The happy guy

Mike was certain that if it hadn’t been for the drone footage, everything would have turned out maybe just a little bit better. A five-year prison sentence, perhaps.  But not planetary humiliation.  At this point, though, it didn’t really matter what he thought. He was the happy guy now, and he always would be.

Watched in isolation (though only the police detectives would do so, later),  each one of the individual video clips captured by the three surveillance cameras at the newly-renamed Daniel Quayle Elementary School were, at best, mildly entertaining.  But when the mystery editor expertly stitched those three brief clips together, added the extraordinary drone footage at the end, and set the whole thing to a soundtrack of public domain 1990s-style euro-emo dance music, the finished product transformed Mike into a never-before-seen strain of social media superflu.

The entire six-and-a-half-minute video was far longer than your average viral dancing cat video on YouTube, but nonetheless it instantaneously burned its way through the multi-platform global population of device-clutching humans, picking up local language subtitles along the way. Analysts later claimed the clip – titled simply “the happy guy” – had a 99.9 percent completion rate, meaning almost no one could stop watching it until the bitter end. Within 24 hours of the video being posted, enterprising people across the globe were making a flash fortune selling happy guy t-shirts, online and on the sidewalk, each one emblazoned with Mike’s twisted, pained face. Mike-themed memes dominated the social ecosphere. Twitter was down for close to an hour, twice, buckling under the petabyte weight of the shares and likes. Late night talk show hosts feasted on the happy guy during their monologues, and super-edits of their monologues went viral, too.

So, the video, as we all now know: There, in the first few seconds, the perimeter surveillance camera shows a wide-angle Mike unsteadily approaching the front door of the low-slung brick-and-mortar school. The world, of course, would soon learn that this was Mike’s childhood school, K through 6, some 40 years earlier. But right now, watching this portion of the video, the world can only see that Mike is clearly very drunk. The ghostly green glow around Mike tells even the most media illiterate viewer at home that this is deep dark nighttime security camera footage.

In the next few seconds of what has since become the most watched video in the history of YouTube (4.6 billion clicks and counting!) the lobby security camera shows a large rock, followed by a large Mike, crashing through the glass sidelights of the front door. Mike has ripped his pants on the jagged glass frame, and his leg, too, but it’s hard to really see the blood on the first watching. In any case, whoever edited this viral video has clearly taken pleasure in shifting to slo-mo mode as Mike struggles for 20 seconds to remove his torn pants, falls to the faux-marble floor, knocks over a Pledge flag display, and crawls out of frame with his sagging, blood-soaked tighty-whitey underwear high in the air.

The next few seconds of the video, 2x speed this time now and captured by the ceiling-mounted hallway cam, shows Mike entering classroom B-12, and leaving the same room almost instantly — only now he is clutching a large metallic suitcase.

The running timecode at the bottom of the screen shows nearly 11 minutes of video have been edited out from the time he entered and exited his old homeroom. Sadly for his billions of his newfound fans, there is no footage of Mike (who people in the furthest corners of the world now know is 51, divorced, recently-unemployed and clinically obese, but a quiet neighbor who mostly kept to himself) actually in classroom B-12.  But knowing what one does now, one can easily visualize Mike perched precariously on those little desk-chair combos, straining to tear bare-handed through the 34 removable ceiling panels above, before he finds his treasure. There’s no real-life audio, either, save for the background euro-emo music dubbed in by the mystery editor, so the folks watching at home can’t hear the police sirens outside, or the school’s burglar alarm wailing away. But one can imagine.

Still, so far, this is just your average, run-of-the-mill breaking-and-entering video, like thousands more posted online. It’s the closing, expertly- and efficiently-edited 218 seconds of the clip that have made Mike a global icon.

What’s next on screen – those last 218 seconds – is video obtained from the serendipitously-passing drone.   (As everyone who reads the papers knows, the drone photographer was a reclusive, sandal-wearing unmanned aerial vehicle hobbyist named Mitchell Froom who lives just a few hundred yards down the street from the Quayle and was almost immediately sentenced, when all the dust settled, to 11 years of hard community service by the FAA Police for Droning Without a License).

Mike, in glorious 1080p drone POV footage, leaps from the school’s roof to a nearby tree, miraculously nailing his dismount on a large branch without dropping the silver suitcase.

It’s a slow night otherwise in Sammitch, Illinois, and 11 policemen are surrounding the tree, guns drawn. Three K-9 units are straining on their leashes.

The drone pilot is a real enthusiast, of course, because – as noted in so many of the magazine profiles on him — he’s equipped the drone with a lightweight, high-quality near-military strength microphone, too. Beneath the soft purr of the drone’s blades, the now-legendary exchange between a bloodied Mike and the tallest cop can be heard.

Tallest Cop: “Put your hands up!”

Mike: “I can’t! I’ll fall!”

Tallest Cop (motioning with gun): “What’s in the suitcase?”

Mike: “It’s a time capsule! From 1977!”

Tallest Cop: “A time capsule? You broke into the school for a time capsule?”

Mike: “Yesh! Our teacher made us write a letter. It’s important!”

Mike sounds more than a little drunk at this point in the video, but it’s the anguish – the sheer, unfiltered, unhinged anguish – in his voice that’s so riveting. One Sunday morning network TV pundit said it was like watching Hamlet performed in a pine tree.

Tallest Cop: “What kind of letter?”

Mike: “It’sh about what I want to be when I grow up! Our teacher, Mish May, she said – dream big! I can’t remember what I wrote. I need to know!”

A moment of silence. Then, Mike, again:

“Things haven’t been going too good for me lately.”

The hovering drone cam captures the cop as he slowly looks down at his shoes and lowers his gun. The others follow suit.

Watching at home, later, one can almost see the dogs relax.

Tallest Cop: “Well…open it up!“

Mike (really crying now, shoulders heaving): “Really?” (He wipes away some snot with a battered sleeve, endearing him to billions in a single, thoughtless, gross little gesture.)

The drone cam zooms in a little as Mike steadies himself in the tree, balances the suitcase in his lap, and flips open the 40-year-old latches.

Down rains item after item of mid-1970s kitsch. Later, of course, we are told that the time capsule contained mostly bicentennial paraphernalia, Carter/Ford bumper stickers, a TV Guide with Fonzie on the cover, an article from the local paper about a new movie called “Star Wars” that all the kids are crazy about, and a group class photo with Miss May front and center.  Miss May was 84 when she died in a car wreck last week, which most experts believe may have triggered this whole thing for Mike.

Since there were only 12 kids in his homeroom that year, Mike quickly finds his letter to his future self. He opens it with shaky hands, still nestled in the arms of the tree.

The tallest cop, who would never be officially identified and would never see a penny in revenue from all those t-shirts featuring his face superimposed over the words “WHAT’S IT SAY?” in block type, says: “What’s it say?”

Mike: “It says. Dear Mike. When I grow up…”

It’s at this point in the video that the emotions on Mike’s face change so subtly, yet so meaningfully, that the viewer at home – irrespective of nation or cultural norm – feels the change in his emotion on a subconscious level and immediately feels unsettled, disgusted, sympathetic and embarrassed, all at once.  Psychologists would dissect and discuss Mike’s facial expression at that moment on the morning talk shows for weeks to come.

Mike: “It says, Dear Mike. When I grow up, I want to be – happy. Love, Mike.”

And then, drained entirely, both Mike and the drone cam crash to the ground in perfect unison.