“I always knew you were thirsty,” Isabel said.
Erin playfully threw a pillow at her head. “All day errday, girl,” she said.
Another in-joke that I didn’t get. Classic.
I decided to flex an in-joke of my own.
“Hey, Isabel,” I said. “What time is it?”
“The time is 3:21!” came the cheery English voice from Isabel’s wristwatch. I knew I’d killed two birds with one stone when Erin exploded with laughter and Isabel rolled her eyes to mask her embarrassment.
“Did you know it took him weeks to record that?” I said.
“Weeks!” Erin howled.
Isabel’s wristwatch was the product of a side project Rupert L. had spent millions of dollars on. His one and only flaw, as he so often reminded us in interviews, was his inability to tell time on analog clocks. He talked about it the way other people talked about actual afflictions, like diabetes or gluten allergies, but really he’d just missed that day in grade school when they taught kids the difference between the big hand and little hand.
There was the now infamous TV interview Rupert L. did where he recounted his childhood, growing up never knowing the time. The interviewer held up his watch and asked, “Can you tell me what time it is right now?” And Rupert L., using all of the muscles in his face to try and squeeze his tears back into their ducts, replied, “No, Matt. No, I cannot.”
The “telling time problem,” or TTP as it had come to be known, won Rupert L. a lot of sympathy from his fans, so he decided to put all of his money on a line of designer watches that literally told time. Anytime anyone within a ten-foot radius of the watch said, “What time is it?” his voice would come through to tell you. And you had to trust that it was correct, because there were no numbers to be found anywhere on the thing. As such, it totally failed as a watch in the strictest sense of the word. But it gave us his commercial, which was a gold mine for gifs. You’ve probably seen it already, but it’s too good not to describe in its entirety.
It starts, weirdly, with a close-up of his bicep, muscles rippling beneath dark, tattooed skin. The camera zooms out to reveal Rupert L., hair freshly cut in a ’90s-era Fresh Prince hightop taper fade. He’s wearing a tank top, and pumping iron in front of a sky-blue backdrop—the same kind they use in school pictures. Then he launches into a whole diatribe about watches and time and how analog watches are a thing of the past. But the best line in the whole thing is this gem:
“It took me weeks to record my voice on the watches.”
There was something about the way he said “weeks”—loud and squeaky—that always made me and Erin laugh like maniacs. And that was aside from the fact that it had taken him weeks to essentially record himself saying, “The time is” and then counting to fifty-nine. That was all he had to do, really—count to fifty-nine. It wasn’t even like he sang the time.
“You know what he could’ve spent all those weeks doing?” Erin said, her laughter not yet dying down. “Learning to tell time.”
We all liked Rupert L., but that didn’t mean we couldn’t also harp on him a little bit. He was the group’s lovable idiot. (In this case “lovable” is used loosely and “idiot” is used emphatically.)
Isabel was starting to look mad. Well, madder than usual. “You ain’t shit for your Rupert L. shade.”
You probably think it’s a little strange, the way we were talking about Rupert L. You’re asking yourself how we could really call ourselves fans of The Ruperts if we were willing to make fun of one of them. I don’t know how it was in the days of yesteryear (maybe all fangirls were like Apple—blindly devoted), but the fangirls of today are a way more sophisticated bunch. Loving someone so fiercely gave us permission to also be critical of them. You’ll find the biggest Ruperts critics in Strepurs. Sometimes we won’t like a tattoo they’ll get, or we’ll think a haircut makes them look like a drug addict, or we’ll make fun of the way they’ll pose in photographs. Just because we teased did not mean we didn’t also love. Fandom is a complicated culture.
“We should try looking for the boys in the hotel gym,” I said. “Rupert L. is always working out.”
I waited for either of them to say something, especially Isabel, who would’ve probably given up her ability to sneer if it meant getting to see Rupert L. sweating those buns of steel off, but she was too busy with her phone, and by that point so was Erin. So I left them and went into the next room to check out the couch/bed situation. But I didn’t have time to dwell on that, because that was the moment when the proverbial shit hit the fan and our lives as fangirls changed forever.
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