“Uh, yeah. Yeah! I think it’s a good idea.”
“Greg,” she said, with a huge lovely smile, “this is going to be amazing.”
“Maybe it’ll be good!”
“I know you are going to make something wonderful.”
So I felt deeply conflicted here. On the one hand, basically the hottest nice girl in the entire school was telling me how great I was and how great of a film I was going to make. So that felt really good and was making me stand funny to hide a partial boner. On the other hand, though, I was agreeing to a project that I had grave doubts about. Actually, I didn’t even know what I was agreeing to.
So I said, “Uh.”
Madison waited for me to continue. The problem was I wasn’t even sure what to say.
“One thing, though,” I said.
“Mmmmm?”
“What, uh. Uhhhmmmmm.”
“What?”
“It’s just, uh.”
There seemed to be no way of asking this question without sounding like a moron.
“What do you think,” I said carefully, “the film should be.”
Madison now had kind of a blank look.
“You should just make a movie,” she said, “that’s specifically for her.”
“Yeah, but, uh.”
“Just make the movie that you would want to get if you were Rachel.”
“But what should it be, uh, about? D’you think.”
“I dunno!” said Madison cheerfully.
“OK.”
“Greg, you’re the director. It’s your movie!”
“I’m the director,” I said. I was really starting to lose focus. I felt the distant rumblings of a major freak-out coming on.
“I have to run. I’m so happy you’re doing this!” she exclaimed.
“Yeahhhh,” I said weakly.
“You’re the best,” she said, hugging me. Then she ran away.
“Burp,” I said, when she was out of earshot.
The exploding turkey had an expression on his face, like: “Goddammit! I’m exploding again?”
Earl had even less of an idea of how to do this project than I did. However, he was much better at articulating that.
“The fuck,” he kept muttering as I was trying to describe the project to him.
“Look,” he finally said. “You agreed to make a film for somebody. Now what the hell do that mean.”
“Uh, I guess . . . It means . . . Huh.”
“Yeah. You got no idea what the hell it mean.”
“I feel like I sort of do.”
“Well, spit it out, son.”
We were in my kitchen and he was rummaging through our food, which put him in at least a neutral mood, if not a good one.
“I mean, if we were painters, we could just paint a picture of something and give it to her as a gift. Right? So let’s just do the film version of that.”
“Where the hell do Pa Gaines keep the salsa at.”
“I think we’re out. Look—what if we just did a one-off film? And gave her the only copy? That works, right?”
“Son, that don’t give oh, hot damn.”
“What?”
“What the hell is this.”
“That’s—lemme look at it.”
“This smell like a donkey’s hairy-ass dick.”
“Ohhhh. This is goose-liver pâté.”
“There ain’t no salsa, I’ma eat this shit.”
As I’ve mentioned before, Earl gets very fired up about the occasionally gross animal-derived foods purchased and refrigerated by Dr. Victor Q. Gaines. I say “purchased and refrigerated” because Dad never eats them right away. He likes for them to spend a lot of time in the fridge, so that the rest of the family has a chance to become aware of them. It’s a habit that Gretchen may hate more than anything else in the world. However, Gretchen’s extreme dislike is balanced by the almost-as-extreme appreciation of Earl. Earl expresses his appreciation by talking about how disgusting the food is while eating it.
“Son. We still have no idea what the film gonna be about.”
“Yeah, that’s the hard part.”
“Yeah.”
“Uhhhh.”
“Like, we could make the David Lynch film that we was gonna make, and just give it to Rachel, and that’s her film. But I don’t think we want to do that.”
“No?”
“Hell no. That’d be weird as hell. We’d be like, Yo, Rachel, watch this crazy-ass film about lesbians running around and hallucinating and shit. We made this film especially for you.”
“Huh.”
“Like at the beginning, it’s like, ‘For Rachel.’ It’s like we’re saying: Rachel, you love David Lynch. You love freaky-ass lesbians getting they freak on. So here’s a film about that shit. Nah. That don’t make no sense. Now what the fuck is this.”
“No, no, don’t eat that. That’s dried cuttlefish. That’s like Dad’s favorite. He likes to wander around with part of it sticking out of his mouth.”
“I’ma take a little bite.”
“You can like nibble it once, but that’s it.”
“Mmm.”
“What do you think?”
“Man, this taste stupid. This taste like some kinda . . . undersea . . . urinal.”
“Huh.”
“It taste like dolphins and shit.”
“So, you don’t like it.”
“I did not say that.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it’s like seventy-five percent dolphin scrotum, twenty-five percent chemicals.”
“So you do like it.”
“This is a dumb-ass piece of food.”
I had to agree with Earclass="underline" We couldn’t just do any film. There had to be at least some kind of connection to Rachel’s life. But what connection could that be? We sat in the kitchen and we brainstormed a bunch of them. All of the ideas were stupid.
They were really stupid. You’re about to see exactly how stupid. I mean, my God.
“Are you done eating that?”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t finish that, Dad’s gonna want some.”
“The hell he will.”
“He will.”
“It’s so nasty. Son, it’s so nasty.”
“Then why are you finishing it?”
“Takin a bullet.”
I knew our first plan was a mistake when Jared “Crackhead” Krakievich waddled up to me in the hall and addressed me as “Spielberg.”
“Hah yih doin, Spillberg,” he shouted, grinning hideously.
“What?” I said.
“I seen yer maykin’ a mewvie.”
“Oh yeah.”
“I dinn know yih made mewvies.”
“Just this one,” I said, probably too hastily.
“I’m call yih Spillberg fruh now on.”
“Great.”
It was the first shot fired in a nightmarish barrage of attention that would continue all day.
Mrs. Green, Physics 1 I.S.: “I think what you are doing is so . . . touching and . . . remarkable, and just really touching.”
Kiya Arnold: “My cousin died of leukemia. I just want to say. I’m so sorry about your girlfriend. How long y’all been together?”
Will Carruthers: “Hey faggot! Lemme be in your gay movie.”
Plan A was: Get the well-wishes of everyone at school, synagogue, etc., and put them in a film, and have that be the film. A get-well film, basically. Simple, elegant, heartwarming. Sounds like a good idea, right? Of course it does. We were completely seduced by this idea. We were morons.
First Problem: We had to get the footage ourselves, meaning we had to reveal ourselves as filmmakers to a hostile world. Originally, I asked Madison if she would get the footage herself, i.e., if she would hang out in a classroom with a camera instead of me and Earl. This led to me saying that I sort of didn’t want people knowing I was making a film for Rachel, which made her upset. That led to me saying that I didn’t want people to know about my feelings for Rachel, which made her upset in a different way that I did not, frankly, understand. Anyway, she insisted that I get the footage, and said “Oh, Greg” about seventy times until I quietly freaked out and ran away.