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I was thirteen when I saw My Girl, a romantic melodrama made for the sole purpose of jerking the tears right out of teenage girls and their mothers, starring Dan Aykroyd and Macaulay Culkin. It tells the overwrought, saccharin story of Vada Sultenfuss (I’m not making this up), an eleven-year-old girl whose mother has died, whose father owns a funeral parlor, and whose best friend, Thomas J., is “allergic to everything.” As I sat there in the theatre watching the story unfold, its events escaped harmlessly from my memory almost as quickly as the images flickered past on the screen.

Until the moment of Thomas J.’s all-too-predictable death.

Yes, the movie’s plot was certainly manipulative, trying to tug, no, yank at one’s heartstrings at every opportunity, but something happened as I watched the life blink out of this slightly-younger-than-I boy. It was like the filament of my own insulated, comfortable existence was quietly tearing, somewhere in the distance.

The next weekend, I went to see The Hand That Rocks the Cradle at the Orange Showcase Cinemas. Boy, was I in for another afternoon of high-quality early-90s filmmaking. I won’t even bother to summarize the story of this cradle-rocking mess, but during its final reel, Rebecca De Mornay’s character, a homicidal nanny of sorts (this was the era of Basic Instinct, Single White Female, Sleeping with the Enemy, Point of No Return—female leads were predominantly either frigging whacko, frigging vengeful, or frigging both), meets her end by falling (or being shoved, I don’t exactly recall) out a window and through the glass roof of the greenhouse below (I’m not making this up, either).

It was at exactly that moment, as I sat there with my monstrous bucket of popcorn in my lap, watching Ms. De Mornay’s awkwardly contorted, bloody corpse on the screen, that the filament which anchored me to my comfortable obliviousness gave way completely.

Suddenly, I was bathed in a cold sweat. My pants clung to my legs and crotch, and my shirt felt two or three sizes too small. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel the blood pulsing through my ears. My face was hot and seemed to be pushing out against the air, as if my head were expanding. My stomach had flipped itself upside-down and inside-out. My mouth was dry, and the lump in my throat was too large and raw to swallow around.

Without even thinking about it, I was out of my seat and fumbling down the row toward the aisle, out into the hall, and through the men’s room door. I stumbled to the wall of urinals—they were the sort that run all the way to the floor with drains slightly below floor-level—and flushed one. The sounds blurred into their own reverberations: my hand on the metal handle, my sneakers squeaking on the tiled floor, the water rushing drainward. The echo surrounded and consumed me and redoubled itself in its endless amplification and multiplication. The fluorescent light and the shiny chrome and porcelain assaulted my pupils, and the room spun violently. As the water ran down the white enamel wall in front of me, I knelt on the textured floor—tiny grey and maroon squares which scraped my palms—and vomited undigested popcorn and Jujyfruits into the urinal.

As bits of food followed the running water down and were trapped outside the drain beneath me, I thought, This is the moment of my death. This is how I’ll be found. Covered in my own puke, face-first in a movie theatre urinal. And at thirteen, no less.

Continue reading ‘Rebecca De Mornay, Macaulay Culkin, and the Day I Finally Died’