Harry Potter
Tonight at 10:30 a father will polish off a scotch and drive his 11-year-old daughter and her best friend to the midnight screening of Harry Potter, all the while composing an elaborate speech to deliver to his wife later re: the injustice of him having to a) wear a ridiculous lighting-bolt tattoo on his forehead in public just because their daughter would throw a fit otherwise and b) sit through 130 minutes of fantastical inanity when he could just as easily drop the kids off and pick them up afterwards. (Later his wife will remind him of the 8-year-old Hasidic child mutilated without motive in Brooklyn, and they will hug.)
While making his way through the outskirts of the AMC 25 parking lot the father will notice a parked car with fogged up windows and will briefly consider asking its passengers for a hit or two. Which would’ve at that moment been a terrible idea, as in the back-right seat of the car a 19-year-old boy will be cradling a blunt and actually crying, struck by just how much time has passed since his mother (now M.I.A.) first drove him to see the first Harry Potter film on his 10th birthday. The crying kid has 20/20 vision but his tears are fogging up the limited edition Harry Potter glasses he got at a book release party in 2003, which he went to with a girl who at that very moment will be coming dangerously close to biting her left thumb off in the corner of a halfway home in Arizona; she hasn’t seen a Harry Potter movie since Chamber of Secrets.
One of the crying kid’s friends is just openly laughing at him, but in a hysterical and sort of terrifying way that seems completely removed from the situation at hand. The guy in the front seat is trying to rid himself of an erection while staring at a guy and a girl walking a couple of feet up ahead.
“Well somebody’s toking up in there,” the guy a couple of feet ahead says and immediately regrets it, because first off who knows what this girl’s stance on recreational drug usage is and secondly he’s not entirely sure if people still say ‘toke up,’ or if they ever did, or what.
“So anyway yeah as I was saying,” he continues, “I mean I get it—it’s not great literature, or anything, but it’s fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll never forget—I must’ve been thirteen, and my parents, they used to have a timeshare in the Hamptons—it was beautiful, it really was, you would’ve loved it. And the very day that the fifth book came out, I forget its title—”
“The Order of the Phoenix.”
“Right, whatever, so the very day it came out I made my mother drive me all the way into the town to buy it, and so we get home and I settle into my little reading chair and I get forty pages into it before I think, ‘who cares?’ Even then, I knew there were more important things out there—things that really get at what it feels like to be human, alive, you know? And it might sound silly, but that’s really what I try to go for in my own writing. Have I told you that I write? I write.”
“We don’t have to see the movie, if you don’t want to. We can do something else. I can see it another time,” the girl says, thinking that at least he hasn’t tried to kiss her or anything.
But so anyway the movie was sold out and they saw Horrible Bosses instead, which was just fine, if you’re into that sort of thing.
