#6. Fire&Tyler
JACK: Home was a condo on the fifteenth floor of a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.
The walls were solid concrete. A foot of concrete is important when your next- door neighbor has to watch game shows at full volume.
Or when a blast of debris that used to be your furniture and personal effects blows out your floor- to-ceiling windows and sails flaming into the night.
JACK: I suppose these things happen.
DOORMAN: There's nothing up there.
DOORMAN: You can't go into the unit. Police orders.
DOORMAN: Do you have somebody you can call?
JACK: How embarrassing. A houseful of condiments and no food.
JACK: The police would later tell me that the pilot light might have gone out letting out just a little bit of gas.
That gas could have slowly filled the condo. Seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings for days and days.
Then, the refrigerator's compressor could have clicked on...
MARLA: Yeah. I can hear you breathing...
JACK: If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I called him.
JACK: Hello?
TYLER: Who's this?
JACK: Tyler?
TYLER: Who's this?
JACK: We met on the airplane. We had the same suitcase? The clever guy?
TYLER: Oh, yeah. Right.
JACK: I called a second ago. There was no answer. I'm at a payphone.
TYLER: Yeah, I star-sixty-nined you. I never pick up my phone. What's up?
JACK: Well. You're not gonna believe this.
TYLER: Could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you're asleep and toss it out the window of a moving car.
JACK There's always that. I don't know. When you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that's it. That's the last sofa I'll ever need. No matter what else happens, I've got the sofa issue handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent. A wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.
TYLER: Shit, man. Now it's all gone.
JACK: All gone.
TYLER: Do you know what a duvet is?
JACK: A comforter.
TYLER: It's a blanket. Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of a word? No. What are we, then?
JACK: I dunno. Consumers.
TYLER: Right. We are consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty. These things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine. Viagra. Olestra.
JACK: Martha Stewart.
TYLER: Fuck Martha Stewart. She's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down,man. Fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let's evolve. Let's the chips fall where they may. But that's me, and I could be wrong. Maybe it's a terrible tragedy.
JACK: It's just stuff. Not a tragedy....
TYLER: You did lose a lot of versatile solutions fot modern living.
JACK: Fuck, you're right. I don't smoke. My insurance probably gonna cover it, so... What? TYLER: The things you own end up owning you.
TYLER: Do what you like, man.
JACK: God, it's late. Hey, thanks for the beer.
TYLER: Yeah, man.
JACK: I should find a hotel. What?
What?
TYLER: A hotel?
JACK: Yeah.
TYLER: Just ask, man.
JACK: What are you talking about?
TYLER Oh, God. Three pitchers of beer and you still can't ask. Just ask me.
JACK: What?
TYLER: You called me up, because you needed place to stay.
JACK: Oh, hey. No, no,no.
TYLER: Yes, you did. So just ask. Cut the foreplay and just ask, man.
JACK: Would.... Would that be a problem?
TYLER: Is it a problem for you to ask?
JACK Can I stay at your place?
TYLER: Yeah.
JACK: Thanks.
TYLER: I want you to do me a favor.
JACK: Yeah, sure.
TYLER I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
JACK What?
TYLER I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
