Untrue Life Stories: Exaggerated Accounts from Unreal Situations, part one
This series will focus on the exploits and the day-to-day life of Brent Orgill (who responds to different names in different audiences), a cinephile with male-pattern baldness and an eating disorder. Brent decided to quit his minimum wage job at a well-known fast food restaurant and become a guerrilla filmmaker - that is to say, he walks around with a cheap video camera and bothers his friends. On his first outing (that is to say, out of his parents' house and past the couple of blocks on the street where he lives), Brent decided to videotape his trip to Arizona to visit his friend, Dane Sears.
Orgill referred to Dane as "The Atheist Pope." Dane was a student physicist, mathematician, and militantly anti-theist. Upon their first meeting, he and Dane became fast friends, despite the fact (or perhaps because of) they were admittedly hard to get along with. In his short time in Rexburg, Orgill had never met anyone quite like him; an atheist.
Brent was expecting a visit full of warmer climate and nostalgia. The Pope had other plans.
When Brent arrived at the address in the taxicab he had acquired at the airport (Orgill doesn't like driving), he wasn't quite sure he was at the right place. It appeared to be an abandoned elementary school. The lawn was dead and yellow; the roof looked as though it could collapse at the faintest of wind; used condoms and needles littered the walkway.
"You sure this is the place?" asked the cabby in a thick Hispanic accent.
"No," Brent smiled. "But I got the feeling it is."
"Place ought to be condemned..." the cabby muttered as he accepted his fare.
Camera in hand, Brent knocked the door. There was no response. So he knocked again. Again, there was no response. Beginning to worry that he looked like a creep standing in front of an abandoned school, he opened the door and waved the cabby off. As he entered, he could hear something stirring in the back. Probably Dane, he thought. Or possibly a homicidal crack whore. Either way.
As Brent approached the cafeteria of the abandoned school, he could smell faint odors of dried vomit and Pine-Sol. Suddenly he heard it; the unexpected, but unmistakable mutterings of an ape. It seemed content, but it made Brent feel decidedly discontent. He called out hopefully, "Dane..?"
Dane popped his head out of the cafeteria. "Brent? Good, you made it!"
Dane looked to Brent like the standard, stereotypical Aryan - "the master race" they so often joked about. His eyes were blue, his head was shaven, giving him an "Anton Goeth meets Anton LaVey" look. Dane took him into the room, and there on a table in a dog kennel was a chimp.
"A bonobo chimp, actually." Dane explained.
"You mean those hyper-sexual chimps?" Brent asked excitedly. "The ones that use sex to express themselves?"
"Yeah, but it's not the one I asked for." Dane said impatiently.
"Wait, so why did you need a chimp?" Brent asked.
"Why do you need to videotape this?" Dane countered.
As they sat at the table, Orgill explained that he was taking up guerrilla filmmaking, and that he intended to film everything. His camera was old (old to the point where it seemed comically oversized), but he got a decent deal for it at a pawn shop - the camera and about two dozen tapes with which to film. Dane, in turn, explained that he was making a very secret, very private experiment to prove evolution once and for all.
Dane, in his time off from school (and between shifts of pizza delivery), had built what he called an "evolution chamber," a capsule which accelerated the evolutionary process.
"But," Brent replied, "how does it work?"
"The answer came to me in a dream," Dane answered. "I know it sounds cliche, but that's how it happened. I was spending my nights mostly playing Dead Space and wondering how I could finally disprove the creationist theory once and for all."
"Hasn't it already been pretty much disproven?" Brent asked. "I mean, I don't necessarily believe evolution disproves the existence of God, but regardless of your theological beliefs, I was under the impression that evolution was pretty much indisputable."
Dane sighed. "The theist's idiocy knows no bounds, Brent. I wanted to take hard evidence and shove in their fat, stupid faces. And the answer has been there all along. Everyone knows it. It's so simple. 2 + 2 = 4."
Brent stood in silence for a minute. "I understand completely," he jested.
Dane smiled. "I wouldn't expect you to understand. But the evidence is there. And it always has been."
"Okay, I'll go along with this, but only because I acknowledge that you're smarter than me," Brent said. "But how do you know this will work?"
Dane smiled and looked at Orgill for a moment before laughing, "This isn't the first time I've conducted this experiment, merely the most elaborate."
Brent sat forward. "When?"
Dane laughed again. "You're not going to believe me."
"Tell me." Brent demanded. "Who was the guinea pig?"
"It actually was a Guinea pig..." Dane answered.
"I see what you did there. Very clever. But dude, just tell me!" Orgill pleaded.
Dane sat back, amused. "You know him as 'Muffinman.'"
Brent sat in silence. Then he stood up and walked around the room, as though in contemplation. Then, he started laughing. "Muffinman," he laughed. "That idiot is an actual Guinea pig. I can totally see it. I knew there was no one dumb enough to call themselves 'Muffinman.'"
"No, you don't understand," Dane laughed. "I named him Kevin. He named himself 'Muffinman.'"
They laughed hysterically.
Orgill wiped away a tear. "Okay, then. What's this fella's name?"
"So far?" Dane answered. "Just 'Experiment Number Two.'"
"What? That's an awful name, man!" Brent exclaimed.
"Well, that's all I got," Dane said. "What else should I do when my last experiment changed his name?"
"Well name him something." Brent shrugged. "How about Admiral Ackbar?"
"Why Admiral Ackbar?" Dane asked.
"Well, why not?" Brent responded. "It's what I suggest everybody name their pets. It's what I suggested my friend Sebastian name his fish, until it was pummeled to death by Boba Fett."
"Fine." Dane replied. "But you're part of this experiment now, so now you're gonna have to help."
Apprehensive, Brent agreed. Dane explained that he had done his best to maintain a natural environment for the bonobo, going so far as to bribe a zookeeper to take care of it for a few days. But there were problems when the other chimpanzees didn't get along with him, forcing the .
"What's considered problem-solving to one chimp is considered rape to another," Brent mused.
"So goes life," joked Dane.
As Brent and Dane strapped a tranquil Admiral Ackbar into the capsule, Dane offered a word of caution.
"Muffinman was a fluke. There was no controlled environment, no natural habitat. Kevin was born in and sold from a pet shop. Admiral Ackbar has been in Arizona fresh out of the Congo for five days. The most time he's spent in a cage is for about 3 hours today. He goes in a bonobo, but we have no certainty of what he comes out as."
They set the dials and sealed the capsule. Dane pulled a lever, and six minutes later, out of the capsule emerged a short, bipedal creature. His cranium was considerably large in proportion to the rest of his body, with a heavy brow. He appeared as a troglodytic dwarf, but with a slender body. Finally, he spoke.
"Out of the jungle... for this? So-called civilization that rejects science and embraces monogamy?"
Brent smiled. "Well, Pope. I think you may have found a friend for life."
Dane smiled back. "So, what are you going to do with the footage?"
Brent shrugged. "I dunno. I never really intended to be the cameraman for the Discovery channel. I guess I'll just wait till something better comes along. Can we go out and do something boring now, like get something to eat and maybe catch a movie? That's what I was under the impression I was going to film."
