THE SHARDS: It's a Shard Knock Life for Us!

We got some hot Barbies and Kens playing Bret Easton Ellis courtesy of Ryan Murphy over here!

Welp. Here I was thinking I was going to bury myself under the ground for two years having no thoughts whatsoever until AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Queen of the Damned premiered. But NO! The Universe had other plans for me!

It was all like, “Hey, we got some hot Barbies and Kens playing Bret Easton Ellis courtesy of Ryan Murphy over here on FX! Doesn’t that sound like a glossy morally bankrupt dumpster fire good time???”

But I said, “Eeek! I’m not sure I’m comfortable with any of that. I am basically allergic to the Ryan Murphy-verse. And also, isn’t Bret Easton Ellis pretty much the literal worst these days?”

And The Universe was like, “*shrug* Nothing matters!”

Then, I was telling my new life coach — a.k.a. the lady who cuts my hair — about all this, plus how I wanted to spend the rest of the summer pretending I was on an actual vacation, and she was like, “You barely have a job! Just do the recaps, lazy bone!”

And I was like, “Ugh, excellent point.” So, here we are: Week 1 of The Shards!

Young Bret, Boobra, Thumb, Kaia Gerber, Robert Mallplethorpe.

The year: 1981. The city: Los Angeles, a totally bitchin’ time and place to be if you were rich and white and a teenager, which is exactly what young Bret Shmeaston Shmellis, fictional “person”, and all his fictional best friends were.

Those friends included Thom Thumb, the lovable doofus himbo quarterback, and his brunette girlfriend/Bret’s bestie gal pal Kaia Gerber, the most beautiful and popular gossip girl at Constant Billiards School for Brat Packs. Plus there was Debbie, who was also beautiful and the most popular, but blonde, and her whole thing was doing cocaine and horseback riding, but these days that was kinda taking second place to Bret-back riding. See, what had happened was, Bret had recently blossomed into a CockyBoys.com muscle twink, and Debs was super into it and had forced him to become her CockyBoyfriend, which Bret was not 100% opposed to because it officially made him the fourth or fifth most popular boy according to the transitive property of high school.

Except one problem with that was Bret was secretly sort of in “love” with Kaia Gerber, just like “I” was “in love” with Kate Moss in middle school. Oh how Bret erotically loved gazing worshipfully upon Kaia Gerber and imagining what it would be like to toss about her glistening chestnut mane and get railed by Thumb just like she did!

But that wasn’t Bret’s only problem. He also had a deep dark secreter secret, which was that he was secretly gay with TWO (!) other closeted goofballs who he was constantly goofballing all the time. Their names were Matt and Ryan. Matt was a braindead stoner who lived in his parents’ pool house and didn’t care about anything except smoking drugs all day, but sometimes he would let Bret go to pound town on him, because why not? And Ryan was a closeted sportsman who cared very much about everything, especially making sure that no one knew that he sometimes slobbed on Bret’s knob.

So, anyway, it was almost back-to-school time, and the gang had spent all summer doing whatever teenage stuff they wanted because all their rich parents were trapped in the Phantom Zone forever or something. One of the things Bret did was go to the movies one day where he encountered the hottest boy who ever did live, according to Bret:

This guy? Ok?

This tall dark stranger kinda resembled a Pekingese crossed with a lizard pretending to be Robert Mapplethorpe, which really did it for Bret! He already had a stoner and a jock, but his PokeMen harem was sorely missing a bad boy model type. So after the movie, he tried to find Mr. Sexlegs Modelthorpe in the mensroom, hoping they could do it quick and nasty in one of the stalls and then run away to Tangiers together to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, the mysterious stranger had vanished in a poof of Calvin Klein Obsession. But Bret never forgot his scrunched little face and the raging boner it provoked in his loins…

Before long, it was the night before the day before the first day of school, and Debbie was having a party at her mansion. While Deb was busy making sure all the cocaine got did by her, Kaia Gerber kept watch over the festivities, smoking pensively all the while. One thing she witnessed was Ryan breaking up with Bret. He was all, “No homo!” And Bret was like, “Yeah, no, for sure, NBD, goodbye forever” while wiping furiously at the tears that were welling up in his eye holes. Kaia Gerber rushed to her precious wee bouncing baby butt buddy’s side and was like, “What was all that tragic gay stuff about?” And Bret was all, “Nothing tragic or gay at all!”

By then Debbie and Thumb had joined them and Kaia Gerber remembered to tell them all that there was a new boy joining their school that year. Strangely, tho, she could not remember his name. It was as if some dark force had tied her tongue, and everyone felt the icy breath of evil upon their supple sun kissed flesh. Then Kaia Gerber was like, “Oh yeah, his name’s Robert Mallory!” And the moment she uttered his sinister name the strand of pearls she was wearing broke, everyone’s champagne flutes shattered, and Debbie’s pool froze, trapping several speedo-clad teens in its grip!

“Something wicked is clearly afoot!” Bret said, but no one else cared about that and Debbie was like, “Meet me upstairs for straight sex in five!”

So, Bret went wandering around the mansion, where he stumbled upon the desiccated husk of Wes Bentley, a.k.a. Debbie’s gay dad, in the hot tub with some teen boys. “Scram, twinks!” Wes Bentley said, “I wanna talk biznass with Bret!” See, Wes Bentley, movie producer, wanted to have “lunch” with Bret, a long, hard, sweaty “lunch,” so they could talk about turning his 11^th grade English assignments into a motion picture! That sounded entirely plausible and not suspicious at all to Bret, but just as he was about to pee his panties with excitement, Wes Bentley’s creepy vizier, Jordan Roth, appeared from the shadows in an Andy Warhol wig, and Bret was so unsettled he bolted for Debbie’s boudoir in terror.

But before he could even mount the stairs to reluctantly mount Debs, her mom, Evan Rachel Wood, pounced on him and tackled him to the ground! “KEEP YOUR GRIMY PAWS OFF MY GAY HUSBONE!” Evan Rachel Wood shrieked, her eyes bloodshot, her teeth bared. Luckily for Bret, Jordan Roth once again slithered from the shadows. “Sleeeeeep,” Jordan Roth whispered to Evan Rachel Wood, whose grip on Bret began to loosen. “Run along, young Bret. Run to your Debbie while you can,” Jordan Roth cooed as he gathered Evan Rachel Wood’s limp body into his clutches.

Hasn’t poor Evan Rachel Wood been through enough!?!

Christ! Everyone in that house was so nuts and frightening! Young Bret really should have skeedaddled! But no. He had appearances to keep up, vis-à-vis heterosexualness, so he resumed his journey up to Doobbie’s room. There she was lounging on her satin drenched bed, a coke straw lodged in her perfect nostril, waiting for him to plow her into Middle Earth, when suddenly, she heard a shrill noise. It was her telephone, but when she picked it up she could hear nothing but the sound of the ocean. Then she realized she was holding one of her shoes to her ear and giggled to herself and tossed it out the window and did more cocaine. And then Young Bret was there like, “Let’s get this over with so I can go home and write my erotic friend fiction.” So they both flopped around on the bed like dead fish for a while, because that was what Bred had convinced Debbie sex was, and he left.

Except Young Bret didn’t go home! He went to Matt’s love shack to perform actual gay sex with him. But after they were done smashing their butts together, Bret noticed that all Matt’s fish were missing from his aquarium, and this was odd because fish are famously bound by the laws of nature to remain underwater forever. Matt was just like, “Huuuuuuhhhh?” And Bret suddenly realized that he had been taking advantage of Matt, who was too perpetually stoned to ever consent to gay sex, so they broke up.

Later, it was the first day of school, and some chodes who were probably both named Chad arrived at a tennis court to find a true horror! It was the unclothed body of some poor girl whose boobs had been replaced by cat heads! JEEZUS! She was dead, obviously, and what had happened to her was that she had been stalked by some spooky creep who had stolen her dog and her fish too, and then he kidnapped her and the rest was disgusting, unsettling history for her!

But that wasn’t the only disgusting, unsettling thing that happened that day! Young Bret arrived at school to find that the Constant Billiards Falkor memorial statue had been vandalized with blood and dead fish too! Bret ran to barf about this to Kaia Gerber, but she and everyone else was too zonked on Klonopin to care. So, they all went to their first class of the day, which was lunch, and who should stroll up to them but Robert Malintent, the new boy. Young Bret felt a familiar waggling in his trousers, which thank god had nothing to do with dying fish this time, but was just his weenus stirring. “Hey ZOINKS!” he said to Robert Malfoy. “You’re the sex bones I saw at the movies before!” But Robert was like, “What is a movies?”

Bret knew Robert was a dirty liar! His wang never forgot a face and it was pointing right at Robert’s like one of those pointing dogs that points all the time. Then, after school, he saw Robert talking to poor dumb brain damaged Matt in the parking lot, and suddenly his dong was filled with fantasies about the three of them tangled in each other’s arms and legs nakedly, their taut hairless bodies entwined like a steaming bowl of shpagget! “No, dong!” Young Bret said to his dong, “This is not horny times! I suspect foul play!”

So Bret hopped in his car and chased Robert Malardy to the mall, where he found him pressing his crotch against some fish tanks. “Hey weirdo,” Robert said, “Sorry I don’t want to fall in love with you over an Orange Julius, I’m too horny for Kaia Gerber!” Kaia Gerber?! Young Bret thought. That was Thumb’s girl and also his for sure definitely secret heterosexual crush! Clearly Robert Malaria was here to ruin them all and DESTROY THEIR SCHOOL! There could be no other explanation for any of this!!! Then RM was all, “When you talk to my you’re really talking to yourself.” Which, who actually knows what that means. (Seriously, no spoilers, but I’m almost 400 pages into the actual book and it still doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything!)

Shaken by that nonsense, Bret went home to watch the news, which was all about The Trawler. He was the guy who killed that one girl, plus some others because he was a serial killer. Well, that’s obviously Robert Mallory, Young Bret thought. But who would believe him??? No one, that was who, because he had no proof other than his psycho sniffing peen! Then the phone rang, but when Young Bret fumbled it to his ear with his club feet all he could hear was someone moaning “Oh help! My fish and I are being tortured to death by Robert Maleraleraleroy probably!”

That should have been the end of things for this week, but since FX has such confidence in this show and is burning it off two episodes at a time, it’s on to Episode Two!

Young Bret was now obsessed with getting fishboned by the Trawler, specifically: avoiding same. But none of the rest of the gang cared about that at all. All they wanted to do was cocaine and pizza party and hot tub orgy heterosexually, which was a real bummer for gay ol’ Bret. Especially because they wanted to do a pizza party for Robert Mallboro.

“I have determined independently with my dong-dar that he is mad! Mad, I tell you!” Bret said. But Kaia Gerber said, no, because Principal Skinner or whoever had told her that Robmalbert was just locked up in an insane asylum one time, but he was for sure cured now, obviously. And then Debbie roofied Young Bret so she could grind her girl gears on him all night long.

The next morning, Young Bret woke up in a haze of regret and shame, and Boobrah was like, “BTW Matt, the stoner loner you’re def not gay sexying with beknownst to me called and said stop calling him and panting the whole time.” And Bret was all, “Huh?” because he had not been doing that at all! Then he remembered that there was a murderous cult running amok all over the city, so probably that was them? Which may or may not have anything to do with the Trawl Daddy?

100% heterosexual chemistry oozing from these two!

The rest of the episode was just Young Bret going places, and the first place he went was a hot happenin’ new club with Doob. But it turned out that club was just an empty gallery filled with TVs playing the newest cutting edge art form, which was music videos. So, Bret was just sitting there watching MTV basically when Robert crawled out of an ashtray and was like, “I heard your pothead sidepiece broke up with you,” meaning Matt. And Brett was all “I BROKE UP WITH HI— What are you talking about? I’ve never heard of this ‘Mart’ you speak of!” Then Robert started talking about how hot Kaia Gerber was and how he wanted to take her to ice cream and eat the cherry out of her sundae, except way more erotically rudely than that. So now Young Bret had to worry about Knobert murdering his secret crush Kaia Gerber on top of everything else!

After that, Bret was off to Matt’s marijuana lair to investigate what was going on with his butt. But Matt was not interested in having his butt investigated by Bret any longer, due to all the murder calls he thought Bret was committing on him. Bret tried to explain that it wasn’t him! It was the cult! Or the Trawler! Or Robert Mallory, who was maybe both or neither of them! Bret was such a great teen Encyclopedia Brown! But Matt was unconvinced and just slumped over into a K hole or something.

Later, it was the next day, and Bret was at some restaurant waiting for Debbie’s gay dad, Wes Bentley to show up for their “meeting” about his “novel” which Wes Bentley “wanted” to “make” into a “movie.” Suddenly, Jordan Roth crawled from beneath the table and was like, “Greetingssss, Young Breeeeettttt,” his forked tongue flickering betwixt his pointed teeth. “I ssssssee dark thingsssss in your fuuuuuuture…” Meaning Wes Bentley’s leathery tan and monumental bush. Luckily, Bret was armed with the Light of Elendil, which he thrust forward, and shouted “Be gone, foul worm!” And Jordan Roth melted back into the shadow realm, for now…

Lunch with Wes Bentley was pretty much just him pumping Young Bret for sexual details about his teenage friends and being like, “You’re down to clown with dudes, right?” and Bret letting his salmon tartar dribble out of his mouth. Then Wes Bentley said he wanted to buy Bret’s erotic friend fiction, so that was great news and probably not a devil’s bargain with an adult sex pest.

Lastly, Bret had another lunch to go to, this time with the gang plus Robert, because that was what they were all majoring in at Constantine Ballards: Lunching. But this was no fun lunch with the funky bunch! It was all bad news, courtesy of Kaia Gerber, who said that Bret’s secret not-boyfriend Matt was now MISSING!

“Matt? Matt who?” Bret said.

But secretly he was so upset! For he knew in his bone of bones that his poor brainless boy toy had been taken by the cult or the Trawler or Robert Mallory for sure! And sure enough, when he got home one or all of those three suspects who all may or may not be the same person/s had left Bret an audiocassette tape, which was a new technology that only the best most sophisticated serial killers used in the 80s. As Bret listened in horror to that tape he could see the scene play out before him using his finely tuned paranoid detective skills: Poor gangly, but ripped Matt was being tortured to death, pumped full of drugs and forced to eat all his missing fish! But for all his empathic abilities, the one thing Young Bret could not see was the perpetrator’s face, and there was nothing he could do to save his doomed fuck bud!

To Be Continual…