Lisa and I played a game back then: we would try and guess the word that was on the other person’s mind. We would sit on the sofa in the basement of my mom’s house and stare into each other’s eyes and each of us would think of a word. Sometimes I would think of what a word meant or signified, other times I would write it in the void of my headspace, twist lines into their tortured English shapes, sometimes in script, sometimes in print. As I did this, Lisa would be staring back at me, doing the same thing—though we’d never discuss our processes. We would be staring into each other’s eyes, communicating telepathically. It could take a few tries, on bad days it could take more, but almost always we were able to string a few words together, one after the other. After, we would laugh uncontrollably. We had broken out of the normal world, that’s how it felt. We had known each other for our entire lives, give or take a few years, and that meant something. We walked to school together every day and walked back together sometimes too. People at school noticed this and made assumptions, but we didn’t care.
It was around this time that I got my camcorder for Christmas. We would set up the camera for our word-saying sessions and let it roll. We would use the same tape over and over, taping over the old sessions with the new ones. Immediately after we were finished, we would watch it back and laugh at ourselves. We saw ourselves as the rest of the world saw us. I didn’t have a word for the intimacy I felt.
When Oscar first came over to my mom’s house and witnessed this game, he didn’t quite know what to make of it, but we invited him to play regardless. I think he and Lisa fell in love playing it, but I didn’t feel any jealousy, I was actually excited. As for Oscar and myself, when the two of us would play, we would begin laughing hysterically by the third word.
With Lisa it always was more serious, somehow. That first afternoon we spent playing this game was the big turning point: we were officially friends with Oscar, we were no longer simply the weirdos that he ate lunch with after transferring into our school.
We spent most of the following summer making movies with my handheld camcorder. The movies were short and made entirely for our own amusement. We called them art films, though they were more like crude imitations of what we thought art films were. It was like we had seen parodies of Last Year at Marienbad without knowing the title; somehow, we thought this entitled us to join in on the fun. Primarily our movies involved the three of us taking turns uttering non sequiturs and a negative space where the plot should be.
School started again, senior year. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about GPAs and extracurriculars and what colleges people would be applying to. Our movie days seemed to be over, but then it was Labor Day weekend, and a new film was thought up. I was informed that it was going to be some kind of horror and pornography mash-up. Lisa promised a murder. On Friday night, the three of us departed my mother’s house wearing pasty stage make up: red around the eyes and grey contours on our cheeks and jowls.
The night felt charged because there seemed to be something that the two of them weren’t telling me. In the year that had passed since our duo had become a trio, things had mostly remained the same, but there were added dimensions. The unknowns were in the open now. It wasn’t only a matter of what I did or didn’t tell Lisa, it became a matter of what I did or didn’t tell Oscar. And, of course, all that wasn’t being told to me. For this particular art film, all the two of them would say is that we were making a porno. Of course, none of us had ever had full-on sex before. I remember that night there was an intense nervousness I felt every time I opened my mouth, like I had something to say but I didn’t know what.
Production was set to start on Oscar’s father’s boat, a fifty-foot yacht that he kept docked at the marina. We chose the boat because it was supposed to be empty and because we thought that it would lend a faux-luxe ambience to our film. We had made a few of our previous movies on the yacht as it always seemed to be empty and there was plenty of privacy. Between my mom’s basement and Oscar’s dad’s yacht we could do whatever we wanted. “Just don’t make a mess,” Oscar would say—it was practically the only time he would drop his ultra-cool persona.
That night, we found four duffel bags filled with Oscar’s father’s clothes on the deck of the boat. Though they were very expensive, high-quality garments, they had been shoved into the bags awkwardly, most of them were still on hangers. In the cabin, we found Mister Oscar, pickled on martinis and dead to the world.
Our plan to film the three of us getting naked on the boat suddenly seemed very juvenile. Lisa and I crouched on one side of the bed like goblins while Oscar tried to wake up his dad by tapping him gently on the face.
“Whenever he falls asleep wasted on his boat, he always wakes up with some gross stomach flu,” he said.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t wake him up,” said Lisa.
Two nights before, it had just been Lisa and me in my mom’s basement watching TV. She got a bloody nose and asked me in her ironic way to lick the blood off of her face. I slowly took her head in my hands, and we looked long into each other’s eyes. But unlike when we played our same-word-game, there was no message being conveyed, no word to receive. She was excited, maybe a little afraid. The blood curled down around her mouth. I could tell she wasn’t sure if I was going to do it or not.
Oscar’s dad came to and the moment he laid eyes on the three of us he bolted upright and puked into the wastebasket beside the bed. Lisa and I excused ourselves to the deck to let the two of them hash out whatever family drama they were in the middle of.
Outside, the light was harsh. It seemed to etch lines into everything, and it made the makeup on Lisa’s face look especially cakey. Though she had lovely skin, with the makeup it looked old, weathered.
Lisa said to me, “I see this as a fight over me. You guys’ll be competing.”
I said, “what?”
“The movie,” she said. “That’s what the plot could be.”
“What plot? Since when do you care about plots?”
She aimed the camcorder my way, turned it on, and ran it slowly up and down my body. She said, “How the night’s shaping up—now it’s more like a documentary: the making of a porno.”
I was annoyed so I took my camera from her and walked to the front of the boat. There were too many lights on at the marina. Every walkway and every boat was totally illuminated, and the bright lights cast dramatic shadows. In the darkness there were ripples, minute movements that were barely detectable. The night was ruined.
I had taken a handful of pills I purchased at the general store near the marina. Altogether they cost me ten dollars. There was a large variety in the package: gel caps, oblong vitamins—a muted rainbow of pills. The packaging made a vague promise of male enhancement. I ate them on an empty stomach. Oscar and Lisa had gone to Jack in the Box, but I wasn’t hungry. I went to go buy condoms for Oscar and me and I saw the pills by the register. The clerk looked at me like he had seen this a million times before.
I could feel the effects of the pills almost immediately. A heat began to build inside of me, but my skin was cold and clammy. I could feel my blood churn, my heart was pounding. Whatever you might have heard about these pills, I’ll just say this: one, they’re disgusting. For days afterwards I was burping this awful smell like tuna fish and vitamins. The other thing is that the pills work. That night, while Lisa and Oscar tried to cheer up his dad, I had this ridiculous, uncontrollable hard-on.
Lisa and Oscar spent the rest of the evening playing Mommy-Daddy, trying to take care of moaning Mister Oscar. He groaned and laughed and apologized to Oscar and Lisa. “So sorry son!” he chuckled, before barfing once more in the wastepaper basket beside the bed. They tried to make macaroni and cheese because there was a box in the galley, but they gave up after about half an hour trying to figure out where to get the water to boil the noodles, because the boat’s tap water wasn’t potable. They debated back and forth whether that meant they couldn’t boil the noodles in the water or not—it was pretty stupid. Oscar’s dad poured himself another drink from the martini pitcher on the bedside table, took one sip, and immediately puked again. “Aw, Dad,” said Oscar.
The situation was out of my hands. I refused to participate in this game with Oscar’s dad and the two of them had decided to go on and play it without me. It was the first time I felt jealous. I stayed on deck, occasionally peeking down the stairs to see what was going on, and all the while listening to their conversations. The air was cooler than I would have expected for September; the sun had gone down only a couple of hours before. The cold air did not deter me from dropping my pants at the bow of the boat and admiring my big hard-on. Some new salacious figurehead. I pointed the camera south and slowly—but not too slowly—manipulated myself. It didn’t take long. My goal wasn’t pleasure, I only wanted to make a little splash. I liked the idea of little plankton eating my material up and then getting eaten up by bigger and bigger fish. Then one day maybe I’d eat one of the big fish, and the whole eco-system will have made a neat little loop—I described all this for the camera while I whacked off.
The real reason was that I thought it would be funny to show Lisa and Oscar. It was also supposed to be a covert fuck you to them, like, here’s your porno, assholes, but I don’t know—my feelings on this were weird and off-the-charts hormonal. In hindsight it wasn’t exactly subtle. I thought their ideas for movies were dumb, and that the only reason they wanted to film a porno in the first place was because they wanted to screw, and they were too weird to admit that they liked each other.
If I hadn’t bought those pills, I wouldn’t have done any of this.
* * *
I didn’t think of the movie that I had made on the bow of the boat until two years later, when Oscar and I were both home from college on Christmas break. I hadn’t seen him in some time, but everything from the way that he carried himself to the way that he dressed was basically the same. Personally, I believed that I had matured, at least slightly. I read books now and I was becoming a serious person. We were back in my mom’s basement again, drinking beers and catching up until quite abruptly Oscar went to the computer and said that he wanted to show me something. He switched the browser to incognito mode and pulled up a video in which a redheaded British woman put seven hard penises into her mouth, one after the other. The entire time this was happening she looked into the camera and talked about how “yummy” all of the penises were. At one point Oscar stopped the video and pointed to one of the penises.
“That’s me,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t say anything.
Lisa had been accepted into a very prestigious university but had opted instead to move to Spain and work at a luxurious art gallery. Sometimes she would write me emails, but they would all be in Spanish. Instead of haha, she would write jaja—it was annoying. Online, I would peer into her life, and I couldn’t help but notice that she no longer looked like the girl next door. She looked like a girl who lived in Spain. Though we had known each other for most of our lives, I had never noticed that she wanted to be someone else.
That night with Oscar in my mom’s basement, I remembered the video I had made that night on Oscar’s dad’s boat, and it seemed like a good idea to show it to him. I wanted it to be a surprise, so as I started opening and closing closet doors and the drawers to my desk in search of the camera, I continued our conversation as usual, or tried to, talking about college life, what we had heard of our former peers from high school, and other inconsequential matters, but Oscar saw through this and kept asking me what exactly I was looking for, and I kept demurring. Eventually I gave up and sat down with him on the sofa.
“I’m sorry I showed you that video,” he said. “I thought you would think it was cool.”
I thought of the night when I licked the blood off of Lisa’s face and I thought about telling Oscar. I had these urges to share with him—first the movie I’d made, and then that secret moment I’d kept with Lisa.
I could see that I was making him uncomfortable. He didn’t say much else, only continued to work on his beer. Once he was finished, he said, “See you around man,” and left.
In the year that had followed our summer making movies together, we had splintered. Oscar had gotten a job filing papers for his mother’s law firm. Every day after school he would don a shirt and tie and drive over there to file the day’s work. Lisa still came over after school, but we no longer played the same-word-game and instead focused on our own projects. Lisa spent her time studying. While she had always gotten good grades with no apparent effort on her part, she now seemed to be almost competitive about her schoolwork, spending extra time with teachers and reviewing work that had already been completed. As for me, I never wanted to look at my camera again. I had started making collages, sifting through the neighbor’s recycling bins looking for discarded magazines, and eventually going to the transfer station itself and hauling back six or seven grocery bags worth. I would sit at the craft table with an X-Acto knife, cutting photos of people and objects out of old magazines. I collected these snippets in a cigar box, seeing each one as discrete. It was at that time that I began to see the actual world in fragments as well.
My collages were lazy, small-minded projects, but they were only for me. We had enjoyed a year working as a trio, as great friends, but now the time was approaching that we would be split apart. It wasn’t something that we talked about and at the time I never thought about it. The movies became locked in the black box of my mind, as did practically everything else.
