The End Is Now

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.

We settled on this O. Henry thing where two people try to save each other at cross purposes, sort of. I’m this scrappy DJ who owes money to gangsters, who could maybe be Vikings because we had some helmets and fake fur. And Janelle is a dancer who posed for some questionable photos years ago and now this sleazy guy wants to publish them and her strict family will disown her. So I decide to break in and snag the sleazy guy’s hard drive, while Janelle wants to do whatever it takes to raise money to bail me out—even take on a dancer job that turns out to involve dancing on an unstable scaffolding at a construction site. And then the Vikings turn up while I’m trying to break into the sleazy guy’s studio, and they want to break my legs but the sleazy guy has a protection deal with a Samurai gang. So we have a pitched Viking-Samurai battle in a photography studio, while I’m trying to slip past them and grab the hard drive. And then Janelle somehow falls off her scaffolding into the middle of our fracas and I have to run around to catch her.

It only took us about five hours to come up with that storyline, and by then the swan was submerged up to its neck and water slopped over the sides of its torso. We had to haul ourselves up onto the bridge without breaking our necks.

Janelle took a day off film school to help me location-scout our movie called Photo Finish. We found this large art/performance space which people actually used as an art studio. It had crumbling brick walls, a high platform leading to some big industrial-looking windows, and a red velvet curtain that perfectly said “Sleazy Photographer.”

Reginald nearly bit her head off, trembling in his charging-bull helmet and muppet-fur cloak while she coached him on his lines. “No, come on Reggie, try it again and this time put everything you’ve got into the word ‘maul.’ You have to feel that word. Jesus, Rock, where did you find this guy?”

She tried to choreograph the big Viking-Samurai throwdown, even down to me throwing the big photographic backdrops in people’s faces and Zapp Stillman, the lead Samurai, hurling his katana at a Viking and hitting the sought-after hard drive instead.

The fifth time we stopped so Janelle could micro-manage, Reginald looked ready to light the set on fire, rip several people’s heads off, and then use his broadsword to make a head-kebab. I was having seismic levels of fidgetiness, to the point where I had to hug myself.

Sally pulled me aside. “Jesus, what the fuck are we going to do about Janelle?” Sally torqued her elbows and claws. “She’s driving me fucking bonkers, man.”

I didn’t have any answers, except that I was worried about Reginald’s inside-out fuse. Another hour went by, and you could have made a milkshake on my head. It was thirty seconds’ filming and then wait wait wait, ready, no hang on, wait, wait.