Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

All in all we made forty-two films, starting with Earl, the Wrath of God II. We had a ritual for when each film was finished: We would burn the film to two DVDs, erase the film on Dad’s computer, and then I would take the raw footage out to the garbage behind our house while Earl smoked a cigarette. Mom usually watched disapprovingly while this happened—she thought we would want the footage for later, and also, while she tolerated the smoking, at the same time she wasn’t exactly the biggest fan—but she let us do it, because we didn’t give her a choice.

We didn’t want anyone watching the films but us. No one. Not Mom and Dad; we knew we couldn’t trust their opinions. Not our classmates; we didn’t care about their opinions, not after the Aguirre, the Wrath of God fiasco. Also, it’s not like we really were friends with any of them.

In Earl’s case, the fact is that he just didn’t give a shit about making friends. I was the closest friend he had, and aside from making films, we didn’t hang out all that much. In middle school he started spending a lot of time on his own; I didn’t know where he went, but it wasn’t his house or mine. There was a period where he was doing drugs, but I wasn’t really privy to any of that. It didn’t last very long, either; there were two movies that we did where he was sort of cracked out the whole time (Walk Lola Walk [2008], Gay.I. [2008]), and then pretty quickly he got himself together. By eighth grade, he had restricted himself to cigarettes. However, he remained a very solitary person, and there were weeks where I didn’t see him at all.

And as for me: In middle school I just had a hard time making friends. I don’t know why. If I knew why, it wouldn’t have been so impossible. One thing was that I just usually wasn’t interested in what other kids were interested in. For a lot of kids, it was sports or music, two things that I just couldn’t really get into. Music really only interested me as a soundtrack to a movie, and as for sports, I mean, come on. It’s some guys throwing some balls around, or trying to knock each other over, and you’re supposed to watch them for three hours at a time, and it just sort of seems like a waste. I dunno. I don’t want to sound condescending, so I’m not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.

So I didn’t really share any interests with anyone. More to the point, I’d be in some kind of social situation, and I had no idea what to talk about. I definitely didn’t know how to make jokes that weren’t part of a movie, and so instead I would freak out and try to think of the most interesting possible thing to say, and it was usually something like:

1. Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin.

2. If this were a video game, you could just break everything in this room and a bunch of money would come out of it, and you wouldn’t even have to pick it up, you would just walk into it and suddenly it would be in your bank account.

3. If I were to talk like the lead singer of some old-school rock band, like for example Pearl Jam, everyone would think I literally had a severe head injury. So how come the guy from Pearl Jam was allowed to do it?

These are all great things to talk about when you’re friends with someone, but not when you’re just trying to make polite conversation. And somehow I just never got to the friendship stage. By the time I got to high school, and figured out how to talk to other people a little better, I had decided I didn’t really want to be friends with anyone. Other than Earl, who like I said was really more of a coworker.

And girls? Forget about girls. There was never any chance, with girls. For reference, please refer to chapter 3, “Let’s Just Get This Embarrassing Chapter Out of the Way.”

So, to conclude, we never showed the films to anyone.