Authors: Daniel Handler
T
he movie was kickass, which was appropriate, because tonight it was called
Kickass: The Movie
. It was a sort of action-adventure thing starring two women and one man, and another man who was the villain, and they all said funny lines sometimes, so I guess you could call it an action-adventure comedy except it was not a comedy in the traditional, classical sense, not in the way Ms. Wylie called it. Lila and I were in the same English class and we both worked Saturdays and Thursday nights at the Sovereign Cinemaplex, and I guess if I were a little braver I would have asked her something like, “Do you think Ms. Wylie, who we both have fourth period, would call
Kickass: The Movie
a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?” and we could have that conversation, and it would lead to other conversations, during the flat and lonely times in the Sovereign, when all the people had paid their money and bought their girlfriends popcorn and handed their tickets either to Lila, if they used the right-hand escalator, or to me at the left-hand one, to be torn in half, the emptied-out times when all the happy people were happy in the dark, and Lila and I just stood around at the bottom of the whirring escalators, taking nobody up and up and up for the big show. But the thing is, that line about Ms. Wylie is sort of
lame, and I think Lila would just roll her eyes, which are green and thick with black eyeliner and beautiful.
Ask me why people go to the movies. You won’t ask, right? Because it’s obvious. There is nothing complicated about why people would stop driving around Mercer Island, staring out their car windows at those black, petrified parking lots with the birds sulking in the garbage, and come inside where it’s warm and where
Kickass: The Movie
is playing on two screens at 11:00, 11:45, 1:00, 1:45, blah blah blah, you can see it very clearly from the left-hand escalator and I’ve looked at it a million times. It’s not complicated. First you meet these two guys, one famous and one black, and guess which one dies in the first five minutes? Obvious. And they’re partners, I forgot to say, and the big white guy who always plays the Chief is playing the Chief, and he says the famous guy has to train these two women rookies, one of whom used to be a stripper and the other one I forget. I mean, it’s based on practically the most famous TV show ever, so even if it was complicated you could just stay inside your crampy house and flip channels for five minutes and find an episode which would explain it all for you in about ten kickass seconds, and it’s not complicated. It’s not. Even on Thursdays it’s packed. The villain wants to blow up a stadium full of innocent baseball fans, and guess if he succeeds or if the two women who have to wear tight leather pants as part of an undercover operation manage to stop him, and guess if the famous guy gets to use that top-secret mini-submarine we got to see in the opening credits. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Obvious.
The only reason I’m blah-blah talking about it is so that you
get what kind of night it was. Late, is what kind, but also obvious, and the obvious part was sort of messing with the kickass part, if you know what I mean. Like, just for instance, standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass, with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in it where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and with how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have two lovely things next to each other in the Sovereign Cinemaplex. But the kickassness of Lila was a sort of muted kickassness, a kickassness tainted with melancholy, because there was also the obvious part, which was named Keith.
Keith. Unchivalrous Keith. Keith who picked her up from work every night, and who, if this was
Kickass: The Movie
, would have a little fuzz of mustache so that we would know what an asshole he was, except this being the real-life Seattle Metropolitan Area there was no way anybody could tell and so he just drove up to the Sovereign and beeped his horn and Lila just pushed open the swinging glass doors with the stupid sticker-heads of all the famous people stuck to them and ran out into the night of Keith without anybody running after her and saying, “Don’t go out there to Keith! The boy who has stood by you, at the left-hand escalator, for nine Thursdays and eight Saturdays, loves you very much, plus his chivalry!” Which is the kickass part on my end, the part I think about every Lila moment, from the first bell for Ms. Wylie to the tearing of every little ticket that is handed to me: the total King Arthur chivalry that sits deep in
my puny, frantic heart. Example of chivalry, why am I working at the Sovereign? What is the money for? To buy flowers for Lila and to give them to her. Keith? Honk honk honk, please come running out of the Cinemaplex doors and jump into the seat next to me where there are no flowers and I won’t even tell you how nice you look, I bet. But my secret special kickass chivalry is tainted, obviously, by obviousness. And it’s the obvious thing that it’s not going to happen. Because there might be a suburb of Seattle where a girl says, “Oh my god! Flowers? You are chivalrous, Joe,” and then I win and she doesn’t care that Keith has one of those all-terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand-cylinder engine to drive over the hordes of bloodthirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape, or maybe there’s a suburb of Seattle where Lila wouldn’t care whether or not her chivalrous suitor was wearing a fucking
WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW!
button on a red why-the-hell-is-it-fireproof Sovereign Cinemaplex vest which is sort of blocking the signals of that hungry heart of mine, and Lila and I drive around this other suburb of Seattle in a car I take care of myself on weekends and tell each other a big bag of secrets we’ve been hiding underneath the beds our parents bought us, tossing and turning over its poky burlap creases and staring out of the window screens at a spooky blue moon that is beaming down secret New York bus tickets of a grown-up love future, and then someplace where the sun is setting or rising she takes her top off, but I don’t live in that suburb of Seattle. I live on Mercer Island, and here we just tear tickets and wait to watch her go home.
Here I was maybe forty minutes ago, sort of claustrophobed in the gap between the kickass movie world where Lila dumps the guy with the smarmy mustache and the obvious one where it just keeps getting later. It was the last show and were I to guess it was just the moment where the stripper woman is forcing the hired-sunglasses dude to tell her who sent him to mess up all the chrome in her apartment where she sits in a towel and stares at a picture of her brother who was killed in a motorcycle accident, when Lila and I see this guy with his hands behind his back walking very slowly across the Sovereign carpet staring straight down like the chivalrous code of the wisdom of the ancients was encoded in stray kernels of popcorn that it was my turn to suck up before closing.
“At this point,” says the woman who I’m beginning to remember was in the air force but was thrown out for insubordination, “we are departing for regions unknown.”
This guy was not from Mercer Island. He was older than me. He was the age where chivalry has rewarded you, I hope I hope I hope, and he was carrying a jacket. When he reached the two escalators, he stopped looking at the carpet and looked at both of us, and then he did what I would have done, which is go over to Lila.
“Hey,” he said, “has anybody turned in a pair of keys? Two keys, on a ring?”
“Turned in?” Lila said, chewing her beautiful gum. “I don’t think so.”
The guy frowned and then looked at me and I made a face to the guy like I don’t have your keys either. “Is there—could I check the lost and found or something?”
“We don’t really have like a lost and found,” Lila said. “We have a box with some sweaters in it, behind popcorn. But nobody turned in anything tonight. Did you lose them tonight?”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “I don’t know when, but tonight. Two keys on a ring. I can’t find them. I’ve been looking all over the parking lot and I went back to the restaurant where we ate so, um, I thought I’d try here.”
“Sorry,” Lila said. She looked at this guy and shrugged just a little little bit. It was sort of a gorgeous sneak preview of the “Sorry” shrug supercombo that I would get some day if I actually bought the flowers and laid them at her gorgeous hardcore rap-star sneakers, and maybe that’s why I spoke up. Or maybe, probably, it was the jacket. Maybe it was the pretty dream of a time when my fireproof vest would be nowhere and if someone asked me, like at a party where everything is poured into real glasses, did you ever work at the Sovereign Cinemaplex, I would call across my chrome Manhattan place to my wife and say, “Lila? Remember like a hundred years ago when we used to rip tickets in half? This guy in the jacket wants to know about it,” and we’d all shout the healthy, excited laugh of people with ice in their drinks who can stay out as late as they want, a time in my life when sorry wouldn’t be good enough when I’ve lost my keys and I’m looking for them on the filthy floor and hoping against hope against hope for a chivalrous squire to say “What movie were you in?”
“What movie were you in?” I asked. Yeah.
The guy sighed. “That one with all of those skinny women kicking things,” he said. “You know,
Kickass
.”
“
The Movie
,” I said, and I said it perfect. I know because the guy gave me a little smile like he and I knew the same perfect code of: this world is suckier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys. The kickass rookie women smile at the famous guy the same way after the three of them break up a fight at the biker bar where they go to get to know each other over a product-placement beer by pounding this bandanna asshole against a heavy metal jukebox playing a song that was popular a million years ago when my parents roamed the earth free and loose. “Let’s get to work,” the famous guy says, and the women nod, like yeah I know, I know so well that you didn’t need to say it but you’re not at all geeky and overtalkative for saying it anyway. I walked over to Lila’s escalator and reached down to the flashlight they make us wear, clipped to my belt, bouncing along my thigh like a bonus helping of embarrassing. I held it up for the guy. “Let’s get to work, check it out. We can go in there and see if it’s on the floor. See if you dropped it.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiled again, my chivalrous compadre. “Thanks.”
Lila was looking at me with some gorgeous indecisive loveliness, like she couldn’t decide if I was cool because I could talk to this guy, like we were two cool guys standing near her, or if I’d just dragged him down and we were two lame guys who weren’t Keith and that was all we had to offer. “There’s people in there,” she said. “The movie is playing.”
“We won’t bother them,” I said. “We won’t bother the movie patrons.” I said a bullshit word like
patrons
so the guy would
know that I didn’t think those people would stop us for a second. “This guy lost his keys,” I said. “It’s more important than a movie. We’ll be quiet.”
“Thanks,” the guy said, nodding at me.
“Okay?” I said to Lila, and I watched her consult. She consulted the same imagination that bought that lipstick, and made her face a sexy promise for anyone who happened to have at least one working eye in their yearning little head.
What principles from the life of Sir Gawain do you see practiced in your own life?
asks Ms. Wylie’s essay question which is due on Monday, and I watched Lila consult her imagination. I might be the guy practicing chivalry, I hope I hope she was thinking. “Okay?” I said. “Okay?”
“Whatever,” she said. “Be careful out there.”
By this time the threesome had cornered the main suspect, but it was so early in the movie you knew he couldn’t be the right guy, even if you didn’t actually see that the real mastermind had created a false digital trail by utilizing the satellite time he exchanged for rubies in the shadowy scene they filmed in a hurry. “Your training is over,” the famous guy tells the slightly hotter of the two women after she kicks in the door before he can, and we opened the swinging doors at the back of the theater and cast a fine yellow slice of light, all laid out as a triangle on the carpet like a big piece of pie. Some heads swiveled and swiveled back to the sputtering wrong suspect, who they made a sissy for comic relief.
“Where were you?” I said. “Where was your seat?”
“She wanted to be toward the back,” he said and his jacket
shrugged in the closing light of the door. “She said it was going to be loud.”
He led the way. “But there are like fifteen speakers all over the walls,” I said. “You can’t escape a movie loud like this.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said grimly.
“Shut up,” said someone who got himself an aisle seat so as to show the world,
Hey, I got boots
. The guy glared and for a minute I thought that
Kickass
might start playing on one more screen, if you know what I mean. Wicked boot man didn’t want any real-life audio to interfere with the famous guy saying, “Of course! It’s a false digital trail,” but my guy was all set with the chivalry secret weapon.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” and in the light of the next morning in front of police headquarters I was so fucking proud of him. Chivalrous chivalrous with the “I’m very sorry” and the “sir,” and without a sword being drawn my man Gawain made the guy embarrassed
and
wearing boots. “I heard about your shenanigans last night,” the Chief said all grumpy on the screen, but I knew my guy was shenanigan-free.
He stopped in the aisle. “Here I think,” he said, and it was pretty empty. He moved my flashlight slightly and we saw some couple making out and a few bored alone men. “Or a row up or down, or two rows, I don’t know.”
“We’ll find it,” I said. “We’ll look.”
“I hope so,” the guy said. “I got a girl outside and she’s not that happy at me about it.”
“Outside?” I said. It was cold outside, what else is new in this part of the world.