The World According To Chris Brewer

Okay. It’s 12:39 AM over here, I am running on fumes after only six hours of sleep last night, and the only reason I’m still up is because my roommate is snoring like Jesus is coming back tomorrow and he needs to get all his snoring in before then. Which makes me really wish Jesus was coming back tomorrow.

I think I’ve gone crazy. Partly because I’m so tired, partly because of stuff I’ve said and done over the past couple days in different situations. So since I’ve gone so crazy, I think tonight will be the start of my career as a screenwriter of a television show called “The Life of Rufus.” I will try to provide the world with a weekly script so that you all can help me hone my directorial skills.

Tonight we start with the pilot, called “Premiere Episode: Meet Rufus Bonifide.” It is approximately 16:32 long. As in 16 minutes, 32 seconds and roughly 24 frames. Which is 1 frame away from 16 minutes, 33 seconds if you are editing video in film mode on my favorite software, Avid Xpress or Avid Arenaline. It is this short because corporate America loves to make commercials and viewers enjoy watching funny ones.

Background of the series: H. Rufus Bonifide is a horribly underprivileged boy living in a city called Frampton. Rufus is sixteen but he has the mentality of a six year old because his parents underdeveloped his mental and social skills. And even some motor skills. He is son to a father who is pretty much a senior citizen and an invalid, and a mother who is 22 years her husband’s junior and married him for reasons that should not be discussed among people with manners or morals. They all live in a dilapidated trailer on Burnt Mill Road, a residential drag through town with nice houses except for the dilapidated trailer because for some reason to be explained later, the city is chicken to condemn it.

- BEGIN SCRIPT -

The movie starts out with some babe walking down the street and the camera following her head closely so all you see is blond hair blowing in the wind and you can’t even tell it’s a babe. Heck it could be a 80s hair band lover dude for all we care, but I am the only one who knows it’s a babe at this point. Camera pulls out to show the side of her face and she is wearing hot Oakley sunglasses, and you get to see the collar of her leather jacket. Some guy goes by with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder playing some Vanilla Ice tunes while kids ride bikes in the road and jump over potholes. Then the camera pans and you see a one bedroom trailer home with rust streaks down the sides. It basically looks like a tin box, and it has a crappy door and a crappy screen door outside of that, that blows in the wind and squeaks higher than old women singing hymns at church.

In walks Rufus, a 16 year old high school sophomore with black hair cut in some 80s hairstyle that is way out of date and wearing really highwadding pants and a sweatshirt that says BUM Equipment on it, so you know his parents still buy his clothes at the swap meet. He walks into his room and slips on a Transformer toy and hurts his foot. Then he cries for about two minutes solid and picks up the Transformer, forgets his pain and then tries to destroy Decepticon. (I know too much about Transformers and that is scary considering I never had the toys nor watched the television series.) Then the neighbor kid Billy from the basketball team, who scores about 25.4 points a game and gets hot babes and drinks near beer all the time, looks inside his window and starts laughing at poor Rufus’s misfortunes. Rufus gets mad, cries a little bit, then cries so hard he wets himself. This is bad because it is his only pair of pants to wear over the next two days at school because he peed himself the day earlier in his Hammer Pants while he was playing hide and seek and was running after the object of his affection, Carol Mindenhall. Carol is a 15-year-old troll who likes to play Transformers with Rufus, routinely takes the role as Decepticon and gets defeated every time. She also has bucked teeth and red hair with more split ends than all the football teams in the world, which should be good for making audiences cringe.

Rufus walks into the bathroom, and he passes his mother, who is rather portly and eating potato chips while sitting on the living room sofa watching reruns of Three’s Company and Different Strokes with their TV’s Picture in Picture feature. He forgets he has peed himself and laughs at a lame Gary Coleman joke. Then he walks farther and his pants are getting wetter lower by the second. The wetness has reached his left knee, so he decides it’s time to take off his pants and make a mad dash for the bathroom. He makes it, locks himself in and sits on the john for a couple of minutes pondering his future. He takes care of necessary business, flushes, then grabs his mom’s blow dryer that she never uses because she is so busy sitting on the sofa eating potato chips and collecting welfare money (read: your and my tax dollars hard at work…it’s more common than you think).

So he blow dries out his highwadders and realize it looks like he spilled lemonade on his socks. Oh duh, he thinks suddenly, the pee ran down to my socks too. So he puts those in the washing machine, because he knows he has more socks even though the colors are mismatched, and he knows his mom won’t start another load of laundry for another week because welfare doesn’t pay for loads of detergent, it pays for potato chips, gosh darn it. But it’s ok, his priority is cleaning his highwadders so he can wear them to school tomorrow. Poor Rufus pushes his glasses back up on his face, combs his hair again to one side and cleans his ears with toilet paper because welfare does not pay for Q-Tips. It pays for potato chips, you better believe it. All the while his highwadders are drying out on the door handle with a oscillating fan blow drying them out because the hair dryer doesn’t work.

Rufus walks out in his He-Man underwear (they are actually pull-ups because he is incontinent, but that is revealed in a later Life of Rufus episode, I think episode 21 of season 1) and runs to his bedroom, playing with more toys and waiting out the drying of his pants. Then Billy looks through his window again and sees a half-naked Rufus. If there is a human being you do not want to see with any article of clothing off, Rufus is the one. Billy brings LaQueesha, the flavor of the week (he rotates girlfriends like a carousel) to his window and they laugh at Rufus together then start making out. Rufus is lucky because even though he starts crying again very badly, he can’t wet himself because he went 10 minutes ago.

Which means we have to come up with 3 more minutes worth of script. That is easy since I am on a roll.

Rufus walks into the kitchen (which is pretty disgusting, dishes everywhere and a spot on the floor where the neighbor’s cat left a gift) where he meets up with his little brother Biff, who is not quite a white Urkel but more like Peter Parker pre-Spiderman days. Rufus asks Biff if there are any Corn Flakes left. Biff says no. Rufus asks if there is any milk. Biff says no. Rufus then asks if there is any bread to make a mayonnaise sandwich. Biff wisely tells Rufus no, all the welfare money went to Mom’s potato chips and Dad is secretly hoarding his disability money, but Mom doesn’t know since she lives and breathes TV Land. And Fox News. And ESPN2 when non-sports-related sporting events come on. Rufus says okay then sits down and cries while his stomach growls and Biff eats the remainder of his free lunch from the Frampton school district (read: more taxpayer dollars at work!!!).

The camera zooms in close on Rufus, then circles out over the house, which shows Dad in the bed asleep in his bedroom, Mom laughing at Gary Coleman stuff, Biff chowing on a burrito and Rufus sitting next to the neighbor’s cat’s gift to the Bonifide family. Then the camera pulls out into the street and shows kids and people walking around and doing normal stuff and leading a better life than the Bonifides.

- END SCRIPT FOR EPISODE 1 -

That wasn’t so hard. Now that the snoring is over, it’s time for me to go to bed.