After my brother Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started making more frequent trips to Phoenix to see him. During many of those visits to his house, he began pulling things out of the past like a magician who had decided, late in his career, to specialize in nostalgia. Baseball cards. Old records. Toys I hadn’t thought about in decades. Artifacts from shelves that, in my mind, had long since been cleared, boxed up, or lost to time.

And then one day, he handed me a Super 8 film.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of sentence that should make you both excited and slightly nervous.

When I got back home, I took it to a local shop to have it digitized. A few days later, I went back to pick it up, and the guy behind the counter was smiling in a way that suggested I was about to become either very proud or mildly horrified.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, echoing my brother almost word for word, “but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

That felt promising. Or at least memorable.

I rushed home, opened the link, and hit play. It was a movie I had made when I was twelve years old with my friends Jamie and Dave. A full-blown cinematic production titled The Meat Eater, which is exactly as subtle and nuanced as it sounds.

The casting was tight. Jamie was the detective. Dave was the serial killer. And I, displaying an early commitment to range, was the victim. Multiple times.

Jamie, it’s worth noting, was a very popular kid. The kind of kid who didn’t need to spend his afternoons making low-budget horror films. And yet, for a stretch of time—right around the period after my mom passed away between seventh and eighth grade—he did. We weren’t best friends, but he was kind to me during a time when kindness mattered more than I probably knew how to articulate. Looking back, that feels like a bigger part of the story than anything we actually put on film.

The premise of The Meat Eater was simple. Dave would kill me, and then, in a bold narrative choice that really pushed the boundaries of suburban storytelling, he would eat me. To achieve this effect, we purchased hamburger meat, placed it on my stomach, and covered it in ketchup. This was our special effects department. It was meant to be funny. And it was. Just not in the ways we’d eventually come to appreciate.

What makes the whole thing remarkable, watching it now, is not just the plot—which holds up about as well as you’d expect—but the complete absence of supervision. No parents. An alarming number of BB guns. At one point, we were jumping off the roof of Jamie’s house into the swimming pool, which felt like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time and, in retrospect, like something that probably should have required at least one adult in the general vicinity. And through all of it, an unwavering confidence that what we were making was not just a movie, but important.

And honestly, it kind of works. Not because it’s good, exactly, but because it’s so fully committed to being whatever it is. There’s plenty of humor in it, and we were very much in on the joke. But there’s no distance. No sense that we were making something disposable or temporary. Just three kids, a camera, and the firm belief that a hamburger and some ketchup could carry an entire narrative.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

– Pink Floyd, “Time”

Which, in a strange way, is exactly what The Reivers is about.

Published just a month before two time Pulitzer winner William Faulkner died, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. It’s often described as a lighter, more accessible Faulkner, which is a bit like saying a roller coaster is a more accessible form of flying. Or that a bar fight is a more accessible form of conflict resolution. Or that a road trip with questionable decision-makers is a more accessible version of growing up. Technically true, but still not something you approach casually.

The novel tells the story of Lucius Priest, an eleven-year-old boy in Mississippi, who embarks on an impulsive road trip with two companions: Boon Hogganbeck, a charming and reckless family friend, and Ned McCaslin, a resourceful and morally flexible man who may or may not be the most competent adult in the group. What begins as a simple joyride quickly turns into something else entirely, involving stolen cars, questionable decisions, a detour through a brothel, and a series of escalating consequences that none of the participants are fully equipped to handle. It is, in other words, a perfect childhood adventure disguised as a very bad idea.

What elevates The Reivers beyond mischief is the way it’s told. The entire novel is narrated by an older Lucius, looking back on the events of his youth with a mix of affection, embarrassment, and hard-earned clarity. The story hasn’t changed, exactly, but the meaning of it has. At the time, it felt like freedom. Later, it looks a lot like chaos. At the time, it felt like courage. Later, it edges closer to recklessness. At the time, it was just something that happened. Later, it becomes a story worth telling.

For me, The Reivers sits somewhere in the lower middle of the Pulitzer rankings. It’s undeniably enjoyable, occasionally chaotic, and filled with moments that linger, but it doesn’t quite reach the emotional or stylistic heights of Faulkner at his best. What it does offer, though, is something a little different. It reminds us that not every meaningful story needs to be heavy. Sometimes it’s enough to capture a moment in time, let it unfold with all its messiness intact, and trust that meaning will reveal itself later.

These are the days you’ll remember.”

– 10,000 Maniacs, “These Are Days”

Watching The Meat Eater, I had the same feeling. The same sense that what once felt immediate and important now reads as something slightly different—messier, funnier, and, in its own way, more meaningful.

At twelve, we weren’t making something ironic or self-aware. We were absolutely trying to be funny, and at least to us, we were succeeding. But we were also making something we believed in, with the full force of our limited resources and unlimited confidence. We thought we were telling a funny story. We didn’t realize we were becoming one.

And like Lucius, I’m now the one looking back, trying to make sense of it. Trying to reconcile the seriousness of the experience then with the absurdity of it now. Trying to understand how something so small—a few minutes of film, a hamburger, a bad idea—could carry so much weight decades later. Because it’s not really about the movie. It’s about the people in it.

I lost track of Dave after elementary school. Somewhere along the way, the thread just snapped, the way those threads tend to do. One day you’re making a film together in a backyard, and the next you’re living entirely separate lives without even realizing when the transition happened.

Jamie, though, stayed in orbit a little longer. Although he started high school at a boarding school, he came back to Phoenix and we ended up at the same high school for senior year. Then, like most people, we drifted.

But when I found the video, I sent it to him. No context. No warning. Just a digital time capsule dropped into his phone.

And recently, when I was in Phoenix, we met up for a drink. It had been decades. And yet within minutes, we were right back there, talking about The Meat Eater, laughing about scenes we hadn’t thought about in years, filling in gaps in each other’s memories like two slightly unreliable historians reconstructing a very low-budget crime.

At some point in the conversation, I also told him I still remembered how he had treated me during that time after my mom died, and that it had meant a lot to me. And then, a few minutes later, Jamie told me something I didn’t know. He said that one of the reasons he ended up going into the tech field was because of my dad. Back then, my dad had brought one of the early home computers into school, and when Jamie would come over, we’d spend hours playing games on it.

I had no memory of that meaning anything beyond what it was at the time. Just something to do. Another way to pass an afternoon. But for Jamie, it stuck. It mattered. It shaped something.

Which is the part of all of this that I can’t quite get over. The idea that these small, seemingly insignificant moments—a Super 8 film, a shared afternoon, an early computer—don’t just disappear. They ripple outward in ways you don’t see, connecting people and decisions and lives long after the moment itself has passed.

It’s strange what survives. Not the things you expect. Not the moments that feel important while you’re living them. But a shared memory that refuses to fade completely, even as everything around it changes.

In The Reivers, Faulkner suggests that we don’t really understand our lives while we’re living them. We understand them later, in the telling. In that sense, The Meat Eater wasn’t just a movie. It was the beginning of a story that took forty-five years to understand.

And somehow, improbably, it’s still doing what it was always meant to do.

Not bringing people back, exactly. But reminding you they were never entirely gone in the first place.

P.S.

On a whim, after finishing this essay, I tried to find Dave. Facebook came up empty, which felt about right. But a quick Google search turned up a psychologist who lives less than a mile from me with the same name.

So I emailed him. Just a short note asking if he had grown up in Phoenix and if he happened to remember me.

Unbelievably, it was him.

I sent him the video.

This was his response:

“Oh my god that’s insane! I had no memory of that, but after watching it, now have a faint recollection of it. What a solid production. Sorry I had to kill you so many times and eat your organs. I guess that’s why I always had this feeling of having a part of you with me all this time!”

Which, all things considered, feels like about as good an explanation as any.