Rhett McLaughlin - The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

“So, I don’t know,” GamGam concluded. “How many people was that I just named? Maybe forty?”

Janine continued to zone out for a couple seconds before realizing her grandmother had stopped talking. “Yeah, forty sounds right,” she said, having no clue. “Wow. Since kidney stones aren’t, like, contagious, why do you think so many people here get them?”

“I don’t know, Nee—I mean: I don’t know, ma’am .” She winked again. “Guess it’s just something in the water! Dr. Bob says perfectly healthy people can get kidney stones. He’s had a bunch.”

“What does this Dr. Bob say about people passing more than thirty a year?”

“That it’s painful as all get-out!” GamGam laughed. “Woo, boy, kidney stones are not a good time. Did I tell you yesterday what they feel like?”

“You did, yes. In great detail.”

“But did I mention what it’s like as they’re comin’ out of you?”

“Uh—” Janine heard a click on her camera. She’d reached the end of another tape. An act of mercy, really. “We’ll have to get it next time, GamGam.”

“Aw, nelly, I was just gettin’ started!” She’d been speaking for ninety minutes.

As if struck by an epiphany, but the bad kind, Janine suddenly knew:

She’d made a terrible mistake.

Why she had thought talking to older women about their kidney stones would make for a cinematic masterpiece was beyond her. Clearly, it wouldn’t. Even Nosy Rosy, who Janine felt confident would be the linchpin of the whole movie, came up short in her interview last night, clamming up when the camera was aimed at her, offering limp gossip that would barely sustain a public access television show, let alone a critically acclaimed documentary. (“Harriet Logan doesn’t actually have kidney stones,” she’d said, her eyes wide. “It’s just gas .”)

As Janine’s mom had said: You’re making it sound way more dramatic than it is. That was always what Janine did, and she felt incredibly stupid that she was twenty-six years old and still hadn’t learned to listen to her frigging mother. It was a bunch of old people with a lot of kidney stones. Big deal.

“Well, I gotta say, makin’ movies is a whole lot of fun, Neenie,” GamGam said, rising gingerly from her chair and hobbling over to the kitchen. “And I think people are gonna love this one. Especially Dr. Bob.”

“Yeah,” Janine said, taking the camera off the tripod and placing it on the kitchen table. “I guess we’ll see.” Dr. Bob wasn’t exactly her target audience.

“Hey, I keep meanin’ to ask,” GamGam said. “How’s that boyfriend of yours?”

Janine froze.

GamGam had uncorked the painful truth Janine had been trying to avoid. The real reason she’d jumped at the chance to leave New York and ended up in this godforsaken town.

Dennis.

“Oh, uh…we broke up,” Janine said, blinking her eyes repeatedly in an effort to not cry in front of her grandmother.

“Oh no,” GamGam said. “Did that just happen?”

Janine nodded as she let the tears flow. She’d been dumped almost three months ago, which probably no longer qualified as “just happening,” but it was too embarrassing to admit she was still this sad after so much time.

“I’m sorry, Neenie,” GamGam said, walking toward her, even though it was obviously a strain to do so.

“No, no, don’t overexert yourself, GamGam,” Janine said. “Please, I’m fine. I’m really fine.”

She wasn’t fine.

The night before Janine’s big idea had come to her, she’d run into Dennis at a mutual friend’s party. He wasn’t alone. He was with Lola Cavendish, the actress who had starred in his grad thesis film. To say it stung was an understatement.

Janine was crushed. Devastated. Furious.

When she’d met Dennis almost three years earlier, during their first year at NYU’s grad film program, she’d instantly dismissed him (along with his leather jacket and purposely ripped jeans) as a pretentious, insecure wannabe, even as she’d objectively recognized that he was gorgeous. As the year progressed, she was exasperated to see Dennis become the crown jewel of their class, because Janine saw through him. She knew his films were just a hodgepodge of stolen references with no actual heart: a pinch of Godard here, a dash of Kubrick here, and a small sprinkle of Kurosawa for good measure. She’d diplomatically expressed this during a class critique, and the professor, the TA, and several classmates had practically bitten her head off.

Meanwhile, Janine’s odd, original film projects—like her riff on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a woman woke up one day to find she was a kangaroo—were met with lukewarm smiles and head-scratching. It was maddening. By the end of her first year, Janine was seriously considering dropping out.

But then something strange happened: Dennis asked her out on a date.

She’d scoffed at first, assuming she was about to be the butt of one of his attention-grabbing jokes. But then Dennis had continued: “I really like your films. They’re unique. And I like what you said about my work that day. It really got me thinking.” Janine was skeptical, and conflicted. No good Riot Grrrl needed validation from a boy. But she couldn’t help but be strangely flattered.

Dennis’s charms eventually wore her down. Before long, they were inseparable. They became the class power couple, and Janine loved it. Soon she was ripping her own perfectly good jeans.

By the time their third year of school rolled around, Janine was deeply intertwined with Dennis, both producing and running camera for his thesis film, The Boy Who Became a Man, and already planning the production company the two of them would start after graduation. They would call it Dennine . Janine cringed just thinking about it now.

Their hard work had paid off, though, as the entire faculty thought Dennis’s film was genius, the head of the department going so far as to pass it along to some hotshot agent friend, who loved it and wanted to meet with Dennis in L.A. immediately. Janine and Dennis had done it. They were on their way.

Or at least Dennis was. The week after they graduated, he’d flown to California alone, explaining to Janine that he thought it would make more sense to meet with this agent one-on-one first and fold her into the mix later. “Okay, that’s fine,” Janine had said, “but I can still come with you to L.A. and just not go to the meeting.” “I don’t know,” Dennis had said, grimacing. “It just seems easier for me to do the trip alone.” He’d been uncommunicative his entire week away, and the day he came back, he dumped Janine over the phone.

“What? Why?” Janine asked, completely blindsided.

“I just had so many good meetings this past week,” Dennis said. “I don’t really have time for a relationship right now.”

“We can make this work,” Janine said.

“I don’t think we can,” Dennis said. “Best of luck with whatever else you make, though.”

“What about Dennine!”

He’d hung up.

Best of luck with whatever else you make, though. Almost two years together had gone up in smoke with that hideous sentence.

Janine fell into a deep depression. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t think. She could barely eat. She moved into a Chinatown apartment with one of her grad school friends and cycled through a series of mind-numbing temp jobs, simultaneously searching out and avoiding any and all gossip about what Dennis was up to. The more time went by, the more she realized that she actually hated his ostentatious films, and also that in dating him, she’d all but abandoned her own passion, her own creativity, her own voice.