The Idiots

A true-enough story from 2009

In some ways, the summer of 2009 was the peak of my life. I’d just finished middle school; at our school’s faux-graduation, Moving Up Day, I received a “diploma,” printed on laminated yellow paper, that read “Matthew Danger Lippman.” My gym teacher, Ms. L******, put the name down, following my request, to “shame” me in front of my parents and peers. “Let’s see if they find ‘Danger’ so funny.” My rap group, the Default Code, even performed at the ceremony.

By the end of that year, I’d start drinking and smoking weed, and get my first kinda-girlfriend; these things all imbued socializing with a paranoid, hyperaware element. None of that existed for me in the summer of 2009: I had nothing but free time; my “sex life” was twice-a-day masturbation and texting with my bros about how horny we were. Our social sphere was the semi-suburban mile between my house and the local Target. It all felt important to me, and worth canonizing. So that summer I set out to make a documentary.

The stars were me and my friend R***. R*** was a master thief. We’d go into Target, and he’d come out, HDMI cords and guitar cables wrapped around his legs, CDs and DVD players wedged into his cargo pants in the most inventive ways. Afterward we’d smash most of our winnings in the parking lot. Then we would go to the ice cream shop next door and play a game: we’d trade off on who was the mentally retarded kid and who was the handler. I would spill ice cream on myself and start crying, and then the next day he’d walk up to families and wave with a dangly slow “hi. Hi. Hi.” I brought my camera around and filmed us the whole summer, convinced I was making something edgy and important, like Kids, that would kickstart my career. Years later I would discover that we were essentially remaking Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots. The footage even kinda looked the same.

One day, late into the summer, we stopped into Subway for a lunch break. I ordered a turkey sandwich. The sandwich artist, a tan guy with black hair and a thin mustache, pointed at my camera: “you making a movie?” I explained that we were making a gritty documentary about our lives as middle-school graduates. “Y’know,” he said, looking both ways, “I’m a student at UB for film. I’ve even edited a couple of the local ads on Channel 2. Y’know those ads, Fuccillo Automotive? ‘It’s gonna be HUUUUUGE?’ I edited that.” R*** and I gasped. This was the closest in my 14 years I’d ever been to an industry insider.

He introduced himself as K*** T****. He told us he had an editing suite in his basement, with high-tech equipment “that even Tarantino would be jealous of.” He offered to edit our movie for free; “I could use the credit, and it would be fun to hang with you guys. This retarded kid movie sounds genius.” I gave him a piece of paper and he scrawled his email address – something with “dungeon master” in it, something like d*ngeonmaster1270@***.com. “Come over and let’s make your movie.”

R*** and I left in a state of shock. We made a plan to make our film more “legit” for K***, spending the next weeks stealing more, bigger items. We had our friend J** pretend to be mentally challenged, stole some Silly String, and sprayed it into his mouth in the ice cream shop while he screamed. Someone yelled at us to stop picking on someone with disabilities. It was our best footage yet. A couple weeks later, we stopped back into Subway. K*** was there.

“Matt! R***! Where ya been? I thought we were making our movie!”

I clarified that we’d been working hard, and wanted to incorporate him only when we were at the editing stage. “It’s all good, man, I totally understand. I’ve just been desperate to get to work with you guys.” I went to pay for my turkey sandwich. He told me that all our sandwiches were on-the-house. “I just wanna get you guys in a room and make the next Pulp Fiction.” I thanked him for the sandwich and the encouragement, feeling the most legit I’d ever felt in my life, and told him I would email him soon.

I never did. R***’s mom washed his cargo pants, and the note with K***’s email address was in the back pocket. The address had become an illegible scribble. We checked Subway a couple times, but it never turned out to be during one of K***’s shifts. Summer ended, we started high school, and the Saturday before school started I saw my friend A***** L** suck his own dick at a sleepover. It was all anyone could talk about. We completely forgot about our movie.

A couple months later, I opened Facebook and was greeted with two images of K*** – his front and side profile. My friend Anna had posted a photo album entitled “PEDOS IN THE AREA.” It was a collection of mugshots of every convicted pedophile in our 5 mile radius. I was shocked to see his image with the description “K*** T**** – 39 years old. Actual, Sexual Contact. Victim age: 7 years old.” Turns out he had gotten out of prison only 2 years before we’d met him.

I sent it to R*** — “is this our K***?” It was him alright. We traced back everything that he’d said to us. Suddenly it didn’t seem so likely that he was a college student. We wondered what would have happened if we’d gone into his “dungeon.” We debated what we should do about it. Eventually we had the idea: we made a rap song about it. The Default Code put out a new single, “I Met A Predator on the Predator,” in which we envisioned my meeting K*** on the Six Flags ride the Predator. “A man sat next to me and in a voice so tender / said ‘I’m a convicted sex offender.’” It was met with very little enthusiasm. Within a year the rap group broke up. R*** became addicted to Robotripping and flunked out of 9th grade. I never went to that Subway again.