Amorak Huey
Stripes
No wonder I thought to love was to get as close as possible without touching. No wonder I thought things would turn out okay no matter how much I sabotaged my own life. Bill Murray was around 30 when he made Stripes. I was 11 when my father took me to see it, and 30 was the same as 20 was the same as 50, every age the same but mine. Nothing has changed. I sat in the dark and laughed and wanted and wanted and did not know why. Nothing has changed.
Tootsie
Sometimes you’re not the star but the roommate of the star. Not the planet but a moon in orbit around someone else’s more interesting story. Not quite so desperate. Not quite so lonely.
Caddyshack
I’ve always been more comfortable being uncomfortable at the edges of the room. Easier to imagine coming out of nowhere when you are nowhere. I’ve spent my life repeating my name for strangers, offering absolution in advance for not remembering, it’s okay, it’s weird, I get it. Working outside is therapeutic, especially the kind of work that involves clippers, trimmers, blades: cutting down growth, making a hole in the landscape the exact shape of my body.
Meatballs
I never went away to camp, but I thought about it a lot. Imagine all that freedom. All those broken rules. Imagine bad food, obvious enemies, a lake where you could drown. Imagine learning all the wrong lessons.
Ghostbusters
Most everything I ever learned about adulthood was a lie. Sure, there are ghosts, but it’s not funny, and love isn’t a problem you solve, and endings aren’t happy or predictable, and sure, sometimes you get what you want but you can never keep it and when you try to tell the story of what happens next it’s not the same.
Groundhog Day
There are only twelve years between Stripes and Groundhog Day. This seems impossible. Groundhog Day came out 30 years ago. This seems impossible. I might have guessed nine years ago. Or six, or fifteen, I guess it’s all the same, which I know is the point of the movie, you make a million mistakes, you make them again, and then in the end, you make them again. I dream about wanting, I wake up wanting, and this is the point of the movie, of all the movies, and maybe this is what my father was trying to tell me all along, though he probably didn’t know it any more than I did. Of course I’ve left out so much, and of course this isn’t in order, things don’t happen in order. Sometimes the wanting comes first and sometimes it’s the wanting.
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Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).