I meant to tell some of my friends about Reginald, but then I got sidetracked into thinking about my character. Not my real-life character, which I didn’t really know much about, but my movie character.
Think about it! Harold Lloyd is the same guy in every one of his movies—a small-town innocent, maybe a little egg-headed but not street smart, with his heart on his sleeve but also full of crazy ambitions. I could be like that, except maybe more cunning and just a little loopy. Or okay, a lot loopy. Coming off the super-cold-relief formula and cognac buzz, I felt a swelling urgency that people should root for me, not just laugh at my hijinks.
Janelle, the cute film student with the rainbow dreads, agreed with me. The comic hero has to be loveable or relatable, or at least there has to be a moment of connection with the audience in between all the falling gargoyles, she said. The two of us cornered Sally Hamster, our director, who kept trying to get us to talk to her hands. Sally was like, “I make art during the week. This weekend shit is just for fun.” Sally had been making serious strides at film school until I came back into her life, fully recovered from my nervous breakdown and eager to make more weird movies on the internet. But Janelle and I both said it wasn’t about art, just making the fun as fun as possible.
I kept forgetting to mention Reginald the corner-store robber, until he showed up on Saturday wearing some kind of bright red wrestling costume, or maybe those were just his regular exercise clothes. We dressed Reginald up as a cop, and a bunch of the film school kids played a motorcycle gang who’d started riding bicycles because gas was $12 a gallon, so they all overcompensated by whooping really loud and blasting heavy metal when they pedaled into town.
Someone had renovated a whole section of Boston near the river to look like a little “ye olde” village, except it was really all yuppie boutiques that had been boarded up since the Debt Crisis. So we turned it into a small town that was trying to keep the bikers out with the help of Reginald the cop, and I got mixed up in the middle of their conflict because I had to deliver a cactus to a sick friend. Once again, my motivation was a little hazy, and it bothered me as well as Janelle. Sally had her elbow in the way of us doing any kind of love story, even though I could never figure out why. It wasn’t just that she’d gotten her heart pulped with her boyfriend Raine’s head during the Peace Riots. She was just dead set against goo-goo eyes.
Everybody thought Reginald rocked, especially the sequence where a bunch of the bikers rode up a giant ramp we made out of an old herbal facial spa sign and flew over Reginald’s head while he tried to kick-box with their wheels. Except Zapp Stillman, because Reginald somehow managed to break Zapp’s nose, although the other film geeks said it would just add some boxery distinction to his face. (Zapp was the grand-nephew of some famous movie director, and an expert on everything.)
Sally asked where I found Reginald, and I said I just ran into him. Reginald nearly dropped me off the Longfellow Bridge when he found out this was a volunteer gig, but I convinced him the exposure would help him to get other, paying gigs. He got pretty jazzed thinking about his roundhouse popping up all over the internet and becoming a cult phenom. He was pretty glad he didn’t actually kill me, at least for now.
I started wondering if I should tell Sally the truth about Reginald, but I figured he would probably disappear soon anyway, since he made me look like long-attention-span guy by comparison. I hadn’t been able to concentrate much before Raine died, but ever since I involuntarily ate a piece of Raine’s brain I was a human jitter. The Army recruiter doctors had taken one look at me and just laughed at the idea of militarizing me.
People hit our video-tumblr like bam-bam-bam. Sally thought soon we’d be more popular than we were in high school, and we sold some advertisements. People would bring us pieces of meat and shoes in return for an ad on the site sometimes. Sally got that gleam in her eye, the one she used to get when the internet first fell in love with us. But she also kept saying how un-artistic our movies were, compared to the fancy stuff she and Janelle were doing for film school.
So Zapp Stillman was a hyper-mega rich socialite, who didn’t really notice a lot of what was going on around him, and I was his overeager manservant trying to cater to all his idiotic whims. Despite what Reginald had done to Zapp’s face, he still looked delicate and sheltered, and I got to wear this great houndstooth suit that fit really well except for the arms, shoulders, knees, and crotch. I practiced walking straight and butlery, which only made me more splashmanic, and then Zapp and I were supposed to go on a trip to the seaside except I had to shelter him from all the violence on the streets. Zapp hadn’t read a blog or seen a newscast in years and I kept him unaware of the state of the world. So for example, we rode our two-seater bicycle past piles of comatose bodies, and I convinced Zapp it was just a group of people camping out for tickets to the Imagine Dragons reunion tour. And then a bunch of guys on scooters chased us to rip our heads off, and I told Zapp it was a friendly race. (All dialogue was big black captions, like in an old-school classic movie.)
It was a cool movie with good character moments, but a ton of stuff went wrong when we were filming. Like we staged a fake riot with a bunch of film students in ripped-up clothes pulling down bricks we’d placed strategically. Then random people wandered by and saw what was going on, and they wanted to join in and pretty soon they were tossing big chunks of wall around, and they saw Zapp and me on our dorky bicycle built for two and threw rocks at us, so the peddling-for-dear-life sequences were way more realistic than we’d bargained on. The camera guys had to run like hell to keep their equipment from being smashed.
Mid-summer, Boston was all melty but people on the street sold home-made ice cream and you could ignore all the rotting smells if you thought about the river ducks. I still felt like I was about to crash everyone around me into the gritty old walls. I would forget for a second; I would bounce down the street, jumping over the people on the sidewalk and swinging on the low oak branches. And then I would have a mental image of myself landing the wrong way with my foot in someone’s stomach, maybe someone I loved or maybe a stranger.
Some nights I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes I saw Raine getting his head exploded, the chunks of skull flying apart, the brains splattering into my open mouth. This image blended together with all the ways I’d injured people by accident, or the times when I could have injured people if things had gone a little different. Raine’s head got pulpier and more vivid each time.
Janelle and I got together and wrote a movie script, to Sally’s total horror. “Okay, so what is this story about?” Janelle asked me twenty or thirty times. We sat on an abandoned swan boat in the middle of the lake in Boston Common, and the boat kept almost capsizing as water sloshed in and out of its gullet. Once, tourists had chugged around in these boats, but now they just bobbed their decaying shells in and out of the algae. I didn’t know what our story was about, since I didn’t even know what the story was. Couldn’t we take one leap at a time? But Janelle was scary patient and kept talking themes: communication, Social Darwinism, the impossibility of really knowing other people because the closer you get to them the harder it is to see the whole person. Janelle had run away from home as a kid, and lived in the attic of a bookstore cafe for years, reading every book in the stockroom and living off of abandoned scones and salads. Nobody had known she was there until she used the store’s address for her B.U. application and the acceptance letter turned up.