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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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This Is How Horror Movies Start

As you grow up there are many milestones, signs, ages and moments that claim you are “a man.” There’s the fake ones like being bar mitzvah’d or losing your virginity or just turning eighteen. There are the assumed ones like getting a job, getting married, buying a house or having a kid. There are the personal ones, like the fact that I was recently able to root for the New York Rangers in a playoff game. As a kid I was an Islanders fan. The Rangers made me angry. The Rangers made me cry. The Rangers made me slap a kid in the face when I was twelve because he rubbed it in a little too much after a devastating loss. So the fact that I could stand up with 23,000 Rangers fans and legitimately cheer for them was to me, a true sign of growth and maturity, because my twelve year-old self would never be able to fathom how that could ever happen. But does that make me “a man”? Doubtful. Maybe the only way to really know if you are a man is to measure yourself against others. To be put in the same environment and see how you do. Maybe the real sign of manhood are the tests, tests of will, tests of courage and tests of sanity.

A few years ago there was a test that presented itself and put my manhood on the line. "Daddy, I want to catch a fish." This came from my son Charlie, an ocean-life obsessed five year-old at the time. He really wanted this more than anything and there was only one man that could help him reach this goal, and he was two thousand miles away.

My wife grew up in Montana, a state whose name I don't think I even uttered until I was twenty-five. I am amazed when I go there at how she could have come from such a place. It is beautiful no doubt, but from my perspective it's a different country. It is so far from our current reality, as she's been in New York for over twenty years. There were moments when I was more at home in India (Jewtown specifically...look it up). My wife always says that she felt like an alien growing up there and I totally understand. That's what New York is for. It's a planet filled with all of these aliens who have found a home away from their hometown. A place where they don't stand out but they actually blend in. I am very comfortable in my own hometown and can fake it in most places, but in Montana, you may as well just get me a seat between Richard Branson and Justin Bieber and send me to Mars.

I went on my first trip to Montana in 2002, essentially, to meet the FAMILY. Her dad has two brothers and five sisters, who have an average of two kids each. Her mom has four brothers and one sister, also averaging two kids each, so the math is extraordinary as far as cousins go. Luckily only about a third of her family lives in Montana. The other three thousand live in the slightly more familiar planet of Minnesota. In preparing for the trip I had to work with flash cards. "So Rick is married to Jean and their kids are Kayla and Keith"? "Cody...Kayla and Cody...Keith is my uncle that lives in Minnesota." And it would go like that for days up until the big family dinner where I would look at Rick, shake his hand and say "hey Kevin".

If they were to create someone that is the polar opposite of me then my father-in-law, Tom, would be the perfect choice. Let's look at the scoreboard. He lives in Kalispell, Montana, shadowed by Glacier Park, where bears are a nuisance. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, shadowed by Prospect Park, where strollers are a nuisance. He retired at 62 after 35 years working on the railroad (seriously, he drove cargo trains up and down the Pacific Northwest). I'm a fucking ad guy with no hopes of retirement. When a relative wants a house, they buy a plot of land, call my father-in law and his brothers and they drive hundreds of miles to help build it, from scratch. Where once there was nothing, now there was a house. Like a family of David Copperfields. After we bought our house, completely renovated, my in-laws flew out and built a shed in our backyard over a rainy weekend. They were rubbing it in my nose, literally in my own backyard. When my relatives buy a house I might send them a lovely waffle iron. My father in-law's "pets" are packhorses, horses that he uses to disappear into the woods for two weeks so they can carry a recently shot moose on their backs. I have a Labradoodle, who sometimes wears a raincoat on her back. His favorite hobby is hunting, but he uses a bow to keep it fair. I like playing basketball, but I stay on the outside to avoid aggressive elbowing. So my insecurities of where I stand on the manhood acceptance scale are at a heightened state before I even board the plane for Montana.

If there were one place that really boils the culture shock down into an image it's my in-laws' basement. It is overwhelmed by the presence of stuffed animals, just staring at you from all angles. And I’m not talking inanimate stuffed animals like Nemo, Snoopy and Buzz Lightyear, but animals that were once very animate and now are stuffed. Two things really stood out in that basement. First, these were not stuffed birds or squirrels. There were cougars, moose and elk with antlers that looked like giant witch fingers. The second thing that hit me was that these were all animals he had actually bagged. I think the moment I saw that room my penis went to the nearest computer, got online, booked the first flight back to New York (I think he prefers Orbitz when in a rush), packed up his little rucksack, hopped to the front door, realized he forgot something and approached me, yanked my pants down and grabbed my balls, dropping them in the bag. He continued to the door, turned back toward me, gave me one last look with his eye and said, "And you've been telling people you're a man all these years. Well I can't support this charade anymore." That was followed by a dramatic door slam.

As I looked at all of the animals covering the walls, no matter how anti-gun, anti-hunting, anti-NRA, anti-anything an upper west side raised Jew would be anti, I could feel nothing but respect. My wife had told me stories of how one elk would feed them for the winter. They would get it butchered into steaks, burgers, chops, chili and sausage and put it in a freezer. It's probably the right way to live, although I don't know if I could give up going to specialty stores and getting the meat in one place, the bread in another and the veggies from the green market fresh on a daily basis. Now that's my kind of hunting ("oh I hope Union Market has the Alaskan wild-caught Salmon, or US farmed, never foreign farmed, yeah I hope they have that.")

Tom and I did find common ground in sports, specifically baseball and a love for the Minnesota Vikings. So there was always easy conversation if there were any awkward moments of silence in my future. Like if we were going after some elk or a bear we could talk, I should say whisper, about the Yankees overspending, the Vikings' offensive line play and their draft class that year.

My son was fixated on fish from a very early age and he would always talk about wanting to go fishing. I have no experience fishing, at times going to great lengths to avoid it, but he and his sister, Lucy, are the only two people on the planet that could make me go and actually be excited about it. Charlie had to catch a fish. We had tried and tried, on lakes, rivers, ponds, even in Prospect Park, with no luck, although we did catch some "stick fish." But Grandpa Tom was going to make it happen. An old friend of his had a house with a stream about forty-five minutes away, deep in the woods. Now when I say woods, we are talking about the woods of Montana. This is like the Yankee Stadium of woods. This is the kind of woods where your chances of survival take a noticeable tick down, and I've brought my five year-old son into this. Two thoughts begin to battle in my mind.

1. This is what being a father is all about.

2. This is how horror movies start.

As a parent you are constantly playing a game of "Final Destination". The name of the game is in reference to a series of movies in the 2000's where Gen-Xers were killed seemingly by accident, although darker forces were at work. Electric wires would loosely squirm around and land in a puddle as the football player steps in it. A trailer becomes detached and slams into the young fashionista's car. A flying metal pole impales the over-the-top snobby girl that seduced the hot English teacher (ok I've never seen these movies but I imagine I'm not too far off). It was basically a Hollywood version of a safety manual. The way the parent version of the movie works is you scan a room, playground, restaurant or situation and determine what are the simple to outrageous ways my kids could get hurt, maimed or killed. There are minimal risks ("just move that table before you jump off the couch"), moderate risks ("you can only climb up to the middle rail if you're going to lean over the boat") and unacceptable risks ("don't put the drape cord around your neck"). The unacceptable one is always met with rejection, a lot of "but whys" and at times pure defiance, resulting in grabbing, pulling, redecorating or outright banishment. There are certain times when this game is heightened, usually because of two things - when confronted with the unknown, and when others leave you alone to deal with that confrontation. And when this one two punch works in tandem, it could expose you as a complete and utter wimp. My punches came in the woods of Montana.

We are bumping along in the truck with my wife's seven year-old nephew towards what could be the highlight of my young son's life and the worst nightmare of mine. As we approached Paul's house, Tom, with complete sincerity and sternness, says "Jon, I should let you know there are bears out here, so keep an eye on the kids when we’re outside." My head jerks up, hoping he was joking, but he did not break character. So I eked out an "Ok" that, let's just say, lacked the confidence that one might be looking for from a parent. So the game was afoot and Death had made its presence felt. The images begin. Let's call it "a horrible mind," as it starts racing to all of the things that I read, saw or heard about bears and how to avoid them or, worst case scenario, defend yourself against them. The major points that I remembered were "be still and hope they don't approach you but never...never run. And if mauling is about to happen....fight like hell." So I am ready to give myself up for my son, already preparing for the mauling, hoping the bear starts high and ends it quickly. I activated my spidey sense, constantly scanning the area. If we were in New York I would be completely aware of my surroundings. I would know where the best pizza place is within three blocks or where the nearest New York Sports Club is in case I had a bathroom emergency. I could even break down suspicious characters and know if I needed to cross the street at any moment. But here, it was just complete, helpless paranoia.

We arrived at Paul’s, immediately unloaded our gear (that's right I said gear) and headed out to the stream. We are all business at this point. And speaking of business I had to be on a conference call with a client about twenty-minutes into our angling. Although I was in one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of the country, I was feeling more stress at this moment then I've felt being stuck on the Southern State Parkway on a Friday in August trying to catch a 6:30 ferry to Fire Island, probably the most stressful feeling a New Yorker can have. This is not what "A River Runs Through It" was trying to convey. We walked down to the stream, which was teeming with fish...excuse me, brook trout. They were basically falling out of a rock and grass tunnel into the fast moving water, like splashing kids going down a water slide, three and four at a time. This was gonna work. Tom started to bait Charlie's hook and threw the bait to me for mine. This is one of those moments that we all know well. It's the "pretend you know what you're doing so you don't look like an ass even though you don't know what you're doing" moment. If my penis were still around I'd imagine he would look up at me, maybe his Shar Pei like wrinkles would contort to look like folded arms, and say something to the effect of "whatcha got?"

I am an animal lover but I will eat the crap out of pretty much anything, except veal as I'm still shaken by the photo of what "milk fed" really means. But I'm rarely confronted with murder. Okay, it was a worm, but I was ending its life by sticking a sharp hook into its head, or whatever they call it. Once I realized that my son was staring at me, there was no turning back. "Daddy, are you going to kill that worm?" Then I remembered, the worm doesn't die, it wriggles and taunts. The fish does the killing. That's the whole point. I was exonerated. "Well, actually Charz, the worm is alive, the fish does the killing. The worm needs to entice it.” Look at me. I took this awkward, uncomfortable moment and turned it into a lesson. This is how you grow, as a parent, and as a man. As I glowed with pride, Charlie looked at me, blinked a couple of times and said, "so you're just torturing it?"

While I was playing Mengele, completely mangling this poor worm, Tom had already caught two fish, Charlie immediately running over and reminding him that this was catch and release, needing visual evidence that they were thrown back. Eventually it was time for Charlie to get his fish. The plan was for Tom to actually catch it on the hook and quickly pass the rod to Charlie. I had to hold onto Charlie so the quarter pound fish didn't pull my twig of a son into the "crick." Tom felt a bite, gave me the signal and it was like clockwork. Charlie grabbed the rod, pulling and fighting the fish. I helped him reel it in and there it was, flopping around. Everyone celebrated Charlie's first fish. But within 30 seconds, Charlie realized something. "Grandpa, now I want to catch my own fish." The boy is no dummy. He knew what we did and this was not him catching a fish. We threw the imposter first fish into the shallow water and headed for the back-up plan, the stocked pond.

As they moved our operation to the pond, I hopped on my conference call. So here I am in a clearing in the woods of Montana, always on the look out for bears while also trying to capture Charlie's ultimate moment, yet I need to discuss the end messaging for our commercial for Fruit2day, a unique fruit juice experience; real fruit juice blended with real fruit bits, that's right bits, don't say chunks, because that would be gross.

Paul created a funnel from the creek to a pond, basically the bottom pool of the water park, where the kids pop up, slightly discombobulated, before they say they want to do it again. But there was no way out of this water park. The fish just accumulated there. Easy pickings. I finished up the call and raced down to the pond. We threw our lines out and the biting began immediately, everyone was pulling up fish, and then Charlie got a bite of his own. Tom helped Charlie stabilize and they reeled it in slowly, the fish fighting, Charlie battling (okay he was just holding the rod but he felt the fish) and then they pulled it in. He was thrilled, but not so thrilled that he forgot the golden rule. So after two minutes of glory, we threw our prize back in the pond, to live another day and tell his side of the story.

Having accomplished our goal it was time to head back to Paul's house and have some celebratory ice cream. We walked up the slight hill, the boys chasing frogs as Paul began boasting about an elk he just had stuffed (taxidermied?). He had to show Tom, and Tom was excited to see it, as if they were ten and Paul told him he just got a Mickey Mantle rookie card. So we got to the house and entered through the basement, which was filled to the gills with stuff, man stuff; oily rags, fishing reels detached from their rods like dug up skulls, hunting magazines and half finished projects everywhere. It was similar to the lair of Jaime Gumb, the killer in The Silence of the Lambs, only with better light and a more stable, civilized, less pre-op transexual, psycho killer vibe. My penis would look around, take a deep breath and say to me "now this is what I'm talking about. Get your notebook out young lady because you're going to school." They could do an entire Final Destination chapter in this room. Final Destination 9: Paul's Basement. Or if they decided to do an Off-Broadway version this would be the set. It would be tough to find a square inch of that room that wasn't wrought with danger of one shape or another. A wrench hanging off the edge of a counter, a knife left on a coffee table like it was a forgotten piece of toast, canisters of poisons, powders, cleaning fluids...just a death trap. So this prompted a reaction of protection for my son. The first step was corralling, basically keeping at least one hand on my child at all times. That could mean holding his hand, to an arm around his shoulder or, in this case, the two-shoulder-I'm-driving-and-you're-on-autopilot-mode.

As I controlled Charlie through the maze of death, the kids got their ice cream and we sat at the counter, thumbing through Fishgutting Illustrated, when Paul invited Tom upstairs to look at the elk head. As they headed up, Paul remembered something, stopped on the third stair and casually turned to me as if he were going to say something like, "Oh Jon, the paper towels are under the sink" or “help yourself to the lemonade in the fridge". But he didn't say those things. What Paul said, in a throwaway manner, was "Oh Jon, keep the kids away from the guns...they're all loaded." I watched as they continued up the stairs and squeaked out an even more lackluster "Ok." I now had a much bigger problem than the bears. Death was not only present but it was now in the same room, and potentially in many places of the room. Instantly my mind Googled and downloaded the thousands of stories I had heard about kids shooting themselves, their siblings, their friends, their parents and their cousins with guns found lying around the house. Paul had no idea who he was dealing with. Maybe he thought I was the type of man who can grab a gun, disassemble it, reassemble it blindfolded, click the barrel open and dump the ammo out in seconds flat. These are the men he's used to and that's the norm to him. But not this guy. It would be like me saying to Paul if he wanted to get from my house to Madison Square Garden - "Oh, just take the F to the A or C. No problem." Maybe Tom should've given Paul a little shake of the head or a whisper, ”He's not really a man”. But alas there was no help coming. This was the test. It was me against Montana. So I had to break down what he said, "they're all loaded." All as in more than one but as many as....a hundred and fifty seven? Couldn't he have said "they're both loaded" and at least looked in the direction of the three-foot pile of newspapers or the chainsaw leaning against the rocking chair? Just some numerical or geographical clue. My eyes scanned the room, and I could hear the Steve Austin vision SFX kick in di-di-di-di-di-di, but I couldn't find one, much less all, of the loaded guns. So after my five-second moment of scouting, I did what any man would do when confronted with a life or death situation, I avoided it head on. "Boys, let's eat our ice cream outside” (so we don't drip on all of Paul's loaded guns). I escorted them outside, still looking back into the room, as if the loaded guns were sneaking up on us, plopped the boys down in some chairs and got back to scouting for bears.

Looking out onto the vast, wide open, death ridden space I felt good, comfortable, confident, almost at home. Charlie caught a fish, I sold through a tagline ("a new way to eat fruit") and avoided a horrific front page news story ("penis-less New Yorker watches as five-year-old son shoots seven-year-old cousin with one of all of Paul's loaded guns"). I imagined something coming over the hill. It probably was nothing but in my mind it was my dick returning to me, balls in tow, preparing for a tearjerker of an ending. Loving me for who I am, as a father and as a man. This was not a horror movie anymore. This was a romance. And if it were a bear charging over that hill it should do the running because I was ready to fight like hell.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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Lobster Boy

"We got lobster boy! I think it's a two parter,” and then there was a bit of a celebration in the office. This was the high point of my first Hollywood gig, writing recreation scenes (like recreating a scene from real life, not recreation like volleyball or ping pong) for a 1994 tv show called Behind Bars. The show could be described as a low grade, reality based look at crime from all perspectives - cop, victim and criminal. The low grade aspect comes from the insane production timeline and the lack of...of...caring on anyone's part. A story would get a green light on a Thursday. Interviews of criminals, victims and law enforcement were held on Friday. We wrote the script on Sunday and Monday. Casted it Monday afternoon. Shot it on Tuesday. Edited it on Wednesday and Thursday. Aired it on Friday. Not much room for…thought or creativity. What gave it a bit of notoriety was that it was hosted by Darryl Gates. This was Gates' post riot, post retirement move, to host a show that sympathizes with criminals and victims, probably his two weakest demographics. The producers stuck with this head-scratcher for twenty five episodes. The final twenty five were handled by the more grounded and more respected Paul Sorvino. I was there for the transition and we didn't skip a beat, because we had no time for the beat to skip.

The process started with the news, not the front page, but more like the local crime blotter. We called this the research department. A producer would dig up "interesting" crime stories. Victims also played a huge role, as most of the time the stories would come from their transcripts, if they were still alive, as well as the transcripts of the criminals, who were ultimately the "stars". It was truly stomach turning stuff to work on, and these stories were generally ones that were passed up by the tv movie crowds, the Inside Edition crew and the 20/20's of the time, which I think was 20/20. But, hey, I got paid to write on a TV show.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 I was committed. I went for it. I would write as much as I could - spec scripts, screenplays, anything, and while I was waiting for that big break I took any job I could find. My first one was as a pre-production assistant on the film "Amos & Andrew" starring Nicolas Cage and Samuel L. Jackson. Remember it? Exactly. Not my fault. It was being produced by Castle Rock and, at the time, there was no hotter place to be. Seinfeld was just taking off, they were making great movies and the top people in the industry were milling about. I would make copies, get coffee for auditioning actors, make sure they signed the sheet when they arrived, you know, a part of the industry. I drove my grey Jeep from Brentwood to Beverly Hills and parked it in a lot, with a pass, no validation needed. I was validated every day. The only things missing were money, fame and anyone seeing me as a writer. On one of those perfect days I was late, my guess is horrific traffic not just on Santa Monica but on Little Santa Monica too, and I rushed to get to the office, parked my car and started going about my very insignificant business. About an hour later a guy comes into our small office and just yells out "who the fuck parked in Rob's spot? A grey Jeep?". I think I blurted out an "oh shit" and just weaseled down to the parking lot where I saw as clear as day that my car was parked in a spot that said "reserved for Rob Reiner." Now most Hollywood stories like that end with the PA shlub getting his big break. But not this shlub. Still waiting.

I was writing spec script after spec script, almost getting the break and almost getting an agent. Because the biggest Catch-22 in Hollywood was that in order to get someone to read your scripts, you needed an agent but an agent wouldn't read any unsolicited scripts, basically a weeding out phase. But they did read the cover letter, so instead of writing a generic cover letter I made the letter my material, because I realized that was my only shot at them reading anything of mine. The cover letter exposed the Catch-22 successfully as I asked the agents not to read the enclosed material because I understood that they couldn’t read unsolicited stuff, but I asked them if they had a sister or a daughter that I could meet in order to get in good with them, take advantage of the pervasive nepotism and therefore make the work solicited or at least make the point moot. It actually worked as agents enjoyed the cover letter, gave me a pass and started reading my work, which got me an agent. It did little to move the needle but I made it through phase one. Naturally in Los Angeles you run into people going through the same struggle and frustrations. One night I had plans to meet up with my brother, who was in town for work in sports production doing a baseball game. The announcer of that game was from Boston and he had an actor friend that he wanted to see. We all met at a bar in Santa Monica and I started talking to Matt, the actor friend who, to double his punishment, was also a screenwriter. We shared our Hollywood horror stories and talked about the things we were working on. He mentioned that he and his buddy were in the middle of a feature script about two friends from Boston. We wished each other good luck and he must have gotten all of it because two years later I saw Matt Damon again, accepting an Oscar for that script. Me, I was slumming it, writing on TV.

I had been somewhat exposed to tabloid journalism as my roommate was a producer in that world. She had worked on Hard Copy and was in LA to make a made for tv movie about a killer in Texas called the Texas Twister Killer. It had something to do with a guy that killed his wife during a tornado, or after a tornado, or maybe he threw her into a tornado. She looked at news and stories completely differently than I did. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 she didn't see tragedy, she saw opportunity, making calls to friends who were there to get the scoop on perpetrators and victims. She was looking for angles. One day the phone rang. I picked it up.

"Hello"

(heavy southern drawl on the other end) "Is Betsy there?"

"No she's not. Can I take a message?"

"Yeah, I'm calling about the Texas umm...murder thing."

"Oh right, right she mentioned you'd be calling. Sheriff...."

"Well no. This is...well I'm the...I'm calling cuz we had arranged a specific time to call. I'm only available like once a day and this was our scheduled time. I'll have to call back tomorrow."

Click

Later to Betsy.

"I think you're killer called."

"Shit! He's calling back tomorrow right?"

"It sounded like he could fit it into his schedule."

So there was an ick all around me. An old work friend of my Mom's who I reconnected with was a producer/director for Behind Bars and he mentioned that they needed writers that could take the crime and the sound bites and turn them into a story. I told him I was in. It had the title writer in it. All I had to do was transcribe the interviews, pick the key moments and write those scenes out. They had no money so they scraped together whatever they could production wise, costume wise and acting wise. Each episode consisted of some unbelievable mistakes in logic, appearance and just plain "why would they ever put that on film" moments. False mustaches would be falling off, clothes wouldn't fit or match from scene to scene, and actors would be seen reading cue cards like a Saturday Night Live skit. I had to transcribe lines like this doozy from a crack addict - "the rock was the monster". But I wanted to get a feel for the whole operation so I asked to go on a shoot. I picked the perfect one.

The story was simple, and remember we weren't doing The Great Train Robbery or Heat. This was lowlife scum who would be willing to talk to a camera out of some hope that it would free them from jail when dramatically depicted. The crime involved a man who was on line at a grocery store when he noticed the overweight man in front of him flashing a hundred dollar bill to pay for his food. So our hero (criminal) decides to follow the plump guy to his car, hit him in the head with a baseball bat, stuff him in his own car and drive off with his money, his car and his knocked out body in the trunk. Not exactly Ocean's Eleven. Easy enough for a re-creation scene. The rest of the scenes were interviews and recaps by our host, the esteemed Captain Gates in what would be his series swan song. The interior shoot of the store went great, the bad guy looked bad, like every Timothy Olyphant part in his first six movies, and the victim looked like he didn't see it coming, a nervous Josh Gadd type.

As the shoot moved outside and the crew began to block the scene something became very apparent. Clearly the nonexistent props department didn't cross reference with the nonexistent casting department because our victim was too big to fit in the trunk of the prop car, which was the director's gorgeous BMW convertible. They kept trying to shut the trunk on our portly thespian, and as the trunk kept bouncing back up there was an audible "ouch" from our victim, who was stuffed in there like silly putty in a container, parts just spilling out. They wanted to prove he could fit, with no care of how it would look on film, and we had to get him into the trunk because the real crime wasn't the theft of a hundred dollars or even knocking him out. The real crime was driving away with him in the trunk. Kidnapping was the reason the guy was in jail and the purpose of the entire episode. So we couldn't just knock him out and leave him in the parking lot.

Eventually these geniuses accepted the fact that they needed a different car for the stuffing of our victim. The other option we had was, I shit you not, a Gremlin. This was meant for our criminal. It was perfect for him. But it was deemed more perfect for our victim as he could fit, positioned fetally, in the hatchback trunk. All they had to do was switch the cars and no harm done right? Sure. This is how the scene was scripted:

- Criminal drives his Gremlin to the grocery store parking lot just as our victim gets out of his brand new BMW convertible, an obvious target.

- Criminal follows his mark into the store.

- As they are in the check out line the criminal gets confirmation that he's chosen well as the target flashes a hundred dollar bill.

- Criminal follows the victim to the BMW, waits as the victim pops the trunk to put his grocery bag inside. As the trunk opens the criminal sees a baseball bat in the trunk. He grabs the victim's bat and quickly hits him on the head with it, knocking him out.

- Criminal stuffs the victim’s body in the trunk, shuts the trunk and drives off in the BMW, leaving his shitty Gremlin in the lot to be picked up later.

This made sense from a story standpoint.

Here is what was shot and AIRED because of our portly victim:

- CRIMINAL drives his brand new BMW convertible into the grocery store parking lot just as our VICTIM gets out of his GREMLIN, a not so obvious target for our criminal.

- Criminal follows his target into the store

- As they are in the check out line the criminal is surprised that he's chosen well as the target flashes a hundred dollar bill.

- Criminal follows the victim to the Gremlin, waits as the victim pops the trunk to put his grocery bag inside. As the trunk opens the criminal sees a baseball bat in the trunk. He grabs the victim's bat and quickly bops him on the head with it, knocking him out.

- Criminal easily stuffs the victim in the trunk of the Gremlin, shuts the trunk and drives off in the shitty Gremlin, leaving his brand new BMW convertible in the lot to be picked up later.

This made absolutely no sense from a story standpoint. There was a lot of shrugging and acceptance. There was no time to contemplate the stupidity of the decision. So they went with it. And it aired, like that. Darryl Gates should’ve gone to jail for this.

With this as the bar it makes a little sense that there was a celebration in obtaining the "Lobster Boy" story. It was their biggest "get" yet as many family members, law enforcement and victims agreed to do it and it was actually a fairly infamous story, almost legit. It was worthy of a two parter.

Grady Stiles was born with an affliction called ectrodactyly, where his fingers and toes were fused together to form claw-like hands and feet. Stiles' stage name was "Lobster Boy". This was genetic and he was the sixth in a line that began with the birth of his great, great, great grandfather in 1805. Grady Stiles' father was a sideshow attraction in a traveling carnival when his son was born and added him to the act at a young age. As Grady grew up in the circus it became his life, really only being exposed to this world and not much else. Grady married twice and had four children, two of whom also had the affliction and joined Grady on the carnival tour as The Lobster Family. When not traveling with the carnival the family lived in Gibsonton, Florida where many other carnival performers lived during the winter season. Due to his condition, he was unable to walk and while he often used a wheelchair, he mostly used his hands and arms to move around, which lead to incredible upper body strength that, when combined with his temper and alcohol consumption, made him dangerous to his family and others. He was a scary guy and often followed through on his threats. In 1978, Stiles shot and killed his oldest daughter's fiancé on the eve of their wedding, but he wasn’t sent to prison as no state institution was equipped to care for someone with his condition. So he got fifteen years probation and during this time he stopped drinking for a bit and remarried his first wife, Maria. However, he soon began drinking again and his family claimed that he became even more abusive, one time Army crawling from the kitchen into the bedroom with a knife in his mouth until he got to a sleeping Maria, putting the knife to her throat and threatening her. In 1992 Maria and her son from a previous marriage hired a sideshow performer to kill Stiles for $1500. He shot him three times in the back of the head, killing Grady instantly. All three were brought to trial and convicted. In her defense, Maria told the judge, "My husband was going to kill my family. I believe that from the bottom of my heart. I’m sorry this happened, but my family is safe now."

Can you say goldmine? We had the script down and the story was quite compelling, with amazing characters and dramatic moments that we could heighten. But what was really going to make this episode sing were the prosthetics. We went the distance on this one and decided to build the claws. The day before the shoot the prosthetics arrived in the office and everyone was excited to see what the art department came up with. We gathered around to look at the artistry and sitting on the table was...an oven mitt...painted a flesh-like color. The team agreed that this was acceptable (let's remember where the bar is set for this collection of artists). Our actor could wear it and we wouldn't shoot it too close up. If Spielberg could shoot around a flawed robotic shark, we could shoot around six dollar Bed, Bath and Beyond oven mitts.

The script was snappy and rich but we didn't have a title for the show. The writing was on the wall that Behind Bars was not getting a season 2. Shocking. Was it the actors we found on the streets? Was it the poor communication between props and casting? Were we running out of stories? Why would this show not make it? Maybe because it was the campiest, sleaziest, most uncomfortable show I've ever seen. And this is coming from someone who in 4th grade was told by his parents to lie to his teacher about how many hours of TV they watch in a week. "Cut it in half", my mom implored, "I don't think the real number will be believable". So I lied and still beat everyone easily. But there was no saving Behind Bars as it only aired in 5 markets at around 3 am. My parents actually thought about flying to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see the show as that was the easternmost market. So The Lobster Boy episode was to be our Emmy entry and to win an Emmy it needed a title. Other episode titles included things like "My Husband, My Killer", "The Texas Terror” (not to be confused with “The Texas Twister Killer”) and "The Monster and the Rock". So there had to be some punch to it. I looked for my inner NY Post headline and it just came to me. So if you ever come across Behind Bars on YouTube or in some other digital, cloud-like thing that holds all the crap ever filmed and you see this episode, just know that for a week or two I was on a writing high because I surpassed the challenge presented to me, reaching the pinnacle of my art form, and The Grady Bunch was my opus.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

Text

The Karma Bitch

Karma is a bitch. It's the more realistic, unforgiving twin sister of Mother Nature. It shows no mercy. Karma doesn't live on our same timeline. She will wait you out and get you at any point. In fact I think Karma waited twenty years to get me and, unfortunately, some others had to suffer for my actions as well.

I am somewhat superstitious, teetering on OCD behavior. When I was in my teens I had this internal obsession with the number three. I needed to count in threes, step in threes, make choices based on threes. It got a bit out of control but not to the point where anyone but me knew about it, hence my parents are saying right now as they are reading this for the first time, "I didn't know that about Jon, did you know that about Jon?". My superstitions revolved mostly around sports. Nothing out of the ordinary for any sports nut. Thinking that what I ate, wore, sat in, where I watched and who I watched with had an impact on the outcome of games. My most powerful sports superstition was shared with my Dad and it had to be shared because it took two people to activate the winning formula. We called it "The Noozh" (sounds like you are saying noodge but towards the end of it you start saying the beginning of Jacques Cousteau's first name). My Dad has a very proud and prominent proboscis and when we really need it he'll lean into me and say "noozh" and I will, no questions asked, give it a rub like I'm summoning a genie out of a lamp. Whether it was an Islanders game in overtime, a big possession for the Knicks or the last out for Mariano Rivera, that Noozh has come through countless times. We weren't frivolous or reckless with it, we knew it could not be taken lightly or disrespected. For it to work we both had to agree that this was a moment that needed it and if it were overused it would lose its powers (see Yankees-Red Sox 2004).

Am I a master of the "dark arts"? Debatable. I have a healthy respect for whatever is going on in that world and I generally don't like to mess with it. But where do practical jokes fall into this 4th dimension? I mean there are the innocuous ones like going on someone's email when they aren't at their desk and begin sending a message to the head of the company that just says "fuck you" on it. I would then put the cursor right on the send button. The person would return, sit down, look at the screen, get confused, reach for the mouse and then just freeze. They couldn't move for five seconds for fear of detonating the bomb. Someone would eventually have to help that person move the cursor with the mouse as if it weighed a thousand pounds, essentially cutting the green wire. That is fairly safe but sometimes you get into the mean spirited kind of practical jokes. The ones that got out of control. The ones you still feel bad about. The ones that generally happen when someone named Nathan is involved.

Three things you need to know before I tell you this. I was thirteen, at camp and Nathan was an asshole from Westchester. Just a prick. Okay I was a prick too and I enjoyed pissing him off. He and I had an escalating practical joke war. It started small - food fights, water balloons - kids stuff. But then I upped the ante and decided, with some accomplices, to put his entire bed on the roof of our bunk, which took him an entire day to find and get down. His revenge went too far and broke the rules of impersonal, ephemeral pranking. What I'm saying is he asked for it. While I was off, probably shooting 100 free throws or some insane obsessive activity, he erased about ten of my cassettes. That's right, cassettes. Things you can’t get back when deleted. Paul McCartney & Wings, James Taylor, Eagles and AC/DC (I'm sure plenty of people are thinking good riddance). Not cool. I was pissed. He took this to a new level where it was going to end in tears, either from laughter or pain, hopefully both.

It took me a day or two of scheming like a Bond villain. I wanted something nuclear. I was going to end it once and for all. To basically let Nathan know that you don't want to screw with me. I felt that my pranks were well thought out, sophisticated. Like the bank robber who takes six months to plan the heist, traveling around the world to put together the perfect team; the tech guy, the comms guy, explosives expert, the guy on the inside and the fence who puts up the money. I liked the details of a prank. The bed on top of the roof was not a one man job and neither was what we'll call "spreading the jam". Nathan's prank was thought out like a caveman. "Me erase Jon Genesis tape. Duh." I just don't respect that. There is an art to pranking. Oh and we are talking early Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, although I did have a dalliance with Abacab.

Warning: what you are about to read is disgusting, cruel and comes directly from the mind of a thirteen year-old boy who was furious about not having Hotel California on cassette anymore. So beware, skip ahead, go to the next story, hide the kids, but don't judge me, judge the thirteen year-old me.

I put my Goldfinger thinking cap on because Nathan was going to pay. As Nathan was off working on his mediocre tennis game, so he could get back to Scarsdale in the fall and take his junior high school by storm, I looked at his stuff like a serial killer on a scout. Scouring through his bathroom kit, his shoes and his clothes. My good friends/minions, Jon and Patrick were making suggestions that weren't worthy of my ire.

Jon - “Put Tiger Balm in his underwear?”

Me - “Too much of a chance he'll smell them before he puts them on…worse.”

Jon - “Foot powder in his toothpaste?”

Me - “Not bad but I want to haunt him…worse.”

Patrick - “Put dog shit in his shoes?”

Me - “Maybe but...(dramatic pause, maybe the lights even flickered) the dog....what if…?”

And the wheels went in motion. When a dog is in heat, they have certain....secretions and I think the only recognizable one would be blood, but it is a gooey sticky mess when they get excited. We looked over at Birdy, our counselor’s currently in heat golden retriever, as she was curled up in the corner. She was not allowed on anyone's bed due to "her state". I went into psycho mode and walked over to Nathan's bed. I sat on it and started to pat the pillow with enthusiasm. "Birdy, come on girl." My accomplices got exactly where I was going. It was the unspoken language of 13 year-old boys...cruelty. They both joined in, encouraging Birdy. Birdy perked up and scampered over to me. She jumped up on the pillow and settled in for a petting. Then I looked at the horror on Jon and Pat's faces, as they backed away a few steps, which just confirmed to me that this was the right thing to do. All I did was start rubbing Birdy's back, which started the ignition, her leg started moving, she rolled over on to her back. I started rubbing her belly and then things... started... to...happen....on Nathan's pillow, as I placed it on the dog's belly. After about forty seconds, I gave Jon the signal to call Birdy. When she hopped off the three of us looked down on the pillow and, like a dramatic scene from ET or The Goonies where the kids see something spectacular, the camera looking up as their eyes widen and finally resting above their heads, peering down at the alien/creature/body/treasure, we were entranced. This was definitely an alien, because smeared all over Nathan's pillow was something akin to raspberry jam mixed with vaseline (I warned you). We looked at each other and, as adolescent boys do, we celebrated our genius. I calmly turned the pillow over and we left the bunk and went about our business.

That night, at light's out, the twelve campers settled into their beds, the three of us giddy and buzzing with expectation - quick glances at each other with our flashlights to acknowledge the moment. It didn't take long for all hell to break loose. It started with Nathan loudly asking a question to the entire bunk. "What's that smell? Does anyone smell that?" I'm sure someone probably said "your momma”, but that was ruining the moment for us. Then Nathan's flashlight went on and the sheer horror on his face when he turned his pillow over was unimaginable. Think of Mia Farrow when she saw what Rosemary's Baby looked like or the Hollywood producer in The Godfather when he discovered his beloved horse's decapitated head. Nathan jumped up out of his bed and tossed his pillow. The lights came on as our counselor went to investigate. Nathan's eyes immediately went to me. I was calmly sitting up in my bed giving him a "that's what happens when you fuck with me" look. He realized he couldn't play up to my level, he had lost. Eventually the bunk quieted down and everyone fell asleep to Nathan's sniffles and my chuckles. Game over Nathan.

Now that was a bad practical joke in every way possible. But the results and ramifications were minimal. I just had an enemy and a reputation for six weeks at camp. But that was not the worst practical joke, because no one really had to pay. Although I don't really know how Nathan turned out. I have some assumptions - a wealthy upper east side lawyer - okay a very specific assumption.

But did the Nathan practical joke wake up some karmic spirit, who kept an eye on me and basically said "no more”? Did the entity decide to wait twenty years to put me in my place and turn a prank into an international incident? Well, yes. Yes it did.

Twenty years later

I was working on my dream "advertising" job (quotations to be used as a qualifier). I was about to shoot some very cool tv commercials for hockey on ESPN. I was a huge fan and the spots were written from an insiders perspective, so I could get all poetic and shit. In fact, Susan Sarandon agreed to do the voiceover for the spots because she loved hockey and, as she told me, the writing reminded her of Carlos Castaneda. So after beaming from the compliment I immediately looked up Carlos Castaneda.

The shoot had us traveling around the northeast and midwest to work with some of the best players in the game. It was one of those "I can't believe we get paid for this" moments, which in advertising could mean a lot depending on how you deliver the word "this". But this was a positive "this". One of the stops for the shoot was Detroit, as the Red Wings were a dynasty at the time and we were going to shoot during practice and an exhibition game. My partner/accomplice was the nicest, sweetest British woman. Kate was a fantastic art director with impeccable taste and absolutely no knowledge of hockey, which was perfect. I kept it realistic and she made it look nice. Our producer/target, Brian, was perfectly set up for a prank. He was in full business mode, trying to put this big production together. There was very little precedent set for practical jokes during the job, which probably worked in our favor. Detroit, as you may know, borders on Canada and across the river is lovely Windsor, Ontario. Basically an extension of Detroit with less blight and less Kid Rock. Unbeknownst to us, not that it would ever be knownst because we used a travel agent, when booking our travel it became apparent that there were no hotel rooms available in Detroit, which begged the question - are there hotels in Detroit? But there were plenty of room across the river in Windsor, in another country. Passports necessary (foreshadow #1...dun,dun,dun).

In the days leading up to the shoot we had to shuttle back and forth through the Windsor tunnel to and from Detroit. The first couple of times no one paid attention to Kate, who on the initial crossing said, "funny, my passport's expired. I just hope they don't notice" (insert echo effect - notice, otice, ce - foreshadow #2). She actually said this but since this was 1999, we weren't as vigilant or attentive to these facts. Because each time you crossed over you had to show a passport. Sometimes the border guard looked and sometimes they didn't. But each time Kate got a little more nervous. After the third time she mentioned to Brian, "I just wish we had stayed in Detroit. What would they do to me if they noticed the passport was expired?"

"Throw you in jail. Exportation. Firing squad.”

Hahaha. Isn't that funny? (and there's our foreshadowing hat trick).

On the morning of our first shoot day Kate and I had to work at the hotel and drive in later to meet up with Brian and the crew. On our way in to Detroit, after another safe but nervous encounter with the border patrol, we decided to play a joke on Brian. When we got to the arena we called him from the parking lot.

Me (deadly serious) - “Hey Brian, so we have a bit of a situation. It's kind of fucked up”.

Brian - “Umm, okay. Sergei Federov is running late so we're good on time…what?”

Me - “No no no. Kate didn't make it through. They caught her passport, saw it was expired. So...they have her.”

Brian - “.....what? Shut up.”

Me - “What can I tell you? She got caught. They detained her.”

Probably the first time I ever used the word detained. It felt so dire and perfect for the prank. I think Kate even nodded at the word choice. There was a slight pause from Brian but he wasn't biting completely.

Brian - “Bullshit.”

Me - “Look. I'm on my way in, we can talk about it there but they took her passport and they're going to deport her. She's back at the hotel trying to get help from the agency.”

Brian - “Oh fuck. Fucking Windsor.”

And we got him. I am covering the phone and cracking up, nodding back to Kate.

Brian - “So...you're coming in? Can I call anyone? Oh fuck.”

Me - “I know. We couldn't find one hotel room in Detroit?”

Brian - “It's my fault...why didn't she tell me when we booked the rooms? She didn't tell me.”

Me - “Don't beat yourself up. She screwed up. Maybe you could have pushed a bit harder but how could you know. Let's just get through the shoot and try to keep her from getting deported.”

Brian - “Is she okay?”

Me - “Uhh...she's a little freaked out. Look I'll be there shortly and we'll figure it out.”

Brian - “Okay...umm...see you.”

This must be when the Karma Bitch was awoken. A giant alarm clock blaring, her not wanting to wake up but knowing that she can't ignore it because someone was laughing at her, tempting her and they had to pay. So she groggily slams her hand down on the fate tempting alarm. She puts her feet down on the floor, stretches, let's out a morning fart and pulls up her daily log. She sees right at the top that some ad geeks are giving her the middle finger. And then she notices one of those geeks has a record. The Nathan stunt. She stands up and gets ready to go to work.

I hung up completely satisfied that Brian was shell shocked. Kate and I walked towards the arena just imagining the frenzy going through Brian's head. As we approached the ice where the crew was setting up, Kate hid in the entryway. Brian turned and saw me, just milking and cementing the joke a bit. After a few shuffles on the ice he saw Kate step out from the runway and onto the ice. His face went through shock, anger and relief in about two seconds.

Brian - “You fucker.”

The whole crew, aware of the situation, witnessed and appreciated the punking. We made up and went on with our shoot. From this point on you will question this and say "come on, it must have been a different shoot, at least a different day, not the next day. It couldn't have happened". Oh it happened and it freaks me out, and it makes me have huge, universal thoughts. It was as if we went through dress rehearsal the day before. But the next day is when the Karma Bitch looked at the transcript and just said, "Fuck 'em, it's showtime, we'll do it exactly like they said, perfect. Don't change a thing."

We set out for the shoot the next morning, again Kate and I driving in on our own. As we approached the toll/checkpoint, we actually joked about the joke, "wouldn't it be funny if", "what if we...", "Brian would kill us." We did our usual maneuver where I showed my passport and while the guard focused on mine, we slipped Kate's over to him. The theory being they would study mine intently and assume she was with me. We were 9 for 9 up to then. But something must have happened or maybe it's the 9 out of 10 thing, this was the dentist that wasn't choosing Crest. Kate maybe showed some doubt because this particular guard looked a little too close and we saw his eyebrows ruffle and he caught it.

Guard - “You know you're passport's expired?”

Kate - “Yeah, I'm in the process -.”

Guard - “Miss I can't let you through with an expired passport.”

We looked at each other like, no fucking way this is happening. Did Brian do this?

Guard - “You'll have to pull into the station lot and they'll help you out in the office.”

He pointed with Kate's passport to a square brick building across the three lanes. Okay I thought, so they'll help us out. That doesn't sound too bad. We were overdramatizing our prank. How could helping be bad? But honestly all we were really thinking was that we were so totally fucked.

We pulled into the parking area just off to the side of the toll plaza. We were speechless as this was going from ironic to concerning very fast. Cut to the Karma Bitch doing her payback dance/chant - "that's right, who's got the last laugh, who? Who? I can't hear you. Not so fucking funny now motherfuckers". I guess I've cast either Melissa McCarthy or a nemesis from a Pam Grier blaxploitation film as the Karma Bitch.

We walked into the station which looked like a DMV. Just a room with a bunch of people in cubicles behind a long bar. It was fairly empty but there was an air of gravitas to the place. It was silent and sterile. Kate approached and showed her passport. She started to explain herself when the woman stopped her with a look up and a hand giving a stop signal.

Woman (this is where the gravitas comes from) - “You're passport is expired.”

Kate - “I know, we just…"

Kate was losing it as she looked towards me. I took that as an invitation and I stepped over the yellow line.

Me - “I can help out, you see we were -.”

Woman - “Sir step behind the line and don't speak or you will be held as an accomplice.”

And that's what I did (that's the potentially getting shot post 9/11 moment). Accomplice? To what? I wasn't driving a getaway car. But we knew it was serious. The woman told Kate what she had to do. She could not cross the border without a passport, if she tried again she would go to jail. She had 24 hours to arrange her deportation. I'm sorry...her what?. She had to stay in her hotel room until her "arrangements" were made. She had to go back to England and could not return to the US or Canada until she had a valid passport. Fuck Canada. We had spots to shoot and edit in the US. Kate asked a couple of questions but was accepting her fate. We slowly moved back to the car. They escorted us across the lanes so we could turn around and head back to the hotel, the tunnel and the U.S. in our rearview mirror. The line of cars going into the tunnel looked like a tongue sticking out at us in a flash mob like raspberry.

On the ride back to the hotel the conversation was mostly about why she had waited so long and why the hell did we have to stay in Windsor. The blame going back and forth between Kate and the travel agent. But what we didn't talk about was the Deja Vu we had created and that there was an entire crew waiting for us. No blame was thrown my way for awakening the Karma Bitch.

When we got to the hotel we knew we had to call Brian. Since Kate was off calling our office, trying to get help in staying in the states, I had to call him. Now how the hell was I going to do this? This was impossible. You think it's hard to pull of a realistic prank. Try pulling off a realistic scenario based off of a prank the very next day. I called from my room.

Brian - “Hello.”

Me - “Umm…You’re not gonna believe this. They got Kate.”

Brian - “Shut the hell up. We're ready to roll.”

Me - “No. I'm serious this time. They really caught her today. We had to go into the border office -.”

Brian - “And they deported her?”

Me - “I know, I know. But yes, that's exactly right. Well not yet. She has to stay in the hotel and has twenty four hours to get on a plane to London. No bullshit.”

Brian - “Seriously dude. Get to the shoot.”

Me - “I don't know what else to tell you and it's really fucked up but it happened exactly the way we said. She's gotta go. I'm coming to the shoot but she won't be there.”

Brian - “Wait, what? You're not bullshitting.”

Me - “No bullshit. I wouldn't pull the same prank two days in a row. I'm better than that.”

I heard him cup the phone as he spoke muffled, “Prhumpf ssport Kate ghhmskut, ported”. And then there was laughter. Brian was telling our client and our account person what happened, they started to laugh but apparently his face said it all as they abruptly stopped. I could feel the moment over the phone. Brian got back to me.

Brian - “Get down here. Yzerman is ready. This is fucked.”

Me - “As soon as I calm Kate down.”

I might have hung up on him as he was mentioning thousands of dollars and hockey stars and impatient clients and crew but I had to. I went to Kate's cell/hotel room, and had a few un-encouraging words for her. There was a lot of uncomfortable silence. She spoke to the office and the travel agent. The story was that she was booked on a flight the next morning from Windsor to Toronto with a connecting flight to London. She would have the deportation stamp on her as the accompanying paperwork would explain. Then she would have at least three weeks of "dealing with her situation" to try and get back. She'd still be there if this were two years later.

I gave her a hug and headed off to the shoot. As I approached the toll, I had flashes of recreating the scene. I should have distracted the guard more, told some jokes, talked hockey, mentioned that we were about to meer Sergei Federov and Steve Yzerman. It was Canada for crying out loud. Hockey talk is like the go fetch ball to Canadians right? I also thought like a criminal. I could have put her in the trunk, gotten her across and those Canadian bastards could eat our dust. I could've done more. I could've done more. But I had to pay, pay for Nathan.

As I stepped onto the ice and started my long shuffle to where the crew was set up, the silence was palpable. Remember, I am walking across ninety feet of ice in the middle of a completely empty twenty thousand seat Joe Louis Arena, except for a a film crew on the other end of the ice. All thirty people on the crew were staring at me, including all-star and team captain Steve Yzerman, as the story had now found it's way throughout the arena. They were giving me the "here's the asshole" look. And as the Ad guy you're already an asshole from the start, because you're telling them what to do different or can we try this or that. It was truly a walk of shame. It was like the end of a buddy cop movie, where one of the buddies doesn't make it, yet it lacked the heroics. Their eyes were angry, like why is this guy wasting my time angry. Or there were those who liked Kate better and I was the one who lost her. Some looked past me, waiting for Kate to appear behind me, but it didn't happen. There was some elbow nudging, as if there were bets made. If this were a movie, Brian would meet me half way with a smile and then a solid punch to the nose. I would fall hard to the ice and then the blood from the back of my head would pool across the white surface. A truly beautiful shot, maybe from above, as the crew applauded. But that didn't happen. I had to face them all and as I got close enough I just said, "I don't want to talk about it. Let's just start shooting." I guess everyone was relieved that something was said, so that's what happened. It was like I pushed a button. The crew set in motion and we were shooting within ten minutes.

During the shoot the lineup of problem solvers started. Random crew members had some thoughts like -

Sound guy - “I can drive over and get her in my trunk, there's plenty of room.”

Assistant Camera Guy - “I have a friend that works in the immigration office.”

Director (whispering) - “So I was talking to some of the crew and there's a guy who has a boat.”

Now that's a sentence that can never come from a place of legality. If the line was "my buddy has a boat," that's different but "there's a guy who has a boat" can never end in a fishing trip or a nice sail around Lake Michigan. There's trouble written all over it.

Director - “They do it all the time. Wait until around 10pm, hardly anyone's on the water. It takes 15 minutes to get across. We're working on it now. Where to pick her up and all of that.”

I felt like I was in an episode of Hogan's Heroes. Then the client came up to me.

Client - “I may be able to resolve Kate's situation. I...I kinda know Al Gore.”

After the shoot we all gathered at the hotel for dinner with Kate the immigrant. The client was working the Al Gore angle, making some calls, and Kate called off any maritime border crossing or trunk stuffing. Even with the Vice President potentially getting involved, there was a sense of dread. That Kate had fucked up and she had to deal with it. She was handling that end of it. Calling the travel agent and booking her flight home. Ultimately, Gore could not help. Surprising that the Veep, who was about to lose a gut wrenching Presidential campaign couldn't get involved in helping out a British art director with an expired passport. Now if she was caught driving an electric car across the border maybe we had an angle, but this was of no interest to his people. Having run out of options, and time, we said goodnight, some said goodbye to Kate as we were going to drive her to the airport first thing in the morning.

On the long, rainy drive to the airport there was nothing to say. Brian, Kate and I tried to talk about the job, things she wanted us to get on the rest of the shoot, but it really was of no use. For the last half hour of the ride we were silent. We pulled up to the curb and Kate started to laugh/cry as she hugged us. She walked through the doors and we waved as she disappeared into the river of travelers/deportees. As soon as we got in the car, Brian let me have it and I just listened, taking it, because I knew he was right.

Brian - “So you lost our art director? What the fuck were you thinking? Do you have any sense of karma? You don't fuck with karma. Karma is a bitch. Karma will wait you out and win, always.”

We finished the shoot, edited the spots and we waited on word of when Kate would return. Eventually she sorted things out and was ready to come back six weeks later. We ended up loading her desk, actually decorating it, with Canadian items - flags, bacon, postcards, pictures of moose, toys, t-shirts. When she showed up, she cried again. It was traumatic for me so I can't imagine how she felt.

So what did we learn? Don't mess with Karma, because she’s real and she’s a bitch. Don't let anyone convince you to stay in Windsor. Hold out for that room in Detroit. But just in case you do get in trouble at the border, I know a guy, who knows a guy, with a boat.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

Text

Lude Awakening

If this were a teen movie from the 80's the opening scene would be the aftermath of something “momentous”. The apartment would be trashed, the camera would track around the place to see that a raucous party occurred, chips, pretzels and plastic cups strewn across the kitchen table. It would then find our dog licking up vomit, eventually snaking out the kitchen door ending on me waving to Matthew Broderick in an elevator holding up a very wasted girl and thanking him profusely. The scene would freeze on my uncomfortable wave and then the voice over would kick in about how it didn't start this way. Then it would flashback, with the appropriate Go-Go’s song on the soundtrack, to me fighting my way through a crowd that’s gathered around a list, my eyes track down the names until I stop on mine next to the character of Boatswain. I walk away satisfied as the song kicks back in and the credits come up. But this was no teen movie.

Boatswain, in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S Pinafore, is the fun loving second in command of the ship. He needs to be popular with the crew, get along with the Captain and manage civilians. He wants to be loved by everyone. This was also perfect casting when I was chosen, as an eighth grader, to play this role in the Walden Junior High School musical. Just like the character I was third lead in school. I was probably third lead on our sports teams, never the star but you like playing with me. I was an athlete and an "artist". Friends with musicians, teachers, freaks and geeks. Girls liked me but not as the heartthrob, more of the good guy type. There is no shame in any of these categorizations. I was proud of it as that's what I was going for, avoiding the pressure and expectations of being the star. Let him have it, I'll be here when he becomes a jerk. I'll be here when he gets kicked off the team. I'll be here when he becomes too much of a stoner. I'll be here. That was the mantra of Boatswain Goldberg.

As far as my acting career went there was always one issue I had that I carried with me, which probably caused a lack of trust in the director to give me the starring role anyway. I tended to flub, make up or just completely forget my lines. The previous year we put on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians and I got the part of the butler, who fits right in with my brand. He's always around, trying to please the guests, while scheming for an inheritance, and has an occasional moment or two. One of these moments was a pivotal scene where we see the butler for the first time after his wife has died. It's crucial because he has to play it completely straight and deadpan therefore being put on the potential whodunnit list. The scene itself was simple, as all I had to do was walk into the room stoically and recite what was for breakfast that day, which would then set the detective up to suspect me. But when I walked in I completely forgot what was for breakfast and froze. There was a good three beats when the other actors were just looking at me, then the audience got nervous and then the whispers from an actor came to me under their breath, "say your line". I was freaking out and if I were a more seasoned actor and not a 8th grader I would've been able to get something out that would contextually satisfy the scene so we could move on. It didn't have to be "for breakfast we are serving kippers, Eggs Benedict and fresh fruit from the orchard". I could've easily said "for breakfast we will be having bagels and lox" and it would've been fine because it wasn't the words that were important but the delivery. I just needed to touch on any menu item in the breakfast category and I had to be cool, too cool, in order to arouse suspicion because my wife just died and I was being well…too cool. So the worst thing I could do for the scene was to acknowledge that my wife died and do it in a big, emotional way. So what did I do? I acknowledged that my wife died in a big, emotional way. "My wife! She's dead! Who could've done this?" And then I stormed off leaving the actors to deal with that big pile of poop I laid center stage. Eventually they played through it like I said the correct line. "Thank you Thomas, that sounds delicious, we will be right in." And after I left they discussed how calm I was and wouldn't a man who just lost his wife be a little more distraught? Like it never happened.

I was fine being third banana and didn't need the pressure, nor was it offered to me due to lack of trust, to be top dog. But then an opportunity arose that would raise my status if I wanted it to be raised. Sometimes you have to go for it when it's put in front of you and when the idea of me hosting the Pinafore cast party came up I went for it. As cast party host you are the epicenter of the entire school not just for that night but for the week prior and, if done well, many weeks after. Did I really need to elevate my status? I was good where I was so what was I thinking? I got status greedy and took on the responsibility to host the party at our apartment not really knowing what I was getting into.

Because theater was such a big deal at Walden the day the casting list comes out the school is buzzing with nerves, excitement, but mostly disappointment and hatred. It never really works out the way you think, where you slowly approach the list and everyone else makes room for you to scan the names that connect to the part given, searching and praying that you're up there. It's really just a mass of humanity hugging, consoling and bitching. The only people that actually leave the huddle around the list are the ones given the devastating news that they are "crew" - lighting, sets, props assistant to the assistant stage manager or just general crew, the lowest of the low. General crew are basically being told they have no skill whatsoever- you can't act, you can't build, you can't turn on a switch - please just don't touch anything. Eventually general crew would just disappear as the show date approached. Some hung on because they wanted to be a part of it and some spitefully wanted to be close to potentially sabotage it which was almost impossible given their lack of access and responsibilities. But for those of us lucky enough to be in the mix for a role you rarely made it to the front to see your name without someone spoiling it. For the most part there was one spoiler at the front who would see the person approaching and let them know. And usually it was someone with a big role. In this case the spoiler was the female lead, Kelly Ward, who was spoiling at a rate never seen before.

"Mandy - Buttercup…yay."

"Nick - first mate…congrats."

"Lisa - chorus...good for you.”

She looked at me and then down the list and back up the list but I knew, because no one else was going for third lead. No one else wanted Boatswain. I made it easy for the decision makers as I was just good enough to hold my scenes and I didn't ask for too much. The others were all or nothing. They went for leads or chorus. Sometimes even leads or crew not wanting to be subjected to chorus duty. So I spoiled the spoiler and before Kelly could find my name and struggle for another insincere gesture of approval I said "Boatswain". She had a moment where she lapsed into frustration but, because she was the lead actress, she pulled it together, found my name and beamed "yes...congratulations?" She did say it with a question mark as if maybe I got the bronze but for me this was gold. I didn't even look at the list, I just turned around happy to be in my rightful place.

The whole point of being in a school play is to hang out with girls or boys beyond the typical school day. It was exciting to spend two months with a tight crew. We'd stay after school two to three nights a week and if I had a game of some kind (because I had to please that crew too) then we'd stay even later for rehearsals. Those late nights were when you could really gain ground with girls and eventually find places, dark places - behind the stage, under the stage, above the stage, on the stage - to try to kiss them. That was the goal, a kiss. And if you got a kiss during rehearsals then you've set up the make out session for...that's right...the cast party. That's where it all went down. And who is in early position for a make out session? The host. And that's why when Kelly, of course it was Kelly, about two weeks before opening night (closing night was the next night as there were only two very exclusive performances) recanted her offer to host, I stepped in and said "I'll host". I got approval from my friends who knew I had a good party apartment and then it was just about getting approval from my parents.

The move with my parents was to downplay it, almost as a throwaway. I just needed the right moment to play off of. "How's the show going?" My mom offered. "Great...oh by the way I want to have some of the cast over for a party after Friday night's show." I made it seem like a few friends would stop by. Something manageable. "You mean a cast party?” And it was thrown back at me. "Well sure...I guess it's a cast party...sure a cast party. Is it okay?" "Of course just let me know how many people and what you want to serve." Oh boy. I had no idea either of those answers and I didn't know who to ask. "Probably around twenty-five people so just some drinks and snacks." That sounded like a lame party even as an eighth grader but what was I going to say. From what I knew about parties at that age was they start out as one thing and then devolve. Birthday parties became spin the bottle parties. Camp reunion slumber parties became cuddle and "make out" parties. And Bar Mitzvahs became huge gossip parties. So my assumption with a cast party was it would start out as something innocuous and I had no idea what it would become, but making out was the goal. "So yeah, just like soda and chips and stuff...we're just going to hang out.”

Walden’s theater department was a big deal as many of the students were children of celebrities or even actors themselves which is why participation in theater was a big honor and more competitive than any of the sports teams. Also the Junior High musical was always directed by a senior, and that year our senior director was Matthew Broderick. This was a few years before he got big but we knew it was coming. He was on Broadway and about to break out in War Games. So it was pretty cool that he was spending time with us. And every girl (and many guys) in the school from 7th grade to the teachers were in love with him. He was the big man on campus, although our campus was a five story building on 88th street.

As show day approached I had no sense of how many people were coming to the party. I was worried whether even the twenty-five would show up. The show went on without a hitch. Musicals were easier for me and my issue of blanking out on my lines. Maybe it had to do with the fact that there was always someone else singing with the third lead and I could easily just follow along, catch up or mouth my lyrics until I did. After the show we had the regular "oh my God you were amazing" hugs and parents waiting for you after the show. Then it was time to race home and get ready for the party. Little did I know that word was spreading rapidly through the school about the cast party, including my brother and his friends...tenth graders.

As I got home I saw the spread, which was pretty lame but it was what I asked for...chips and soda and some cookies and…milk...probably what was served at the last birthday party they threw for me when I was 9. I didn't know about cast parties but my instincts told me that milk and cookies wasn't right. So I put those away which left just some bowls of pretzels and potato chips to go with Sprite and Coke. This was before water was really an option, to offer or desire. And then came the waiting. Was anyone going to show up to this lame party and what was I planning on doing? Just rely on my nonexistent hosting skills and even less lively gift of gab? Panic started to build its way from my stomach to my throat. Just a fucking Natural History Museum exhibit of Butterflies, Moths and probably a shitload of caterpillars who hadn't decided what they wanted to evolve into in my innards. And then it started. People began to arrive. Cast members, friends, other seventh and eighth graders...9th graders, my brother's friends, people I nodded to in the hallways, people I didn't nod to in the hallways and then people I didn't know at all. My parents had been sequestered in the back, door closed unless I needed them. I didn't want that. I could deal. But I started to freak out when some of the tenth and eleventh graders began looking at the spread and immediately gathered money for booze. I begged people not to bring it back to the house. The park was right across the street. Do whatever you need to do there but not here. I had enough friends and friends of my brother's and friends of my parents' kids to get some respect for that ask. So for about an hour I had things under control and the party was running at a boring but controlled pace. I realized that I just wanted to get through it and deal with the "lame party" buzz. But it quickly took a turn because a group of teens will not settle for a lame party, they need to make it a thing, and within minutes it became a thing. It was as if we were all thrown into a revival of Hair without solid casting or any storyline.

It started when my friend Nick (second lead), a goody two shoes on the surface but an instigator underneath, our Eddie Haskell, came running in and asked for some paper towels.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Umm, Leah cut her lip."

"How did Leah cut her lip?"

"On a wine bottle...we didn't have a corkscrew so we broke the bottle in the park and she cut it when she was drinking."

This is the dumb shit that 8th graders do. I went to the window and looked down the nine stories to see most of the party across the street in the park. Now I just wanted it to end it because what was out there was going to be coming back to the apartment and that couldn't happen. But it did. I could see them from the window above, crossing the street in small groups, like a battalion moving in on a target. Within fifteen minutes Leah showed up with her bloody lip, the stoners showed up looking for food in the fridge. “You have cookies and milk? Bring it on.” Some people broke off into other rooms and Nick almost pushed Kathy Rothman out of the front window. The whole time I kept looking down the hall at the door, should I? My brother noticed I was in trouble and was trying to help me corral and get people out, as he didn't want me opening that door because his friends' participation now made him culpable. We managed to move people into the front room or outside, using friends to invite people for more booze and pot in the park. It became an operation where we assigned pied pipers. Get Adam to take the booze and some followers, get Michael to bring the pot across the street and the rest, the non- threatening ones we just asked them to leave. But then the operation went to shit as soon as Maggie walked in the door. Maggie was a 9th grader who "grew up a bit too fast". She had an older sister at the school and she probably learned too much from her. She walked in or should I say, stumbled in being held up by some friends. And she was mumbling something…

"Maffoo...maffoo."

They dropped her down on the couch, pale and droopy eyed. This was it. I could handle everything else but an incoherent, babbling girl on..."ludes, she took ludes"...ludes I couldn't handle. So I walked down the hallway towards my parents’ room, my brother watching on in a combination of support and disappointment. I explained to my parents what was going on and they bolted up and went to work. They must have felt like they walked through an alternate world because when they went in the back there was no one there and the milk and cookies were on the table but now there were about fifty people there and the milk and cookies were on the floor. My mom immediately used "the voice" to clear everyone out and everyone there had a parent who had that voice, it's the “I'm not fucking around” voice. All she said was "I want everyone out right now please". And because it wasn't what she said it was how she said it the apartment cleared out. The only ones left were the do gooders, the ones who want to help cleanup and gossip, and friends - my friends and Maggie's friends, two groups that have never occupied the same space unless they were forced to because they were in the same class or they just happened to be in the bathroom at the same time.

"Maffoo...maffoo"

"What's she saying?" This was my mom asking one of Maggie's friends after we moved Maggie to the kitchen. "And why is she crying?"

Her friends didn't want to say so they just shrugged.

"What did she take?"

"Take?"

My mom rolled her eyes. She was not playing this game. The voice came back. "What did she take...what is she on?" I'm in 8th grade...remember. I just wanted to remind you. Fourteen years-old. I'm standing by my mom as she's interrogating a fifteen year-old girl about her whacked out friend. I was swirling with curiosity (girls), embarrassment (my mom talking to girls), pride (my mom handling the situation) and fear (a whacked out girl in my house talking to my mom).

"Quaaludes...ludes."

"Okay (the voice, which was like truth serum), what's she saying?"

"Matthew, she's saying Matthew."

"Who's Matthew?" It was now a full blown cop interrogation scene.

"Broderick...Matthew Broderick. She thought he'd be here and she wants to see him."

My mom rolled her eyes. "Okay let's get her home. Can you put her in a cab and..."

"No...no...Mafoo...Maffoo!" Maggie was screaming violently and she got up and started to wail. "I want Maffoo." As she started to rant and rave it happened, she did it right on our kitchen floor, in front of my parents. She threw up...some non-descript food and quaaludes I guess. That smell, I would later learn and become familiar with, was the smell of a big arena concert. Drug vomit. It's very distinct and as far as vomit goes it's one of the worst kinds and as far as one of the worst things goes vomit is right up there. So we were dealing with one of the worst of the worst things and it was on our kitchen floor. My mom and Maggie's friend immediately moved her up the stairs that led to a tiny bathroom, while Maggie was still begging for Matthew Broderick. As this was happening one of our dogs, Peaches, sidled up to the vomit and started to lick it up as if it were the new Ben and Jerry’s flavor, Lude Awakening.

After some consoling and more vomiting. Maggie became a bit more contrite. Too contrite. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry." We were now in the self loathing stage of drug stupidity.

"It's okay. It's okay. I think it's time to go home." My mom tried, but anytime she mentioned going home it sent Maggie into a fit and she began begging for Matthew again. Matthew Broderick was a lead. Good athlete, good actor and a really good guy. He was not third lead. He was the lead, for the entire school, and Maggie was one of many who had fallen under his spell. She wouldn't leave unless he came and got her, eventually locking herself in the bathroom and refusing to come out until he showed up. Eventually my mom looked at me. "I need you to call him."

"Who?"

“Matthew Broderick. We are all tired and if that's what gets her out of here then that's what we have to do. Call him."

This was not third lead material. This was lead role shit. I was not ready for this, but she used the voice and you do what the voice says. The remaining caterpillars in my stomach instantly transitioned into fuzzy butterflies with razors as wings, slicing my innards apart. I went to the phone, looked through the phone book (1981 folks) and found the number. There were people hovering around so I immediately started dialing because that's what a lead does. You don't hesitate. It started ringing, and I realized I had no script...nothing to flub, to forget or to fake, but I did need to move the story along, to carry it to its conclusion. I had to nail this.

"Hello?". It was him. It was Matthew.

"Hi...umm Matthew. This is Jon Goldberg...from Walden. I'm in the play...you know and..." So far so good. It had the right amount of gravitas and the vital information needed to propel the scene.

"Hey Jon...what's going on." He's nice.

"Well so...the cast party is at my house and..." Providing important exposition was necessary as I couldn’t just jump ahead too fast.

"Yeah I know I'm sorry I couldn't come by." He’s really nice.

"No, that's okay."

And then Maggie started screaming his name in the background...loudly. Everything was silent as I was performing… on the phone so she must have caught on that I was talking to him.

“Maffoo!…Maffoo!”

"So Maggie...that's her you're hearing, heh, heh. She kinda won't leave the party unless...(This was the big line. The entire scene wrested on this delivery)...unless you come and get her."

There was an uncomfortable sigh and silence on the other end. So how nice was he?

"I'm sorry what?"

"She's just yelling your name and won't leave. She's kinda messed up or something. She wants you to come get her and won't leave until you do...won't leave my house…and the party’s over so…”

One of the things we learned in acting class, that Matthew was very familiar with, is that every character has stakes in the game and I wanted the stakes to be very clear.

There was another pause.

"Ok...ok. I'll be there in a bit."

He’s - come over to your house after midnight to pick up a vomiting drug addled crazy girl and get her out of your house - nice. That's how nice Matthew Broderick is and I've never said a bad thing about him since and I never will. In fact I owe him one.

So for the next fifteen minutes we reassured Maggie that Matthew was coming over, which cheered her up almost to the point of sobriety and even got her to open the bathroom door. Maybe she wasn't expecting him to come and now she was second guessing her behavior and, more importantly, her appearance - pasty white, sweat washed hair and vomit stained mini skirt. Yep I'm sure that was going to make the impression she was going for.

An excruciating twenty minutes later we heard the elevator door open and out walked Matthew Broderick. Looking like the adorable eighteen year-old Matthew Broderick - innocent eyes and trusting soul. I met him as he approached the open kitchen door and walked him to where Maggie was. He then put on what could have been his greatest performance. He looked up at Maggie, turning disgust into sympathy, but not too much.

"Hey Maggie...what's going on?" Not too condescending but soft and comforting.

Maggie smiled and tried to put on her coquettish persona.

"You came...you really came." And failed.

Matthew helped Maggie up and put his arm around her, walking her down the bathroom stairs and, as if he knew this scene cold, led her out the door and to the staircase outside of the apartment. In his mind this was a two step process - get her out of the apartment and get her into a cab. He sat on the stairs with her for at least twenty minutes, listening to her go on about how great she thinks he is and how happy she was that he came to get her. I'm amazed he didn't throw up on her. Peaches was prepared for a second course just in case. Finally, after nodding and playing along, he got her up and towards the elevator. He gave me a look and, as his Boatswain, I immediately got the cue, ran to the elevator and pushed the button at least nine times so it would get there at least nine times faster. When he got her on the elevator I thanked him. Maggie said drunkenly, “Who’s he?” Matthew respectfully answered, “That’s Jon. That was his party.” She awkwardly smiled. “Great party…dzhzon.” The elevator door closed and, of course, the camera would show it closing on me because I was third lead. The rest of this story would follow Matthew, the lead, as he heroically got Maggie in a cab and home safely. I was left to deal with the aftermath but you never see what the third lead has to go through because you're with the star and he deserves it. That’s why they call it the star treatment.

When the elevator closed that was the last you'd see of me. You wouldn't see me cleaning up the mess everywhere from what would be the last cast party I would ever throw. You wouldn't see me years later as I played third lead in a three person play my senior year when the part called for me to be a tough guy (stretch) who rolled a joint (not a stretch) in front of the entire school, k through twelve. And you wouldn't see the moment towards the end of that play where I spoke a line that immediately jumped the action ahead five pages throwing the other two leads into a quiet panic. Thank God you wouldn't see that.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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In the Not So Big House

"What are you in for?"

Now I can't imagine a situation where or when that is a good thing to hear. But when it's coming from a nameless, faceless man in the cell next to yours, it's really bad.

I am an idiot. Maybe you've figured that out by now but if you haven't I'm healthy enough to admit it. I say the wrong thing at the wrong times, I have rigid, stubborn expectations of things and if they don't go how I see them I will either deny it or, even worse, try to turn them back in my favor. I try to make things happen the way I saw them unfolding but in an unrealistic, almost psychopathic way. My wife and I see it in my son and it's really disturbing.

"Daddy, what time is it?"

"It's nine o'clock Charlie.”

"What should I be doing right now?"

"Sleeping"

"Am I going to get a good nights sleep? I'm afraid I'm not going to get a good nights sleep".

So tough to hear but I am so familiar with the thought process, and I can't even help him out of it because I can’t even do it for myself.

In the summer of 1985 I was"the cool counselor" to ten and eleven year-old boys at Camp Wildwood in Bridgeton, Maine. A former camper who was a good athlete that these sports fanatic boys could look up to. My cause was also helped by the fact that the other counselor in our bunk was a complete and utter tool. He was an English tennis instructor. It was as if he got all of his cues from the jerk in every 80's comedy. Whether it was the boyfriend/husband/boss that Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin or Rodney Dangerfield had to supplant, or the stuck up teacher that Sean Penn, Michael J. Fox or Judd Nelson had to defy, this guy was the perfect foil. He had the accent, the rigidity, the manners and the short shorts and sweater around the neck look to go with it. So the kids would just flock to me and, as an eighteen year-old, I could be a coach, a friend and a parent, but I was still eighteen. I still had my days off and was I still an idiot.

Most of the other counselors were older than I was. They were of legal drinking age, had cars and drivers licenses. At the time, in Maine and New Hampshire, the drinking age was 19, so I was not legal but I had a fake ID. As a teenager growing up in Manhattan, the fake ID was necessary and attainable. The first one you got, at about fourteen, was on 42nd street at a place called Playland. This is a time when you didn't call the area Times Square, you called it 42nd street, even though you were referring to an area that started on 40th street and ended on 45th that also covered eighth and ninth avenue. 42nd street was dirty, scary…awesome, and Playland was one of the cornerstones of that reputation. It was the kind of place where you got mugged inside the establishment. And you got mugged for quarters to play Defender, Galaga and Tempest. "Gimme your quarters" was all that was said, accompanied by a menacing look and four other matching looks to back his up. And then you were playing and waiting to play games alongside those who had just stolen from you. A very odd Darwinian example. It was not a safe place. But to get an ID it was worth it.

The process was simple and understood. You walked in, found your contact amongst the video games and he showed you to the back. You paid ten dollars, he took your picture and you had a laminated fake ID, which got you into absolutely no bars in Manhattan. It was all a matter of whether they carded you or not. The ID just gave you the gumption to approach the door. But as I got older I needed a better ID, a real ID. Luckily I had an older brother, who had friends that were legal. So all I had to do was get one of their old or unnecessary IDs and use that or doctor it. The first one I got was from Andy's friend Alan, who was in college. He looked nothing like me, but he was eighteen. I was able to cut open (mangle) the laminate and take out (destroy) his picture and replace it (jam it) with a picture of me. I was just happy to have accomplished the replacement. To me it was as meticulous as heart surgery on an ant. The result was a frayed at the edges card, taped at the corners with an obviously replaced image (also scotch taped) of a fourteen year-old (Oh yeah. I used a camp picture that was over a year old). At that time the goal was not going to bars to meet girls...yet. We wanted to go to the Piano Bar. Why the Piano Bar? It was five blocks away from home. It had drinks for a dollar fifty and, most importantly, it had free video games when you bought a drink. So imagine a group of high school freshmen walking into a bar filled with post-shift doormen, cab drivers and salty New Yorkers, approach the bar, order drinks, get carded, whip out our various forms of horribly fake IDs, watch as the bartender all but laughed yet still accepted us and began making completely watered down drinks. But our smoothest move was, as soon as we got our drinks, rushing over to the video games to nurse our tonic and tonics for a couple of hours as we dominated Ms. Pac-Man.

As I got older the stakes got higher and I needed to get into real bars to get real drinks and talk to real girls. So my next ID had to be real and I just needed to look enough like that person to pass. Simple enough. This time I went to my brother's friend Dan, he was the bulkier of identical twins we had grown up with. I could definitely pass for him and when he gave me his Vassar ID, it was foolproof. I was seventeen and I looked close enough in age and appearance to the nineteen year-old on the ID, which made me legal. In New York, a college ID was acceptable because no kids drove in the city. No one ever questioned it's validity, until the summer of 1985 in Maine.

It was my day off which came once every ten days, so you had about five during the summer and you had to jam a lot in those twenty four hours. The plan for this one was to go to the beach with some other counselors, ones with cars and IDs to get beer, then dinner and a movie. Nothing crazy. Going to jail was the furthest thing from my mind, because what we were doing didn't even broach danger, adventure or anything remotely shady, and also because going to jail is generally the furthest thing from my mind. The beach was about an hour’s drive in New Hampshire. Four of us hopped into a car and headed out. I was about six weeks away from going to college and I was ready to give true freedom a shot, even though I had plenty of freedom growing up in Manhattan. My parents basically had one rule when I was in high school, if you're coming home after midnight call before eleven. Now that I'm a parent I truly understand the rule. It wasn't put in place as some protection for me or for any other reason than the fact that my parents wanted to go to sleep at eleven without worrying. But there were plenty of times when I didn’t call, wandered in at one or two o’clock and pushed the door open to my mom sitting at the kitchen table, furious. But at camp I just had to be back before morning bell. This day off was a nice little test that I could judge how I did without involving my parents, at least that was the plan.

We brought beer on the trip. but when we got to the beach we decided to leave it in the car because we could “get busted” if we drank it on the beach. If it got hot we could just walk back to the car and drink it there. It’s important to note that when we headed back to the car for our beer break all I was wearing was my multicolor, striped OP bathing suit - no shirt, no shoes. I would not be served at a 7-Eleven in this outfit having left the rest on the beach. But serendipitously I had my wallet, and my ID, in my pocket. A couple of us got in the back seat, one more in the front, our non-drinking driver stayed on the beach. We must have thought we were in some kind of protective bubble completely unaware of what was happening outside. But a bubble is clear and anyone, including cops, can see what was happening inside. So soon enough one of the windows on our bubble was being knocked on by a man in a uniform. Fletch, a handsome, tobacco chewing baseball player from Wisconsin rolled down the passenger seat window and the officer asked us to step outside, another officer providing back up in case this suddenly tense situation got out of hand. I always wondered how I would handle a real police confrontation and I was about to find out. It was my Law and Order moment.

I love every iteration of Law and Order. I love how the city is portrayed, love the characters, the "ripped from the headlines" cases and I really love what I call "the Lenny lines". These are the lines made famous by the late Jerry Orbach, the third and most popular of the older, gruff detectives. The Lenny line was the line that led into the opening music, as the cops stared over a body in a dumpster ("somebody decided to do some spring cleaning" - Duh, dun...da, da, da, da, daaaa), a body in a hotel room ("not really my idea of room service" - Duh, dun...da, da, da, da, daaaa), a body buried under leaves in the park ("who knew going for a run could be hazardous to your health?" - Duh, dun...da, da, da, da, daaaa), a body in a night club bathroom ("now that's pissing your life away" - Duh, dun...da, da, da, da, daaaa), or outside a Chinese restaurant ("I guess someone didn't like what was on the menu" - Duh, dun...da, da, da, da, daaaa). But one thing about the show drove me crazy, and pretty much got me to stop watching because I couldn't take it anymore. Whenever the cops approach a person - a suspect, a witness, a friend, a relative, the dry cleaner - the person is so nonchalant, as if someone were asking for directions. The truth is that when a cop approaches we all tense up, we stutter, we sweat, we get fucking scared. But these people keep sweeping their stores, keep eating their street hot dogs, keep running on the treadmill or keep serving customers beer, food, coffee. I understand the idea of creative license but wouldn't it be more interesting if they acted nervous, tense, like a suspect or like a real human being? Sorry, I had to get that out.

So in a Law and Order world, when the police approached our car I would have said, "come on, it's just a harmless beer. You gotta have something better to do right?". And then I would've rolled the window back down. But that isn't how I reacted. I was brought to attention and pretty much said the first thing that came to mind when the cop said,

"You know you can't drink in the car?"

"Sssorry, officer. We just didn't want to drink on the beach."

"Well drinking in the car is an open container."

We looked at each other and the feeling went from nervous to dread. He used what sounded like an official term. We were no longer just having a cop to citizen conversation. This was definitely a cop to suspect accusation. This is the moment where the perp makes a run for it, eventually getting pulled down from a chain link fence he's trying to climb over after a quick scare from an unseen German Shepherd. But we just looked at each other.

"What's open container?" That was me.

"It's a law that says you can't have an open bottle of alcohol in a public space."

This is when it dawned on us that these were not real cops, they were beach patrol. Not the type that wants action but the type that wants to do good. Their day jobs were teachers, social workers or counselors. We got the vibe not just because they didn’t have a gun or club but because of the way they talked to us. He explained things to us. Lenny would've said "it's against the law is what it is" and then he would've pulled me through the window. But this guy had empathy, concern, he actually cared. “Why don’t you all step out of the car and show us your IDs. You guys got ID?" Music to my ears. We all got out of the car, pulled out or wallets and he put his hand out.

"Not here. At the station."

"What? The station...for what?" That was Fletch, showing a bit more gumption due to the casual nature of our interrogators.

"For open container. Sorry guys. Gotta take you in. Shouldn't take too long."

"Can we tell our buddy…the driver?"

They let one of us run to the beach to tell Andy, the elder statesman of our group, that he would have to leave the beach and follow us to the station. We got rounded up and put in the paddy wagon. If there were photographers around I would've covered my face, but I had nothing to cover it, as I was only wearing one piece of clothing, my bathing suit that looked like someone ate a pound of Skittles and vomited on some nylon. The van we were transported in said something like Attatash sheriff's department - beach patrol. We sat in the back and looked at each other. "Just tell the truth and we'll be back at the beach in a half hour." That was Jim, a tall, skinny, polite tennis coach from Texas. Fletch and I nodded in agreement. I then realized something, relieved that I remembered.

"I'm Dan. Call me Dan."

"What the hell? I just said we tell the truth."

"I know but that's the name on my ID. It's fake."

"Come on."

"Just call me Dan. Well don't call me anything but if you do call me Dan."

They both shook their heads in disbelief and then whipped them towards the door as the van stopped and seconds later it slid open. One of the cops, I'm not sure if it was good cop or better cop, waved us out of the van.

"Let's go fellas. We'll try to get you out of here soon."

We were directed towards a square cement building with a sign that said Attatash Police Department - Containment Facility. Containment? Okay, all signs pointed to our "containment" being short and sweet. The two cop/counselors sat on one side of the desk in a concrete block of a building. The main room where we were currently being contained had a few desks, some chairs, one table and a phone. There were file cabinets lining one wall and a mini kitchen was across from it. A door led to a back room, which I assumed was where the containment occurred. As we began talking to the officers I kept glancing back at that door, my imagination taking over and creating a place where "bad things" happened.

"Let's see your IDs gentleman".

With an orchestra of rips we nervously took our IDs out of our velcro wallets and handed them over. Again, knowing we didn't do anything really wrong, yet still uncomfortable at the situation. The huskier and older of the two interrogators looked over the cards and then at us. He stopped at Jim.

”Texas huh? What are you doing here in New Hampshire?".

"We're counselors at a camp in Maine."

"That right. And Steven (he was looking at Fletch) they brought you all the way from Wisconsin?"

"Yes sir. I'm a baseball coach."

"Great. And Daniel, you from New Yawk?"

"Yeah. From the city."

He started studying the IDs harder, looking at all of us a bit closer. Maybe everyone felt the same but it really seemed like he paused on me a few beats longer, as he should have. I felt my nerves twitch and my muscles tighten and I'm sure I did an extra big gulp/swallow which was accentuated by the fact that I was shirtless. He could pretty much see how my entire digestive system worked.

"So you guys heard us talk about open container at the beach. Basically what that means is you can't drink alcohol in a public place. Now we understand what you were trying to do but it's not allowed."

At this point cop number two dropped some forms and pens in front of us.

"Fill these out, pay the twenty five dollar fine and you'll be on your way."

He handed Jim and Fletch's IDs back and held on to mine, giving it a stare and then giving me a stare. I stopped filling out the forms, and if the charge was something in the murder category I would've stood and held my hands up, and gave another gulp. A bit like the opening scene of "Midnight Express”. They had me.

"So Daniel...Vassar College? Where's that at? In the city?"

Gulp. Now I had to think fast. I studied the ID just for this kind of scenario. But as we mediocre students used to say, "I don't test good". And then it hit me. I remembered...Poughkeepsie. But I didn't answer like someone who went to school in Poughkeepsie. I answered like I was on a game show and suddenly the answer came to me under duress, like I was trying stop a clock or prevent a bucket of snakes from falling on my head. "I'll take colleges and universities with a favorable boy/girl ratio for two hundred Alex.”

So I excitedly blurted out the answer.

”Poughkeepsie!"

Everyone in the room looked at me like I was the biggest moron in the world. And here I was, proud that I got the answer right. The cop sat down in his chair and pulled forward. His body language was clear. It was saying to me, ”kid, you really want to do this?" Almost annoyed that he had to do this.

"Right, right Poughkeepsie."

He looked down at the card again and I had an oh shit moment. he thought was oh shit I’m filling out the form with my real name and real address. I figured that they weren't going to look at the form as it was just a form so I kept playing the part of Dan.

"And where in the city do you live exactly?"

"On the upper west side."

I answered like everyone knew what that was, as if everyone knew the city. It's a very smug New Yorker thing to do. Nothing pisses or pissed New Englanders off more than when a New Yorker would say "we are going to the game at the Garden." They weren't angry that we said the Garden, they were angry because the way we said it basically disqualified the existence of any other Garden. Like the Boston Garden for example. It was a great game to play with New England friends. It inevitably turned into an argument about who was better, which game was better, what team was better, and suddenly you realize not only are you not talking about the Gardens, you're not even talking about teams or players that play there.

So when he asked me where I lived I didn't realize that he was asking for an exact address. Unbelievably I was getting dumber. My friends were looking at me with disbelief and anger. The cop gave a little smile. Now this had gone from being a pain in the ass to being kind of fun for him. It turned into sport.

"The upper west side huh? Okay. And what's your date of birth?"

I had already paused long enough for everyone to know, if they didn't already, that this was not my ID. My friends were done with me as they gave me a pleading look. If a look could scream, they were screaming at me to "just tell the fucking truth.” But something inside me, the stubborn idiot, just kept pushing. So he asked me again.

"When's your birthday...Dan?".

I stared the cop right in the eyes and decided to be Clint Eastwood. What I said could possibly be the dumbest thing anyone in the history of the world has ever said, but I said it like a cocky eighteen year-old privileged New Yorker to a forty year-old history teacher trying to make some extra bucks and help bad kids turn their lives around. This made it even dumber. I indignantly looked at him, crossed my arms and said.

"You tell me?”

Now my friends both threw their arms up and Jim said, "Come on!" It was then that I learned the three phases of having a friend that acts dumb - support, anger and abandonment.

If my challenge of him telling me my own birthday wasn't bad enough I followed it up with another game show contestant response. Excited because I remembered that Dan and his twin brother had a special birthday, a holiday, yes, a holiday.

"Halloween...my birthday's on Halloween, hah." I didn't say October 31st, I said Halloween. Everyone stopped and looked at me like I was crazy, not just dumb anymore crazy was added into the mix. That's when everything changed. The two cops looked at each other and didn't have to say a word. The quiet cop walked towards the desk.

"Jim and Steve, follow me, we'll get you out of here."

My friends stood up and looked at me, Jim gave me an eye roll and Fletch shook his head.

"Don't leave without me.” I begged as they were shown out the door.

"He's gonna be here a while.” This came from the cop standing behind me.

Oh fuck, what did I do? The other cop was still sitting in front of me.

"So...Daniel it doesn't seem like you're being totally honest with us."

"Why...what do you mean?"

Yes, I still was playing like there was nothing wrong.

"Let's head on back. We're gonna put you in a cell until we can figure out what to do with you."

"A cell...for how long?"

"Not sure. Come with me."

I got up, and I’ll remind you that I was only wearing a technicolor bathing suit, and followed him towards the door. Who knows what was waiting on the other side? Were there other "criminals" in there? Was I about to walk the gauntlet? Were they just waiting for me, hundreds of them yelling "fresh meat!", preparing to spit at me, throw feces at me?

The door opened and the hall light went on. It was a very short hallway, which I should have assumed since I saw that the outside of the building was no bigger than one of our camp bunks. But in my head I was walking into Oz, the fictional prison, not the one at the other end of the yellow brick road. On one side was a yellow wall and on the other were two small cells, bars and all, separated by a gray wall. The officer opened up the first cell and pointed me in. The cell had a bench. That was it. I went in and sat on it. As the cop was locking the cell I looked up at him.

"Can I make my phone call?"

He barely even looked at me.

"Who are you gonna call?"

And he walked away, leaving me there with just my thoughts. And my thoughts were "Fuuuuuck!". And then I fake cried.

I hadn’t learned my lesson as I had a history of lying to the police. Once in high school I got caught with a bag of pot in my hands by some cops. The deal was made and the dealer saw the cops, put the bag in my hand and ran. I stood there and turned around, pretty much showing the bag of pot to two uniformed police officers and just froze.

"Come over here."

One of the cops pointed to a spot in front of them. I dropped my head down and walked over. He grabbed the bag and dumped out the pot into a grate on the sidewalk.

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"What would your parents do if they found out you were buying pot?"

"They'd beat my ass."

Nothing could be farther from the truth but I knew it's what they wanted to hear.

"Well, we're going to give them a call. What's your number?"

My instant calculations made it very clear that they weren't going to call but I played like they were. So I gave them a wrong number. The cop wrote it down just for show. They were about to let me go and the other cop came up to me in classic 80's New York style.

"Hey kid. Don't buy your pot on the street. Get it from someone you know. Now get home."

I gave them a solemn nod, turned and headed home, chuckling a bit at getting drug buying advice from a cop.

I needed another command performance here in Rhode Island. I curled up on the bench and fake cried some more. And then from out of nowhere.

"Dude? Hey?"

I looked up and saw a hand sticking out from the cell next to mine waving towards me.

"Yeah?"

"You got a cig?"

I squinted at the question and looked down at my near nakedness, responding gruffly, hardening up for my time in the pokey.

"No."

I walked towards the edge of the cell. I guess he could sense I was closer. His hand was still sticking out enough that I could see him gesturing.

"So what are you in for?"

In for? In for? Wait I was just stopping by. This was my day off. People weren't "in for" anything here. Right?

"Umm, open container."

"Open container that's not good. I'm here for trespassing and open container's worse."

"How long have you been in for?" I was getting the lingo down. Wanting to fit in. Pretty soon I'll be trading for cigs, making shivs and running this joint.

"Two days?"

And that's when I stopped acting and started real crying.

"What? What do you mean worse? I can't stay here two days."

I was that crazy guy pleading not guilty.

"Then you shouldn't have been drinking in public."

He pulled his hand back, his finger pointing at me for effect. I walked away and started panicking. Pacing, looking out of the bars, trying to see towards the door. It felt like hours but it was probably fifteen minutes. Pretty soon the door opened and one of the cops came in and handed me a menu.

"Pick something to eat. You're going to be here a while."

"I need to let my friends know."

"Your friends are gone. They went back to camp."

"No. They have all of my stuff. They won't leave me."

"Really? Well they're gone. Pick something to eat."

I glanced at the diner menu. I was upset but hey, they offered.

"I'll take a cheeseburger, some fries and a coke.”

He gave a slight chuckle and walked off. Boom. The door slammed, with the appropriate echo.

This is when I should have known what was really going on. While I was acting, they were also acting. In fact, their demeanor changed, they were bad actors. But in the moment I couldn't see it as I was too busy with my performance but, at the same time, falling for theirs. Looking back as I was playing Attica I can just imagine that they were playing something too, teaching me a lesson. Doing what they do as good people dealing with an idiot. It probably went something like this.

"What do we do with this kid? It's open container. We can't keep him that long. Plus I want to get out of here at a decent hour."

"Let's scare him then. He blatantly lied to us with that ridiculous ID and he kept lying. Let's lie to him."

"Yep. I'll go in the cell next to him. Scare him some."

"Yeah. Let's tell him his friends ditched him."

That's all they were doing. They were off-duty teachers, so they were teaching. They played it out for about another twenty minutes and eventually they let me go. I signed something, they opened the door and the sun burst through. I probably overplayed it, acting blinded, like a prisoner in Papillon who spent twelve years in solitary. I squinted and saw all of my friends, waiting for me, laughing and clapping. They were joined by some girls who wanted to meet their friend, the convict. I oddly thanked the cops and they left me with one nugget.

"Don't ever lie to a police officer, son."

I turned back to them and put on my best sincere, lesson learned face.

"I won't."

What a lie.

(The swimsuit and the summons)

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

Text

Crapping At The Waldorf

At some point in time everyone has "the worst job ever". It could be based on the person you work for, the conditions of the job, pure boredom, the lack of compensation, the city in which that job is located or any number of things. The criteria of what makes that job the worst is substantial and completely subjective. But I will tell you with utmost respect to everyone else, I had the worst job ever. No question about it. Screw you toll booth attendants. You get to sit in a heated/air-conditioned room - radio, tv, computer, books at your disposal. That's like a Caribbean vacation every day compared to being an apprentice for a hard ass film editor.

I really wanted to be an editor. It seemed sensible. Something I'd potentially be good at. Who was I kidding? It was an interesting job. Oh screw it. It was a job. I got home from college on a Friday and started work the next Monday. Not bad for a C+ student. I was hired as an apprentice editor at a reputable editing house in New York. Horn Eisenberg was known for editing classics like the original Little Caesars "Pizza Pizza" campaign and who could forget the award winning Oil of Olay ads that introduced the idea of nutrition for your skin. It was a well respected place in the industry and seemed like a good idea. I was the apprentice. Apprentice. Me. Apprentice seems like they recruited me. Hand picked as the future of the company. As if some Shaman or Wizard looked at me, studied my aura, waved a magic wand around me and noticed that the wand started to glow, shimmer or make some high-pitched noise. “He's The One. The Golden Child. We have found him." Or maybe they sought me out amongst hundreds of applicants? Like a college football coach recruiting, having to sell my parents on them as a worthy master for their apprentice:

"Mr. Goldberg, your son is the kind of kid Horn Eisenberg is looking for. His career at Tulane, ha ha ha, like I need to re- mind you. The average academic record, the consistent pot smoking and the mediocrity of his daily pickup basketball performance are a perfect fit for our program. (He's suddenly interrupted by the celebration of his taste buds after dipping his pita and taking a bite) Mmmm....mmmm, Mrs. Goldberg, this is the most delicious tapenade...no wonder you have such a strapping young man." (He would never insult me by calling me fat).

The truth? There was a phone call with my mom. She contacted them over the winter break to set up an interview through friends in the business. Apprentice was a kind way to say "messenger" or errand boy. They should have just called me The Favor.

“Who's that kid? Is he The Apprentice?”

“Oh no. We haven't found The Apprentice yet. He's just the favor.”

A messenger in Manhattan doesn't do the humiliation justice, because being a messenger in New York has a long and distinguished history of hipness, rudeness and tragic accidentness. These of course were bike messengers, the pinnacle of messenger status. They even made a Kevin Bacon movie about it. But this apprentice was no bike messenger. I was a foot messenger. I could already hear the bike messengers taunting me. I imagine they had nicknames like Wheels, Gypsy and Flyer. "Hey footer" or "out of the way Sherpa" they would yell at me as they whizzed by, making sure that I stayed at the bottom of the messenger totem pole, a couple of carvings below the droolers who talk to themselves as they looked down at crumpled pieces of paper searching for the right address.

The reason why there was no bike was twofold. First, the company probably wasn't too excited about paying insurance for their apprentice to ride around the city and face one passenger car door away from a lawsuit or an expensive hospital bill. I was their golden child but there was a limit. The second reason made the idea of using a bike a non-issue as the items I was delivering weighed about forty pounds each and there were times that I was carrying four at a time. This was right on the cusp of the digital age. In fact the new machines were just installed and everyone was training to learn how to cut with a computer. Horn Eisenberg were traditionalists and they cut on film, by hand. Eventually the film was transferred to a digital format, but not the digital we know. There were no files or links to send, as the film was transferred to thick, heavy digital tape and a messenger had to physically deliver the giant three quarter inch (the width of the actual strip) tapes to clients and post-production companies. The digital tape was protected and stored in hermetically sealed green plastic cases, the size of a large briefcase and each one contained one commercial. Now I really admire those Filipino circus performers who ride unicycles while carrying three other freaks on their nose but I don't think they could carry four D-2 cases on a bike in New York City. So on foot it was. These cases were put in plastic Horn Eisenberg bags with a string handle that tightened the closure of the bag. I would wrap the strings around my fingers as if tying up a roast, eventually turning them purple, toss the bags over my shoulders and headed out, like the most uninspired Santa who gave everyone the same present.

I always asked when I could learn how to edit or at least watch someone edit, because I was an apprentice after all. Excalibur had to be passed on. I liked the idea of editing by hand. It seemed like a skill I was capable of. But I was a schlepper. And when I wasn't schlepping a hundred and fifty pounds through the Manhattan elements I would do odds and ends around the office: stocking the kitchen (this was a fancy schmancy place with a cook. Lunch was served in the kitchen, apprentices welcome, if he wasn't breaking his arms trying to get to Backer, Spielvogel, Bates by 1:30.), moving equipment, and then there was the bane of my existence, changing out the water bottles, an apprentice’s task akin to a chef cooking an egg. I imagined them saying, "if he can change a water bottle he can cut a great spot someday." I had never done it before and I was too embarrassed to ask how because it seemed by the way the request was made that it was on par with changing a light bulb. On my second day someone said that the water needed to be changed. I stepped up to the cooler and took the empty off, easy enough. I studied the big hole where the jug goes and it made perfect sense. I saw that the empty was upside down so I understood the physics involved but I didn't know how to get it there. I assumed you poured some in and then just gradually tipped it over. I took the plastic cap off and looked around to make sure no one was looking, as I knew this wouldn't look good, being the apprentice and all. I tipped the bottle over and started to fill the container, already feeling a loss of control I used my leg to prop the bottle up and started to go for it. The container was filling to the brim but the bottle was not upright. It wasn't looking good. As I'm getting the bottle over the top I feel a shooting pain in my upper thigh area but I have to push through. Was it muscle? Bone? What was stabbing my leg? Was that blood I felt on my pants? Usually this amount of pain resulted in blood because I was young and had yet to deal with back, neck or knee stuff. So it had to be blood. I finally got the bottle up and over with minimal splashing, but the pain was still there. After the bottle rocked into place I looked down and saw a huge wet stain across my thighs. I put my mediocre education to work and figured out that while trying to get leverage my knee was pressing against the hot water button, releasing scalding hot water. Hot enough to make a quick cup of Chamomile tea and hot enough to create second degree burns on my thighs. Ahh…the golden boy. Ahh…the favor.

The demands put on the delivery of the film were extreme, involving physical and mental prowess. Sometimes I had to deliver very fragile negatives so I couldn't bring it to the typical mailroom. Those animals couldn't handle our precious piece of art. Imagine a world without the Kix cereal commercial where Mom gives a nervous kid a bowl of Kix the morning of his first day of school? (It all works out in the end. His "healthy breakfast" helped him get through the day and meet a new friend.) We would all be different people, worse people without it. I was told that I had to get the film directly into the hands of the client or the post-production house. Each delivery was a mission that had to be carefully plotted out based on entrance - doorman, security guard, buzzer, gate, elevator bank and location of the messenger room - and my clothes. I already had things going against me as I was carrying plastic bags filled with film cases and I was dealing with the elements - freezing cold, boiling hot, driving rain, slippery snow. So sometimes I'd be wearing shorts, sometimes sweatshirts and most of the time I wore work boots. This is not the attire of an executive going to the 48th floor for a huge presentation. This was the attire of a messenger who belonged in the messenger center with "Wheels" and "Gypsy". So I got to know each place in order to avoid the messenger center, as I would get the wrath of Mr. Eisenberg if the package got stuck in the bowels of a building.

Here's a sample of my breakdown:

McCann Erickson - security desk, no ID needed, messenger center on 21, no shorts, boots ok. Easy.

Backer - security at a desk and at elevators, messenger center on 2, no shorts, no boots. Need a wardrobe change. Very hard.

Wells, Rich, Greene - security desk, messenger center on 36th floor, no attire issues, very easy.

Failure was not an option so I would bring different clothes to change into depending on where I was going. I also had to change my personality, pretend like I belonged and knew where I was going, which meant little eye contact. A bit of method acting was required, so my thought process was to prepare for questioning. "What? Oh these bags? These are just some very important advertising materials for my very important advertising meeting with some very important advertising people to discuss...well...very important advertising of course." Occasionally I would get caught by security - I even got to the point where I knew how to play each security guard - and that would lead to conversations like "I have a meeting with Ray Johnson" or "this has to get to him right now!". Sometimes my plan wouldn't work and I would have to go to the dreaded mailroom, and if Eisenberg got wind of it I would hear about it, loudly.

But to be honest, the real reason why this was the worst job in the world really had nothing to do with the job itself. It was a personal one. They had coed bathrooms in the office. Coed bathrooms, to me, was so anxiety inducing that I couldn't even fathom it. It shook my world to its core. Who would make that decision? A very, very comfortable person would make that decision. I understand that they were going for this homey kind of feel with the kitchen and everything but come on. I have to take a crap right before the hot assistant editor had to powder her exquisite nose. That's just how it would work out. This was close to being a deal breaker. If they had only mentioned in the interview, "Oh, we hope it's not a problem but we have coed bathrooms." Click (that's me hanging up the phone). My entire plan from when I woke up to when I got home was to try to avoid taking a dump in that office, a new twist on the not taking work home with you conflict. This was not a newfound dilemma for me. In high school I would only use the library for a big job and once at Tufts summer school I went nine days without crapping, almost causing organ failure or a potential call from The Guinness Book of World Records. I am a "regular" guy, as regular as they come. That was not the issue. The issue was where and when. There are few greater anxieties than being on the subway halfway through a forty-five minute commute and getting "that sense of urgency" when you still have twenty minutes left underground and five minutes left of clean underpants. There are moments when you say "Its gonna happen. Will it make the news? Will this be my legacy? Is there a Gap or American Apparel nearby to get a new outfit? And a dumpster to get rid of the old one?” But that anxiety is counterbalanced by the euphoric feeling of relief when you find a place to eliminate. I mean a place where you can remove layers and take your time. To enjoy the moment and say "I made it" and laugh a bit. You go over the "what would I have done if..." scenario and then you shake it off and say thank God I didn't.

If only New York Sports Club existed back then. There wouldn't have been an issue. One of the greatest perks that comes with belonging to that gym is you have a bathroom anywhere in the city. Look at it this way, if someone offered you a deal where you paid seventy dollars a month and you'd get access to decent bathrooms within any ten block area of the city, and by the way every one of those bathrooms had exercise equipment as a bonus in case you want to get a workout in after a nice dump, there's no way you'd turn that down. But back in the old days there weren't five hundred gyms in the city. But there were hotels. Hotels that had bathrooms. Luxurious, sprawling bathrooms that were clearly labeled - Ladies and Gentlemen, Dames et Messieurs, Boys and Girls. And the cream of the crop just happened to be at the center of my messengering world. The Waldorf. Every day I would walk by, and on very hot or very cold days I would stroll through the lobby, a small reprieve from the elements between Park and Lex. I treated it like a civilized time machine. And that's how I stumbled on my solution.

I noticed there was construction going on in and around The Waldorf. I also noticed that they had a lot of guys walking around the lobby wearing work boots. I was wearing work boots. They were sweaty and exhausted. I was sweaty and exhausted. They needed a place to poop. I needed a place to poop. So one day I got the idea (and when I say I got the idea I mean I had to take a crap) and wandered into the bathroom. It was beautiful. I passed through two doors to get in and was greeted by a gentleman in uniform, who showed me the way to a stall. He asked me how the construction was going and I said "great, we're gettin' there." Why I was comfortable with him in the room I have no idea? It was like a glitch in my anxiety. I went into the stall and I knew I was home. As I left the stall my man was there with a turned on faucet and a towel. As you can imagine being the apprentice of a film editor doesn't pay so well but if I was going to have a permanent throne at the Waldorf I had to pay Waldorf prices. So I dropped a dollar bill in the dish and moved on to "the construction site." I spent five bucks a week there and used it as a changing room when I went to Backer. I chatted up the guy, talked sports and, of course, the progress of the construction.

My opportunity to be an assistant came after about a year of humiliation and great body control. They asked me to spend the weekend splicing negative together. They trusted me with actually handling the film. Maybe it was due to my ninety percent success rate in avoiding the messenger room or maybe it was just that it was time to shit or get off the pot. Did I still want to be an editor? Immediately I realized I was out of my league, trying to take splices of film and taping them together was a lot more difficult than it looked. The splices were hung, lined up like sausages hanging in a butcher shop. Each was numbered and aligned by scene. The biggest trick, and my eventual downfall, was just making sure that you spliced the correct side, the shiny side, together. So you just needed to concentrate. Again, easy enough, but in a thirty second commercial there could be twenty pieces of film and the monotony can make you spacey. One slip up and the whole thing is shot. It was slightly mindless but I got to play with film and splice, actually edit. So of course I spliced a shiny side down instead of up, which had a crazy domino effect that someone else had to fix. That was the weekend I learned that I didn't want to be an editor. Or I should say I didn't want to take the steps it took to be an editor. I lasted another few months there, even trained another apprentice on how to change the water amongst other things, and pretended to try to learn how to edit, but I didn't have the patience. Not sure if I would have made a good editor but I was a hell of an apprentice and I haven't taken a crap at the Waldorf since.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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Bodies Bare Traces of Carnal Violence

I'm hesitant to tell this story as I'm worried that the authorities will take me away from my parents due to two very poor decisions they made when I was six. Yes, I'm 49 now and have a family of my own, but if the proper officials discover what I'm about to tell you they might retroactively revoke custodial privileges. The choices were that egregious. Even with my advanced age and reduced dependence on them I think my parents would still take it really hard. I assume the statute of limitations has run out but, just in case, there should be enough lag time between when they find out about this story and when it reaches the public for them to create new identities, get burner phones and leave the comfort of their domed existence on the Upper West Side. I'm not sure they are ready for a life on the run at this stage in their lives as they are pretty settled in, but hopefully it won’t come to that. We'll see.

My parents loved me, trusted me, encouraged me and respected me. All the ingredients you need in a parent. For the most part they made great decisions with my brother and I but, as a parent now, I've learned that it just takes one bad decision and all of the good gets thrown out the window. Some of the greatest athletes in history talk about remembering the biggest defeats or mistakes much more than the championships or great plays. That’s kind of what parenting decisions are like, only without the highlight reel or glory. And I'm not talking about the tough decisions like when to let your kids start using a knife to cut their food (it depends on how good they are at playing the piano) or when to get them a phone (as soon as possible as there is nothing sweeter than getting an emoji-filled text from your daughter). But what I'm going to discuss here, and what makes this so shocking, are the simple decisions. The ones that you would say "of course I wouldn't..." or "there are no circumstances that I would let my child...". The basics. There are many books on parenting but I don't think any book covers these two judgement calls because of their obvious nature. They're so obvious that if “Family Feud” had a topic on the subject of parenting these would definitely make the top three. I imagine it would go something like this:

Richard Dawson (or whoever is your favorite host): “Ok we asked 100 parents what the top ten things you don't let your 6-year old child do.”

Buzzer sounds. It’s close because both Moms from either family quickly smack their buzzer. But it's the Millers from Topeka who answer first.

Miller Mom: “Don't let your child walk off with a stranger.”

The Millers clap, as they know they have it.

Richard Dawson: “Can I see stranger danger...survey says!”

Ding!

Richard Dawson: “The number one answer on the board.”

This is followed by lots of clapping and head nodding because it is such an obvious answer. The number one answer in fact.

My father's relatives live in Minnesota and when I was a kid we would take an annual summer trip to Minneapolis to see my grandfather, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins. On the day of what my kids now call “when daddy got lost” we were driving back to my aunt and uncle's house, probably to attend to our mosquito bites, when I looked out the window and saw my grandfather walking on one of those quintessential Minneapolis streets. Perfect lawns, big houses, big trees. "There's Grandpa Dan...Grandpa Dan!" We all saw the sweet old man walking down the street. "Can I walk home with him?" My parents immediately said yes and my Dad pulled the car over and they let me out. I ran toward Grandpa Dan and waved to my parents as they drove off. "Grandpa Dan! Grandpa Dan!" I was so excited to see him. He turned around and....it wasn't Grandpa Dan. It was another eighty-something-year-old man in a hat and sweater. And when he turned around and I saw that it wasn't him I looked around for our car but they were gone. Ok I rushed through that sequence because that’s how fast it all happened. But let’s pause and do a bit of a parenting check.

- I was six.

- I was six and in an unknown city.

- I was six, in an unknown city and they let me out of the car by myself.

- I was six, in an unknown city, they let me out of the car by myself and didn't check to see if the man I was going to walk home with was my grandfather.

Let's just focus on this last one, forgetting age and geographical ignorance. There were a lot of ways to make sure this was the right man. Someone could've walked me out to him, say hello and ask him if it was cool that I walk home with him. Maybe he wasn't going home. Maybe he was going somewhere. To take a walk and get away from his visiting family. To visit a friend who hates kids. Maybe he was going to buy heroin from his hooker girlfriend. Doubtful but you never know. The point is you may want to ask just in case. Within that fairly quick and normal exchange they would have gotten all of the information they needed. But I digress because, more important than asking him if it was okay for me to walk with him, they needed to make sure that the him was actually my grandfather. Okay, let's say they were in more of a hurry to get home - a tv show, a bathroom emergency, more studying of parenting basics, whatever their rush was - and they wanted to stay in the car. If that was the case then the easiest thing to do was a slow down drive by ID check. Almost...no exactly like a criminal/cop who would drive by a target/suspect before he is going to kill/arrest him. Whether you’re on the side of good or evil it’s the responsible thing to do. Just a quick turn around of the head or an inconspicuous glance in the mirror. But I guess it was open the door, get the kid out and don't look back, because Burt Reynolds is on The Dinah Shore Show and I can’t miss it. When I ask my parents they have no explanation for the lack of identification.

Now I'm stuck on Elm Street with Not Grandpa Dan looking down at me. All I know is, "Aunt Jean." I don't know her last name, the street they live on or the temple they belong to. No pertinent information for that neighborhood. I looked up at Not Grandpa Dan and said, "Do you know Aunt Jean?" Not Grandpa Dan looked down at me and shook his head. I don't think he turned around and shuffled away as I must have begun some kind of child panic and possibly a few tears started to well up. I think he directed me to one of the houses and suggested I ask them. Then he moved on, as he must have wanted to get home to watch the same show as my parents or attend to his mosquito bites or maybe he was going to meet Grandpa Dan, as he was the friend who hates kids. As he walked away I headed up the lawn of a house and rang a doorbell. "Do you know my Aunt Jean?" I got a head shake and then it was a montage of me at the doors of this neighborhood, asking a question and them shaking their heads, doors shut in my face, me kicking the ground and walking off. Eventually the montage ends as my head picks up and I see what I really need to see, kids playing in a yard, the comfort of my peers. I saw didn’t two kids, about my age, playing with toy bows and arrows (a key memory from which the story is stitched). I asked them if I could play and they didn’t hesitate, handing me a bow of my own. Eventually I must have let them know I was lost as their mom came out and asked me what family I was looking for and all I said was, “Aunt Jean”. She disappeared inside to investigate, as we continued our game of Cowboys and Indians (this was the 70’s).

Meanwhile back at Aunt Jean's house, as my parents were getting caught up on daytime television, Grandpa Dan showed up. I'm not sure if he was already there and panicked ensued but in my mind he walked into the living room to catch this amazing episode of The Mike Douglas Show that had the whole neighborhood up in arms and someone, during the commercial break, asked where I was. After a few minutes of back and forth it all became clear. Then the panic set in as they sent out a search party, which was a couple of cars, going from block to block. Now they were learning how to slowly drive by and check people’s faces. Lesson learned the hard way I guess. Finally my parents turn the corner and spot me playing happily with my new friends. I imagine my mom stumbling up the hill to get to me and hold me, never letting go, and promising to never make that mistake again. I assume they thanked the family and never took their eyes of of me for the rest of trip. I assume that the authorities are thinking about this but ultimately giving my parents a pass. Well wait as I believe they work on an aggregate system so my folks aren’t in the clear yet.

After my harrowing situation in Minneapolis I guess my parents thought that I was a mature, hardened six year-old and that I could handle things that many my age couldn't. I can imagine them questioning something and then waving it off, "He'll be fine. Remember when he got lost in Minneapolis and made it through easy. No trauma whatsoever." It’s true though, as I wasn't clingy. I wasn't mistrusting. I would go head first into many scenarios. I have a lot of issues but abandonment has never been one of them. You want to leave me. Go ahead. I'll be just dandy. I won't wonder why. I won't look for you. I won't call out for my Aunt Jean. No trauma. How or why I don't know. Thus came the second ridiculously poor decision right on the heels of this one.

Let's go back to “Family Feud”. Richard take it away.

Richard Dawson: “Ok...Millers you got the number one answer do you want to pass or keep going?”

Mom Miller: “We'll keep going Richard.”

After a short huddle and a drunken comment from Richard about strangers and kids, the Millers come back.

Mom Miller: “Don't let them watch inappropriate television or movies.”

Again the Millers start clapping and Richard starts smacking his cards into his hand and says something about his show having inappropriate material. After some canned laughter he dramatically points with the cards to the board.

Richard Dawson: “Let's see no watching inappropriate material...survey says?”

Ding! Number 3 on the list as I think consuming poison or maybe something to do with swimming unattended probably snuck in there.

While content has spread to many different mediums and is much more accessible the rule still remains. Just know what kind of things your kids are watching, reading or listening to. Another basic. In this day and age, screw that, in any day and age, what my parents allowed me to watch would never fly. As much as I never want you to stop reading this, in order for this story to be most effective you will have to do a little work on your own and watch something. You can watch it at any point after you are told what it is. If you watch it right after I tell you then it will make you shake your head in amazement as you get more details, and if you watch it later you will be just as flabbergasted, as you will say it can't be that bad and then when you see it, it's worse. But you have to watch, just not with your kids. That's the deal we are making right now. Deal?

I grew up in front of TV and movie screens. Was glued. That in itself could be an indictment today. And I'm not just talking about Sesame Street and the Electric Company. I'm talking about The Today Show in the morning with my mom, All My Children in the afternoon with my Nanny and everything else the rest of the day - The Man From U.N.C.L.E, I Dream of Jeannie, F Troop. In fact I used to measure time in tv shows. If I was told we’d be leaving in an hour I'd ask how many Gilligan's Islands that was - "two Jon...two Gilligan's Islands." Around this time, when I was living in Birmingham, I would see any movie my parents went to see, from James Bond to Rollerball (a particular favorite as in one scene a bloodied James Caan circles the arena to the crowd chanting "Jonathan, Jonathan") to Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. So they were obviously open to taking us to see anything and I am thankful for that. Why they took me is very clear: because they wanted to see those movies. It's that simple and I know it because there are so many movies I want to see but I can't because I can't take my kids. I draw a line, which every passing year gets extended a bit.

But I don't think my parents drew a line. Or had a line. What movie wouldn't they let me see? I think the answer is none. Because in 1973, when I was six, a movie that none of you have heard of and even fewer of you have seen, came out, and how it found its way to Birmingham and my impressionable eyes I don't know. The name of the movie is “Torso.” Not Toto or Tortoise or Horse-o. “Torso.” Just so there was no confusion that this could be mistaken as a kid’s movie. It wasn’t like what happened to many parents in the late 70’s when they took their kids to see Flesh Gordon only to rush them out of the theater in shock that the aliens lacked clothing much like earthly soft core porn. No, the title clearly was the word Torso. Remember the deal we made a few paragraphs back? Well now would be a good time to look up Torso online. Type in Torso 1973 movie. Play around a bit. Take a deep dive. Look at the posters. Watch the trailer. Watch the movie if you like, but watch it with the eyes of a six year-old. Go ahead, I'll wait. The book will still be here when you get back.

Ok. Welcome back to those who just did their research and are thoroughly freaked out. Stop trying to burn your eyes with a match or acid. You can’t un-see that. This is when people start to inform on my parents and let the authorities know that this deed should not go unpunished. If that's the case then the cops will start going after them, given their previous record of losing the same child just months ago. All I ask is give them a little time to pack. My dad is a quick packer but my Mom is a bit indecisive and I’m sure the anxiety of the law being after them won’t help with those decisions. So hopefully they've said their goodbyes and are living the life as an old Italian couple. God speed Gale and Marshall. Or should I say Gaela and Marcello.

The title of Torso was changed from its original, which I guess was a marketing decision. It was an Italian produced film and it's title in Italian was a mouthful - "I corpi presantano tracce di violenza carnale". The English translation makes you understand the marketing decision, because I'm not sure there is a way to market a movie titled - "Bodies bear traces of carnal violence." A terrible, terrible title for a movie. It says too much while saying absolutely nothing. Its non-committal. The opposite of say Jaws. So they went with Torso. Torso has just as much impact with a little more intrigue and a lot less literacy.

So how did a six year-old end up sitting in a movie theater, watching Torso? The way the story goes is that one day my Mom's best friend, Nan, was watching me, and not my brother, for some reason. Nan was someone who we spent a lot of time with and I was very comfortable around. At least when they left me with her, they checked to make sure it was Nan and not some lookalike from behind, so there was some growth. At some point Nan had to think of what to do with me and she knew I loved going to the movies. Simple enough. So she perused the paper and checked out what was playing at the Green Springs 6 or the Eastwood Mall. I can't pinpoint the day but there were probably some good choices at that time. 1973 was a banner year for movies. Here's just a sampling of what she may have found playing at a theater that day:

The Sting (my favorite movie of all time)

American Graffiti

Live and Let Die (my favorite Roger Moore 007)

Serpico (my brother's first movie in the theater so there was a track record)

Paper Moon

Charlotte’s Web

Tom Sawyer

Mean Streets

Robin Hood - animated (my favorite Disney film at the time)

Forbidden Planet - (maybe not for kids so much, but animated no less)

Sleeper - (one of my top 5 favorite Woody Allen movies)

The Three Musketeers - (Oliver Reed, Michael York - my favorite version)

The list kept going. It kept going in fact to the #78 film, in terms of box office, Torso directed by Sergio Martino. Look again at the list above and you'll see some of the greatest filmmakers of all time on there. Now I will say that I saw many of the above movies in the theater so there could have been a bit of a back and forth on what I had seen and what I hadn't but I can't believe we got to #78. Was Black Mama, White Mama sold out? There's one significant movie I left off the list and it was the number one movie that year. The Exorcist. A blockbuster. A game changer. So I don't know if it had come out already or not but there could have been a conversation about maybe going to see that and maybe, just maybe they felt that The Exorcist was a bit much for my six year-old soul to take. Maybe they did have a line and were drawing it in the sand. But how could Torso have been any worse...or better depending on the system we were using to make our choice? I assume after some deliberation and schedule checking Nan landed on her choice. “I think I’ll take Jon to see Torso. Is that OK?” After maybe a quick thought and peek at the paper, my parents nodded. “That’s fine. Have fun.” I do wonder if "Bodies bear traces of carnal violence" would've passed.

What about the movie poster? Anything we can take away from that to get a sense of the film, to inform our decision of entertaining and not scarring a little kid? The movie poster, some were in red and some in yellow, depicted a leather-clad hand holding a hacksaw, and within the frame of the hacksaw you could see a terrified college girl in a nightgown. There were variations of that poster that showed a few more scenes under the hacksaw to give you more detail about plot or content, like a full on lesbian orgy bedroom scene, or another woman in a nightgown, this time with more of a scream on her face, or an image of a man in a ski mask with a red and black scarf, holding, yep you guessed it, a hacksaw. Again, trying to be fair, maybe Nan and my parents didn't see these posters in the paper. Maybe Nan didn't see it until it was even bigger at the theater, when she had one more chance to question this choice before buying a ticket. Before maybe asking if I'd like to see Robin Hood again. I'm starting to think that Nan should be joining my parents in Italy.

Ok so if the title didn't do it and the image on the poster didn't do it, maybe the log line could give a hint. She saw the hacksaw and some sign of lesbian interaction and then maybe she glanced at the line on the poster. The line that sums up the movie like, "In space no one can hear you scream", which lets you know that you will be in space and there will be probably be screaming and, unfortunately, no one will be able to hear that screaming in space. A perfect summation of the forthcoming experience. For Torso it wasn't quite as explicit but it was still quite effective in giving you a sense of what to expect. The line on the poster read, "Enter...if you dare, the bizarre world of the psychosexual mind." It was a dare, questioning whether you want to walk in the theater, and if you did choose to take on this challenge it would be a bizarre world you were entering, a different world, a world that would be occupied by, not cute foxes and singing bears, but someone with a psychosexual mind. Nan took a look at that and decided to take the dare and enter, dragging me into that world.

So what was Torso about? Let's start with the setting. An Italian college town. Not sure what that meant, but in my memory there were scenes of college age men and women going up and down stairs to big, old buildings, always being watched from afar by someone wearing a red and white scarf. Yes there were a few classroom scenes, but there were far more basement and bedroom scenes. If I were to break the movie down sonically, in forty-five percent of the scenes girls were laughing and in forty five percent of the scenes girls were screaming, with the final ten percent saved for the scenes where the girls were making no noise because they were dead. While this bustling college activity was going on there was a killer, a strangler specifically, a strangler of college coeds even more specifically, on the loose. I'm sure there was some kind of weak police procedural plot line but I am admitting here and now that I have not and will not see this movie again for a variety of reasons so I can’t confirm that. What I remember was more like flashback style. The scene or scenario, as it may have happened multiple times, I remember most vividly was the killer, with a bloody hacksaw, carrying a black garbage bag filled with body parts into a basement. That would be the poster in my head. Yes there were glimpses of the lesbian bedroom scenes, and girls running and screaming from the killer, but the basement, the aftermath is what made the biggest impression on me. I couldn't begin to analyze how seeing this movie affected me. As of today, it hasn’t manifested itself in anything too bad, but keep an eye on me.

We joked about it over the years and it wasn't until about five years ago that I actually investigated the movie. It was just a story that we told. An inside joke that never really had any teeth as there was nothing to refer to other than the thought of it. And then the internet happened. The closet that holds the skeletons of the universe, where you can dare to enter into many bizarre worlds. I looked at the posters in utter disbelief. Then I watched the trailer and I think I actually held my hand over my gaping mouth. As I watched the Torso trailer I was angry, mystified and laughing my ass off. How could this have happened? I was just deliberating over letting my seven year-old daughter see Pitch Perfect 2, which is a joke compared to this. I showed the trailer to some of my co-workers and most of them couldn't get through it, others were delighted at the story of it but were condemning my parents equally. Then I shared it with my mom. I asked her if she had seen the trailer. She had not. I asked her if she would look at it. She said she would, and when she did she laughed but also stopped it. She couldn't watch it all the way through. Screw the trailer. I should make her watch the actual movie all the way through. Or I could just drop it. Doubtful. Maybe my feelings and reaction to the film have remained dormant for over 40 years and I've just been waiting for an event to trigger it. I'm currently in the process of building out our basement, which in Brooklyn is as traumatic an experience that you can go through, and when its finished maybe I'll find myself at Home Depot staring at hacksaws and it'll hit me. I hope not but you never know. It wasn't my decision to see that movie and if they find bags of bodies in my new basement then you know what my defense will be. If only I had seen Robin Hood that day.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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Mr. Smiley In The Hut With A Rope

Here are the facts:

1. I'm in a hut.

2. I'm lying on a mat laid across a dirt floor.

3. I'm completely naked.

4. I am oiled from head to toe.

5. There's a barefoot man in a loincloth standing above me, smiling.

6. This is not a story about when I was kidnapped.

7. I've agreed to this, and paid for it, willingly.

8. I'm staring at a rope hanging above me from the ceiling.

9. I'm laughing uncontrollably.

10. I'm in India.

Was it a crime? Not really. Did I feel violated? Completely.

We've all had those "how did I get here" moments. Where you skip gigantic amounts of circumstantial evidence and proof that made it very obvious how you got there. Like agreeing to go to India with your friends. Like actually purchasing tickets for planes, trains and boats to, and in, India. So based on those facts I had a pretty good idea that at some point I would be in India. But you still stand there, or in this case lie there, balls out, and you ask yourself "what the hell am I doing here"? It's like when you're on a roller coaster and it's climbing to its highest point. Tick, tick, tick, tick.... And you reach that pause when you look down at the drop and say to yourself - why? I could've just stayed down there and had another corn dog. This is like that - times ten. Because you never actually drop. You're just always hanging there asking why.

When you get the chance to go to India you go. You don't question it, you just go. When will that opportunity ever come up again? I'm not taking my kids to India any time soon. There are a thousand places that would come first. So I ended up going to India. I was in my “barely working” days at the time, so I wasn't a necessity in my office. They could find someone else to pick up and deliver the footage for a Stephen King miniseries. Stephen King wasn't asked if it was okay that I go to India.

Producer - "Umm Stephen, we've got an issue. The Goldberg kid is going to India for about ten days. Some kind of self discovery bullshit.”

Stephen King - (long pause and an even longer sigh) "So tell me...who's going to pick up the film and deliver it across town to Manhattan Transfer? This is why my work doesn't translate to the screen."

That conversation didn't happen.

A group of my friends had an annual tradition of picking an exotic locale to go to for a couple of weeks over the holidays. Previous trips included South Africa, Thailand and Australia. This is back when few of us were married or even seriously attached so we could just leave for two weeks without too much fanfare. This particular year they mentioned it to me and said they were going to India. Surprisingly, to me and them, I said I was in. Because I had some kind of prescience, at a time in my life when prescience was low, I realized this was probably my one and only chance to go to India. We had the added benefit of a close friend who was living there with his wife. He was going to show us around the country as a tour guide, but a tour guide that I could say "that sounds horrible" to. I have been called a curmudgeon before (and since), and if you ask the others who had the worst time on this trip, there's no question that the unanimous answer would be "Jon," "Goldberg," "definitely Jon," "he was miserable the whole time." The truth is this was a very complex trip. I was miserable for much of it but I was also in amazement at the things I saw, touched and tasted. I'm sure it's been said before but I’ll say it again, India is a place of extremes. The Taj Mahal is one of the most incredible sights to behold and the poverty throughout the country is the most gut wrenching imaginable. After I got back to New York, when I saw the homeless I almost scoffed at them. I wanted to say, "I've seen the pros and you, sir, are lucky. Come talk to me when you're seven years-old, have a club foot and are wearing nothing but underpants."

The food in India could be unbelievable and inedible during the same meal. On one leg of the trip we took a boat overnight down a river. There was a three-man crew and they made us a dinner of chicken and some coconut sauce on a banana leaf. After my first bite I thought it was one of the best things I had ever eaten. I could taste all of these spices and flavors that I've never had before. It was rich, sweet and salty. But about halfway through the meal I thought, and said out loud, "This is disgusting. It's too rich, too sweet and too salty. I can't have another bite.” About twenty minutes later as I was throwing up off of the side of the boat I heard, in between violent wretches, laughing. Was I hallucinating? It was the crew who were just on the other side of the thatched separation. Glad I could entertain. To this day, that sauce, spice or flavor (it’s like a smoky coconut type thing) has joined peppermint schnapps on my no fly list.

As the trip progressed, we headed farther and farther south, I was being stripped of many things including my clothes and, at times, my dignity. But there was also a freedom, a welcomed lack of complete control and understanding, which eventually led to my willingness to be completely naked and staring at a rope.

Halfway through the trip we stopped in the port town of Cochin. As we walked toward the small village we saw a handwritten wooden sign that said - Jewtown. We all jumped at that and thought it can't be what we think it is but we have to investigate. We climbed on a rundown ferry across a canal to a small town, which apparently contained Jewtown. We got off the ferry and followed the signs through windy streets until a narrow alley ended at the front door of a tiny synagogue. We walked into the synagogue and there was one man in his seventies there. He looked Indian and, through some back and forth gesturing, he let us know that he was Jewish and that there were a few Jews still around. I guess if I were squinting he could look like one of my grandparents’ “Florida friends.” He showed us inside the synagogue, which had a few benches, a Torah and some artifacts. Eventually we started to leave but he stopped us and asked if we were coming back for services that night. We said that we weren't planning on it but then he held up four fingers on his hand. Was it the time the services started? No. Was it a date? No. He then pointed to himself, then he pointed to us and held up both hands, fingers splayed out - ten. Someone called out "a minyan", 10 is a minyan. The number needed to have a legit ceremony. He wanted us to come back because they haven't had a true minyan in years and it would mean a lot. Being that there were four Jews he could round up and six of us were bar mitzvah boys we really could help him out. We agreed to come back that night. The rest of the group stayed in the area and I said I'd meet the minyan back at the synagogue that evening, as I wanted to go back to the hotel. I walked to the ferry on my own, and we're not talking double decker ferry, it's more like a tug boat with a roof, flat bottomed and crowded, sinking very low in the water. I felt this odd adrenaline rush. As I got on the boat and sat down, I looked up and realized that everyone was looking at me. It was like I had some food on the side of my mouth and everyone on the boat wanted to tell me but they didn’t know me well enough so they kept staring. I wasn't just a minority, I was an oddity. I now had some concept of what it felt like to completely stand out in a crowd and it was extremely powerful and almost overwhelming. I was being studied. The rush came from the feeling of isolation, compounded by the animal in a zoo focus on me. As I got off the boat and saw the rest of the minyan, there was so much relief. Just that experience on the boat was enough to justify the trip. I don't think I will ever have that feeling again.

The ferry experience did something to me. It changed my approach for the rest of the trip and I began to stop questioning everything. I began going with the flow a bit more. Relaxing on the beach without questioning the fact that there were cows lying a few feet away. I was actually open, enjoying myself (not to mention the thinnest I’ve ever been). Which is why a few days later when Alan suggested an Ayurvedic massage as one of our activities, my response was, "That sounds horrible but okay." At this point we were at a “spa” at the very southern tip of India, staying in wooden huts deep in a forest overlooking a beach where fishermen threw huge nets out into the water and dragged them back in, gathering up the flopping silver bounty. I think the group was a bit shocked that I was game. If this were the beginning of the trip, there's no way I would’ve agreed to a massage of any kind. But after having gone through multiple bouts of digestion issues, including hallucinatory diarrhea in a hotel room where I almost cried out of joy because a comforting NBA game was being shown live at four AM, having to tote around my own toilet paper as you never know when it would hit, and a transcendent moment of isolation, I was up for anything. I'm not a big massage guy. I've had them and I've liked them. I'm just not that into them. But Alan said, “This is not like any other massage. They use their feet."

I bit. ”How do they use their feet?”

"It's hard to describe but it's amazing."

"Why not?" Which was my other response besides "that sounds horrible". "Why not" was my general feeling about the whole trip and I got many answers to that question during the massage.

Four of us agreed to get this unique experience. Again, I was just going with the when-will-I-ever-get-this-chance-again instincts. But that guy is sometimes confronted by the how-did-I-get-here guy and they end up not really communicating very well. Many times it ends up in a big fight in my stomach where there is no winner, just lots and lots of losing. The time for the massage had come and the four of us were escorted down a path in the forest to two separate huts with two doors on each. Steve and Andy went in one hut and Matt and I went in another. Matt walked through the other door in our hut and disappeared. I soon learned that the attractive female escort was not the masseuse. The smiling tan man wearing the loincloth waiting for me in the hut was. He pointed to a chair opposite me. I sat down and quickly did some reconnaissance. The layout wasn’t too informative. The massage table and oils next to it screamed massage, which was familiar and somewhat a relief. It smelled right. Coconut and I'm guessing something like hibiscus. But the big cauldron of oil seemed a bit off, more Macbeth or Bugs Bunny in the jungle than Ritz Carlton. And then I stopped, frozen by the thing that was truly out of place. This was what Alan meant by "it's hard to explain." The thing he didn’t mention as to not “ruin it” for us. On the dirt floor, next to the cauldron, was a big mat. And right above the middle of the mat, hanging from the thatched roof like a giant question mark, was a thick rope that you'd see in gym class scenes from The Wonder Years. Until I learned what that rope was for it was always in my peripheral vision, as if at some point it was going to jump at me and I wanted to be ready. I was mesmerized by that rope. My masseur, still smiling, gestured for me to take my clothes off. I stripped down to my underwear and had that big decision to make, the same one you have in doctor's offices or locker rooms. Do I or don't I. I looked at him for a cue and he just nodded and smiled. Was he doing the yes nod or the no nod? Maybe you are aware of this, but in case you aren’t, the difference between someone gesturing yes and gesturing no in India is the slightest bobble on the yes and the slightest head turn on the no. So for a no it's a fairly typical motion - your chin basically moving from your left collarbone to your right collarbone - and the yes gesture is more your left ear almost touching your left collarbone and your right ear touching your right collarbone and doing it rapidly. It sounds completely different but when done quickly it's almost impossible to decipher a difference. And just to add to the confusion a full on head bobble like a bobble head means maybe. When we arrived at the Mumbai airport we were stymied by a security guard for about 2 minutes, asking him if the way to baggage claim was to the right. He did the bobble. Some of us thought he said no and some thought yes. We asked again, same thing. It was an Abbott and Costello routine if there were one Abbott and eight Costellos.

As I stared at the masseuse he added a slight hand gesture, both hands, palms up at a slight angle directed towards my underwear. He did the slight bobble again and smiled. It was a clear yes. I could hear Matt in the room next door going through the same non-verbal motions. The room next door was just a curtain, so you could hear the same odd silences and shuffling on Matt's side. In a very helpless voice I eeked out "Matt....are you-" and he cut me off, "yes Jon...and this is a solitary experience". A nice way of saying "fuck off, I'm naked too, just go with it." I was on my own. And I went with it. Once again, anywhere else in the world and I was gone but hey when will I get a chance to be naked in an Indian hut standing in front of a strange smiling man in a diaper again? The answer was definitely never. No bobble. This was an ear to ear violent shake of my head. No!

Down came the briefs. It was freeing. I instinctually moved toward the table but my man waggled his finger and pointed to the mat, the mat next to the cauldron, the mat next to the cauldron under the rope. Really? We're going right to the mat? No massage foreplay? You know a little shoulder rub to get to know me? Nope, this was right to the "good" stuff. My masseuse/violator was still nodding and gesturing for me to drop down to the mat. As I lay on the mat, chin to chest to follow his every move while keeping an eye on that rope just above me, he walked over to the cauldron and spooned some hot oil into a ladle. He made a move for me and began to pour the oil on my chest and stomach. As it hit my body and I felt the burning of the oil on my skin I remembered one of my greatest epiphanies. I was in my late teens, flying back from college and it was a horrible flight, bumpy, lots of up and down, just miserable. And I'm not a great flyer as it is but as I left the plane I saw the pilot and co-pilot. They were both a bit shaken, not confident. That's when it hit me. They may be pilots but they're humans first. Humans with emotions, drinking problems, sleep disorders and depression. They were flawed. I have never flown with any kind of confidence since. Just purely playing a numbers game. As the hot oil began to flow on to me, I was initially confident that they would never make it too hot as to burn me, but then I recalled my pilot epiphany, which later spread to doctors, teachers, bosses, chefs and now...half naked Indian masseuses. So when the oil confirmed my mistrust and burned like hell I just shook my head in disbelief. I stayed calm and the oil cooled down, not reaching second-degree burn status, and it was quite soothing. But I’d put myself down as someone who likes his massage oil on the tepid sign.

Now that my front side was fully oiled, my guy took hold of the rope, and it happened so fast I couldn't prepare. There was no movie moment where he looked at the rope and I looked at the rope and in slow motion he grabbed it and I yelled out "noooooo." I immediately got the one answer I had been looking for since Alan first brought up the idea. In one quick move of grace, athleticism and sadism, he pulled on the rope, floated for an instant and was up on my belly with one foot, using the rope for stability. Almost as if the rope were a hand he used to pull himself up onto a boat. He started gliding on me with one foot, pushing off of the other like he was going uphill on a skateboard, my body being the hill. He was swinging all around and really not paying any mind to any of my more sensitive parts, which I assumed Mr. Tarzan here possessed under his loincloth. I wanted to say "Why would you do that to another guy?" But instead I held back, eventually releasing my anxiety and tension through pure guttural, uncontrollable laughter. I just started thinking of the scenario and I couldn't stop. He then looks down at me and he starts laughing. We were actually bonding on the most ridiculous level, stupidity. I finally stopped laughing as the fear and discomfort came back. He continued to polish my body, eventually getting me to turn over and doing the same to my back. This wasn’t too bad. Eventually I got to the table, partially dazed, as he started working my arms, neck and shoulders, his feet firmly on the ground now. I relaxed, and enjoyed it. Not sure if it was relief that it was over or that it felt good. Kind of like the feeling when a painful brain freeze goes away. It's almost worth the pain to feel the relief.

He finished the whole process with my fingers and he just walked away, leaving me to lie there for I don't know how long, my body buzzing. Eventually I sat up and he returned, walking a towel the size of two sheets of bounty over to me. I was glistening with oil everywhere. Like I had an orgy with a bucket of KFC original recipe. This towel was not going to do the job. This is where I would miss the après massage routine common amongst all spas. Most importantly the part that involves showering. I don't need the robe, the comfy chairs and magazines, or even the endless bowl of fresh fruit. But a shower, a bucket of water, a wet sponge would’ve been nice. But here I get a ratty towel to just wipe the oil off or, more precisely, rub it in. I put my clothes back on right there, looking and feeling victimized. I stepped out of the tent, thanking my friend for our moment of intimacy. I wonder if he laughed when I was gone. As I got back to my hut, I saw myself in a mirror and I looked like Nick Nolte's mug shot. I was greasy and dirty and my hair was mussed up like I just finished wrestling a bear. When we all met for dinner that night in our grubby, oil soaked clothes, there was very little talk about it. It was more like an incident that needed to be thought through and reflected on. Not casual dinner discussion.

I think the massage was the end for me. We spent another day or two at a lovely resort, but all I could think about was going home. I had enough, slightly defeated by the masseuse, the minyan, the begging, the barfing, the crapping and just the lack of any normalcy. I loved India. It will always have a special place in my heart, my mind and my stomach. On the final night before our flight the 9 of us were sitting in a hotel room in Mumbai. This was Jeremy's room as he was staying for another week. I looked at him with such pity, that he had to stay. He started laughing because it was incomprehensible to me that he wanted to stay. He could try to explain but I wouldn't believe him. We said goodbye and left him there as we headed to the airport.

When our flight from India arrived at Heathrow I started thinking about one thing. What can I eat to get back to normalcy? I was like an animal set free. The other guys did not have the same enthusiasm as I did. Now I realize the question "where's the best meal you ever ate" is a completely relative one. I've eaten in some of the best restaurants in Paris, Florence, New York. Just some great meals. But my answer to the question is "the Burger King at Heathrow on my way home from India." In fact, I told my friends that I was going to eat by myself. "This is a solitary experience”. I took my whopper, my fries, my other whopper and my coke and tucked into a corner of the airport for some culinary masturbation. That was truly an out of body experience. I didn't want to be seen because I think I was actually crying. All the angst, the discomfort, the extremes that I experienced during that trip came out as I was devouring that symbol of home. Still in a foreign country, and even with their ketchup that's not exactly right, I did get the feeling of privilege and honor to have had the opportunity to spend 10 days in India. So when someone asks what I think of India I would answer this way - "It's not like anything you've ever experienced. A little strange and hard to describe. You have to do it to understand it. It may be a little uncomfortable while you're there but when you leave you'll never forget it." I guess it's the same answer I would give if someone asked me to describe an Ayurvedic massage. Except, remember, they use their feet.

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

Text

A Bette Davis Film Directed By Woody Allen

I once had to sleep with a dead cat.

It wasn't a fraternity stunt. It wasn't a perverted phase in my life. It was completely and only for a girl. All I had to say was, "What are you talking about? No fucking way. Sleep with your own dead cat." But I didn't. I slept with a stiff, dead cat, for two very long, very uncomfortable nights.

I grew up with dogs. I get dogs. We have a dog now. They can be annoying but you can communicate with them, and I'm not even talking about the ones that are trained. Cats have always thrown me off my game and, honestly, I just never found them that cute or enticing to want to have in my vicinity. They always seemed like miniature versions of tigers or leopards that can’t wait to swat me down, carry me up a tree to bleed me out and eat me. So let’s just say I was coming from a less rational, less accepting place when cats came into my life and my vicinity. And this particular cat was not the best representative of the cat nation to send as a diplomat chosen to heal the relationship between their kind and those who did not accept them. More medical miracle than ideal specimen.

“I want to fly Italiano out here and take care of him…he’s really sick.” This unassuming suggestion came from my girlfriend, Amanda. Our story is for another time but she was my high school sweetheart, who I lost touch with for years, finally reconnecting when I was in LA, not living the dream. She was driving back across country, on her way to Seattle, deciding whether she was going to get married or not. Flash forward four years and I am in a serious relationship with her, in Seattle.

“Wow. That’s sweet. How old is he again?” This is the dumb me just moving the conversation along, not knowing a trap was being set.

“He’s eighteen.”

“Amazing. I remember him from high school.”

“Yeah. He’s not doing well and I just want to be with him…”

She trailed off, not wanting to go there. I reacted like a dumb dog, just going along with it and supporting the kind gesture.

Within a few days Amanda flew to New York to accompany the cat, like he was an old Uncle needing an escort, back to Seattle so “she” could take care of him in his final days…his final 76 days. When does “final” truly mean final? There has to be some sense of imminence, which was clearly the case with Italiano, but there is also defiance, which was quite evident as well. So I guess there is some equation or recipe when combining those two qualities and you come up with a range of final. But once I saw him I did not argue with the declaration. I might have even gone a step further that he was making a great case for the existence of the undead.

What I wasn’t aware of, or thinking through, was that because my job, or at times lack of one, kept me at home most of the time, I became the sole caregiver. I was about to learn the hard way that the only thing worse than taking care of a selfish, loveless pet that is completely independent on you is taking care of a selfish, loveless pet that is completely dependent. Although there were times when the dependency turned into rebellion, like when I had to give him his daily shot. Oh wait, didn't I mention that he was blind, deaf, incontinent and dying of diabetes, which required him getting a shot in the stent hanging from his side? How could I have forgotten that? That’s vital information that I should’ve mentioned earlier, because you would want to know that stuff right? Well so did I. There were also some things that I learned on the job, like sometimes the fluid from the shot would back up, creating a sack on his side that grew so much that it would drag on the floor as if he swallowed a messenger bag that he slung around his ribcage. His blindness gave him this odd sense of presence where he knew you were near but lacked the exact coordinates. So if I were working for a bit and I turned around he would be a few feet away, staring at me in such a creepy way, almost looking through me. And he would do it for hours until he uttered his death rattle meets meow. Think of Spongebob Squarepants' voice with a heavy dose of desperate sadness and pain added on, and he's only saying one word/groan over and over again, "ohhh, ohhh, ohhh." Then imagine that it could happen at any time during the day...or night. Oftentimes I wouldn't see him and I would almost step on him or trip to avoid him. I would turn to see those lifeless eyes just staring at me, giving me the chills. Yes, this was an 18-year old cat that was dying. And he was dying in my apartment. "Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh."

I had the best situation in Seattle. I lived in the nicest apartment, overlooking two mountain ranges, the water and downtown. I was writing my own stuff and occasionally I would get some advertising work, write whenever I wanted and send it off to a client I never had to meet. Then around noon I would go play basketball with the same group of guys, one a former pro and another a member of Pearl Jam. I would grab lunch, head home and then the east coast sports were on. “Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh.” Fantastic life. "Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh."

A writer's dream. "Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh."

Holy shit what happened? "Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh."

I thought the benefit of a cat was that they need no attention. That's how cat people tried to sell me on cats. You won’t hear a dog person say, "He's the perfect dog. You never see him. He does his own thing". That's not the agreement we made with this creature. We chose sides and we all agreed on the terms. Dogs involve effort, but there is love and appreciation in return. And cats, you just let them be and they’ll leave you alone. So now I'm agreeing to take care of an animal I don't like and then the only good things I've heard about it no longer applies. Not cool. Amanda was busy running around the city building her Amway business (don't get me started, can't get distracted) and she couldn't be home to take care of Italiano, which entailed being a full time nurse. I probably should've changed into scrubs everyday.

Because of Italiano’s age, along with the stent and the skin bag of fluid on his side, he didn't really walk, he dragged. Kind of like a baby lamb taking it’s first steps on an iced over lake with a fluid filled tumor on its side. And when it was time for Italiano to use the litter box, he would drag himself towards it, but he didn't have the strength to step over the edge of the box. So I had to walk over, pick him up and put him in, every time. Many times he couldn't find the litter box, because he lost his sense of smell as well (down to two remaining senses in case you were counting). Now that I think about it we should've changed his name to Keller. It became a game of "was he just dragging around aimlessly or was he dragging around looking for the box"? He was like one of those clone experiments gone wrong. The ones that were "unfinished" and shouldn't have made it. A bit like Brundlefly at the end of “The Fly”, where he's this mess of a creature who just wants to be put out of his misery. But in this case the misery was mostly mine.

The other thing that comes with the territory of nursing is affection. You need to show some. I would have to pet him every once in a while (I think you have a pretty good idea what he smelled like) just so he knew you were there. The affection was important because it created trust, which was essential when giving him his insulin shot. This was tough because whatever strength he had he saved for fighting this. He bit (do you have room in your imagination for what his breath smelled like?…Yeah, that.), he clawed and he tried to drag away. So the petting at least got him in the vicinity and, because cats are smart, he knew what was coming as I was wearing long sleeves for protection. I'd hold him down, grab the sack of fluid and quickly poke him with the needle. Yay! Until tomorrow.

So there I was trying to keep my perfect situation intact but now it was being interrupted at least twelve times a day because of whining, hunger, neediness, needles and crapping. Never mind him, my quality of life was...lacking. I must admit that I've never wished death on any living thing, but I did have some internal dialogue about whether Italiano should just go to "a better place", which was anywhere but my apartment. Okay I did mention this to Amanda. Not really saying that he should be put to sleep, but whenever she asked how he was doing that day I would always respond, "not good...suffering...suffering bad". I would also (don't hate me more than you already do) call her when he started pleading and I’m not sure if the plea was to sustain his life or end it.

"Hey"

"Hey" (me holding the phone out so she can hear) "ohhh..."

"How's the little guy?" (phone out) "ohhh..."

"Oh....you know" (phone out) "ohhh..."

"Awww (crying)

I know. Terrible. I was just hoping that she would eventually give in. This lasted for over two months. Every once in a while he would go to Amanda's for a visit, but for the most part he was in my care. Yes, she would stay over and help out, but I was in charge of this cat.

Finally, it hit her that he had a few days left and it was time. The equation of finality was starting to take shape. She had been crying about him daily. How much he meant to her since she was 7. So why was I dealing with it? But I stayed composed and dealt. We transferred Italiano over to Amanda's and, I'm not going to say I did a dance when I got home but, there was a sense of euphoria. Okay I did a dance when I got home. I cleaned, mopped and erased all signs of the cat. The dance was a combination of raising the roof, tribal chanting ("freedom...freedom...freedom”) and the unbridled joy of a child going down the most fun slide ever, landing in a giant marshmallow covered ice cream sundae.

The next couple of days were filled with a lot of crying jags. Coming over to her house, lights out and her on the bed, with the cat in a fetal position, as she sobbed. Many of us know what it's like to be in the presence of an inconsolable partner. Maybe an occasional shoulder rub or an "I know, I know" mixed with some half head-shakes of concern. But the other 99.89% of the time is complete and utter discomfort. Now combine that discomfort with the tension of a dying animal sharing that same space. Paralyzing.

Then one afternoon the phone rang, probably interrupting my singing a version of "he's out of my life”. It was one of those rings where I just knew. I think I grabbed my car keys on the way to the phone. I took a deep breath and answered. There was about three unbearable seconds of silence. "Honey?" I said. Then there was some sobbing and ..."he dddied...Italiano died". "Aww honey I'm so sorry. It’s probably for the best as I was...he was suffering. I'll be right over." I hung up and felt really really,…relieved. I wanted to be supportive, starting to work on my sympathy face. But then it struck me, what do you do? Who do you call? Was I supposed to go to the vet? How was it finally…resolved?

I wasn't sure what to expect as I approached her door. I walked in and gave her a hug, still thinking about what was next. But she ended the speculation. "I hope you don't mind but I want to stay with him a bit longer". I'm sure my face didn't match my verbal response. "Ok". I was confused by the "stay with him" part. "He's on the bed", she mumbled. I know my face didn't match my response because I looked at the door and quickly had an internal dialogue about what the ramifications would be if I just left at that moment. Was that breakup worthy? For her as well as me? Is it one of those "and that’s the last time I saw her" moments? But I hung in there, peeked around the corner and saw him lying on the bed. I was able to eek out an "aww", which could’ve easily transitioned into an “eww”. He looked tiny, stiff and completely dead.

I felt a sustained chill. Not a quick, jolting fright but more of an impending, looming, psychological feeling. A film critic would say that this moment was not “a cheap, manipulative scare but more of a get in your head and stay with you scare”. My body remained in the front room, not wanting to follow my head into the bedroom. There were no doors as it was a small apartment with a high ceiling and a big wall separating the bedroom from the kitchen/living room. She took this opportunity to get up on the bed and actually spoon the dead cat. I think I audibly announced the heightening of the chill, "hwwbbwhhh". In the movie version the camera would've done that classic horror technique where everything behind me stretches off into the distance and my face moves towards the camera in fear. Like the moment the wife realizes her husband is the killer, or when the victim hears that the call is coming from inside the house. If Amanda had said "I'm preparing a white wine reduction as later we will eat him to fully embrace the experience so he can be with us forever" it really would not have advanced the creepiness that much. But then in a sniffly voice..."Would you lay down next to me?" I found myself still in the entryway, as I gulped, thinking I could still leave. Maybe she'd want to be alone...with her dead...stiff...childhood...pet. But alas she wanted to share this gothic moment with me. I reached in my mind and, like a good Jew, I came up with something. "You need to eat something” (Please, please, let me go get dinner. I'll gladly drive to Portland to get whatever you want. It’s an up and coming foodie city you know? From their farm to your table in just over 6 hours).

"I'm not hungry, can you just lay down with us?"

Oh God. She was looking at me, questioning why I was hesitating. Why? Why? Hmmm let me think. Oh I got it..."THERE'S A DEAD FUCKING CAT ON THE BED!" But I fought it and took a step into the bedroom, slipped my shoes off and laid down on the very edge of the bed, as far away from the dead animal as possible. I looked over and made sure that her body was blocking the cat, because if I could see him I wouldn’t be able to stop looking at him and if all I could do was stare at him then I couldn’t stay, which I didn’t want to do but knew I had to. It was an insane Catch-22. I reached my arm out and gave what was probably the worst back rub in the history of back rubs. It was the same motion you make when you use a mouse pad to scroll down an article you’re reading, with two fingers to move the cursor a half-inch on your computer. Just repeated over and over. I was discomforting her.

Eventually she fell asleep spooning the cat. There was no way I could sleep so I slowly got up, trying to avoid looking at the cat and failing miserably, and went into the kitchen to eat. I wasn't hungry but I needed a reason to leave that space. Eventually she came in, puffy eyed. She apologized for the situation, even laughed a bit, which relieved me because she did realize the insanity of it all. That gave me permission to ask, "So how long...you know...can he stay like this?" She shrugged and said "I don't know. I'm not ready yet. Do you mind?" (Do I mind? Of course I mind. This is the freakiest thing I've ever been through). "Noooo, whatever you need." So weak.

Amanda went back to bed and I stayed in the living room/kitchen as long as I could. After a while she called me in to lie next to her and I stayed in my “as far away as I can” position, alternating between laughter and fear, as we talked about how wonderful he was. Well I was basically just listening, nodding and agreeing, while keeping my running commentary to myself. "Wasn't he just the sweetest?" Sniffle, sniffle.

“Yeah..." (just the neediest)

"His cute little face.”

“Yeah.” (his strange glaucoma slicked eyes)

"That funny little way he tilted his head?"

"Uh huh.” (that odd sack of fluid on his side that made him look like a deformed dromedary?)

"How he'd just rub up against you for comfort?"

"I know." (how he'd suddenly just be there when you'd turn the corner and you'd almost trip over him?)

"So adorable."

“So cute." (so creepy)

Somehow I fell asleep but not for long because, oh God, there it was. The thing I was waiting for…dreading. The smell. He had started to smell...like...like...well like dead animal. New Yorkers know that lovely scent as “dead rodent stuck in the walls”. I looked over her shoulder as she was spooning him. He looked so tiny and stiff. Rigor mortis? I started thinking back on all the stuff I learned from police procedural morgue scenes. When does rigor mortis set in? No clue. When do they start putting that stuff under their nose to counter the smell? Couldn't tell you. But it was happening and I was freaked out. I got up and went to the bathroom and sprayed a healthy dose of her perfume on my palms and rubbed my hands together like I was washing them with soap. Except I wasn't rinsing this off. I put my stinging hands up to my face and did a double nostril-movie cocaine addict-snort. Just to smell something pleasant. I walked back to the bed, again trying not to look, but magnetically moving my eyeballs towards the horror show, and went to sleep with my hands over my face like a homemade gas mask.

The next day I woke up to the sounds of Amanda crying. At that time I only saw girls cry when I had just said or done something to cause it. So there's guilt associated with it and it's a trigger. Girl + crying = bad Jon. It took me a bit to realize the situation. I didn't do anything wrong so I slowly put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered a bit. "Hey honey...I think it's..." I had to be so careful here. I didn't prepare what I was going to say so I started reaching for the right words. Just zipping through my catalogue of "in this moment you say this phrase". Unfortunately my library of experience was not extensive enough to contain that rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s "if your girlfriend's cat dies and it's been in bed for two days and you had to sleep with it while it was rotting you should say this". So, as I discovered the empty shelves in my library, I went with, "Hey honey...I think it's...time to...to...call your brother". I had been talking to her brother, who also lived in Seattle, and he understood how crazy it was but he understood his sister's "sensitivities". He also knew the cat well and wanted to be part of the "ceremony". Ceremony you ask?

The plan was, and always was, that we were going to bury the cat on a hill overlooking the water. My suggestion in calling Greg was rooted in nothing other than the sooner he comes here the sooner this ceremony happens the sooner I can go home and the sooner I can take a bath in bleach. She nodded and I think I dialed the last number before her chin started moving down. “Hey Greg....it's time". Now there's no way in hell that's what I said but I'd like to think so. It was probably closer to, "Hey Greg...sooooo...great we'll be waiting."

Greg came over and gave Amanda a hug. He stared at the cat for a bit and then just scooped him up and put him in a shoebox. I was looking around for a lighted candle to accidentally knock over in order to burn her bed to the ground but no such luck. The three of us got into Greg's car, Amanda, holding the box with tiny Italiano inside, staring down at him. We drove about fifteen minutes to a nice spot with lots of greenery and flowers. Greg had a shovel and began to dig as Amanda picked some flowers and placed them in the box. It took Greg all of twelve seconds to dig a grave for Italiano as he had shrunken to the size of a small rabbit. A spoon could've sufficed. He slowly placed the box into the ground as Amanda's blubbering got a bit more excited. I stood back, giving them their moment. Greg packed the last few piles of dirt on top of the box and patted it. Amanda arranged the flowers around the grave and then the brother and sister held each other. It was actually very nice and that cat should be very thankful to have been loved so much. I'm sure if he is somewhere floating around he's looking after Greg and Amanda. Occasionally he’ll take a pass over me, stare creepily down and use the wind to make a sound. “Ohhh…Ohhh…Ohhh.”

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