But one thing you could say about Rachel was this: She wasn’t constantly trying to fuck up your plans.
“That’s fine. You don’t have to show it to me.”
“You really don’t want to see it.”
“I don’t need to see it.”
“All you need to know is that it’s about the combination of food and sex. Like, oral sex.”
“Greg, why are you telling me about it.”
“Just so you can know for sure that it’s something you don’t want to know about.”
“Why is Earl combining food and oral sex?”
“Because he’s a psychopath.”
“Oh.”
“He’s just completely insane. If you looked into his brain for even one second you would probably go blind.”
“He sounds like a pretty weird friend.”
“Yeah.”
“How did you guys end up being friends?”
There was no good way to answer this seemingly innocuous question.
“I mean, I’m also pretty weird.”
This actually got Rachel to do a little aftershock snort.
“I guess the pillow thing is weird.”
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.