THE LAST PICTURE HOE
More Movie Night Mix-Ups…..
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Hollywood is the land of dreams. I’ve no idea if the old adage “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere” is true or not, as I’ve never ventured out of the Pacific Northwest for more than a few days. I do know that on several occasions to view what Hollywood had to offer, I have suffered numerous pitfalls & extremely scarring social embarrassments. Here are but a few more memories of my one-way love affair with movies.
1) 1993; Cool Runnings- 1993. The year I left high school…”grunge” music was ruling the airwaves & I was “grunge as f**K” You could tell this, because I wore a Hot-Topic t-shirt with those exact words printed on it. Anyways…also released this year was a John Candy comedy about a Jamaican bob-sledding team. Such a funny & inspiring film! It was so good, in fact, that I felt my teen-angst momentary lifted as I left the theater. This feeling was short lived. Seconds after I left the theater Ryan Carter, my high-school bully pulled up his Camaro in front of me. Loud heavy metal (he hated grunge) blaring, he kicked the door open. “Hey a-hole” (he didn’t say a-hole but this is a family site) He and some other dude grabbed me and threw me in the back of the car. I can only assume they had seen Cool Runnings as well, because half an hour later I found myself tied up inside a makeshift bobsled they had constructed out of an old bathtub and some skateboards. As I felt myself barreling down one of the steepest hills in Seattle I found myself wishing I had never gone to see Cool Runnings. And that I wasn’t headed directly into on coming traffic. I spent the next 8 months in an amazingly painful back-brace and attending humiliating physical therapy classes taught by a guy who smelled of Funions and wanted me to “find my higher power.”
2) 1993; Jack The Bear- One of the films my physical therapy teacher recommended I watched that summer between bouts of learning to walk & use the bathroom without the assistance of a male nurse again was this Danny DeVito film. He said it was uplifting and funny. I guess. I never got to watch it. I tried to see this film downtown, and in order to enter the theater, you had to walk through a metal detector. The second I walked through, holding a large popcorn & 32 ounce Mountain Dew ($23.97) my back brace set off the alarm. The events get foggy, as I spent a while unconscious, but here is what I know. The three security guards had no problem tackling, assaulting & preforming a move known as the “tiger grab” (again, I won’t go into details as this is a family site) on an obviously handicapped teenager. I also learned that if you beat said teenager with rubber hoses, bruises won’t show up. I woke up outside the Lusty Lady covered in a sticky film of what I could only hope was dried Mountain Dew.
3) 2002; Jackass: The Movie- I know what you’re thinking. And no. I was smart enough not to venture out in to public to see this one. I didn’t even get it at the video store. I waited for it to come on cable, and then watched it from the safety of my own home. I cracked open a 2-litter bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red, and threw a pepperoni pizza hot pocket in the microwave. The second I pressed the “cook” button on the microwave a huge, burning shock rocketed through my body. I felt every nerve on my body tighten up as I was thrown backwards at a speed that truly frightened me. As I lay convulsing on the cold, tile floor of my kitchen, I looked up at the microwave to see that it was on fire. I thought quickly about what to do. What I did was empty my bowels and pass out. When I woke up, I was on my couch. A note from the fire department was on the table next to me. It read, it part: “We put out the fire. You are a real pu**y, you know that, right?” They had also taken the liberty of removing my pants, putting make-up on me & posting pictures of it on the internet. We have copies of this film at Moviecycle if anyone wants one.
4) 1993; The Skateboard Kid- One of the biggest hits of 1993 this blockbuster was everywhere that year & I was super excited to see it as it was was one of my favorite books. I wanted to see how Hollywood was going to transform this amazing novel to the silver screen. Two months before the movie was set to hit theaters, I got an e-mail from MoviePromotions.com. I had been selected to attend an advanced screening if I agreed to become a “Platinum Member” of the website. I instantly entered three of my credit card numbers, their pin numbers, my social security number & drivers license number onto the site. It printed out an address, and I headed out to pick up my ticket. Four hours later, I was sitting in an empty room, filling out my MoviePromtions contract on a card table in a building downtown. I was just filling out the “favorite movies section” (Kid with the 200 IQ, Once Bitten, K-9 & She’s Out Of Control) when I heard an amazingly loud noise. A wrecking ball crashed the side of the building, and the building came tumbling down around me. For almost 24 hours I was trapped beneath the wreckage of a building that had been scheduled for destruction for months. Weeks later I found that my entire bank account had been drained. The $460 dollars I had earned that summer as a Little Caesars janitor had all been in vain. In order to pay off the Fire Department rescue bill, I had to spend the next year entertaining at an old folks home in town by singing to the elderly five days a week. Thanks to that job I still know all the words to the Billy Ocean hit “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” I also still know how to help someone into a pair of Depends. Oh, and I suffered a collapsed lung.
More stories to come.