The Rooster Chews Tobacco

He awoke in bed in a crucifix position. He always found himself waking in the crucifix position, arms spread out to the edges of the bed and his legs locked together pointing down and his head pointing up to the ceiling. His eyes blinked once, twice and then he bent himself up in the bed, ruffling his hair.

He slept fitfully that night; he heard a lot of hooting and hollering outside. Not unusual for a marina where all the swells got drunk in their yachts and made a lot of noise. It bothered him because it was his first night out of jail and he wanted to have a peaceful night’s sleep in his houseboat, but no. Big Jason Gulliver was pissed.

“Fucking, fucking, fucking assholes”, Big Jason grumbled. “Fuckin’ lifestylers. Ruining the bay with their rich kid bullshit”.

He woke up in his street clothes, a soiled t-shirt and baggy fatigue pants. He leaned over to put on his Doc Martens when he saw a rat scurrying across the bedroom door. He picked up a boot and threw it at the rat.

“Get the fuck off my boat!” he yelled.

The bedroom was as Spartan as it gets. There was his bed, barely big enough to fit his gigantic frame; a small dresser filling in as a hamper as it collected an unwashed load of clothes; a tiny nightstand with a lamp for his paperback reading, and that’s it. The room was completed by a window with a dirty curtain faded by the sun.

On top of the dresser sat a cassette player with dozens of cassettes strewn about, some buried under a few banged-out paperbacks like Sartre’s “Nausea” and Burroughs’ “Nova Express”.

He got up to face the music, face the world, face the city that paid to put him away, and above all else face his friends, even the ones he owed money to. He fetched back his boot and put them on and walked out the front of his boat.

He stepped up to the dock where a blonde man with a trimmed beard waited for him.

“Oh hey, Jason, I figured it was you. You’ve got a phone call”.
“Tell them I’m still in jail. It’s probably somebody calling about their money”.
“Well, okay. I didn’t know you got out already”.
“Well, the fuckin’ rats didn’t know either, goddammit”, Jason cussed. “Got any coffee?”
“No, dude”, he moped. “Sorry”.

Big Jason lumbered up the dock towards the exit spilling out into the city street, looking around at the cars parked nearby.

“No, fuck it, just got out for that”, he thought. “Can’t jump back into it. Besides, someone might be waiting for me to do it again”. Still, he couldn’t resist ogling at the flashier cars parked around the corner.

He squinted his eyes shut and walked uphill towards the main street to get a cheap breakfast. He felt like a recovering addict, only instead of swearing off drugs he was swearing off theft.

Jason walked like an exiled minotaur, legs stomping spread far apart in a gesture of assertion, funny in contrast to how close his arms were kept to his chest, in the way a boxer keeps his arms and fists close to his face to provide protection in the ring. It might even be said that Big Jason either boxed at some time or trained for boxing during some chapter in his life. This gait was topped off with him leaning forward as he walked, his head and shoulders behaving like antennae, behaving like curb feelers on the lookout for trouble.

Did you ever eat breakfast without even enjoying a single bite? Jason hammered away his meal without really concentrating on what he was tasting, just going through the motions. It wasn’t what you’d call being in a trance. He simply had his mind on everything else but what was in front of him. Sitting in stir will do that to you.

He caught his reflection in the mirror across the room and saw a large, wide piece of half-sculpted concrete. His chin was large, his lips turned down, his short spiky hair crowning his head. The only thing dispelling all this facial cruelty was a set of calm, almost tired eyes. There was peace there while the rest of his body looked hard. He cut an ominous figure but there was something downbeat in his demeanor.

All this soul transference felt harmful because he was too young for such divisions in his mind. While he acted dumb and simple on the outside it was a crowded theater on the inside, thousands of ideas and thoughts racing through his mind like an electrical storm.

He paid his bill and walked out of the café in a trance, slowly trotting down the hill back to the narrow street at the bottom of the hill. An endless line of parked cars showed themselves off to him as he walked by. His eyes flashed at the flashier cars and he felt the tingle, the irresistible urge building inside of him. It wasn’t fair; he was just released for stealing them and here they were heartlessly teasing him.

It was a veritable feast of automotive beauty, steel and chrome pulchritude igniting flames of vehicular lust, daring him to commit another theft. Jason slowed down his pace and turned around, then looked across the street, then craned his head to see if anyone was leering overhead somewhere.

It was a rare moment when there was just him and his urges left alone on the concrete midway. He began appraising his prospective choices: there was the tan Cadillac, “too fogie, no punk would be caught in this thing”; the red Firebird, “perfect looking sled, but red just screams out everybody look at me, I’d get picked up in less than five minutes”; the black Mercedes Benz, “yeah okay, graduation present from Dad, I won’t arouse suspicion pulling this one”.

He looked around one last time, leaned his hips against the driver’s side, reaching for his keys and then broke out chuckling. The window was rolled down.
“Fuckin’ rich people have the dumbest confidence”, he chortled. No need to jimmy the door.

He swung right in, plopped on the red leather upholstery, and quickly reached under the dashboard. He pulled down a few wires, cut off the casing and twisted the bare wires, connecting them, starting the engine quickly.

He popped in the cigarette lighter and grabbed a smoke from the pack on the dashboard, lighting it up. The radio blared out a Grateful Dead song loudly and he turned it off. He pulled out into the empty street and shifted it into a higher gear.

The Benz gave a slight jerk and Jason frowned. “This one’s got shitty transmission. You never can tell if these classy rides are in good shape or not. This one’s a turkey. Well, I’ll dump this in a little bit, but-Hello, who’s this?”

Jason saw a pretty Asian punk girl with spiky blonde hair in a black tee, leather miniskirt and fishnets hitching at the end of the corner. He rolled right up and leaned across the seat.

“Hey, hop in”, he bellowed. “I’m going your way”.
She stared at him for a second and asked, “Do you know where I’m going?”
“Doesn’t matter, babe, I’ll take you there”.
She stared at the inside of the car, appraising it. “Red bucket seats. Okay, but no funny stuff!”
He cranked the door open and she got in. He watched her beautiful legs slide into the front seat.

“So where are we going, gorgeous?”
“Telegraph Hill”.
“Okay, cool”. He let out the clutch and it gave a slight jerk. She chuckled, grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and lit up.
“Hey man, this car is pretty bomb”, she puffed.
“For real, you Japs know a lot about bombs, huh?”
“I’m no Jap, asshole, I’m Chinese”.
“I know, I was just testing you”.
“The fuck you were!” she puffed away like an angry dragon.

“I’m Big Jason”, he smiled at her. “You know, I’ve seen you around somewhere”.
“Yeah, you look familiar”, the girl calmed down. “I’m Suzy, Suzy Wrong. I think…I think I saw you at The Mab once”.
“The Nuns show, I was the one the bouncers tried to kick out but I put up a fight. I wore them out, though, so they let me stay in. Assholes”.
“Assholes!” she cackled.

The car jerked sporadically and Big Jason mumbled, “Smooth ride, huh?”
“Is this really your car?”
“Sure it is! Graduation present from Dad”.
“Where did you graduate?” she asked skeptically.
“University of Alcatraz, baby doll”.

Suzy stared at him for a second, and then laughed. “Yeah, you were the big guy the bouncers couldn’t take down. My friends watched that go down. It was more exciting than the show”.
“Should’ve charged people to watch”. Jason tossed his butt out the window.

“Big tough guys. You’re all a dime a dozen”, Suzy stared at him while her slender hand wandered down to his crotch, rubbing his thick tool against the fabric of his coarse jeans.
He glanced at her from the side and caught her licking her lips.

“Hey, baby, ever been in a houseboat? With beer and pizza?”
“Sounds like a date”, she caressed his unit tenderly. “Let’s make it”.

He dumped the Benz a block away from the docks and they walked down to his houseboat.

One hour later Suzy was in his bedroom wearing nothing but his t-shirt and drinking out of a large bottle of wine from the fridge. She spit some all over his tense, prodigious tool and went to work on him. She tasted the wine and he tasted freedom, among other things.

Nitro (French Canada, 2007)

You can't beat a nutty action film, and it doesn't get nuttier than French Canada's Nitro. Directed with verve by Alain Desrochers, Nitro is a super-charged action film from French Canada spoken in Froglish (French-English, mostly French. Like most action films if your park your brains at the door you can still have a good time watching this nutty high octane opera.

Julien (Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge)is a former street racer (with the racing sobriquet “Mad Max”) gone straight with a wife and stepson, now working as a construction worker. When his wife Alice goes into a coma needing a heart transplant he decides to re-enter the street race game to scare up the big swag needed to get her a heart transplant.

He enters an exciting late night race hustling all the young dudes who don’t remember his champion race past. When someone eventually remembers and outs him as the legendary Mad Max they deny him his cash winnings and a baseball bat battle ensues. He gets the dough, of course. But it’s not enough.

A hospital friend tells him that Alice is so far down the list for heart transplants with hearts being so scarce, anyway that she’ll never make it long enough to live. Of course, French Canadiens don’t know about artificial hearts because then there wouldn’t be a movie. So, Julien comes up with a great idea: steal a beating heart from a living person.

Julien returns to the strip club where his ex-girlfriend Morgane (Lucie Laurier) works. Morgane was also a street racer like him, but they broke up because he caught her making it with the sleazy club owner, Avocat (Martin Matte. Julien strikes a deal with Avocat in front of his gang for a heart. Avocat tells him that a heart can’t be supplied without a proper blood type. Julien feigns stupidity so he can hear the entire gang recite their blood type. When one unlucky bastard cops to being A Positive (Alice’s type, apparently) Julien kidnaps him at gunpoint, giving us a pretty exciting chase scene, highlighted by a fistfight inside a car while Julien keeps his pedal to the metal at 90 miles an hour.

Julien drags the thug to the gangsters’ doctor, a disbarred veterinarian, who extracts the poor bastard’s heart out and hands it to Jules in a red biohazard case. He dashes away with the cops in hot pursuit, and for good reason: the thug he killed was an undercover cop that infiltrated Avocat’s gang.

Julien hides out in Morgane’s flat, much to her scorn. Who can blame her? He dumped her for the dull Alice, who is mostly seen in the hospital making boring New Age speeches about the molecules and tout la planetes. Morgane helps him slip into Alice’s hospital courtesy of her T. Rex, a three-wheel motorcycle car that has to be seen to be believed. The Campagna T. Rex is worth the price of the movie.

To make a long story short, one girl dies and the other doesn’t – yup, spoiler – and even though the movie is silly it’s still a fun action film. Ironically the two best characters are the scumbag gangster Avocat with his shaved head and Abe Lincoln beard (yuck) and the awesome Morgane, another great bad girl added to cinema history. Lucie Laurier is definitely a star and hopefully will be seen from again.

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When I first heard about "Broken Flowers", the Jim Jarmusch film starring Bill Murray, I feared yet another dreary, tired old guy movie like "Lost In Translation". Thank hebbin I was wrong!

“Broken Flowers” puts a new spin on the tired old joke, “I don’t have any kids that I’m aware of”. Bill Murray plays Don Johnston, a successful software developer who gets a mysterious message from an anonymous ex-girlfriend that she bore him a son. Murray subsequently goes on a cross-country odyssey (in a 1996 Ford Taurus) searching all his exes in pursuit of finding out which one had his son.

What follows is a spin on the old “What A Way To Go” formula, where we meet his exes and how different they are apart from each other: Jessica Lange is a pet psychiatrist, Sharon Stone is a NASCAR racer’s widow, Frances Conroy as an ex-flower child turned Stepford wife and Tilda Swinton looking more like Patti Smith circa “Horses” (1975) than Patti Smith ever did. The resemblance is remarkable!

Just like “Lost In Translation” we have a few Lolita moments here, in fact Stone’s daughter Lolita walks around naked for Bill’s enjoyment, and a young florist named Sun Green who medicates his bruises. Although everybody in the film is great it’s clearly Murray’s show all the way, exhibiting the best deadpan humor he’s exhibited since “Ed Wood” (“I’m stalking people in a Ford Taurus!” he complains to a friend). The scene where he tries to hammer down Conroy’s awful boiled julienne carrots is classic, too. Well, this is hands down Jim Jarmusch’s best work in years and, The inside joke at the end is awesome and yes, even Sharon Stone actually looks like she’s enjoying herself. It’s after the end of the world!

"My Car Is My Lover" (BBC America)

The greatest show on television is the weekly BBC America documentaries with episodes like “England’s Ugliest Teeth” or “Too Fat To Toddle”, showcasing morbidly obese children under four years of age. But the pinnacle of gross sensationalism aired a few weeks ago in an episode called, “My Car Is My Lover”. Folks, I think we hit the motherlode of sleaze. Forget about NamBLA, step aside for the new sexual perversion, mechaphilia. We’re talking guys sticking it where the gas pump don’t shine, that’s right, dudes gettin’ wet, hard and sloppy over automobiles. It’s all about the Volvos, not vulvas.

The show documents the cross-country odyssey of two car lovin’ hepcats, one: a fiftysomething ghoul from Washington State named Edward who writes love songs to his VW Bug named “Vanilla”. One tune in particular is called “For My Love Bug”, where he lustfully croons about the sexy curves on her fender and hood and goes something like:

VW Beetle of 74
Chrome and metal that I adore
Your fuel-injected beauty is all I need
I leave my loving seed

Pamela Anderson would be no match to this old flivver in his household.

Then there’s the younger dude from Missouri named Jordan who works at Wal-Mart in the dairy section stocking milk all day and writing death metal tunes on his ProTools all night. He’s in love with his VW Bug named “Ingo” but has another lover on the side, a black Knightrider-type auto called “Todd”. Not only is he a two-timer but that also makes him bisexual!

For the next hour we see Edward wiping his pubic hairs off “Vanilla” the morning after a session with her. He hits the happy highway soon after, occasionally distracted by a Porsche Targa on the freeway the way a regular guy gets distracted by a chick with a killer rack or sexy legs: “Holy cow, check out those tailpipes! They represent the car’s anus. You just feel like exploding with love, greasing it up, and letting yourself go!”

And “exploding with love” he does, raping the film crew’s car while they’re not looking, leaving puddles of his spunky man-juice right by the left fender. The film crew thoughtfully filmed the residue for our morbid entertainment. Cheers, lads!

A little red Pinto gets a similar appraisal. “Ohh! Rumble, rumble, honey. I’d lick it. I’d come all over her.” Meanwhile, Jordan confesses that girls don’t do it for him like a primed Chevy, and pulls over quickly to the curb in the middle of New Mexico to call in sick at his job at Wal-Mart in Missouri. “Uh, I won’t be back for a couple of weeks. Can we talk about my coming back to work when I return?” Big surprise: his boss hung up on him.

After interminable shots of the boys racing down the American desert highways to weepy Dire Straits guitar ("Sultans of Swing"), Edward and Jordan finally meet at a Motel 6 in Hollywood and spend more time drooling over each other’s cars than they do bonding and yukking it up. After Jordan goes to bed an ultraviolet Night Vision camera pointed at the parking lot catches Edward stealthily sneaking out and fucking “Todd”.

The climax of the show (in more ways than one) is a swap meet in Pomona, where scores of beautiful vintage cars get shown off. This is the equivalent to the Foxy Lady strip club for these boys. These guys put the “stud” in Studebaker. Edward trots around the car lot with a tent in his pants fondling tail fins, and sneaks kisses and licks moaning ecstatically while low-riders walk by laughing at him.

Meanwhile Jordan verbally letches over an old Ford, smacking his lips like a frat boy at a bachelor party, reporting that “A lot of these cars I would rape like a wild animal. I would take this car home and rape it silly. Boy, when I get home, me and Ingo are going to make some sweet, sweet lovin’.” Jordan, you beast! With all the talk of car rape floating around I don’t know whether to call Gloria Allred or Henry Ford.

Wander Lust

If there’s anything I hate it’s flying and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the height or turbulence, either. To tell you the truth I’m pretty claustrophobic, and there’s nothing more claustrophobic than flying coach. The most recent plane flight I took was on Air Canada five years ago. I had to sit in the same cramped chair for six hours plus, utter torture. One-fourth of a day just sitting in one prone position, it was interminable. Next to an unwashed French Canadien guy who bit his nails and scratched himself like a rain dog.

The worst part was the flight back to Los Angeles, the first day of the infamous 2005 storm season. The plane bucked like a wild bronco through an unending blanket of gray clouds. You couldn’t stick your hand in front of you because the clouds were so thick. The plane dropped five stories every ten minutes, babies were crying and I squeezed Rebecca’s hand so hard she can still feel it! We finally landed, and landed hard. When the crew stood by the exit to wish us goodbye you could see the pilots with ashen faces. They knew how fucking scary the ordeal was themselves. I’ve never flown since.

So when we got the invite to a convention in San Francisco I said, “Hey, let’s take the train. It’ll be fun!” It was…for the first five hours. A train ride from Union Station (L.A.) to Jack London Square (Oakland) is about twelve hours, much too long to be sitting in a train. Then again, train rides whip plane flights any day. There’s tons of leg and elbow room, you can walk up and down the aisles all day without some stupid drink cart banging your ankles (the snack bar’s downstairs). There’s also a video game room, a great bubble window observation deck with wi-fi and bathrooms of different sizes: handicapped, one with a vanity table for the ladies in addition to the regular closets.

Train travel suffers from a Catch-22 problem, though. They’re very slow, but that’s probably due to the fact that many tracks haven’t been changed since 1921 or farther back, so until tracks get fixed and or upgraded train travel will always be slow and stodgy. But they are fun and very picturesque!

The best mode of travel is still automobile style. Driving to Arizona for eight hours to Rebecca’s art show is the stuff of legend. Each rest stop had a character of its own: one was so infested with killer bees, but when you gotta pee, you gotta pee. I ran like the wind, and one bee even managed to make its way in my car. He got out quickly, though. They’re pretty stupid insects, fuck that National Geographic shit. They’ll circle around a window for 3 hours even though there’s an open door next to it. Stupid motherfuckers. Thanks for the honey, assholes.

I also like the phantom truck stops, some with shower rooms, condom machines in the men’s room with the rubber vaginas for only 75 cents. Heh! The only flaw of course is that your right foot is paralyzed for the next week, cruise control or no cruise control. You still have to pump that pedal, baby. Stick your pedal to metal til your crazy score is settled: now I wonder who sang that tune?