Brad Pitt and George Clooney Go Clubbing

by Duke Harten

Dr. Mankiewicz can find nothing wrong with Brad Pitt. Checks his eyes: normal dilation. Checks his glands: normal size. Takes his pulse, depresses his tongue, looks inside his ears. Even hits him on the knee with a little rubber hammer. “Very good, Brad,” he says. “Fit as a fiddle.” 

Brad Pitt shrugs. “If you say so.” He takes an enormous bite of an Italian sandwich.

Dr. Mankiewicz frowns. “And you say you were struck by lightning?” He drapes his stethoscope around his shoulders and removes his gloves.

Brad Pitt, mouth full of sandwich, shakes his head and gestures: it was the other way around.

“Oh,” the doctor says. “Clooney was struck by lightning.” 

Brad Pitt, still chewing, nods vigorously and mimes getting hit on the head.

“George Clooney was struck by lightning and you suffered a blow to the head.” Brad Pitt gives him a thumbs up. “And now you can’t stop speaking and acting like your characters from Ocean’s 11.”

Brad Pitt swallows, coughs, and hops down from the examination table. He crumples his sandwich wrapper and tosses it over his shoulder, real casual, a no-look three from way downtown. The sound of it landing squarely in the trash splits Pitt’s face into a wide grin. “That’s about the size of it, doc.”

George Clooney stands alone at the bar. Doesn’t stand—leans. Leans and fiddles with his cufflinks, smiling briefly at a passing cocktail waitress. Checks his watch. Where the hell is Brad Pitt?

Then voila, Brad Pitt’s there. Appearing from where, thin air? Clooney seems unruffled. “You have it?” he says, glancing at Brad Pitt’s briefcase.

Brad Pitt looks around the nightclub. Place is a ghost town. 

“I thought you said—”

“I did.”

“You told me—”

“I know.” 

“There’s no one here.”

“It’ll fill up.”

Brad Pitt sighs and removes some carrots and hummus from his pocket. He sets them on the bar and begins to snack.

Clooney looks around. “It’ll fill up. People filter in and out.”

“This is just like Marrakesh.”

“Hey. That was not my fault.”

A beautiful bartender appears and Clooney smiles winningly at her. Brad Pitt takes no notice, just keeps eating carrots.

“Something to drink?” the bartender says. She is the age you would think.

“He’ll have a pilsner,” Clooney says, “and I’ll have a Ring Around the Rosie.”

The bartender, played by Mila Kunis, says she doesn’t know what that is.

Brad Pitt picks a shard of carrot from his teeth. “Two parts vodka, one part gin, rosewater and spicy bitters with three ounces of lime juice. Shake and strain. Tastes like high school graduation but it gets the job done.”

The bartender shrugs and disappears.

Cut to Clooney and Brad Pitt in a VIP booth. The nightclub has, at last, begun to fill up. Clooney is smirking at something across the room. “Did I ever tell you,” he says to Brad Pitt, but a look from Pitt cuts him off. “Right.” Brad Pitt pulls a chicken nugget from his breast pocket and swallows it whole.

“The kid’s good,” says George Clooney, his gaze still fixed on whatever or whoever is over there. Brad Pitt squints through the artificial fog.

“Is he good?” Brad Pitt asks, “or is he good good. Because the last thing we need once Benedict starts sniffing around is some wide-eyed—” But then the figure in the distance does something that proves he’s unassailably good—better, even, than Brad Pitt could imagine—and Brad Pitt falls silent, humbled by this person’s obvious talent. Clooney’s smirk grows wider.

“Excuse me,” Clooney says, raising his hand as if to touch a passing cocktail waitress’s forearm, but he doesn’t—the gesture was just to get her attention. And the way she looks down at his hand, lingering casually, hovering just a heartbeat away from her skin, perfectly manicured…maybe she wouldn’t mind so much if he did grab her forearm, gently. “You see that gentleman?” Clooney says. “Would you mind sending him over here?” And with a flourish he produces a hundred dollar bill.

“Who?” says Matt Damon, peering through the fog and shading his eyes from the relentless neon strobes.

The cocktail waitress, played by someone’s very thin daughter, shrugs. “Two guys. Nice suits. The one who has a briefcase asked me if we serve pintxos.” 

Matt Damon finally finds Clooney and Pitt among the sea of VIP tables. “Oh,” he says. “Okay. Thanks. Do I tip you?” He turns to Ben Affleck. “Do I tip her?” But she’s gone already, drifting away to find someone with a more metropolitan sense of finance.

“I’ll be right back,” Matt Damon tells Affleck, shouldering his way into the crowd.

“This place is beat,” Affleck murmurs, sipping a club soda and scratching nervously at a bug bite on his neck.

Matt Damon emerges from the crush of clubgoers, steps over the VIP rope, and smiles like a suburban East Coast dad. “Last place I thought I’d run into you two!” he says to Clooney and Brad Pitt. “What are you guys doing here?”

Pitt and Clooney look at each other. Brad Pitt smiles slightly and starts polishing his sunglasses with a small cloth, almost embarrassed for Matt Damon. Damon’s shirt is, to be fair, slightly boxy. And he’s wearing sneakers.

Clooney gestures to the booth. “Have a seat, Matt,” he says.

Matt Damon accepts.

“You know why you’re here?”

Matt Damon smiles broadly. “Oh, Ben made me come. He loves this crap. I think he’s trying to recapture—”

“You’re here because you’re afraid, Matt.” Clooney leans forward. “Afraid of stepping outside the bounds of mediocrity. One smoky nightclub after another, feeling up teens and spending twenty-two fifty on watered down daiquiris—”

“Whoa,” says Matt Damon, kind of laughing. “I’m not feeling up…Lu and I are in town for Ben’s premiere and she told me to get him out of the house.”

Clooney leans back, looks at Brad Pitt: just what I expected he’d say.

“Kid,” says Brad Pitt, taking a ravenous bite out of an almond croissant, “This ain’t Big Brothers of America. You want to play Mother Teresa, join Meals on Wheels.” He heaves the briefcase up and with a thud it lands on the table. The latches click satisfyingly and Brad Pitt pulls up the lid.

“You’re either in or you’re out,” Clooney says. “Right now.” 

Matt Damon peers at the contents of the briefcase. “What?”

“Right now. Yes or no. You say no, you walk away and you’ll never see us again. But you say yes…”

Brad Pitt waves a hand at the briefcase. “You say yes, kid, and this is just a taste.”

Matt Damon leans closer and pulls a 20% Off Online Shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond coupon from the briefcase. He looks up at his friends, genuine concern etched across his face. Brad Pitt opens a package of Sour Patch Kids.

“Well?” says Clooney. “What’ll it be, Matt?”

Later that night, in their hotel room, George Clooney flosses while Brad Pitt sets to work on his sixth Hot Pocket. “Matt was acting weird tonight,” Clooney says, but the floss makes it sound like “Att was acting eird anight.” 

Brad Pitt nods and talks through a mouthful of Hot Pocket. “E’ll come awound.”

“I ope so,” Clooney says, then discards the floss in the trashcan and crawls into bed next to Brad Pitt.

“I love you, Brad,” he says. Brad Pitt scoots over so Clooney can lie in the crook of his arm.

“You want me to turn the TV off?” Brad Pitt says.

“No, I don’t mind. Just turn it down a little.”

Brad Pitt sets his empty plate on the nightstand and kisses Clooney on the top of the head. “I love you, George.”

Clooney just sighs contentedly, already drifting off to sleep, as Brad Pitt gently picks up the receiver and dials zero. “Yeah, hi. What time does the kitchen close?”