Midnight Movie: A Novel (18 page)

StinkyCat
©ScaryBarry THE guy? PM me. Please.
May 22 2:48 PM
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TheFakeShaqO
©ScaryBarry Ur a legend. PM me too, pleez.
May 22 2:50 PM
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Supergirl1491
©ScaryBarry Are you this guy? http://21521.tinyurl.com
May 22 2:58 PM
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ScaryBarry
@Supergirl1491 @TheFakeShaqO @StinkyCat @BorisDSpider that article is b.s. none of that piddly crap here.
May 22 3:03 PM
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Supergirl1491
©ScaryBarry What do you mean “piddly crap”?
May 22 3:14 PM
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ScaryBarry
@Supergirl1491 ©TheFakeShaqO ©StinkyCat ©BorisDSpider my shit is five alarm, bitches. they’ll never find me though. but y’all will. come & get it
May 22 3:20 PM
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Needless to say, after Theo and I watched the video, I made it a point to never be in my apartment after 9:30, which meant crashing on couches throughout Austin and a lot of worn-out welcomes. My friends were as cool as they could be about it, but having houseguests is a pain in the ass, especially a guy like me who was ranting and raving about all kinds of supernatural bullshit.

I tried to go about life normally—you know, write my articles, rehearse with the band, get my fill of Internet porn … kidding about the porn—but it was impossible. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Would you have been able to? Would you have been able to get it out of your brain that you turned invisible, then ran or floated into another time zone, then shot red bullets out of
some
part of your body? Good luck not obsessing over that.

No wonder I got baked every night.

I was turning into such a space cadet wasteoid that Theo dragged me to see his general practitioner so I could get a full physical workup. I’d been poked and prodded enough at the sleep center, but my health insurance at the newspaper was okay, and this guy was in our network, so I figured,
Why not, it won’t cost you anything except time
.

So we’re sitting in the waiting room, and I’m reading a three-month-old issue of
Sports Illustrated
, and somebody taps me on the shoulder. It was Janine Daltrey, who I hadn’t seen since the Tobe Hooper screening. The poor girl looked terrible. Her sister, Andi, however, looked smashing, so smashing that when I asked Janine what was wrong, and she told me about getting beaten by her ex, I couldn’t look away from Andi, which made me feel like a lame-o. I’ve always considered myself a gentleman, and I’ve never been the guy who gawks. But if you saw Andi that day, there’s absolutely no way you wouldn’t have stared. I mean, she had on a tight, strappy tank top that pushed her breasts together and gave her some death-defying cleavage. Her jeans had big holes in
the knees, so you could see the fishnet stockings she was wearing underneath. Andi Daltrey was a walking pheromone, and it took all of my restraint to not lick the back of her neck.

But my gentlemanliness trumped my lust, and I managed to focus on Janine. I told her about my disappearing act, and she kind of freaked. She said, “We had ghosts one summer when I was in high school.”

Andi said, “We did?”

Janine said, “You were at overnight camp.”

Andi asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Janine said, “What good would it have done? They went away before you got home.”

Andi said, “You’re bullshitting me.” Then she turned to me and said, “She’s bullshitting me, right? It’s the twenty-first century. They don’t make ghosts anymore.”

I said, “Andi, you’re talking to a guy who has filmed evidence of himself disappearing. There’re ghosts.” Then I asked Janine what happened.

She said, “It wasn’t as sinister as it sounds. The woman who owned the house next door to us died when I was a kid. Her name was Mrs. Pupe—spelled P-U-P-E, but pronounced ‘poopy.’ You can imagine how much crap she took from us kids in the ’hood.”

Andi said, “Oh, I kind of remember her.”

Janine said, “I’m not surprised. She loved you. She thought you were the cutest little girl. She used to give you candy all the time. Me, not so much.”

Andi batted her eyelashes and said, “I was pretty cute. Still am.” Then she rubbed her fingernail on my knee and said, “Right, Erick?”

Back when I was in junior high, I thought about sex so often that I’d get a boner if a leaf fell off a tree and landed on my head. If a girl accidentally brushed her arm against me, forget it, I’d be in a daze of lust for forty-five minutes. But that was junior high.
Now that I’m a semi-adult, it takes me a minute or three to get an erection, but when Andi Daltrey’s finger grazed my leg, I swear I almost came. A bit disconcerting, I have to say. I excused myself, and went to the men’s room, and, if I may be crude, finished myself off in the stall.

When I got back, Janine was struggling to get to her feet. I gave her a hand standing up, then asked her what happened with Mrs. Pupe. She said, “Long story. Call me.” Then she gave me her number and went to see her doctor.

My arms were still pretty bruised up, and my eyes were still rain-bowed, and my ankle wasn’t all that much better, and Dr. Finnegan was concerned that my wounds weren’t healing faster. He wanted to take some blood and run tests to make sure I wasn’t anemic or something.

I walked over to the lab, and Andi said she wanted to ask the doctor a few questions. I hate having blood drawn—I hate needles in general—so I asked her to come with me and hold my hand. She said, “No, sis.” Then she touched the doctor on the chest—a doctor who, I should mention, was probably in his mid-fifties and was, if I may be rude, pretty damn fugly—and said all whispery, “I have a few questions for the physician.” I swear, he shivered.

Long story short, I wasn’t anemic. They couldn’t find anything. I was at wit’s end. And I wanted to hurt somebody.

They found nothing. I was pissed. Times ten. And I didn’t know what to do. I mean, where do you go when your friends, in spite of their best efforts, can’t help you, and your doctors are useless?
Outside of Theo, there wasn’t anybody in my life who’d take this seriously.

All the shit with the Game was raining down—the fires and the bombings and whatnot—but at the time, I wasn’t following it. My television was permanently tuned to American Movie Classics, and the only two things I ever did on my computer were write and answer e-mail, so unless the news was happening right in my front yard, I wasn’t aware. And that was just the way I liked it.

Random chitter-chatter from the outside world wasn’t good for my career—hell, most of the outside world wasn’t good for my career, but that’s for another book. Seriously, all I needed was a keyboard, a screen, some food, and a few libations, and I was good to go. It was when I had to deal with the general public that things got hairy. Like, for example, pitching projects.

If you put a gun to my head and asked, “What’s worse, a zombie attack or a pitch meeting with a studio head? Answer quick or die,” I’d probably be dead, because that’s a question that merits much pondering. If a zombie attacks you, you’ll fight the good fight, and if you go down, you’ll go down with dignity. But when a dude from the studio attacks you, or your script, or your ideas, you get defensive, and you start to beg. You beg for money, or you beg for an audience with the next fellow on the food chain, or you beg for a second chance, a third chance, a tenth chance. They cut you to pieces, but they do it so politely that you don’t even realize you’re gushing blood until you’re in your car and halfway home.

I liked to go into these things with a small pile of scripts and a big pile of ideas; that way, if they chopped off my leg, I’d still have another ten or so to stand on. So if somebody asked me, “Tobe, what were you doing during the beginning of the Game?” I’d tell them, “I was prepping for one epic motherfucking pitch meeting.”