That One Episode from One Tree Hill

I never took my phone out, though.  Never called Omar.  In fact, the prospect of collecting the thousand dollars from him and his cousin Meelod quickly became unrealistic and equally as unimportant, irrelevant.  Why?  Because while sitting there on the floor, cat in my lap, watching some coming-of-age TV drama from the 2000s—One Tree Hill Des said when I asked—I realized that Nadia was, to put it plainly, a perfectly nice lady.  And what I mean by that is she seemed completely unlike her brother and cousin.   Where Omar and Meelod were frenetic and harebrained, Nadia was quiet and measured—though I’m not sure what I should’ve expected, considering she’d been forced from birth to experience the world in blackness.  I’d probably keep to myself, too, if that were my lot.  Of course, I’d just met her, so this was all mere speculation, yet, regardless of whether the money was real (it wasn’t), I resolved then and there that I wasn’t going to alert Omar or Meelod to the fact that I’d found the missing Nadia.  In fact, I cast out into the roiling sea of my mind all thoughts of Omar and Meelod, and I tried to relax and enjoy the quiet afternoon at Des’s. 

Like I said before, the cat had set up shop in my lap, and, while I’m not much of a cat person, I tentatively scratched it behind its ears and tried to convince myself that each time it emitted its soft, rumbling purrs, it was not announcing, in that odd, slinky way of cats, that it was fixing to pounce and slice my face to shreds.  I recalled the article I’d read the other day about pets and their therapeutic properties, their mental health benefits, tried to remember the headline—something like Forget Simply Petting Your Pet: Trying Wearing It Like A Hat!  Oh yes, that was it.  The author had even advocated for placing your pet on top of your head like a Russian ushanka, arguing, for example, that a cranially-perched Felis catus could absorb from your brain all the stress and anxiety and frustration and pain inside it.  Lord knows I had a few, if not all, of those guys pinballing around up there, but, wanting to keep my scalp intact, and not wanting Des to kick me out of her house, I decided not to move her cat from my lap and onto the top of my head.

But all this talk about pets and their health benefits is rather fitting, because holy cow was I confused by this One Tree Hill episode.  Really, just a single scene from it.  I’d heard of the show but didn’t know anything about it, so I’d asked Des to give me the skinny, and, from what I’d gathered, it seemed like your typical angsty teenager drama—which I can’t stand, by the way, because let’s be real: life, especially teenage life, just isn’t that goddamn interesting—or important—despite the egocentric and immature belief of literally every single teenager.  Everyone knows this.  Christ almighty, looking back on my own seven years of teenagehood, it’s a wonder I wasn’t murdered by any of the adults with whom I interacted, especially my parents, the snot-nosed little prick that I was.  Of course, the human race would’ve long ago been extinguished had the first set of parents committed mass filicide due to the surly know-it-all-ness of the little fucking troglodyte teenagers.  Insubordinate…and churlish! 

Anyway, back to One Tree Hill.  Like every TV show, especially one dealing with teenage life, it’s the writers’ job to make it seem more interesting than it actually is.  No one’s faulting them for that.  So, what do they do to spice it up?  Well, the usual recipe is a scandalous love triangle or two (or three), with perhaps a pregnancy scare sprinkled in there, a lot of drug use, a big splash of it, and, of course, a large dollop of the overhyped and overly dramatic (and poorly acted) high school sports—you know, the “But Coach, if I don’t play, I’m literally going to die” type (feel free to substitute sports with some sort of social gathering, e.g., “If I don’t go to the dance, I’m literally going to die!”).  Anyway, I wasn’t sure what season we were in, but I imagined we were fairly far along due to the fucking outlandish nature of this episode—this one scene—in particular.  Let me explain.

Okay, so the scene begins in the hospital with this wheelchair-bound dude (who is sporting a classic, early 2000s hybrid swoosh-bowl cut, by the way).  He’s smiling as he’s petting this dog, not a care in the world it seems, like, hey, I may be in a wheelchair, but this dog is just too damn cute.  Don’t worry, though, he doesn’t pick it up and put it on his head.  Then, all of a sudden, the camera cuts to this other dude running down the hospital hallway.  Queue the dramatic, ominous music.  He’s carrying a Styrofoam cooler that reads in big, red letters: “HUMAN ORGAN,” and the cooler looks exactly like the kind you’d buy at the Tom Thumb down at the beach during college Spring Break, you know what I’m talking about—you’re in college, you’re too cheap to buy (or remember to bring) a more suitable and environmentally friendly option, so you pick one up at the gas station while you’re buying your even cheaper beer, and it’s a piece of junk because it can’t even hold an entire twelve-pack, and more importantly, it can’t support the weight of your stupid drunk and fat fuck of a friend Andrew as he plops his enormous ass down on it, demolishing it into a million tiny pieces of white puff that get carried by the wind down the beach…anyway, I’m getting off topic here.  So yeah, the dude is running down the hallway and then, well, it turns out the dog belongs to some mindless idiot, some ponytail-sporting, track-pants-wearing hipster and, whoopsie daisy, the dude carrying the cooler doesn’t see the extended leash and he trips over it.  The cooler goes flying and then crashes to the floor, and, the cooler being of the piece of shit variety as I’ve already explained, the lid is unfastened, unsecured, so it pops off, and then what spills out of it?  Yup, you guessed it, a human organ, and not just any organ—a fucking heart!  The fact that it’s unwrapped, unpackaged, and was just sitting there naked on top of a bed of ice cubes that they probably got from the breakroom freezer is whole other thing entirely and I won’t get into it here because I’m already rambling, but, anyway, the heart spills out and then eventually slides to a stop on the nasty hospital floor.  The dude in the wheelchair stands up now, looking all confused and worried, so that’s when I figure, hmm, that must’ve been that dude’s heart?  But you don’t have enough time to wonder about that because, next thing you know, the fucking useless hipster’s dog is trotting over towards it, and what does it do?  Well, not sure if you could’ve guessed this one, but it eats the fucking thing!  I mean, I don’t know what’s crazier, the fact that the dog just trotted up to it all willy nilly and got it in its mouth, like a duck-hunting dog trained to retrieve downed ducks, only this one was trained to retrieve dropped human organs, or the fact that literally the entire room is silent: the wheelchair dude, the dude who was carrying the heart, the hipster, the receptionist lady behind the desk, all of them—they’re all just standing there dumbstruck, watching the dog run away.  Like, not one person is shouting, not one person is even chasing after the dog?  I mean, the heart is probably fucked useless now, but still.  Then, just when you think it can’t get any more preposterous, some shady figure in jeans and a leather jacket, looking like he just parked his Harley outside, stands up as the dog trots past him, and then he slowly turns his head to our man from the wheelchair and gives him this incredible look, this half-smirk, half-glower, like he’s saying “Well, what do I always—what do I ALWAYS—say: you drop a human organ ‘round here, a dog’s liable to eat it.”  And the useless, vacuous stare from our man from the wheelchair as the camera cuts back to him confirms that, yeah, I guess that was going to be his heart or whatever, but I mean, hell, he looks fine without it, at least for now.  The dramatic music fades out, the screen turns black, end scene.

Now, it was my turn to be speechless, the proverbial cat had my tongue (the real cat was still in my lap, don’t worry).  As the countdown for the next episode in the queue neared zero, I heard a voice not belonging to Des—meaning it was Nadia’s?—saying something about “Dan” being a righteous dickwad and that he deserved the dog gobbling up the donor heart and that she was just sorry it wasn’t instead a transplant organ of a different variety, namely the male reproductive system.  Stunned, I looked over my shoulder and saw Nadia and Des connect on a high five.  Grasping that I may have stumbled upon and interrupted an impromptu She-Woman Man-Haters Club meeting, I quietly turned back around and readied myself for the next episode of One Tree Hill.