Somebody at Starbucks asked me how I was doing today. “Not great,” I said. Why? they asked. Well… well, where to begin? Everything you know is a lie. Trust no one; “friends” are a fiction of a previous universe in which love had greater influence than hate. Some may say that I’m contributing to the maelstrom of negativity that’s taken over the world in the 2020s, and some may say I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, to which I say—how do you think a mole feels? Do you even know? Do you even care? Of course not. Most of you probably don’t even know that I’m a walking, talking, ageless rooster with a cousin and a… whatever kind of in-law Monica is… you don’t even know that. The bare minimum. My name is Bennington Quibbits and I deserve to be heard.
Maybe you’ve been following my articles over the past year. It’s true, I worked on The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth in close collaboration with our director Mr. David Fincher and the man who I considered to be My Sensei, my magnificent life coach, the person I trusted most before Monday night. See… and keep in mind, I did not know this about him… I did not know this… but My Sensei hunts ducks. For sport.
I know it’s a cliché, I know it makes me sound dumb, but please, please, I beg of you, listen to me, listen to the words as they were before they became tainted by association and repetition. Okay? My Sensei hunts ducks for sport. Let that sink in.
I’m still letting it sink in. It feels like a knife slowly but surely making its way through my abdomen. I’m bereft. Not even Rooster or Monica understand. They think “my Quentin phase” is over just because I’ve been home for a few months and I stopped complaining about it. Listen, I had a great time and I’ll treasure the experience forever, but there were hangups. There were snags. I won’t go into it now, but if you’d like to know, you can read my columns from the past year. Me and My Sensei—well, we had fun. Emphasis on had. He’s dead to me. I don’t care if his car breaks down outside our cabin and he’s bleeding from the leg and he needs urgent medical assistance. Someone pulled a hit-n-run and you need to call an ambulance? You need a drink of water? The time? Sorry, it’s a hard no from here on out.
Allow me to share with you what I found so disturbing. My Sensei went on The Howard Stern Show in 2022, and because I don’t have Sirius, I never heard the full interview. I’m also still pissed that Howard fired Benjy Bronk (a friend), but I forgot about that when I saw that My Sensei’s full 2022 interview was posted on YouTube. I listened to it on Monday night, figuring he’d talk about me, praise me, despite not having met me yet (look, if you’ve seen his movies, you know that anything is possible in life—even shooting Hitler in the face with a machine gun). Instead, he talked about going duck hunting with John Milius, Robert Zemeckis, and Steven Spielberg right before the 1995 Oscars. I was familiar with the story of Spielberg taking My Sensei aside and assuring him that not only would Pulp Fiction be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, but also that it would lose to Forrest Gump in every category—except Screenplay. Spielberg looked at My Sensei and said, “Second movie, little gold man. Not bad.”
Yeah. Heartwarming. So heartwarming. How about this?
Howard Stern: “So what happens when you go with Spielberg and the crew to duck hunt?”
Quentin Tarantino: “Yeah, I got a duck!”
HS: “Did you feel bad? I could never kill a duck, I’d feel terrible.”
QT: “Well, okay, it’s an interesting thing. I had a whole conversation with myself before going—and well, I’m going to eat the duck, alright, so if I have no problem eating a duck in a restaurant, then I better have no problem killing a duck to eat it, you know… But—not having done anything like that and being caught up in my own liberal humanism bullshit, I had a little conversation with myself: ‘Okay… I’ll only shoot a duck if I know I can kill it. I don’t want to just wound the little fella, and then he crashes, and the suffering and everything, I had that kind of thought… Cut to, now I’m in the blind, my blood’s up, and here they come, and dadadadada okay… Two hours later, FUUUUUCK THAT SHIT, I’m trying to blow them all out of the sky. I’d fucking wing one, like ‘OOOOOOOOkay, well, I didn’t bring you down, but you’re fucked up, dude! Some fucking wolf’s gonna be eating you later tonight, buddy! You got away, but you’re not getting far!'”
Speaks for itself, no? And to think I called this man My Sensei. MY SENSEI. More like Murderer of My People. I’m taking a mental health break now for everyone’s sake. But I’m not okay. I might never be okay again. My Sensei shoots ducks. Makes them suffer. Laughs about it. Evil is real and it’s recognized and rewarded in Hollywood.
—Follow Bennington Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits