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Matt Getty: In the Way

Matt Getty: In the Way

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What They Made

I always told Todd it was a game. But Jenna Wilson’s mom told her love was what you made it, and that’s exactly what Jenna did when Todd knocked her up. She made it. I saw the whole thing. Heard about some, but I saw it mostly.

Well, she waltzed in here crying her hair off one night. Heck, I knew what she’d been hiding for weeks, but I waited her out. And then one night she waltzes into my bedroom with her hands cupped on her belly and her eyes all streaked with mascara and that glitter make-up she wears, carrying on about, “I’m having a baby,” “Todd don’t want it,” “What’s going to happen?” – all that ballyhoo. I just sat her down. I said, “Jenna Pearle Wilson, you tell your mamma everything, and we’ll figure something out.” So she did. And then we did.
#
We were drinking one night. Up at the Tavern. It was back when me, Mike, and Chris were all still busting hump for the township. Whenever we didn’t get all grassed up from mowing lawns, we headed over to Freymoyer’s Tavern for happy-hour. She was perched there at the bar. I knew who she was. Everybody knew her from school. She ran with that “them” crowd – those sophomore girls everybody chased back when I was a senior.
She looked good. It was like my dad used to say about a woman – “She ain’t wearing them clothes; they’re wearing her.” That’s the way Jenna was. She had these jeans on so tight it didn’t even look like there was room for skin underneath.
So we’re all playing pool. Me, Mike, and Chris. And I’m not the only one that notices her. Chris scratches two breaks in a row, his eyes were so busy at the bar.
Finally, he walks by me, nods in her direction and says, “Jenna Wilson.”
I say, “I know,” and he’s like:
“Tell you what, I wouldn’t mind getting me some of that.”
Then Mike starts in. Right away he’s mocking Chris in that voice he does. It’s like a German voice – half retarded though. He’s like, “Toll ooh vut, Me vouldn’t mind me some of daht.” And we’re both laughing.
That’s the way Mike is. He don’t care. Chris is a big talker and Mike only cares about the game. He don’t want to listen to Chris tell the story of how him and Jenna were this close to it at some party senior year. Some crap about sitting up in somebody’s bedroom all drunk when she staggers in; him and her talk for a while; maybe he even leans into her – then she passes out. It’s not like it mattered if it happened or not. Chris tells that story on just about every girl that graduated after we did. “Tell you what,” he’d say, “if I had that chance again, I wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.”
But this time Mike doesn’t give him the chance, because right after Mike mocks him, and Chris gets all big-eyed, with his “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike tells him to relax because he’d piss his pants before he even got within five feet of Jenna Wilson.
“Hell I would,” Chris says, and then they’re going back and forth on it for a while, till it turns into a bet.
“I bet you fifty bucks you ain’t got the balls to say two words to her,” Mike says, and Chris is like:
“You already owe me fifty bucks for the nine-ball game you lost a half-hour ago.”
That’s how it got all tangled up with pool, because right after that Mike’s talking about another game of nine-ball and if he wins Chris has to take his bet and try to talk to Jenna. Then after a little more bull-shitting all three of us are shaking hands on a game of cut-throat. Stakes are, whoever wins has to take that fifty dollar bet.
Mike got knocked out early. We’d sunk all the middle balls right off, and then I think Chris was high and I was low. He had two balls left – ten and twelve, I think. So I line up a shot on the twelve, give myself enough draw to come back for the ten, and then I sink that one too, not even thinking a grain about what it means.
Then I turned and it was like, there she was – oh, right . . . I got to do this. But the thing is, five minutes ago, there’s no way I was going up to her. You know? Five minutes ago that barstool she was perched on seemed a whole hell of a lot higher – like it stretched right up to the ceiling. Now, she might as well have been sitting on the floor, because now it was just a bet – just a game.
It’s like Mike always used to say: You got to make it into a game. That’s all. If you want to talk to some chick, you got to look at it the same way you look at an eight-ball combo, or the way you used to wait for Don Flamenco’s swooping punch in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. It’s all in the rhythm – wait, wait, wait, and then go. And if you make it a game, that’s all you think about. You don’t think about how her lip’s going to scowl at you; you don’t think about how her eyebrows are going to shoot up before you even open up your mouth; you don’t think about how she’s going to turn away and leave you with her shoulder; you just think about the game. That's the whole trick right there, and seeing it that way . . . That’s the hard part. If you do that, you’re cruising.
So now I had it already done for me. With the bet on me now, it wasn’t about trying to talk to Jenna Wilson; it was all about winning. Even as I took my first step off the corner of the pool table, she had her head cocked over her shoulder, and her one eye was asking me who the hell I thought I was. But I didn’t care, cause I wasn’t anyone. I was just finishing the game. Wait, wait, wait, and then go. . . Easiest fifty bucks I ever made.
#
He was so cute when he came up to me. It’s like, the first four words out of his mouth were either “Hey,” “Um,” or “Uh.” In fact, I think his first sentence went, “Hey, um, uh, hey.” He sounded like an Indian or something, and I’m all ready to laugh in his face, but I didn’t.
It’s like, I was used to guys coming up to me in bars. I ‘m not saying I’m beautiful or anything. I mean I’m not bad, but I’m no Pam Anderson. Anyway, it happens. You go to a bar; guys talk to you. That’s the way it works. So I saw them from the beginning – him and Mike and what’s his face. They’re looking and talking, slapping around at each other . . . Then they play another game of pool, and I see Todd come walking over to me.
I was so ready to gun him down. It’s like he was too much set to be Mr. Hero for his buddies. Sometimes you do it – you know – just to do it. Sometimes you stare a guy right into the ground, listen to whatever they say, and then turn your back on him. So I’m watching him over my shoulder as he comes up. I even put down my cigarette so I’d be ready to bust out a full spin on him. But then he opens his mouth, and it’s “Hey, um, uh, hey,” and I know he’s OK. This one, I think, feels right – like when you finally slip on the right shoe from the cheap rack. It might have been a size too big, a size too small, but it fits. So I’m all ready to bust out laughing, but the whole time I’m telling myself, “This is happening, Jenna. This fits.” And when I finally couldn’t hold it in anymore, I just smiled.
#
I told him not to start up with her. “Can’t trust her – that’s all.” That’s what I said to him. You know Mike’s too pussy to say it, so somebody has to tell the kid. And look. Look what happened. The girl was a slut. I’m not saying nothing about her now. But whatever Todd’s got to live with today . . . It’s all because of that: The girl was a slut.
#
Jenna had been going with Todd for six months; then they broke up and she found out she was pregnant. That’s the whole story in a nutshell. But then I saw it – or heard some – some from Todd, some from Chris too.
Todd gave her the money for the abortion. Couple hundred bucks – put it right in her hand. She came over to his house one night crying. She had this big hair – big and bleached. This was when she still worked at that barbershop in J.C. Penney’s, so she was always doing something with her hair. Usually she sprayed it way up like a mane, but by the time she got over to Todd’s, it was plastered down to her forehead. Todd came out onto the porch, shut the door, so his mom wouldn’t hear, gave her the money, and he thought that was the end of it.
That’s when Jenna talked to her mom.
#
“OK, so you kids made love,” I told her. “But now you’ve got to make love.” Because that’s all it is. Today, they don’t understand that. These boys and girls bump into each other, have a laugh, rub together a little bit, and they think that’s the end of it. They think it’s all a game, but it ain’t that simple. It’s work really – an endless lot of work. Back when I was dating Stan, things were a little different. People kept their clothes on a tad longer, but truth is – not much changes. Love ain’t all fireworks and slow dances and looking into each other’s eyes. Love is what you make it.
Now, first she was bellyaching about two boys, and I said, whoa Nelly right there. “First things first. You get one boy Jenna – one boy. First thing you got to make is a decision.”
She says there ain’t no decision; it was always Todd.
“OK,” I say. “First thing, right off the top, this other boy. Forget about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t even say his name again. Ever. If you want this Jenna, you’re going to have to work at it. That’s what making love is. It ain’t sex. First thing you learn is that sex ain’t love; second thing you learn is that love ain’t love – love is work. So if you want this, you’re going to have to be willing to do everything I tell you.”
So we set to talking. She tells me all about Todd – about how his daddy left the family when he was young, about how Todd still harps on him, talks him up a storm. So I said that’s it: “Jenna, you don’t talk to that boy, you don’t look at that boy, you don’t see that boy until the baby’s born, and then you bring it to him. If you want him, that’s the way it’s got to work.”
#
First? First, I was pissed. I didn’t want it. I wanted the abortion. It was easy. It was just a word. Neither of us said it, but still, it was just a word. Have an abortion, I thought. She’ll have an abortion. I don’t know how I would have felt if it had happened before all that stuff with her and Tom Jacobs happened, but as it was, we weren’t even together. We hated each other. It was all a big mess. And if you got to choose between a mess and a word, I guess anybody’d take the word.
#
You make mistakes, and then they make you, or you make them right. That’s all. It’s like everyone thinks it’s not going to happen to them. Every girl I’ve known since high school has done some majorly shady things. Everybody. Guys too. Guys especially. Except for them it’s not all that risky. They can break up with you and be done with it, but if they’ve left something behind, it’s all yours to deal with. That’s really how I felt with Todd too – like he’d left something behind. Like, you know how when you break up, there’s like two months of giving stuff back?
After me and Todd broke up, I found out that he’d left behind a pair of sneakers, a Miami Dolphins Jersey, two Led Zeppelin CDs, and a little half-formed baby. The sneakers and all I could give back, but the baby . . . ? I could have had the abortion. Mamma wouldn’t want to know that, but it’s true. She thinks I had to have the baby so then I had to have Todd, but really it’s the other way around. I could have given it back, but it was his, and if it was his, I wanted it.
#
I only ever told Mike about it. Nobody else. He didn’t believe me; I could tell right off. We were driving over to Flying Hills for Thanksgiving the other day and I told him, “You know when Jenna first started dating Todd? You know that night he went crazy and busted up the street lights on River Road because he couldn’t find her all night? She was with me that night.” That night and a bunch of others. Right up until they broke up, and a little while after. Right up until she got pregnant. Mike just looked at me out of the corner of his face. He thinks I’m bullshitting him, so I tell him I’m just kidding. What’s the point – you know? I already did everything I could for Todd. Ain’t no point in telling the truth now.
I guess they had had a pretty big fight. In the beginning they used to always fight about Jacobs – Jenna’s ex-boyfriend. Some guy who graduated a couple of years behind us. Went off to school up at State and then he and Jenna broke up. So she was still digging that nail out when she started with Todd. Isn’t that how they say it? “It takes one nail to get out another.” Sluts.
Anyway, Todd went off half-cocked one night, and just drove off from his mom’s leaving Jenna in a huff, and she came to my place looking for him. What could I do? You got a hot girl all slicked up with tears, talking about how she’s so confused about this guy and that guy . . . ? You offer her a beer. One beer tumbles into two beers, tears get choked back for a couple of laughs, and then me and Jenna tumble into each other, clothes go flying – you fill in the blanks. Shit, I ain’t saying there was anything right about it, but if there was anything wrong with it, you can’t say that I didn’t try to set it right.
Cause two weeks later the two of them were all stitched up at the hip, walking around in a daze, hands all tangled up together everywhere they went. It was sick. I couldn’t watch it. I couldn’t just sit there and swallow this pretty little picture of this girl who I knew – I knew what she was . . . I couldn’t just sit back and watch her turning Todd into her “little man.”
So I kept things up with her as far as I could. Todd was still going cold on her every now and then, so whenever she needed to whine about Jacobs and being confused or whatever, there I was. I thought that’d be enough to do it too. I thought If I said the right words, I’d get her to fizzle out on Todd – before she did any real damage. But she kept going – she just kept ricocheting back between the two of us. That’s when I pulled the shit with Jacobs. I knew there wasn’t anything going on between her and Jacobs, but I knew when State had their Spring Break, so I knew that Jacobs was coming into town the Tuesday before Easter. I also knew that Jenna was planning to go out to the Tavern with Todd that night. So I called her. Told her I had to see her. Even made my voice break up a little bit on the phone.
“What’ll I tell Todd,” she asks me.
“Just tell him you got called into work,” I say. “Tell him you have to work.”
#
This is about eight months after they broke up – seven months after Todd gave Jenna the money for the abortion. I go over to Todd’s on like a Sunday. Chris is already there. Todd’s mom lets me in, sends me back to his room, and I see Todd and Chris sitting in front of the TV playing Nintendo – RBI Baseball. Chris was leaning forward, clicking his thumb away on the button and yelling at the screen because he couldn’t get those fat little men to run around the bases fast enough. Everybody says, “What’s up?” and then I sit down on the bed behind them and I'm like, “Hey, Todd, when’s the last time you seen Jenna.”
He’s like, “Huh?” and he’s barely listening, leaning over to his right. Cal Ripken had just hit a deep fly ball to left field – Chris always used the Orioles – and Todd was trying to run the fat little outfielder under it. So I say it again:
“When was the last time you saw Jenna?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Couple of months ago. Why?”
Then the little white dot – the ball – sails over the fence and into the crowd, and Chris is slapping his knee, shouting, “Cal Ripken, baby!” and Todd is like, “Ooh, Kol Vipken baby,” mocking Chris in this voice he rips off from me.
But then I just go ahead with the conversation, and I say, “You know she’s pregnant?” and Todd’s like:
“She was.”
“No,” I say. “Is. I saw her yesterday. She’s big as a house.”
So then Chris turns around, but Todd keeps looking forward, all like, “No, she’s not” and all.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Actually, I think she is. I was walking through the mall yesterday. I saw her in line at the food court. She’s big as a house. Maternity clothes and all. She’s pregnant.”
Todd was like, “Fuck you,” but Chris kept looking at me until he heard a beep come from the screen. Todd had just struck out Fred Murray, and Chris starts yelling at him, calling him a cheater. But that’s how Todd is – cool about the whole thing. Still playing the game. Never even looks at me.
I tell him, “I’m serious,”
He says, “Fuck you.”
I’m like, “You should give her a call.”
He says, “Fuck you.”
He must have called her that night. He told me all about it later, but he never told me when. He asked her if she had the abortion, and she said yes, but then she started bawling and she asked him if she could come over and see him.
When she got there she was big as a house. Todd was waiting on the porch and he saw her waddle up out of the car, and he’s like, No way.
She was bawling a lot now, but her hair was sprayed up – she’d taken the time to do it up in the mane and put on her make-up. None of it mattered to Todd. He just tells her to “get the fuck out of here.”
Then, they’re both standing on the porch and she grabbed his hand and started bawling the word “please” over and over again. Then: “Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”
“Go fuck yourself and die,” Todd said to her. “Go fucking die!” And he just shook her off and told her to get out of there.
Todd ain’t normally like that. He gets mad and all, but he’s a good guy. I guess I should say why. I mean, he don’t really know I know, but the reason Todd was so torqued up was because Chris’d told him that he’d seen Jenna giving her ex-boyfriend a blow-job in his car. That’s why they’d split up. Todd never talks about it though. If you ask him why they broke up that first time, he says it’s just because he started feeling pressured. And normally I don’t put too much water in what Chris has to say, but when Todd told me how he went off on Jenna like that, I figured that was the way it worked.
#
It was simple – I just told him to call up Penney’s. See, it was my word against hers and it’s not like she could tell him the truth. I said I saw her doing the kneel and bob in the driver seat of Jacobs’ El Camino the Tuesday before Easter and she said she was at work. Tells him she got called in like I told her to say. All right, he thinks. Fine. But then I tell him what I saw.
First, he’s like, “No way. You’re bullshitting.” We were standing out in his back yard shooting hoops, and he just kept right on chucking.
I grabbed the rebound, bounced the ball once and then looked him dead in the eye. “Hey man,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t bullshit you on this. It’s not like I enjoy saying it.”
He had his hands up by his chest, waiting for me to toss him the ball, but then he just kind of let them go limp. “Nah,” he says. “Jenna’s not like that. I can trust her,” so I’m like:
“Well, if you can trust her, why don’t you call up the Salon at Penney’s. Tell them you want to know the name of the girl who cut your hair last Tuesday so that you can ask for her again. Then ask them if there was a girl named Jenna there? If you trust her, you got nothing to worry about.”
So he brings his hands back up to his chest, calls for the ball like he’s ignoring me and I give it to him. “Nah,” he says. “I trust her.” But I already know he’s going to call, because he spins into this little ten-foot fade away, and we both watch the ball arc up and down, and then splat against the pavement without even touching the rim.
#
So Jenna just went home after Todd went off on her, and nothing happened for a couple of months except phone calls – hang ups, star-sixty-nines, all the normal break-up stuff, only up a notch. Then she has the baby.
So this is like two weeks after Jared was born: I was over at Todd’s with Chris again. Me and Todd are playing Nintendo; Chris is sitting behind us on the bed. Darryl Strawberry had two strikes on him – I always played with the Mets – but I wasn’t swinging at anything. I was trying to work the count to full. The bases were loaded, there were two outs, it was the bottom of the ninth, and I was down by three runs. It was like a story-book set-up. I remember I’d gotten the count to two and two when we heard the front door open. First we just heard some talking out there, so we just figured it was one of Todd’s mom’s friends. Then, Todd gives me a fast ball over the outside corner of the plate, I hit the button to swing, Strawberry pops up a weak infield fly, and Jenna Wilson walks into the room carrying a baby.
We all looked up from the game. Todd’s mom was standing behind Jenna, and she said Todd’s name. Todd stood up and looked at the baby. It was all wrapped up in this light blue cloth – you could barely see its face. Todd opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out, and then Jenna held Jared out to him. She had her hair sprayed up, but she wasn’t bawling. Her face just screwed itself up into this stare, and her mouth was like a line, like she was thinking: There – there’s our baby. But she didn’t say anything.
I remember I looked at Todd’s mom – her face was all soft and curved – then I looked back at the TV and saw that Strawberry’s pop-up had landed in front of Todd’s shortstop.
And Todd just stood there. He looked at Jared for a while, and then he smiled. Then he laughed. Then, he put his face in his hands and started bawling.
Two weeks later Todd and Jenna moved out to one of the town houses in Flying Hills. Jenna’s dad got Todd a job running their grounds crew, and they got married the next year.
Me and Chris split pretty soon after Todd started bawling, but when I first stood up, I kept the Nintendo controller in my hand. I looked at Jenna, Todd, Todd’s mom, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see the TV screen, and I could see my base runners moving around the bases. Chris is up and off the bed, holding his mouth open and staring at Jenna and the kid, and she ain’t looking at anything but Todd. I gave Chris a look like, Guess we’d better jet, but even then I kept my thumb pressed down on the controller and I didn’t let go until I heard four little beeps, one for each of the four little fat guys who slowly crossed over home plate to win the game.
#
Todd likes what Mamma said about “making it.” He talks about it a lot, busts the phrase out every now and then. But the truth is it didn’t really go like that. She don’t know, but I went to see him before Jared was born. I had to. I wasn’t going to just bust out this baby on him one day like that. I knew it too. I knew I didn’t have to trick him into it. It’s like once I saw him that night, standing up on his porch while I was climbing out of my car all eight months pregnant, I just knew. He didn’t get mad or anything. He just stood there looking at me, and then he started crying. Never said a word, just looked at my fat belly and cried – like he was a little kid looking at something he’d broken.
We hugged a bit on the porch, then I pulled away and left – not because I knew I had to – like Mamma told me. It was more like because I knew I was supposed to – like that’s the way they’d write the scene if it was in the movies or on TV. Just walk away.
See, Mamma says it’s work, but I think there’s a lot of play in it too. Cause up till I had Jared, Todd would call me up and go on about me and Jacobs – that was the real pebble in the shoe. I kept telling him it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t say anymore than that, so eventually I just decided I had to play along. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” And the funny thing is I was. I played sorry, and then I was. It’s like with what’s his face. Yesterday, me and Todd had a bunch of us over for Thanksgiving – Mamma, Mike, and then Todd wants to invite what’s his face, who he knows I can’t stand. So what can I do? I smile as I pass him the Stove Top, I laugh at his dumb joke about the nun and the bus driver . . . I even gave him a hug goodbye. “It was so nice to see you,” I said to him. And it’s funny, but you play the game like that, and there’s nothing that can touch you. It’s like everything . . . It’s like when I talk to Jared these days, I can hear myself imitating my mother, you know? Like a big play. But it’s wonderful really. It’s not just work. It’s actually – I don’t know – kind of fun.
#
Well, that’s it. That’s the whole ballyhoo. She showed him the baby, Stan got him a job and a place up at Flying Hills, and they’ve been married for three years. I guess now’s the point where I say, “It was all because of me.” Jenna and Todd turned out fine all because of me. But to tell it plainly, I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for any of it.
I drove up to their house yesterday for Jenna’s little Thanksgiving party, and between those two hooligan friends of Todd’s – one with his dirty jokes, the other . . . the other’s like a gosh-darned five year old, always playing games . . . Then you got Jared. What with his Star Wars toys and his PlayStation, that boy’s so spoiled he don’t listen to no one. It’s a mess. A mess. Now she’s got Todd walking around quoting me too – “Love is what you make it.” Well, I’ll tell you what they made. Those two kids didn’t make nothing but a mess.
#
It’s hard, yeah, but that’s the way it should be. It’s hard, but sometimes I feel like that’s what’s right about it. It’s like when we used to do double sessions for football in high school. It was hard as hell, but by senior year we kind of liked busting our humps, because we knew how good it was for us. That’s how it goes. It’s all what you make it.
Yesterday we had them all over for Thanksgiving, right? Mike, Chris, Jenna’s Mom. And after dinner things got a little bit rocky. Jared is showing Mike how to play the new Mario Brothers game on the PlayStation, and Jenna’s mom starts pestering Jared back to the table for some apple pie. So Jared don’t want no pie, and when Jared don’t want to hear you, he’s got this way of just tuning you out, so pretty soon, Jenna’s Mom is shouting at him, and then Jenna’s chirping back and forth with her Mom for a while, and Chris gives me this look, like: Man, look at what you got yourself into. But the truth is, it’s all right. It’s like double sessions; it’s hard but it’s good . . . Cause I’m just looking at Mike and Jared on the floor focussed on the TV with their controllers in their hands, and I’m like: that’s my kid; that’s my buddy; that’s my wife; that’s her mother; that’s the way they talk; and this is the way we live. It’s good, you know – it works.
#
So she got him anyway. I went over there with Mike yesterday and saw the whole thing – wife, kid, mother-in-law, wall-to-wall carpet, turkey dinner. The whole shit and shabootle. Can’t say I didn’t try to help him.
I remember she told me one night that they were going to “make it.” One night before she had the baby, I’d called her up – or she called me – whatever. Anyway, she said to me: “Me and Todd are going to make it, and you can’t stop it” – all drama-queenie and shit.
So I’m sitting there after dinner yesterday, and I look around and I think to myself, well, all right, this is what they made. And that’s what kicks me in the ass – that’s what gets me. I look around at the imitation oak Ikea furniture, the kid in his little flannels and Baby Gap jeans, the knick knack crap all over the walls – “Bless This Home,” wooden spoons, egg beaters . . . And it’s all so ordinary. I mean after all her work, I look around and it’s all so ordinary.
Thing is, you look at Todd’s face long enough, you look at the way he looks at it, and you’d think it glowed. I swear, if Mike spends enough time over there, he’s going to be looking to get married pretty soon himself. It’s like a virus or something. Even me. I’m sitting there after dinner trying to tell this joke I heard from the road crew guys last week. It’s about a cab driver and a nun. You know – the one where the cab driver admits he’s not a cab driver and the nun admits she’s not a nun, cause she’s just a queer going to a costume party. Anyway, I’m halfway into it and I’m looking around at all their faces. I see Todd looking at his kid over there on the floor playing video games with Mike, and all of a sudden I see it too. Suddenly the kid and all the Ikea shit get this little glow cause of how he looks at it, and now I feel like I’m in church or something. Like the whole place is suddenly too good for me, but too good only because it’s so goddamned ordinary. I don’t know. I got through the joke, but every time I went to say “ass” or “fuck” I ended up saying “butt” or “screw” or some shit. It just didn’t work.
#
So it ends like that. It ends with Jared. He’s all right too. He’s a cool little kid. It’s like he’s got everything he wants and he’s just chilling with it. He’s got the new PlayStation. Man, it’s a trip. I was over there yesterday for Thanksgiving – Todd and Jenna put out a whole spread – and Jared’s showing it off to me. The new Super Mario Brothers Game. Little kid – four years old – he don’t even know how to play the game; he just takes the controller and runs the little man around. But that’s the thing, the way the game is now, that’s all you have to do. Remember the crappy little Nintendo Mario Brothers? All you could do was move right or left. Well this one’s like three dimensional, and it’s endless. You can go up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards. There’s like a whole world in there and it never ends.
So at first I’m like, “Hey Jared, you got to pick up the little coins.”
He ignores me for a while. Then he says, “I just like running around.”
“But if you want to get points,” I tell him, “you got to pick up as many coins as you can. That’s how you play the game.”
Then he looks at me – the little guy’s pretty smart. He looks right at me and he goes, "Nah, that’s like doing chores. I just like running around.”
So then Jenna’s mom starts calling him back to the table, but Jared’s just chilling with Mario so he don’t even hear it. Pretty soon, Jenna and her mom start getting into it about the kid, then Chris starts telling some lame joke to Todd who’s ignoring him because he can’t take his eyes off of his kid playing this video game. I started to feel like me and Chris shouldn’t have been there – like maybe these people needed some privacy.
Then I got to looking around and thinking how all these people here don’t know how much I know about them. Todd don’t know that I know about Jenna and Jacobs, Jenna don’t know that I know about how Todd told her to “fuck off” that first night she came over pregnant, and Mrs. Wilson don’t know that I know she’s the one who put this whole thing together. Then I got to thinking about what Chris said on the way over.
He told me some bullshit story about how him and Jenna had been going behind Todd’s back the whole time they were dating. Even tells me to take a real good look at Jared. “Little tike might be mine,” he says. That’s the way Chris is. He’s all right, but he’s basically got all the class of a . . . I don’t know, something without class, I guess. Anyway, he told me he was just kidding, and I knew it was bullshit from the start, but still, it got me thinking: If I know stuff that they don’t know, there’s probably a whole heap of a lot of stuff they know that I don’t know.So I sat there with Jared. He’d given me the controller, and now I’m Mario running around in this little world. I climbed up on some mountain, fell in some water, jumped over some mushrooms, and pretty soon I’m lost. So I turn to Jared and I’m like, “Jared, how do I get back to the coins?” Course, he don’t even answer, and I’m thinking, look who I’m asking for advice. Then it’s like, yeah, I’m lost. And I’m here with Todd, Jenna, their kid, their mom, Chris, and I’m thinking about what I know that they don’t know. And I’m thinking about what they might know that I don’t know. And then I figure it’s all just endless. Cause when I picture Todd screaming on the porch, and Jenna holding out the baby in Todd’s bedroom, and Jenna’s mom yelling for Jared to get back to the table, I figure it’s all just as endless as the game.