As a side note (and maybe also, I admit, as an overly self-conscious attempt to justify the inclusion of this lengthy footnote), I think it’s worth my pointing out that Triple-J did not, in A Fistful of Fists, include even a partial scene from The Matrix, nor from any of its sequels. Perhaps that disinclusion owes to his having something personally against the film, sure, but then again it might just as easily owe to his never having seen the film (I never thought to ask him if he’d seen it), which could, in turn, indicate that most people Trip’s age haven’t seen the film, and that the phrase “hear the matrix” already, i.e. at this writing, sounds to them anachronistic, if not entirely meaningless.
THE ONLY WRONG PERSON
MY GRANDMOTHER MAGNET USED to, for our Christmas gifts, treat us to tickets to a matinee showing of a movie of her choosing, often popcorn as well. Christmas morning, after opening our presents, we’d eat Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam and powdered sugar, stacks of bacon, fresh-squeezed OJ, coffee for my parents, and hot cocoa for me. To stave off food coma, we’d then go outside and build a snowman on the lawn, or, if that wasn’t possible, head to the playground for a tetherball tournament, after which we’d drive the better part of an hour to whichever theater in my grandmother’s neighborhood was showing the movie she’d picked. Much of our conversation in the car would revolve around guessing what that movie would be; we never knew what it was til my grandmother handed us our tickets in the lobby.
In 1986, my guess was Three Amigos! From the commercials I’d seen, it was obvious to me that Three Amigos! would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with—a movie about characters mistaken for characters those characters played in the movies; ingenious!—and I thought that would’ve been equally obvious to my parents as well, which it may in fact have been, given the speed with which they dismissed my guess, though I entirely misunderstood that at the time. At the time I missed the point. The point was my grandmother, however inadvertently, always picked a lousy movie to see on Christmas.
(In fairness to my eleven-year-old self, it was reasonable for me to have missed that point: the previous year, my guess had been Clue. From the commercials I’d seen, it had been obvious to me that Clue would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with—a movie about characters from a board game; ingenious!—and I thought that would’ve been equally obvious to everyone else, but…No. My mother, who’d guessed we’d see Jewel of the Nile, and my father, who’d guessed we’d see White Nights, thought Clue looked lousy, but not lousy enough, and they not only urged me to guess again, but, when, from pride, I stuck to my guns, they thought that was adorable (at the time, I thought they thought it was adorable that I thought Clue would be a great movie, but what it really was was that they thought it was adorable that I still believed my Grandmother Magnet might choose Clue when there were so many far more obviously lousy movies available to be seen), and they said that if I somehow turned out to be right, they’d buy me a new bike at the end of the school year. And I turned out to be right. That year we saw Clue, which both my parents and my grandmother found to be lousy, but I rather liked. It wasn’t everything I’d hoped for, but I laughed quite a bit, plus it won me a bike; the following June, I’d get my Street Machine.)
But as I was saying: in 1986, I guessed Three Amigos!, Clyde Eye of the Tiger, and my mom Star Trek IV.
Grandmother Magnet had tickets for Platoon.
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Platoon was R-rated and renowned for its violent, depressing content. My mother said it wouldn’t do; I was allowed to see some R-rated movies, but not until after my parents had seen them first and vetted them. My grandmother said they were being overprotective; my mother muttered something under her breath about Sally the Balls; my grandmother ignored my mother’s muttering, and said that Platoon was supposed to be important; my mother said Oliver Stone was a hack; my grandmother said there were already whispers that Platoon would win Best Picture at the Oscars; my mother said the Oscars were just like the Pulitzers; my grandmother said she didn’t see how that could be a bad thing; my mother said that was the problem with my grandmother; my grandmother asked her what in the hell that was supposed to mean; my mother then recited a list of movies that had won Best Picture at the Oscars since 1979; my grandmother insisted they were all important movies, especially Terms of Endearment and Chariots of Fire; my mother said both of those movies were garbage; my grandmother called my mother a snob; my mother said my grandmother was the one who kept talking about important movies, so who was the snob?; and before my grandmother had a chance to respond, Clyde suggested my mother and I should see something else while he accompanied his mother to Platoon. Grandmother Magnet gave us our tickets to exchange (she held on to the bucket of popcorn she’d bought) and walked off with Clyde.
I don’t remember all the movies that were playing, but Three Amigos! wasn’t one of them, and my mother, although she bristled at Eddie Murphy’s standup (“Every other punch line is faggot,” she’d said, which was certainly an overstatement, however true it was in spirit), had been a fan of his sketches on Saturday Night Live, and allowed me to convince her we should see The Golden Child, his latest comedy, and the only non-R-rated comedy playing at the theater.
I thought The Golden Child was great. The jokes contained enough swearing and sex and sexual innuendo that my knowing when to laugh at them—even if I didn’t fully understand a few of them—made me feel clever beyond my years. The joke at which I laughed hardest, however, entailed no swearing, no sex, no innuendo at all. That joke comes in the middle of a chase scene near the end of the movie. Chandler Jarrell (played by Eddie Murphy), who has been tasked with saving and protecting the golden child, and the golden child himself—a young boy from Nepal with magical powers of healing who may or may not be the latest incarnation of the Buddha—have just narrowly escaped the Los Angeles–based Tibetan religious cult/motorcycle gang that had kidnapped the golden child earlier in the movie, and has since (i.e. the gang has since) been trying to get ahold of a special dagger with which to murder the golden child. The two of them—Chandler Jarrell and the golden child—have just gotten into Jarrell’s car. Jarrell, behind the wheel, is afraid, out of breath, and clutching his chest when he turns to the golden child, who’s sitting in the passenger seat, placid as a cow, and Jarrell says to him, “Did somebody give you a Valium or what?”
I don’t know how long I laughed at that line, but it was long enough that my mom, who didn’t initially laugh at all, ended up laughing at how much I was laughing, and eventually set her hand on my shoulder, to still me. “Did somebody give you a Valium or what?” was the single best joke I had ever heard.
Misheard, it turned out.
On our ride back home from the theater, when my father, after reporting that Platoon was “kind of sappy,” asked me how I’d liked The Golden Child, I told him I’d never seen anything so funny, and then I described the scene I’ve just described above, and delivered the line.