Every two years, Dad grows a beard, and it makes him look like a member of the Taliban.
Marla Gaines: And that’s my mom, Marla, the ex-hippie. Mom led a very interesting life before she married Dad, but the details are carefully guarded. We know that she lived in Israel at some point, and we suspect that she may have had a boyfriend in the Saudi royal family, which would have been sort of a big deal, because she is Jewish. In fact, Marla Weissman Gaines is very Jewish. She is the executive director of Ahavat Ha’Emet, a nonprofit that sends Jewish teenagers to Israel to work on a kibbutz and lose their virginity. I should point out that the virginity-losing part is not technically in the mission statement of Ahavat Ha’Emet. I’m just saying, you do not leave Israel without getting laid. You could have an eight-inch-thick titanium diaper bolted to your pelvis, and you would still somehow get laid. It should be their official tourism slogan: Israel. Where Virginity Goes to Die.™
Israelis get it on.
Anyway, my mom is a very loving woman, and she lets Dad do whatever the hell he wants, but she is also very opinionated and strong-willed, especially when it comes to Matters of Right and Wrong, and when she decides that something is the Right Thing to Do, that thing gets done. No ifs, ands, or buts. For better or worse. Whether we like it or not. This characteristic, in moms, is a colossal pain in the ass, and it basically ruined my life as I knew it, as well as Earl’s. Thanks a lot, Mom.
Gretchen Gaines: Gretchen is my older younger sister. She’s fourteen, which means that any kind of normal interaction with her is doomed to failure. We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic. Her main interests are yelling at Mom and not eating whatever is for dinner.
Grace Gaines: Grace is my younger younger sister. She’s six. Gretchen and I are pretty sure Grace was an accident. Incidentally, you may have noticed that all of our names begin with GR and are not at all Jewish-sounding. One night Mom had a little too much wine at dinner and confided to us all that, before we were born, and after she realized her children would have Dad’s also-not-Jewish last name, she decided she wanted all of us to be “surprise Jews.” Meaning, Jews with sneaky Anglo-Saxon names. I know, it makes no sense. I guess it shows that a vulnerability to brain fungus runs in the family.
Anyway, Grace aspires to be a writer and a princess, and like Dad, she treats Cat Stevens as though he is a human being.
Cat Stevens Gaines: Cat Stevens was awesome, once—he used to do things like stand up on his back paws and hiss whenever you entered the room, or run up to you in the hallway and wrap his arms around your shin and start biting you—but now he’s old and slow. You can still get him to bite you, but you have to grab his tummy and jiggle it. Technically, he’s my cat; I was the one who named him. I came up with the name when I was seven, having recently learned about Cat Stevens’s existence from National Public Radio, which of course is the only radio station that gets any burn in the Gaines house. It seemed like an obvious name for a cat at the time.
Only years later did I realize that Cat Stevens, the musician, is totally beat.
I cannot emphasize this enough: Dad has a strong affinity for Cat Stevens (the cat). In addition to sharing long-winded philosophical meditations with him, sometimes Dad plays Cat Stevens like a drum, which is a thing that Cat Stevens loves. Cat Stevens is also the only other member of the family who enjoys eating the meats that Dad brings home from the Strip, although sometimes he expresses his enjoyment by barfing.
Gamma-Gamma Gaines: Dad’s mom lives in Boston and comes to visit occasionally. As with Cat Stevens, I named her when I was a toddler, and now I don’t get a do-over, and me and my sisters all have to call her Gamma-Gamma. It’s embarrassing. I guess we all make mistakes when we’re young.
I found out about Rachel’s leukemia on a Tuesday. Wednesday, I tried calling her again after more nagging from Mom, and again she didn’t want to hang out. Thursday, she hung up as soon as I said my name.
So on Friday, I had no intention of calling whatsoever. When I got home from school, I went straight to the TV room to watch a movie. Specifically, Alphaville (Godard, 1965), which I was then going to re-watch later with Earl for research purposes. I realize you have no idea who Earl is still, even though we’re deep into this unbearably stupid book. Earl will be introduced soon, probably after I attempt to slam a door on my own head.
Anyway, I was barely into the credits when Mom walked in and pulled one of her trademark moves. She shut off the TV, opened her mouth, and emitted a nonstop stream of words. Nothing I did could make her stop talking. This is an unstoppable move.
MOM
You do not have a choice about this, Gregory, because you have been presented with the opportunity to make a very real difference in som
GREG
Mom what the hell
MOM
s rare and above all meaningful thing that you could be doing and let me tell you that it is not
GREG
Is this about Rachel? Because
MOM
nd I’ve seen you day after day just lying around like a dead slug and meanwhile a friend of yours
GREG
Can I just say something?
MOM
completely unacceptable, completely, you’ve got all the time in the world, and Rachel frankly doe
GREG
Mom stop talking can I just say something
MOM
f you think any of your excuses are more important than the happiness of a girl with
GREG
Holy shit. Please stop talking.
MOM
ou are going to pick up your phone, you are going to call Rachel, you are going to arrange to spend
GREG
Rachel won’t even let me say anything! She just hangs up! Mom! SHE JUST HANGS UP.
MOM
n this world, bottom line, you’re gonna have to learn to give, because you’ve been given everythi
GREG
UUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRGGGG
MOM
think you can “urrrg” your way out of this one, buster, you can think again, nuh-uh, no way, you
There was nothing to be done. I had to call Rachel. You can’t fight Mom’s unstoppable move. It’s probably how Mom got to be boss of a nonprofit: Nonprofits are all about persuading people to do stuff by talking at them. It’s like Will Carruthers talking you into giving him your Doritos “one time,” except that the nonprofit doesn’t have the additional persuasive advantage of you worrying that later the nonprofit is going to jump you in the locker room and whip your naked buttocks with a towel.
So yeah, I had to call Rachel again.
“What do you want.”
“Hi please don’t hang up.”
“I said, what do you want.”
“I want to hang out with you. Come on.”
“. . .”
“Rachel?”
“So you ignore me in school, and then you want to hang out after school.”
Well, this was true. Rachel and I had a few classes together, including calculus, where we sat right next to each other, and yeah, I made no effort to talk to her during any of that time. But I mean, that’s just what I did in school. I didn’t make an effort to talk to anyone. No friends, no enemies. That was the whole point.
If you think I had any idea of how to say this on the phone, though, you have not really been paying attention. I am about as good of a communicator as Cat Stevens, and only a little less likely to bite you.
“No, I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“Yeah, you were.”
“I thought you were ignoring me.”
“. . .”
“So, yeah.”
“You always used to ignore me, though.”
“Uh.”
“I always figured you just didn’t want to be friends with me.”
“Uhhh.”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“Greg?”
“The thing is, you broke my hea
rt.”
I’m smart in some ways—pretty good vocabulary, solid at math—but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is.
“I broke your heart.”
“Well, sort of.”
“How did I ‘sort of’ break your heart.”
“Uh . . . Remember Josh?”
“Josh Metzger?”
“In Hebrew school I thought you were in love with Josh.”
“Why did you think that?”
“I thought everyone in our class was in love with Josh.”
“Josh was depressed all the time.”
“No, he was all sullen and, uh . . . and dreamy.”
“Greg, it sounds like you’re in love with Josh.”
“Harf!”
This was unexpected. It had never happened before. Rachel had made me laugh. I mean, what she said wasn’t that funny, but I just really wasn’t expecting it, which is why instead of a normal laugh I made a sound like harf. Anyway, that’s when I knew I was in.
“You really thought I was in love with Josh.”
“Yeah.”
“And that broke your heart?”
“Of course it did.”
“Well, you should’ve said something.”
“Yeah, I was being really stupid about it.”
One of my few effective conversational tactics is to throw previous versions of myself under the bus. Twelve-year-old Greg was a jerk to you, you say? He was a jerk to everyone. And he had like thirty stuffed animals in his room! What a loser.
“Greg, I’m sorry.”
“No! No, no, no. It’s my fault.”
“Well, what are you doing right now?”
“Nothing,” I lied.
“You can come over if you want.”
Mission accomplished. I just had to call Earl.
“Hey, Earl?”
“Sup, ike.”
“Ike” is a good sign. It’s slang for “dude,” and when Earl uses it, that means he’s in a good mood, which is rare.
“Hey, Earl, I can’t watch Alphaville today.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I’m sorry, man, I have to hang out with this girl from, uh—this girl from synagogue.”
“Wha-a-at.”
“She’s—”
“Are you gonna eat her pussy?”
Earl can be sort of profane sometimes. He’s actually mellowed out a lot since his middle school days, believe it or not. Back in middle school he would have asked this in a much more violent and horrible way.
“Yeah, Earl, I’m going to eat her pussy.”
“Heh.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you even know how to eat pussy?”
“Uh, not really.”
“Papa Gaines never sat you down, said, Son, one day you’re gonna have to eat the pussy.”
“No. But he did teach me how to eat a butthole.”
When Earl is in full-on Gross-Out Mode, you have to play along or you’ll feel stupid.
“God bless that man.”
“Yup.”
“I would teach you some pussy-eating technique, but it’s a little complicated.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I would need some diagrams and whatnot.”
“Well, tonight maybe you can draw some up.”
“Son, I don’t have time for that. I got like twenty pussies over here that I need to eat.”
“Is that right.”
“I’m on pussy deadline.”
“You’ve got twenty vaginas, all lined up in a row.”
“Aw, what the hell. What the hell. No one’s talkin bout vaginas. Greg, what the hell is wrong with you. Man, that’s nasty.”
Earl likes to mix it up sometimes by pretending that you’re being gross and he is not, when he’s clearly being much grosser. This is a classic humor move that he has perfected over the years.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Man, you’re sick. You’re perverted.”
“Yeah, that was really out of line.”
“I’m talkin bout pussy. I got a little honey mustard over here, a little Heinz 57, and a whole lotta pussy.”
“Yeah, that’s not gross. What I said was gross, but not what you just said.”
“Got some Grey Poupon up in this. Got some Hellmann’s.”
Gross-Out Mode can last indefinitely and sometimes you just have to change the subject without warning if you actually have a message to convey.
“So yeah, sorry I can’t watch Godard tonight.”
“So you wanna watch it tomorrow?”
“Yeah, let’s do it tomorrow.”
“After school. Try to get some of them little steak tips.”
“OK, but I don’t think Mom is making beef tips tonight.”
“Steak. Tips. Give Ma and Pa Gaines some love for me, ike.”
Earl and I are friends. Sort of. Actually, Earl and I are more like coworkers.
The first thing to know about Earl Jackson is that if you mention his height, he will windmill-kick you in the head. Short people are often extremely athletic. Earl is technically the size of a ten-year-old, but he can kick any object within seven feet of the ground. Additionally, Earl’s default mood is Pissed, and his backup default mood is Mega-Pissed.
It’s not just that he’s short, either. He looks really young. He has a sort of round bug-eyed Yoda-esque face that makes girls go all motherly and start cooing. Grown-ups don’t really take him seriously, especially teachers. They have trouble talking to him as though he’s a normal human being. They bend down way too far and speak in this ridiculous up-and-down singsong: “Hel-lo Ear-rul!” It’s like he gives off an invisible force field that makes people stupid.
The worst part is that his whole family is taller than him—all of his brothers and half brothers, his stepsisters, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his stepdad, even his mom. It’s not really fair. At family barbecues, he gets his head playfully rubbed by someone about every ninety seconds, and it’s not always someone older than him, either. He is constantly being pushed out of the way by people who don’t even realize they’re pushing him out of the way. He can’t wander out into the open; if he does, his brothers take turns running up and leapfrogging over his head. You would be perpetually angry at the world, too, if this was your life.
However, from some perspectives, Earl’s home life is awesome. He lives basically unsupervised with two brothers, three half brothers, and a dog in a huge house a few blocks above Penn Avenue, and they play video games and eat Domino’s pizza pretty much all of the time. His mom lives in the house, too, but she usually restricts herself to the third floor. What she does up there is rarely discussed—especially with Earl around—but I can tell you that it involves Bacardi Silver mojitos and chat rooms. Meanwhile, downstairs it’s six guys in a house, living it up. Nonstop party! What problems could there possibly be?
Problem 1. Well, there is the troublesome matter of the house’s finances. There are no dads in the house—Earl’s dad is in Texas or something, and the half brothers’ dad is in prison—and Earl’s mom provides little in the way of income. Two of the half brothers, the twins, Maxwell and Felix, are in one of Homewood’s enterprising gangs—Tha Frankstown Murda Cru—and provide some of the family’s financial support by dealing drugs. Earl himself has done most of the major drugs, although these days, he smokes only cigarettes. So, there’s some drug dealing and gang activity in the house, which probably counts as a problem.
Problems 2 and 3. I guess I should also note that there’s a bit of a noise problem—video games, music, yelling—and a smell problem as well. There’s generally garbage lying around, often with little pools of garbage juice underneath, and the brothers don’t really do that much laundry. Sometimes someone will also get really drunk and throw up on the floor, and that can take days to clean up, as do the frequent hills of poop created by the dog. I don’t want to sound like a “pussy-ass bitch” (Felix’s words), but this is surely less than ideal, as living situations go
.
Problem 4. It’s also not an incredibly scholarly environment. Earl is the only one still attending school every day; Devin and Derrick can go for weeks without showing up; all of the half brothers have dropped out, including Brandon, who is thirteen and probably the most violent and aggressive of the bunch. (For example, he has a huge painful-looking neck tattoo that says “TRU NIGGA” next to some pictures of guns. Brandon himself owns a gun and has already managed to impregnate another human being, even though his voice hasn’t dropped all the way yet. If the city of Pittsburgh gave out a Least Promising Human award, he would be on the shortlist.) Due to the noise problems mentioned above, the Jackson house is not a great place to try to read, or do homework, or do any kind of work; also, if someone finds you alone in a room with a book, sometimes this is considered sufficient grounds to whup the hell out of you.
Problems 5 through 10. The house itself is kind of falling apart—there’s a big chunk of the gutters lying in the front yard, and the ceiling drips in some of the bedrooms, and usually at least one of the toilets is clogged and no one really wants to deal with it. In the winter, the heating generally conks out and everyone has to sleep in their winter coat. There’s definitely a rat problem, and a cockroach problem, and it’s not a good idea to drink the tap water.
The video games, however, are solid.
So Earl and I, when we hang out, usually hang out at my house instead. By now Earl is almost a member of the family: the chain-smoking vertically challenged son my parents never had. They’re the only grown-ups besides Mr. McCarthy who even sort of know how to talk to him without pissing him off. Emphasis on “sort of.” Their interactions with him are always kind of surreal.
INT. LIVING ROOM OF MY HOUSE — DAY
DAD is sitting in his rocking chair, contemplating the wall, as he likes to do. CAT STEVENS is asleep on the couch. Enter EARL, on his way to the front door, smacking a fresh pack of cigarettes against the palm of his hand.