Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

The Hamster family had social aspirations, all about Sally going to Harvard and not hanging out with boys with dyslexic arms and legs. I went over to their house a few times, and it was full of Buddhas and Virgin Marys, and Mrs. Hamster baked us rugelachs and made punch, all the while telling me it must be So Interesting to be the class clown but how Sally needed to laser-beam in on her studies. My own parents weren’t too thrilled about all my school trouble, and why couldn’t I be more like Holman, training like crazy for his military future?

High school freshman year, and Sally got hold of a video cam. One of her jag-tooth techno-hippie uncles. I got used to her being one-eyed, filming all the time, and editing on the fly with her mom’s hyperbook. Our first movie went online at Yourstuff a month after she got the camera. It was five minutes long and it was called Thighcycle Beef , which was a joke on some Italian movie Sally had seen. She had a Thighcycle, one of those bikes which goes nowhere with a lying odometer. She figured we could light it on fire and then shove it off a cliff with me riding it, which sounded good to me.

I never flashed on the whole plot of Thighcycle Beef , but there were ninja dogs and exploding donuts and things. Like most of our early short films, it was a mixture of live-action and Zap!mation. Sally figured her mom would never miss the Thighcycle, which had sat in the darkest basement corner for a year or so.

We did one big sequence of me peddling on the Thighcycle with Sally throwing rocks at me, which she would turn into throwing stars in post-production. I had to peddle and duck, peddle while hanging off the back wheel, peddle side-saddle, peddle with my hands while hanging off the handlebars, etc. I climbed a tree in the Hamsters’ front yard and Sally hoisted the Thighcycle so I could pull it up there with me. Then I climbed on and “rode” the Thighcycle down from the treetop, peddling frantically the whole way down as if I could make it fly. (She was going to make it fly in post.) The Thighcycle didn’t pedal so good after that, but Sally convinced me I was only sprained because I could scrunch all my fingers and toes and I didn’t lose consciousness for that long.

We were going to film the climax at a sea-cliff a few miles away, but Sally’s ride fell through. In the end, she settled for launching me off the tool shed with the Thighcycle on fire. She provided a big pile of leaves for me to fall onto when I fell off the cycle, since I already had all those sprains. I missed the leaf pile, but the flaming Thighcycle didn’t, and things went somewhat amiss, although we were able to salvage some of the tool shed thanks to Sally having the garden hose ready. She was amazingly safety-minded.

After that, Sally’s parents wanted twice as hard for her not to see me. I had to lie and tell my parents I’d sprained my whole body beating up a bunch of people who deserved it. My brother had to carry stuff for me while I was on crutches, which took away from his training time. He kept running ahead of me with my junk, lecturing me about his conspiracy theories about the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen, and how they were flooding the United States with drugs to destabilize our country and steal our water, and I couldn’t get out of earshot.

But all of my sprains were worth it, because Thighcycle Beef blew up the internet. The finished product was half animation, with weird messages like “NUMCHUK SPITTING TIME!” flashing on the screen in between shots, but the wacky stunts definitely helped. She even turned the tool shed into a cliff, although she also used the footage of the tool-shed fire elsewhere. People two or three times our age downloaded it to their phones and watched it at work. Sally showed me the emails, tweets, and Yangars—we were famous!

I found out you can have compound sprains just like fractures, and you have to eat a lot of ice cream and watch television while you recuperate. My mom let me monopolize the living room sofa, knitted blanket over my legs and Formica tray in my lap as I watched cartoons.

My mom wanted to watch the news—the water crisis and the debt crisis were freaking her shit. I wanted to catch the Sammo Hung marathon, but she kept changing to CNN, people tearing shopping malls apart with their bare hands in Florida, office windows shattering in Baltimore, buses on fire. And shots of emaciated people in the formerly nice part of Brooklyn, laying in heaps with tubes in their arms, to leave a vein permanently open for the next hit.

Did I mention ice cream? I got three flavors, or five if you count Neopolitan as three separate flavors, like all right-thinking people everywhere.

I went back to school after a week off, and the Thighcycle had a posse. Ricky—arm-cracking Ricky Artesian—came up to me and said our movie rocked his freaking head. He also said something about people like me having our value, which I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. I saw one older kid in the hallway with a Flaming Thighcycle T-shirt, which I never saw any royalties for.

Sally snuck out to meet me at the Starbucks near school and we toasted with frosty mochas. Her round face looked sunburned and her hair was a shade less mouse than usual.

“That was just the dry run,” she said. “Next time, we’re going to make a statement. Maybe we can go out to the landfill and get a hundred busted TVs and drop them on you.”

I vetoed the rain of TVs. I wanted to do a roller disco movie because I’d just watched Xanadu .

We posted on Yangar.com looking for roller-disco extras, and a hundred kids and a few creepy grown-ups hit us back. We had to be super selective, and mostly only took people who had their own skates. But Sally still wanted to have old televisions in there because of her Artistic Vision, so she got hold of a dozen fucked old screens and laid them out for us to skate over while they all showed the same footage of Richard Simmons. We had to jump over beach balls and duck under old power cords and stuff. I envisioned it being the saga of skate-fighters who were trying to bring the last remaining copy of the U.S. Constitution to the federal government in exile, which was hiding out in a bunker under a Chikken Hut. We filmed a lot of it at an actual Chikken Hut that had closed down off near the Oceanview Mall. I wanted it to be a love story, but we didn’t have a female lead, and also Sally never wanted to do love stories. I showed her Harold Lloyd movies, but it made no difference.

Sally got hooked on Yangar fame. She had a thousand Yangar friends, crazy testimonials, and imitators from Pakistan, and it all went to her head. We had to do what the people on the internet wanted us to do, even when they couldn’t agree. They wanted more explosions, more costumes and cute Zap!mation icons, funny catch phrases. At fifteen, Sally breathed market research. I wanted pathos and chaos!

Ricky and some other kids found the school metal detectors missed anything plastic, ceramic, wood, or bone, and soon they had weapons strapped all over. Ricky was one of the first to wear the red bandana around his neck, and everyone knew he was on his way. He shattered Mr. MacLennan’s jaw, my Geography teacher, right in front of our whole grade in the hallway. Slow-time, a careful spectacle, to the point where Ricky let the onlookers arrange ourselves from shortest in front to tallest in back. Mr. MacLennan lying there looking up at Ricky, trying to assert, while we all shouted Break! Break! Break! Break! and finally Ricky lifted a baseball bat and I heard a loud crack. Mr. MacLennan couldn’t say anything about it afterward, even if he could have talked, because of that red bandana.