Timmy Failure It’s the End When I Say It’s the End Page 2
else.”
“I get to do lighting!” shouts Nunzio
Benedici, pulling a piece of paper out of the
hat. “I guess I just turn the lights on and
off!”
“Well, it’s a little more involved than
that,” says Mr. Jenkins. “But it is relatively
easy.”
“I’m craft services!” shouts Rollo, pulling
his hand from the hat. “Wait. What’s that?”
“You bring the food,” answers Mr.
Jenkins.
“My mother is the greatest cook ever!”
exclaims Rollo. “Will I be graded on her
macaroni and cheese?”
“Perhaps,” answers Mr. Jenkins. “If she
brings enough for me.”
“Absurd!” I cry, pointing at Rollo and
Nunzio. “Rollo just has to eat pasta, and
Nunzio’s gonna turn off the lights when he’s
done. How fair is that?”
“Stop complaining, Timmy, and reach
into the hat.”
So I reach into the hat to pick a job.
“With your eyes closed,” says Mr.
Jenkins.
So I reach into the hat again, this time
with my eyes closed.
And grab a slip of paper.
And suddenly, my retirement is ruined.
“How am I supposed to write an entire
movie?!” I yell to my mother that night.
“Hush,” she says, “I’m trying to watch
TV.”
So I stand in front of the TV to get her
attention.
“What in the world are you wearing?”
asks my mother.
“It’s my smoking jacket and pipe,” I
answer. “Given that I am now retired from
detective work, I am supposed to be a man of
leisure.”
“Where’d you get that pipe?”
“Husband Dave gave it to me.”
“No, I didn’t,” says Husband Dave, seated
beside her on the couch. “He must have
taken it from my sock drawer.”
“Give me that,” she says, taking the pipe
from my mouth.
“You are no help at all,” I tell Husband
Dave.
“Timmy, we have a whole extra bedroom
in this townhouse,” says my mother. “It’s
quiet. It has its own computer. Just go in
there and write. Because the two of us would
like to watch this film.”
“Looks boring,” I say, glancing at the
screen. “What is it?”
“It’s about a big, fancy ship that hits an
iceberg,” says my mother. “And there’s a
man and a woman and they fall in love and
they kiss.”
The next day at school, I turn in my proposed
film synopsis.
“Timmy,” says Mr. Jenkins, “you just
stole the plot from the movie Titanic.”
“Artists don’t steal,” I reply. “They
borrow.”
“Yes, but you stole.”
“Fine. What if I change it slightly and have
the boat hit an elephant?”
“How did elephants get into the ocean?”
“Parachuted from airplanes,” I answer.
“Timmy, you have to come up with your
own idea,” says Mr. Jenkins. “That’s all
there is to it.”
“But I’m a detective, not a writer! We
don’t write stories—we ARE the story!”
“Yeah,” he says, leaning back in his chair
and putting his feet on the desk.
“Yeah, what?” I answer.
“You said you wanted to write your
memoirs, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, instead of doing that, why not turn
them into a film?”
“I have never seen you work so hard on
anything in your life,” says my mother,
peeking into my writing hovel, formerly
known as the extra bedroom.
“Mother, I’m in the midst of a
particularly compelling piece of dialogue.
And the muse is a fickle master. Please.
Give this writer space.”
She reaches down and lifts a page of my
screenplay from the floor.
“Wow,” she comments.
“Which draft are you reading?” I ask.
“This one,” she says.
“That’s the first scene,” I tell her.
“That’s quite an entrance.”
“Yes,” I answer. “My problem now is that
the screenplay is limited to one hundred
pages. And my birth sequence alone is
seventy-five pages.”
“Maybe you can cut out some parts.”
“No. It’s all inspired work. So nothing
can be deleted.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re excited about it.
But just five more minutes, okay? You have
school tomorrow and I don’t want you to be
exhausted.”
“Got it.”
“Five minutes,” she says. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I stayed up all night writing this,” I
proclaim to my classmates, all gathered
together at the city library for our film
project meeting. “And it is a masterpiece.”
“Not sleeping is bad for your health,”
says Molly Moskins. “You could have died.”
“I know,” I answer. “But sometimes
that’s the price of art.”
“I don’t want to die,” says Rollo Tookus.
“I just want to get an A.”
“I should tell all of you one thing right
now,” I continue. “And that is that I plan on
running a very tight ship on this film. So if
any of you are less than fully committed to
my vision, you should probably leave now.”
Angel de Manzanas Naranjas rises and
heads for the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I’m not even partially committed,” he
says.
The library door slams behind him.
“None of you saw that,” announces Toody
Tululu, hopping to her feet.
“Why not?” asks Nunzio Benedici, seated
next to her.
“Because I’m in charge of publicity on
this film, and we can’t have the world finding
out that the production is already falling
apart.”
“Nothing is falling apart,” I remind them.
“I have everything under control.”
“Can we talk about costs?” asks Corrina
Corrina. “Because I’m the producer and I
have to see to it that we don’t spend more
than the nine hundred dollars Mr. Jenkins
is giving us.”
“None of you are going to worry about
costs,” I say without looking in Corrina
Corrina’s direction. “The bar scene alone will
cost ten times that.”
“What bar scene?” asks Rollo.
“I walk into a bar filled with mobsters,
and one by one I throw each of them out a
tenth-story window.”
“The actors could die,” interjects Molly.
“I vote that nobody dies in this film.”
“No one is gonna die,” I remind her.
“Because we have trained stuntmen.”
“Who?” she asks.
“Max Hodges,” I tell her
.
“I’m not a trained stuntman,” interrupts
Max.
“You will be,” I assure him.
“No, I won’t,” answers Max, standing up.
“Because I’m going home.”
Max opens the library door and leaves.
“Fine,” I answer. “We’ll just make Gunnar
or Jimmy Weber or Nunzio the stuntmen.”
“No way. I’m in charge of lighting,” says
Nunzio, springing from his seat and turning
off the lights.
We are momentarily in darkness.
When the lights are turned back on,
Gunnar and Jimmy Weber are gone.
“Oh, God,” says Toody Tululu. “This
whole thing is a disaster.”
“There will be no talk of disasters,” I
announce. “You will all be proud to say you
were a part of this film.”
“I don’t even know what it’s about,” says
Scutaro Holmes.
“It’s about a boy and his polar bear,” I
explain. “And you, Scutaro, are lucky enough
to be playing the polar bear.”
“Do I get to eat anyone?” asks Scutaro.
“Only the evil ogre.”
“Who’s the evil ogre?”
“Principal Scrimshaw,” I explain.
“Timmy,” interjects Rollo, “we can’t
make a film where a polar bear eats our
school principal. We’ll get a bad grade.”
“Yes, well, if need be, I have a PG-rated
version where the polar bear just chases
Scrimshaw off a cliff and he falls to the
valley floor.”
“Then he better bounce off the valley
floor!” yells Molly. “And live happily ever
after.”
“Okay,” says a voice from behind us,
“you guys are gonna have to keep your voices
down.”
We all turn to see the city librarian, Flo,
standing behind us.
“I’m fine lending you kids one of our
conference rooms to work on your film, but
not if you’re gonna be loud.”
“Sorry, Flo,” I tell him. “We’re having
artistic differences.”
“But please don’t tell anyone,” adds Toody
Tululu.
“All right, well, we’re closing up anyway,”
says Flo. “You have two minutes.”
“But, Flo,” I plead, “I still have to explain
my artistic vision. That’ll take hours.”
“Do it in two minutes,” Flo says as he
walks out the conference-room door.
With Flo gone, I sit quietly, thinking of
how I can cram my brilliant vision of the
film into a mere two minutes.
And then a boy wearing a scarf speaks
up.
“I don’t need to hear your vision,” he
says. “I have my own.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” I say to the
boy with the scarf after we both leave the now-
closed library.
“Tom John John,” he answers.
“What kind of a name is that?”
“What do you mean? My name is Tom,
but that’s my dad’s name also, so my family
calls me by my first and middle names put
together, which is ‘Tom John.’”
“But you said ‘John’ twice.”
“Yes, ‘John’ is our last name also.”
“That’s quite odd,” I tell him.
“Not as odd as forcing all of us to make a
film about your life,” says Tom John John.
“Did Mr. Jenkins approve that?”
“Yes, he approved it,” I inform him. “It
was his idea. And if you’d like to contribute
to the film, perhaps I could find you a job
bringing me coffee or feeding the mules.”
“Yes, well, I have a much different concept
of our respective roles.”
“Well, good for you, Tom John John, but
I’m the writer, and when it comes to a film,
there is nobody more important than the
writer.”
“Yes, there is,” he answers.
“No, there’s not,” I reply.
As we argue, I see Rollo Tookus waiting
for the bus to pick him up from the library.
So I turn to him to break the tie.
“Hey, Rollo, tell this kid with the scarf
who the most important person on a film is.”
“The director,” Rollo shouts over the
rumble of his arriving bus.
“A director?” I yell back at him. “Who’s
ever heard of a director?”
“Mr. Jenkins explained it all to us,”
answers Rollo as he boards his bus. “But I
think you were writing your memoirs.”
“All right, fine,” I shout. “Say there is
such a thing as a director, what’s he do?”
“He’s in charge of the whole film,”
answers Rollo from his seat on the bus.
“The whole film?” I mumble as the bus
starts moving. “Then who’s this clown?” I
yell, pointing at Tom John John.
Rollo pokes his head out the window
of the departing bus and shouts:
“He’s the directorrrrrrr!”
“Tom John John is a transfer student,”
says my mother as we drive in her car. “I
think one of the parents said his family hops
around a lot. Mostly in Europe.”
“So we can deport him,” I tell her.
“Kick him out of the country? No,
Timmy. We can’t kick him out of the country.”
“But he wears a scarf. It’s very pompous.”
“You wear a scarf, Timmy.”
“Yes. And it makes me look quite
distinguished. He, on the other hand, looks
buffoonish.”
She stops the car in front of a storage
facility.
“Is this where your storage unit is?” I
ask.
“Yep.”
“Why do we even have a storage unit?”
“Because when we moved out of our
house, I had nowhere to keep the stuff from
our garage,” she says as she unlocks the
padlock on the large metallic door. “Now,
help me push this door up.”
We push up the large metallic door and I
see a large array of boxes.
“This place is huge,” I tell her. “Have you
thought about living in here?”
“No, Timmy. We have a nice home.”
“Yeah, but what if Husband Dave gets on
your nerves? You could hide here.”
“I’m not gonna hide in a storage unit,
Timmy.”
55
“Well, maybe I should have a key. In
case Husband Dave gets on my nerves.”
“Are you gonna start looking through
these boxes or not?” she asks. “You’re the
one who wanted to look for something.”
It’s true. I did.
And there, on top of a box, I find it.
It’s a well-known fact that many advanced
mammals can communicate over long
distances.
For lions, it is a roar that can echo
across canyons.
For whales, it is a tone that can carry for
miles underwater.
And for polar bears, it is the fax
machine.
Not much is kno
wn about how polar
bears got their hands on so many fax
machines. Some speculate that when people
started discarding them in the 2000s, they
were scooped up by polar bears posing as
Goodwill truck drivers.
Though we’ll never know for sure.
In any event, the way a fax machine
works is this:
You stick a piece of paper into a machine
that reads all the information on the
paper.
Then you dial the fax number of
whomever you want to send the document to.
Then, like magic, the other person’s fax
machine spits out an identical copy of your
document.
At first, polar bears were confused by
the technology. They thought that when you
stuck a piece of paper into a fax machine, it
magically flew through the air to the other
person’s fax machine, the same as if you had
just folded it up into a paper airplane and
sailed it over to your friend.
As such, they tried to use it to send
bologna.
But once they figured out the technol-
ogy, polar bears created a vast network of
communication capable of spreading news,
sharing gossip, and finding relatives.
“This is how we’re going to find your big
brother,” I explain to Total, holding the fax
machine I got from my mother’s storage unit.
He just stares at it.
“And we’ll keep it here in my writ-
ing hovel, which will also serve as our
headquarters for this top-secret mission.”
“WHATT for short,” I inform him.
Total is so happy, he hugs me.
“All right, let’s not get emotional,” I tell
him. “I’m only helping you because we’re