Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (8 page)

Earl and I
are
both pretty weird. And maybe that is why we’re friends. But probably you deserve more of an explanation than that.

Also, what the hell does “weird” even mean? I’ve just written it like five times and all of a sudden I’m staring at it and it doesn’t even mean anything anymore. I just murdered the word “weird.” Now it’s just a bunch of letters. It’s like there’s all these dead bodies all over the page now.

I’m sort of close to having a freak-out about this. I have to go eat some snacks or leftovers or something.

OK, I’m back.

Although, let’s just do a new chapter, because this chapter got really fucked up somehow and I’m afraid of what will happen if I continue with it.

Earl and I come from very different worlds, obviously. And it’s definitely insane that we even became friends in the first place. In some ways our friendship makes no sense at all. I guess I’ll just give you the backstory of it and let you draw your own conclusions. Then we can make our triumphant return to Cancerland.

Cancerland is not nearly as popular of a board game as Candyland.

Some observers would conclude that our friendship is a triumph of Pittsburgh’s public school system, but I would tell you that instead it’s a testament to the power of video games. Mom has never allowed video games in the house, except for the educational kind, like Math Blaster, and that wasn’t so much to teach us math as to teach us that video games sucked. However, my first encounter with Earl left no doubt that video games were, in fact, awesome.

It was the second or third week of kindergarten. So far I had made it without having to interact with any of the other kindergarteners—that was my primary objective, because all of
the other kindergarteners seemed to be evil, or boring, or both—but one day Miss Szczerbiak had us sit in groups and decorate cardboard boxes. It was me, Earl, and two girls whose names I forget. All the girls wanted to do was cover the box in glitter, but Earl and I recognized that this would look terrible.

“Let’s make a gun out of it,” said Earl.

I thought this was awesome.

“The laser gun from GoldenEye,” added Earl.

I had no idea what that meant.

“GoldenEye for N64,” explained Earl. “My brothers got an N64 and
they
let me play it whenever I want.”

“I have Math Blaster on my computer at home,” I said.

“I never heard of Math Blaster,” said Earl dismissively.

“You have to do math problems and then it lets you shoot pieces of garbage,” I said. Then, realizing how pathetic this sounded, I shut up. I was hoping that somehow Earl hadn’t heard. But he had, and he looked at me with both pity and scorn.

“In GoldenEye you don’t have to do no math, and you get to shoot
people
,” said Earl triumphantly, and that settled it. As the girls dutifully coated the box in glitter and had a discussion about pixies or domesticity or whatever, Earl and I sat at the other end of the table and Earl told me the entire plot of GoldenEye three times. Pretty soon it was agreed that after school, I was going to Earl’s house. As fate would have it, it was Dad picking me up from school that day, and he saw nothing wrong with sending his kid off to Homewood with some other kid he had never met before, plus that kid’s two rambunctious brothers, one of whom was repeatedly promising to shoot everyone else to death.

Earl had lied in at least one respect: The brothers, in fact, did
not
let Earl play N64 whenever he wanted to. When we got to the Jackson house, Devin (the oldest) announced that he had to complete a mission before we did anything else.

So we sat on the floor, in the glow of the screen, and it was the best thing I had ever experienced. We were in the presence of a master. We watched in rapturous happiness as Devin steered a tank through the streets of St. Petersburg, laying waste to everything in his path. We did not make a fuss when Devin told us he was going to do a second mission. We marveled as he snuck around a battleship, quietly murdering dozens of people.

“Now y’all can play me,” Devin said, switching to the multiplayer option. I picked up a controller. It had more knobs and buttons than I could reach with all of my fingers, so I tried getting a foot involved. That did not particularly work out. Earl tried to explain how it worked, but soon gave up. It was clear that he himself was not much of an expert. For twenty minutes, we jogged around a snowy Siberian missile base, threw grenades at random into the forest, got trapped against walls because we didn’t know how to turn around, and were slaughtered by Devin, who chose a new and exciting weapon each time: the assault rifle, the shotgun, the laser pistol. Earl’s other brother Derrick ignored me and Earl completely, choosing to do battle with the master alone. It was a losing effort. Taunting us mercilessly and without cease, Devin painted the tundra red with our blood.

“Y’all both suck donkey dick,” said Devin at the end. “Now get the hell out of here.”

A friendship had been born. Earl was definitely the leader,
and I was the sidekick. Even when we weren’t playing video games, I deferred to him, because he was far worldlier than me. He knew where the alcohol was in his kitchen, for example. I was worried we were going to have to try some, but fortunately that wasn’t part of the plan. “Alcohol gimme a damn headache,” he explained at some point.

Back then, the Jackson household was more in control. Earl’s stepdad was still living there, and his half brothers were toddlers, and Earl’s mom hadn’t begun her third-floor exile yet. I got to see the collapse of Earl’s house firsthand. That’s not really the story I want to tell, so I won’t go into detail, but basically Earl’s stepdad moved out and then got sent to jail, Earl’s mom went through a few boyfriends, she started drinking a lot, and then around the time when the youngest half brothers got to kindergarten, she pretty much gave up on everything and started hanging out in chat rooms 24/7. I saw a lot of this as it was happening, but I was really only able to put the story together after the fact. And even now I don’t have a great sense of it. It was a hard place for me to understand.

Anyway. As things got worse over the years, we spent less time at his house and eventually starting hanging out at mine. But at my house, it wasn’t clear what there was to do. We tried playing board games, and that sucked. We busted out some G.I. Joes, but playing with them was so much lamer than video games that we felt like we were going insane. We ran around the house with water guns hunting Cat Stevens, but Dad made us stop after we broke some stuff. Finally, we went on a desperate search through the house one Sunday afternoon for anything
even remotely close to video games, and that was how Earl found Dad’s DVD collection.

For some reason I had never really been interested in Dad’s DVDs. The only movies I had ever even thought to watch were animated and G-rated. These other non-animated movies had struck me as something for grown-ups. Basically, I just kind of assumed they were boring. And probably if I tried to watch them on my own they would have bored the hell out of me.

But Earl found them, and started freaking out and going all bug-eyed and saying, “Yeah, this is the shit,” and something clicked in my head and I saw them completely differently.

He was especially excited about
Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
“Look at this crazy dude,” he yelled, pointing at Klaus Kinski, who on the cover is wearing a Viking helmet and looks like a psychopath.

So—with Dad’s permission—we put the film in and watched it.

This would turn out to be the single most important thing ever to happen in our lives.

It was incredible. It was confusing, and terrifying, and incredible. We had to pause it every time there were subtitles, and a bunch of times we had to run out to get Dad to explain something or another, and eventually Dad came in to watch it with us, and it was
still
incredible.

Dad being there was actually a big help. He read the subtitles out loud and answered questions we had about the
plot, and we had a lot of questions, because everyone in the film is insane.

Again: It was incredible. It was like nothing either of us had ever experienced. It was funny, and it was grim. There was a lot of death, but it wasn’t like video-game death. It was slower, and bloodier, and less frequent. In GoldenEye, you see someone get shot, and you watch them fall backward and crumple on the ground; here, you would just suddenly find a body. The randomness of it blew us away. Every time someone died we yelled, “Oh
snap.
” And the suspense was unbelievable. Klaus Kinski doesn’t lose it and kill anyone for the entire first half hour. Then, even when he does, he acts like it was no big deal, and you have no idea when he’s going to do it again. He has this unpredictable, psychopath brain that you can’t read. It got us so fired up.

We loved all of it. We loved how slow it was. We loved that it took forever. Actually, we never wanted it to end. We loved the jungle, the rafts, the ridiculous armor and helmets. We loved that it sort of felt like a home movie, like it all actually
happened
and someone on the raft just happened to have a camera. I think most of all we loved that it didn’t have a happy ending for
anyone.
The whole time, we were sort of expecting that someone would survive, because that’s how stories work: Even if everything is a total disaster, someone lives to tell the tale. But not with
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
. Hell no.
Everyone
dies. That’s awesome.

Also, the movie had the first breasts I had ever seen, although they were not what I had been led to believe that breasts looked like. They were like cow udders, and one of them was bigger than the other. (In retrospect, this may have been responsible for my
complete lack of sexual development, which we’ve already talked about. I guess at least I wasn’t going around saying things like, “The best thing about your two boobs is that they are the same size.”)

Afterward we asked Dad a bunch of questions about it, and somehow we got to talking about the
making
of the film, and apparently it was a total disaster. People got sick, the entire cast and crew got stranded in the jungle for months, and some of the crew might have died. Dad wasn’t sure. Best of all, the actor Klaus Kinski himself was just as crazy in real life as he was as Aguirre. He actually shot one of the other guys working on the film. It was because he was being too noisy, and Kinski wanted to concentrate. So he shot his crewmate
in the hand with a gun.
If that doesn’t make you drop this book and go watch the movie right now, I don’t even know what’s wrong with you. Maybe
you
have a brain fungus.

Obviously, we had to watch it again. Dad wasn’t up for another round, but we thought it was even better the second time. We imitated the German voices, especially Kinski’s, who talked like he was being strangled. We imitated Kinski’s drunken staggering walk. We lay around the house for hours pretending to be dead, until Gretchen found one of us and had her own mini freak-out and started crying uncontrollably.

In short, we decided that it was the greatest film ever made. And the next weekend, we invited some classmates over to share it with them.

They hated it.

We didn’t even make it past the first twenty minutes. They said it was too slow. They couldn’t read the subtitles, and we
weren’t good enough at reading them out loud. The speech at the beginning by Pizarro, they said, was long and boring. The plot of the movie seemed stupid to them: Aguirre and everyone were searching for a city that
it said right at the beginning did not exist.
They didn’t understand that that was
the whole point.
They didn’t get that it was awesome
because
it was so insanely meaningless. Instead, they kept calling it gay.

It was a disaster, but it was also useful. It made us conscious of what we had really known all along: We were different from the other kids. We had different interests, a different kind of focus. It’s hard to explain. Earl and I actually didn’t have much in common with each other, either, but we were the only ten-year-olds in Pittsburgh who liked
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
, and that counted for something. It actually counted for a lot.

“The young nihilists,” Dad called us.

“What are nihilists?”

“Nihilists believe that nothing has any meaning. They believe in nothing.”

“Yeah,” said Earl. “I’m a nihilist.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Good for you,” Dad said, grinning. Then he stopped grinning and said, “Don’t tell your mom.”

And that’s part of the backstory for me and Earl. It’ll probably be relevant later, although who really knows. I can’t believe you’re still reading this. You should smack yourself in the face a couple of times right now, just to complete the outstandingly stupid experience that is this book.