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.
One thing I’ve learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking. Everyone likes to talk about themselves. It’s not just kids whose lives are good. Take Jared “Crackhead” Krakievich, one of Benson’s scrawniest and least popular students. As far as I know, Jared has never done crack, but he walks around with his arms dangling awkwardly behind the rest of his body kind of like a chicken, his mouth is always hanging at least three-quarters open, and there is usually food in his braces. He smells like pickles and his parents are yinzers. You’d think he wouldn’t want to talk about his life, but you’d be wrong, as I discovered one day on the bus. For example, I learned that his dog can tell when Ben Roethlisberger is about to get sacked, and that he (Jared, not the dog or Ben Roethlisberger) was thinking about learning to play guitar.
If you’re not from Pittsburgh, I should probably explain that “yinzers” are people with heavy Pittsburgh accents. For example, instead of “you” or “y’all,” they say “yinz.” Another feature of yinzers is that they wear Steelers apparel at all times, including in the workplace and at weddings.