When I started At Last!, my greatest fear was that it would, like all other web-logs before it, evolve along one of two distinct paths: It would become either a daily catalog of the mundane efforts, concerns and disappointments of my life in New York, or would wither from neglect and devolve into a stagnant, rarely updated puddle of loosely affiliated ramblings. It seems that, despite my sincerest efforts, the siren song of the latter is too strong to ignore. And so it goes, that weeks slide by with nary a post in sight.
Blame the Russians. For the last month I have been slaving away on a feature film semi-secretly funded by the Russian government. While there's no nondisclosure agreement preventing me from disclosing the details of the project to my heart's desire, the fact of the matter is that after spending almost every single day of the last month on set, after having the plot explained to me, even after reading the screenplay first-hand, I am no closer to understanding what the fuck the movie is about than I was that first day on set, watching the lead actor scream at a fur coat.
The majority of my time was split between babysitting the trucks that contained our equipment, driving said trucks through the traffic-choked streets of New York, and coralling/diverting/hushing onlookers and passersby whenever we rolled camera. All three brought me, unsurprisingly, into close contact with every asshole living in this city. I'd be remiss to recount every time I was bumped, jostled, pushed, or told to fuck off -- these are, after all, numbered as the very threads with which this city's grand tapestry of humiliation, resentment and failure is woven -- but there is one exchange that bears singling out.
About halfway through the shoot we had to stage a car accident in Times Square at 3 in the morning. Why Times Square? Why 3 in the morning? My guess is that it's part of some post-communist treachery designed to punish Imperialist stooges such as myself by giving us pnemonia and/or getting us stabbed by junkies, drunk tourists and the other assorted weirdos walking down 42 street in the rain-sodden early hours of a Monday morning. In order to secure our little corner of Times Square, we had to show up many hours in advance and stake out enough parking for our fleet of camera trucks, crew vans and winnebagos. Once the spaces were coned off it fell upon the production assistants - among whose shivering, numb-fingered ranks I count myself - to wave off the legion of angry would-be parkers, which we did with aplomb. Fuck you too, prick.
And that would have been that, a long, cold night of neck-veined aggression and casual profanity, had I not been stationed right in front a Church of Scientology building. More to the point, my night might already have been bitterly cold and unpleasant had I not been drinking coffee all goddamn night and been overcome by a powerful and obvious need. I ducked into the zealot-hut and greeted the empty-eyed cultist with a friendly Hello, Scientologist! and asked to use the bathroom. She said no, possibly because it's in accordance with their crazy religious beliefs to deny comfort and shelter to soaking-wet SPs whose bladders are filled to bursting, or it might have been because I accompanied my friendly Hello, Scientologist! by snapping my bootheels together and thrusting my left arm into the air. Either way, I walked out of the revolving doors smug but unrelieved.
And yeah, I might have said something like fuck scientology to one of my fellow PAs, something exactly like that, when out of the blue some chubby ten year old rushes up, calls me a shithead and takes a swing at me. Having been called a shithead and been nearly punched countless times over the last few weeks, I did what came naturally and told the kid to go fuck himself, then realized that I had just told a ten year old kid to go fuck himself. He told me that Scientology is a good thing and that assholes like me just don't understand. I said beat it, kid. It felt awesome. I recommend that everyone antagonize a pre-adolescent just to give them an excuse to say those words. It means strangling your inner child, stabbing it in the neck, setting it on fire and kicking it into a snakepit, but them's the breaks.
But for those of you that think it was grossly intolerant of me to impugn the pseudo-religious beliefs of a child, regardless of how deeply rooted in the nonsensical, paranoid ramblings of a terrible science fiction writer, know that Lord Xenu did look upon my transgressions and smite me with a wicked case of food poisoning which has, in a twist befitting the limited imagination of scientology's Great Hack in the Sky, turned the last few days into one long mad scramble through the streets of New York, looking for the nearest toilet or approximation therof where I can void my bowels with a minimum of embarrassment.
Somewhere, an empty-eyed 10 year old asshole is laughing. Goddammit.
