“For me, it’s the money! The YouTube video has made like five thousand dollars already. Keep clicking on that link, you guys,” I say directly to the camera.
Andy is freaking again.
“You’ve made that much?” Pat asks.
“Oh yeah,” I reply. “Also, a bunch of networks ran our video before we gave them permission, so Andy’s dad, who is a lawyer, basically got to extort the networks for a frankly embarrassing licensing fee. I paid off exactly 42 percent of my student loans this week.” And then I wink at the camera.
We went on to talk, of course, about the mystery on everyone’s mind. Pat joked that maybe Carl was sent by space aliens, and because I knew about the Wikipedia sequence and no one else did, I got to confidently say that I knew there was more to the story. But of course I didn’t tell anyone what the more was. I looked cocky, but people either love that or they love to hate it, and in the attention game (which I was playing even if I didn’t know I was), those things are equally good.
* * *
—
So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.
Some people found me precocious and entitled, but that didn’t matter because those people would still watch, which was all the people doing the booking cared about. Other people thought I was refreshing and clever, and, honestly, I liked it. I liked that I was good on camera, and that people were talking about me, and that I was getting more followers on Twitter, and that people were listening to me.
Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.
Power only does all its business of empowering when it’s perceived as a difference between the power of those nearby and, even more important, the power one previously had. And I’m not going to pretend that this weird new confidence combined with this weird new platform wasn’t more than a little bit intoxicating and already getting addictive. They tell you that power corrupts . . . They never tell you how quickly!
In the squishy, leather, new-car-smelling back seat of the Escalade that was driving us to our hotel, I was obsessively checking Twitter and Facebook for Carl news and Andy was not quite amused and not quite annoyed with me.
“Why can’t you just do what they tell you to do?”
“Because that’s boring. You were right when you said a lot of people want to be in my shoes, so I might as well be doing something interesting.”
“It’s like . . .” He was working it out in his head, and then he finally figured it out. “It’s like you don’t have any respect for any of this.”
“Andy, that is exactly it. I don’t. I told you, I’ve never watched any of these shows. I watch almost exclusively 1990s comedies on Netflix. If Pauly Shore calls and asks me on his show, I will be suitably freaked-out, but I just value these things differently than you.”
“But can’t you just see that everyone else is valuing it and respect it for that reason?”
“No, Andy. I’ve honestly worked my whole life to not think that way. I think that’s how a lot of people end up respecting bad things, actually. Not that I think that show we just taped was bad—I’m sure people love it and it makes them happy. I just don’t know enough about it to care.”
I was starting to feel a little bad, but I also wasn’t going to give up on the freedom and the power I’d felt.
“I don’t know if I’m necessary . . . Why am I even here?” he said quietly.
I grabbed him by the face, and he blushed slightly. “Andy, don’t be dumb. You’re here because you’re part of this. And also you’re here to make the videos.”
“Huh?”
“Like you were saying yesterday”—he had been saying it yesterday—“we have a YouTube channel with fifty thousand subscribers. We should make more videos. We should be controlling this story.”
“You want that?”
“I think I do.”
“But . . .” He didn’t have to say all the reasons I had already given him for not wanting to make more videos.
“Don’t start arguing my case back to me . . . You won.”
“A hundred thousand,” he said. “We doubled in the last two days.”
I leaned forward and said to the driver, “Can you take us to someplace that sells cameras?”
That night we made and uploaded the second April-and-Andy video. It was about what our lives had been like After Carl. I made sure everyone knew that Andy was a partner in the channel. (Every time we did a TV thing, there was some confusion because I had faked that he was a stranger on the street in the first video.) I made some jokes about television sucking, but at least there was free food. I only made very peripheral mentions of Carl and I certainly didn’t mention the Freddie Mercury Sequence. Carl wasn’t going to be news forever, I figured, so if we were going to transfer this into something that would last longer than that, we’d have to start differentiating ourselves.
I figured we could maybe turn it into a show about art and design. I could do all the talking; Andy could make the camera work and do the editing. We could even bring in Maya to help us write episodes and do illustration. It’s weird to look back on how we imagined ourselves back then and feel equal parts “Aww, we were so useless and adorable” and “I miss that life so much I would end every panda to get it back.”
Sometime while we were shooting that video, the show aired on the East Coast and I got like five thousand text messages. I didn’t bother to respond to any of them, not even Maya’s. I figured we’d talk soon enough. I was giddy with the attention, with lack of sleep, and with excitement about what Andy and I were doing. I had understood the magnitude of the lightning strike, and we were catching it. Or at least part of it.
But maybe the most energizing thing was that we didn’t have anything to do the next morning. Andy’s dad wanted to get us into an agency to talk about whatever agencies do, but that wasn’t until like three in the afternoon. We were going to get to SLEEP! Really, truly, wonderfully, covered-in-drool, all-by-yourself-in-a-king-sized-bed sleep!
I didn’t even bother to stay up and watch the West Coast airing with Andy. I shuffled to my hotel room to take off my goddamned shoes and my goddamned bra and my goddamned pants and drown myself in fancy high-thread-count hotel sheets.
CHAPTER FIVE
Of course it didn’t work out that way. I looked at my phone, and instead of texting some of the many people who had texted me, I went through Twitter and saw all the things, good and bad, that people were saying about me. And then I opened my inbox . . . like an idiot.
I read and answered an email from Maya and one from my brother, who was proud of me and so excited to see me at his wedding, and one from my parents, who really hoped I was taking care of myself. Then I remembered that email I’d sent to the woman at UC Berkeley. I checked to see if she’d replied. She had, actually, like twelve days ago. I hadn’t seen it—her reply had been buried by everything else and I’d totally forgotten about our conversation.
This turned out to be extremely fortuitous because it allowed me nearly two full weeks of blissful freedom from crushing anxiety. I almost went to sleep one last time like that. One more night of normal. Well, not normal, of course, but not this. I’ve pasted it here completely unchanged (though I did fix some typos because Miranda would have a total meltdown if I didn’t).
RE: You said it was warm?