-Middle-Class Senior Jewish Girl Sub-Clique 2a: Rachel Kushner, Naomi Shapiro, and Anna Tuchman. Naomi Shapiro had this loud, blustering, sarcastic persona that she used at all times, and Anna Tuchman was OK but invariably clutching a paperback with a title like The Meridian Sword or Cleavage of Destiny or something. A few times before school, I was roped into spending time with these girls. Their conversations were tough to be part of for a sustained period of time.
INT. BENSON HALLWAY — MORNING
ANNA
Ugggh. I don’t want to go to English today.
NAOMI
MR. CUBALY IS SUCH A PERV.
Giggling from RACHEL and ANNA.
NAOMI
pretending not to understand the giggling
WHAT?! HE’S ALWAYS TRYING TO LOOK DOWN MY SHIRT.
More giggling. GREG is also politely trying to giggle and failing.
NAOMI
IT’S LIKE: TAKE A PICTURE, MR. CUBALY, IT’LL LAST LONGER.
ANNA
pretending to be horrified
Naomi-i-i-i-i-i!!
All of a sudden everyone is looking at Greg to see what he thinks of all this.
GREG
deciding that the safest option is simply to summarize what has been said thus far
Uh . . . Takin’ a picture of some boobs. Cubaly style.
NAOMI
UGGGGGH. BOYS ARE SUCH PERVERTS. GREG, CAN YOU THINK ABOUT JUST ONE THING OTHER THAN SEX.
ENTIRE HALLWAY’S WORTH OF STUDENTS
Greg, we are all making a note of your playful bantering friendship with this loud obnoxious person.
So yeah, my hard-earned social invisibility definitely was taking something of a hit. I even made the mistake one afternoon of agreeing to have lunch with Rachel and her friends in the cafeteria, a place I hadn’t set foot in for years.
The cafeteria is chaos. First of all, it’s in a perpetual state of low-level food fight. It’s rarely violent enough for the security guards to get involved, but at any given time, someone is attempting to whip a piece of food or condiment at someone else from close range, and half of the time they miss and hit someone else in a different part of the cafeteria. So it’s like one of the more chill battles of World War II.
Second of all, the food every single day is pizza and Tater Tots. Sometimes to mix things up they put little gray poop-like nuggets of sausage on the pizza, but that’s as much variation as there is. Also, a lot of food ends up on the cafeteria floor, and both pizza and Tater Tots get very slippery when stepped on. There’s also a lot of dried Pepsi down there, which is sticky and therefore easy to walk on but somehow even more disgusting.
Finally, the cafeteria is extremely crowded, meaning if you accidentally slip on a slick of pizza cheese and mashed-up Tater Tots, you will probably be trampled to death.
Basically, it’s like a low-security state prison.
And so I had to sit there with my backpack perched awkwardly on my lap, because you do not want your backpack down there under the table accumulating greasy food stains and families of insects, and I was eating my weird but probably healthful lunch that Dad had packed because if I ate pizza and Tater Tots every day I would be even more overweight and my face would have a pimple somewhere the size of a human eyeball. And Naomi was loudly talking about how Ross Said Something Ignorant and I Was Like Don’t Even Go There, and I was attempting to listen politely and probably had some kind of dumb smile or grimace on my face. And that’s the state I was in when Madison Hartner came over to sit with us.
So in case you don’t remember, Madison Hartner is the insanely hot girl who probably dates one of the Pittsburgh Steelers or at least a college student or something. She’s also the girl that I relentlessly antagonized in the fifth grade, with the Madison Fartner nickname, the Booger ChapStick accusation, etc. That’s all water under the bridge now, of course, and in October of senior year, we were on vaguely friendly terms with each other. We would say hi to each other in the hall sometimes, and maybe I would even make some kind of bland inoffensive joke, and she would smile or something, and I would daydream for a couple of seconds about nuzzling my face in her boobs like an affectionate panda cub, and then we would both get on with our lives.
Did I want to get with Madison? Yes. Of course I did. I would have given up a year of my life just to make out with her. Well, maybe a month. And obviously she would have to be doing it voluntarily. I’m not suggesting that some weird wish-granting genie would force her to make out with me in exchange for a month of my life. This entire paragraph is a moron.
Look: If you asked me, Greg, who do you have a crush on, the answer would be Madison. But most of the time I was able to not think about girls, because in high school guys like me are completely unable to get with the girls they actually want to get with, so there’s no sense in dwelling on that like a pathetic idiot.
I asked Dad point-blank about girls in high school once and he said that, yeah, high school is impossible, but college is different and that once I get there I “should have no trouble making whoopie,” which was embarrassing but reassuring at the same time. Then I asked Mom and she said I’m actually very handsome, and that statement immediately became Piece of Evidence #16087 in the case of Mom v. The Truth.
Anyway. Madison, a hot and almost universally popular girl, came strolling up to us and plunked her tray down next to Rachel’s. Why did she choose to do this? Here, let me give you another long-winded explanation of something. I am like the Joseph Stalin of narrators.
There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL). Olivia Ryan—the first girl in our class to get a nose job—is definitely an Evil Hot Girl, which is why everyone is terrified of her. Periodically she will just randomly destroy someone’s life. Occasionally it’s because that person wrote something on Facebook like liv ryan is a btichhhh !!!! but most of the time, there’s no reason for it. It’s like a volcano suddenly erupted in someone’s house and melted their flesh. At Benson, I would estimate that about 75 percent of hot girls are evil.
But Madison Hartner is not evil. Actually, she’s like the president of the HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL. The best evidence of this is Rachel. Madison and Rachel were, at best, distant acquaintances before Rachel got cancer, but when the cancer happened, this triggered Madison’s Friend Hormones.
Let me also tell you that the problem with HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL is, just because they’re not intentionally out to destroy your life, doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes still destroy your life. They can’t help it. They’re like elephants, blithely roaming the jungle, occasionally stomping a chipmunk and not even noticing: hot, sexy elephants.
Actually, Madison is a lot like Mom. She’s obsessed with doing Good Deeds, and she’s awesome at persuading people to do stuff. This is just an incredibly dangerous combination, as you will see later in this book, if I can even finish it without freaking out and throwing my laptop out of a moving car and into a pond.
All right. So Madison’s leukemia-activated Friend Hormones had begun pumping through her system, and now she was showing her friendship by sitting with us during lunch.
“Is anyone sitting here?” she asked. She has this dark honeyed kind of wise-sounding voice, which doesn’t quite fit how she looks. That is also hot. I feel like an assclown writing about how hot she is, so I’ll stop.
“I DON’T THINK SO,” said Naomi.
“Sit with us,” said Rachel.
So she sat there. Naomi was being quiet. The balance of power had shifted in ways that none of us yet understood. There was tension in the air. It was a moment of great opportunity, and greater danger. The world was about to change forever. I had beef in my mouth.
“Greg, that looks like an interesting lunch,” said Madison.
Lunch was leftover beef slices, bean sprouts, and lettuce in a plastic container. There was also teriyaki sauce and scallions and stuff. It basically looked like an alien came to earth and took a class in salad-making but didn’t do all that great on the final exam. Anyway, this was my opportunity, and I seized it.
“I already had lunch,” I said. “This is the barf of a space alien.”
Rachel and Anna snorted, and Madison actually giggled a little bit. I did not have time to truly register the boner-generating ramifications of that, because Naomi was clearly about to make a loud irritating attempt to reclaim the center of attention, and I had to prevent this at all costs.
“Yeah, for extra credit in Mr. McCarthy’s class, I’m doing a documentary on the barfing habits of space aliens. I follow them around with a camera, and I collect their barf in containers like this. You thought I was going to eat this? No way. Madison, you must think I’m perverted. I’m a barf historian, and you need to have some respect for that. That’s why I have this beautiful specimen of barf in this container here. I’m going to do some research with it.”
Naomi was periodically trying to cut in by bellowing “GROSS” and “YOU DID NOT JUST GO THERE,” but to no avail. I was getting some momentum and had some decent laughs going, especially from Rachel, who at that point was the Duchess of Snortsylvania.
“I am not going to eat this precious barf. Let me explain something to you guys. When an alien barfs, it’s a sign of trust. I have spent a ton of time with aliens, gaining their trust so that they can bestow their wondrous barf on me, and I am not about to sabotage that trust by eating the barf. Even though it looks nutritious and like it would taste awesome. Check it out. Look at these weird sperm-looking thingies. Do they make me want to just go to town on this barf? And eat it in my mouth? Obviously. But this is about trust. Next question. Rachel.”
Rachel was helplessly snorting and honking away, so I knew if I gave her the opportunity to speak, it would let me reload a little bit without letting Naomi talk. I was also trying not to focus on the fact that I was making probably Benson’s hottest girl laugh. This was easily the only time anything like this had ever happened.
“Where do you even find space aliens,” Rachel eventually managed to ask.
“Awesome question,” I said. “Space aliens generally disguise themselves as people, but if you know what to look for, you can identify them pretty easily.” I was sort of looking around the cafeteria for inspiration. For some reason I was focusing on Scott Mayhew, one of the Magic-card-playing gothy dorks from eighteen thousand words ago. He was wearing a trench coat and he was clumsily loping around with a school lunch tray.
“Aliens have an unusual fashion sense revolving around trench coats,” I continued, “and they haven’t really figured out how to use human legs to walk normally. Like, don’t look now, but Scott Mayhew over there? Yeah. He is a textbook alien.”
My heart was racing. On the one hand, I had just committed a cardinal sin of my whole way of being: Never make fun of anybody. Talking shit on people is probably the easiest way to make friends and enemies in high school, or really anywhere, and as I have noted like a billion times, that is the opposite of my goal in life.
But on the other hand, I had three girls cracking up, and one of them was Madison, and another was Rachel, and I had to keep it going.
“You’ve probably seen Scott running around all weird and stuff, and you’ve thought to yourself, what is his deal. Well, he’s from outer space. His home is on some fucked-up meteor or something. And it’s taken a really long time for us to get to the level of trust where he’ll let me carry around his barf. You don’t even want to know how much alien poetry I’ve had to sit around and listen to. It’s mostly about centaurs. And finally this morning after he read me some of his poetry, I was like, ‘I’d like to thank you for that, that was really beautiful,’ and then he was like, ‘I’d like to honor you with my barf.’ And that’s when he barfed in this thing here. It’s been a wild ride.”
And then I shut up, because Scott had sort of stopped what he was doing and was staring at us from across the cafeteria. He can’t have liked what he was seeing. Anna, Rachel, and Madison were all looking at him and laughing. And I was saying things with a big dumb grin on my face. He knew we were making fun of him. It was obvious. He gazed at me coldly and angrily.
“GREG, YOU’RE WEIRD AND GROSS,” announced Naomi, stepping eagerly into the void.
“Greg, you’re being mean,” said Madison with a sweet smile on her face.
How the hell was I going to get out of this. “No, no, no!” I yelled. “Naomi, alien barf is not gross. That’s the whole point. It’s rare and beautiful. And Madison, what I’m saying is not mean. It’s like the opposite. I’m celebrating this magical bond that Scott and I have. With his barf. That I’m holding right now in this container.”
But I was freaked out. I had temporarily lost control of myself and talked shit on Scott Mayhew and made him probably hate me. And also now I had created a reputation for myself as a guy who talks shit on people. I was so freaked out that I didn’t even really say anything else until the bell rang for next period, and of course in the weeks to follow, I did not return to the cafeteria. I couldn’t even think about eating lunch down there without my armpits getting all hot and prickly.
Later, Rachel confided to me that Scott Mayhew had a big crush on Anna.
“Ohhh. That makes sense.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She’s always reading books about centaurs and stuff.”
“I think he’s too weird for her.”
“He’s not that weird.”
I was still feeling guilty and sensitive about the whole Scott thing.
“Greg, he’s pretty weird. And his hair is gross.”
“Well, he’s not as weird as me.”
“I guess you’re the one making the space alien barf documentary.”
“Yeah.”
“Are your other films documentaries?”
I think Rachel was trying to give me an opportunity to go on some open-ended riff about something here, but honestly I was too freaked out to really say anything. There was the Scott thing, and now there was Rachel bringing up my films, and I just didn’t know what to do.
So I kind of just said, “Uhhhhh. Not really. Uh.”
But fortunately Rachel understood what this meant.
“Sorry, I know they’re secret. I shouldn’t ask you about them.”
“No, I’m being stupid.”
“No you’re not. It’s important to you that they’re secret. I don’t want you to describe them to me.”
I have to say this: In that moment, Rachel was awesome. Meanwhile, I guess I probably have to describe the films to you. You’re being less awesome than Rachel, you stupid reader.
I mean, I’m the one who’s deciding you have to read about them, so really it’s me who is being a human poop factory right now.
This should come as a surprise to no one.