LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET

Originally published in 2011, and yes, this actually happened. 

Holy fuckballs, what a story I have for you…

As regular readers of this blog are aware, I have been unemployed for going on two years, and my unemployment benefits ran out on the day before Thanksgiving. Since then I’ve hustled and brooded and been a nervous, despairing wreck, wondering about what fate has in store for me, especially when considering my very limited financial resources. In short: I’m forty-six, jobless, living in New York City (specifically in Brooklyn’s Park Slope), and nothing is happening in terms of a bright light on the job horizon.

On Friday afternoon I received one of the freelance checks I’d been expecting and in no time at all most of it was spent on my rent and the bills that have been gathering moss, so, with weary heart, I went to the local supermarkets to pick up the fixings for a sandwich that would approximate the outstanding sausage and peppers delight I’d experienced just one day previous. (There’s no companionship or sex going on in my life at the moment thanks to there being no merry and horny female present, comic books have lately been mostly an enormous disappointment, there have been no movies that pique my interest, so I’ve occasionally been taking meager comfort in food.) I first stopped at the Key Food on 5th Avenue, the one just a stone’s throw from Flatbush Avenue, and snagged some of their excellent sweet Italian sausages, after which I walked up the street to the Associated market located around the corner from my humble abode to pick up the rest of what I needed.

Upon wandering the store’s aisles, zombie-like, I got on line at the checkout counter and found myself directly behind some random guy and a woman who was annoyingly holding up the proceedings by trying to explain to the cashier that two of the four items she’d brought up were not the right ones on the sales circular, so she wanted to replace them. She explained this to the cashier in the most convoluted and time-consuming manner humanly possible, and myself and the guy in front of me were both about ready to pull our hair out as this decidedly one-sided exchange dragged on. “Great,” I thought to myself, “not only am I about to spend most of the last of my pitiful funds, I have to wait behind this walking annoyance while doing so.” Presently, one of the store’s employees came over to me and steered me off of the non-moving line and had me stand at the far checkout aisle, right behind two mothers with strollers who were unloading enough food onto the counter to feed all of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. That line was clearly not going to move either, so the staffer apologized for taking me off of my first position and promptly steered me back to where I was in the first place, and in the maybe twenty seconds that elapsed between my shifts in lines, three more people had gotten on line in front of me. So there I was, stuck with a choice of two lines, neither of which was making any kind of progress.

While stuck on line behind the lady who wanted to exchange her items that were not on the sales circular, my eyes began to glaze over and my mind focused on just how my life had suffered a slow and depressing reversal of fortune from the time when I first hit NYC as a wide-eyed college grad who’d landed a job at Marvel Comics — a dream job to one of my geekish ilk — through my being let go from that job thanks to the company’s Chapter 11 woes, on to my time at DC/Vertigo and the mishegoss endured there, followed by two years of unemployment before working at the barbecue joint and dealing with that place’s attendant issues, finally arriving at the dead end of my largely worthless job at the design ‘ho house and my subsequent unemployment in the wake of what was at the time its latest wave of brutal layoffs. I pondered how it could possibly be nearly two years — TWO YEARS — since that layoff and how my life had just lurched along as a shabby going-through-the-motions existence, and the more I considered all of that, the more morose and fed up with life I became.

Suddenly my death march down the dark corridor of memory was interrupted by a frantic-looking guy bearing a bottle of seltzer, and he looked at me with an expression of earnest need plastered across his face. He sheepishly said, “I’m sorry to be ‘that guy’ but can I please go ahead of you? I just have this one item…” After enduring the long lines and annoyance, I was irritated by his request, but I remembered the lessons learned as a wee lad at my mother’s side during many excursions to the market, and she always let people in this guy’s situation go ahead of her, simply because it was the polite and kind thing to do. A simple act of courtesy and kindness in this miserable world keeps us all civilized and all that, right? So I let the guy go ahead of me, for which he offered profuse thanks.

Then, as his one item was rung up, an alarm went off, a loud popping noise was heard (like a champagne cork) and the air around us was filled with balloons. Just as abruptly, the manager’s office door burst open and out flew a video cameraman, a crew member wielding a mike on a short boom, and a guy bearing one of those enormous simulated checks as seen in sweepstakes ads on TV and in magazines. Then a large, glad-handing guy breezed over and directly addressed the seltzer guy with, “Congratulations, sir! You are this store’s one-millionth customer…and you have just won FIFTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!”

(pause for you to process this)

Yes, you read that right. The guy I had let cut the line in front of me with one measly item had just won FIFTY FUCKING GRAND, all because of my act of simple courtesy.

As the celebratory atmosphere began to spread and the sweepstakes officials shook the winner’s hand, the enormity of what happened poked me in the frontal lobe like a solid redwood truncheon. The understandably surprised winner reacted with “Awesome!!!” and welcomed the camera crew and sundry others with open arms.

The other shoppers who’d been on line behind me, some of whom were recognizable neighborhood locals and neighbors from the building next door to mine, at first stood there just as gobsmacked as I was, but they recovered more swiftly than I and began shouting statements along the lines of, “Oh, HELL no! That guy (indicating me) let the dude with the soda go in front of him, so he’s the real winner! This isn’t right!!!” As it all sank in, I said aloud, “This is a joke, right? Seriously, this has to be a joke…please tell me this is a joke…” My words were utterly ignored as the prize people began to usher the winner away for a photo op but before they could full get away, I centered myself and, with no yelling or cursing, announced to the camera in my most stentorian and serious voice, “People, here you see a prime example of exactly why being polite and considerate of others is pointless. I let this guy go ahead of me with his one item and now he’s fifty thousand dollars richer. I’m unemployed and struggling and I get zero. That it. I’m out!”

That only served to fan the flames of the onlookers’ outrage and they began hurling verbal abuse at the store’s manager, while I, feeling a galaxy-wide sense of complete and utter defeat, just waited for my groceries to be rung up. The cashier, who’s served me for years, saw how crushed I was and, looking like she was about to be physically ill, asked me “Are you okay?” to which I responded with “No, I’m most definitely not okay. I just want to take my groceries and go home…” That was certainly true. If I didn’t leave right then, I would have likely smashed my head repeatedly against the nearest wall in an expression of cosmic frustration. More shoppers came over and offered to tell the manager that the seltzer guy only won because I let him cut in front of me, but I had said my piece and was resigned to the simple fact that I had once again lost in the game of life and that again I’d unwittingly been drafted as a source of amusement for whatever cruel gods there may be.

Then a woman walked over and stated she’d witnessed what had happened and that she would try and have words with the manager and try to make things right, but again I stated my desperate desire to simply leave this death camp of my own personal existential mockery. She let that thought hang for a moment and then stated that I’d just been part of a taped “social experiment” and that her crew would pay for my groceries and hand me three-hundred dollars cash up front, so would I please step over here to sign some release forms?

Double-stunned, I followed her to the secluded aisle in back of the manager’s office and watched through what seemed to be someone else’s perception as she reached into her coat and produced a manila envelope positively bursting with crisp fifties. She counted out the aforementioned three hundred bucks and handed it to me, after which she asked me a number of questions as I filled out a release form and gave her my full contact information. “Well, we certainly didn’t expect the reaction we got of you,” she stated. “Were you angry as it was all happening?” I looked her square in the face and told her, “Lady, every word I said back there was true. I am unemployed, so when a guy I’d let go in front of me wins fifty G’s, you bet your sweet ass I was angry! I wanted to leave before I tore his fucking head off!!!” She laughed at that and then had me pose for two head shots, holding a piece of paper with my name written on it in strong-smelling marker and standing directly in front of the stacked maxi-pad display. She also made it clear that they needed all of my contact info in case they decided to use my footage for their show, in which case I will be paid at a professional actor’s rate. As we parted, she asked me not to talk to anyone local about all of this since they planned to spring the setup on other unsuspecting shoppers over what remained of the day. (I stuck to not posting about it until the market’s closing time, after which I felt it was kosher. Plus, I very much doubt they’d pull the same move in the same place the following day, so there you go.)

As I gathered my groceries, the staff of the market all came over and laughed as they apologized for setting up one of their regular customers, but I had free groceries and three-hundred bucks in hand, so I was far from mad any more. Then the seltzer guy came over, hugged me, and wished me the best, also stating that he hoped they used my footage because of the unexpected nature of my response. (I’m betting they expected the big, leather-clad black guy to flip out and act the fool in a stereotypical display of the kind of ghetto histrionics that appall/delight viewers, but what they got was obviously something they did not expect at all.) When I walked out, I ran into the film crew and they laughed their asses off as they high-fived me.

It wasn’t until I returned to my apartment that I remembered seeing notices up around the Associated yesterday, notices warning people not to park in front of the place because there was to be a film shoot there the following day. I didn’t pay much attention to them yesterday because the neighborhood is constantly the site of independent film shoots, Hollywood shoots, and frequent episodes of LAW & ORDER: SVU, and as a result of all of that I never give such notices a second thought, so I was the perfect mark for the show’s purposes.

Still quite stunned, I called a few friends and related this story, much to their amazement, and my old friend Jim Browski clued me in to the fact that the show in question is most probably something called WHAT WOULD YOU DO?, a reality show that places unsuspecting citizens in trying situations and lets the camera roll to see how they handle whatever predicament they find themselves in. I don’t have cable, so I’d never heard of the show, but I assure you I’ll let you all know if they decide to air this lunacy. 

NOT SO ANCIENT HISTORY

 Originally published in 2006.

One of the many things that suck about being a descendant of a mostly close-mouthed family governed by an emotionally oppressive southern matriarchy is the paucity of documented evidence about our ancestors and their stories, tales that have slipped through the cracks of history because "We didn't talk about those things." What little that I have been able to glean of the history of my mom's side of the family mostly goes back as far as the late 1880's/very early 1900's, much of which is piecemeal at best (and apocryphal at worst), and considering the horrors contained in much of it I can't honestly say I'm surprised by little of this lore being passed down. Fortunately photography was around at the time, so in some cases I am able to attach a face to some snippet of my family's painful minutia.

My maternal grandmother gave up the ghost just after Thanksgiving in 1988 and when my mom traveled back to Alabama to settle her mother's estate, she returned with many artifacts of her mother's, including the one photograph known to exist of my great-grandfather, Liggon James. (see below)

I was already very much aware of the genetic stew that makes up my lineage, but I was taken aback when I saw the image of my great-grandfather. Here was a dude who looked like he could have been the guy they used as the model for the cartoon character found on the Pringle's New-Fangled Potato Chips container, in other words, he looked like a quaint "gay nineties" white guy. When I asked my mother about it, she related to me what little history about Liggon that she could recall (he died when she was very young).

As previously stated, my mom's family was basically a matriarchy, but that bastion of strong women was founded by my great-grandfather. You see, his mother was a freed slave whose name has been lost to time and when she was a young woman in the 1870's she worked in the home of a white employer as a housekeeper. According to what my mother was told, during her time there my great-great-grandmother was raped by her employer and Liggon was the unwanted result. When he was old enough to understand why he looked quite unlike the other kids, Liggon was told of how he came to be and from that point on he firmly defined himself as Black with a capital B, and when he was old enough to start a family he made sure that each of his many daughters got a college education so they would never have to endure what his mother went through.

Other than the story of his origin, the only remaining Liggon tale that my mom related to me was of how he held a well-paying job as a foreman of a construction company, and at the company's main office there was one of those stores where employees could buy all manner of goods for greatly reduced prices. When Liggon's very dark-skinned wife, Saveda, arrived one day to shop, one of the company executives took Liggon aside and said, "Look, we all love our nigger whores, but for Christ's sake, we don't bring 'em to work!" When Liggon informed the guy that this was no "nigger whore" but his wife, the executive flipped out because that was the first time he realized that my great-grandfather was not exactly a white man. Shortly thereafter, Liggon was drastically demoted in position, but he didn't give a shit because he had already saved a lot of money and therefore there was nothing that could really be done about it. Take THAT, you cracker pricks!!!

TODAY I AM 60

                                                                Yer Bunche, circa 1965.

Despite decades of hardcore drunken carousing, smoking as much weed as Cheech & Chong, eating lots of food that's bad for me, surviving multiple stents being placed in my ticker due to congestive heart failure, years of torturous atopic dermatitis (now cured thanks to Dupixent), and enduring late stage kidney failure and thrice-weekly ongoing dialysis for the past five years, Yer Bunche has somehow made it to age 60. I have to spend my birthday enduring yet another dialysis session, but at least I still live to spread my madness. "HOKUTO SHINKEN WA MUTEKIDA!!!"

Yer Bunche at 60. Other than the giveaway of the white beard, "black don't crack."

"RUN AWAY!!!" Celebrating 50 years of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

I just attended Fathom Events' 50th anniversary screening of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), the film I have seen countless times since discovering it at age ten. I went With dear old friend Matt Snow, whom I met nearly a half century ago, and one of the many things our adolescent sensibilities bonded over was our love of all things Monty Python. Some things you never outgrow.

Me representing as Tim the Enchanter, and Matt, wielding the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

If I had to guesstimate, it was an audience of perhaps thirty people, many of whom were under-16s who had been brought by parents.I wonder how they processed the film, and Python in general, because Python's bizarre style has been well-absorbed into the global language of comedy over the past 55 years, so does their flavor have the same kind of seismic impact on today's youth as it did on my generation? I kinda doubt it, and it saddens me to think that works such as this may now reside in the "you had to be there" category. Nonetheless, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL remains my personal pick as the funniest film ever made. Definitely not for all tastes, but its utter absurdity has always resonated with me.

Representing with a female Sir Bedevere cosplayer, Note her bag: a duck. If you know the movie, you get it.

RECOGNIZE!!!

When I returned from Tuesday afternoon's screening of SINNERS, I crossed 5th Avenue and was about to enter the Associated supermarket, when I saw a scruffy, hipster-looking dude who was perhaps in his early thirties, sporting the above t-shirt. I waved at him and exclaimed "Yeah! Fuckin' GG!!!", at which he stopped and smiled, and he then noted his appreciation of my Hardcore Devo tee. We chatted briefly at the corner of 5th Avenue and Union Street, sharing anecdotes about each of us having met GG Allin and his Hitler-mustached brother Merle, and when we both had to leave, we smiled and bade each other a friendly farewell. It was a lovely moment, and proof that music brings people together. Even the music of a guy with (non-) hits such as "Kill the Children, Save the Food" (GG's answer to USA for Africa), "I Wanna Piss On You," "I Wanna Rape You," and that timeless family favorite, "Expose Yourself to Kids," in his catalog.

CLASSIC OF MARTIAL ARTS ASS-WHUPPIN' THAT YOU NEED TO SEE

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EARLY SHORTS OF JOHN WATERS: HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964), ROMAN CANDLES (1966) and EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968) at Lincoln Center

From 2014.

Young John Waters, circa 1972.

Manhattan's Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center has been home to many terrific retrospectives that I've had the distinct pleasure to attend over the years, and last night was the opening evening of the first complete retrospective of the films of John Waters (which, I might add, saw several nights of its program completely sold out online in a matter of moments after tickets went on sale). I've been a slave to Waters's films since I saw the infamous (and fucking hilarious) PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) while still in high school. The film's warped and offensive sense of humor, incredibly twisted content, and in-your-face celebration of its outsider protagonists had a seismic effect on my development as a person and I unequivocally consider seeing that movie to be a life-changing experience. It also instantly rendered Waters my favorite living director and I subsequently went on to see every one of his movies, so I naturally had an interest in experiencing his rare, seldom-seen short film works. Never released on any home video format and only periodically screened when Waters had the whim to do so for friends or as a limited  part of a film series or art show, these early efforts have been the source of great curiosity among the Waters faithful, so their inclusion in the Lincoln Center retrospective is a joyous occasion indeed. The films are apparently no longer extant in their original 16mm prints but they have been preserved in digital form (presumably transferred from archival videotapes), allowing for them to be shown on the huge flatscreen TV in Lincoln Center's amphitheater.

I arrived early and picked up my pre-ordered ticket for the sold-out 6:30pm screening of FEMALE TROUBLE and then made my way across the street from the Walter Reade Theater to the amphitheater. The screening of the shorts was at 4pm and free to the public, and every seat was filled by the time the lights dimmed. Here's what transpired, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by what I got.

HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964)   17 minutes

Sporting one of the best titles ever, this seventeen-minute experiment was shot by the eighteen-year-old director on a budget of thirty bucks — the actual figure according to Waters and, judging from what's onscreen, he's not lying — utilizing stolen film stock and starring a number of Waters's cronies, including Mary Vivian Pearce, who would later become a recurring featured player in his first five full-length films. The quasi-narrative depicts the marriage of black man to a white ballerina on the roof of John Waters's parents' house, with the ceremony witnessed by assorted weirdoes and presided over by a cross-wielding Klansman. Employing the same kind of ADD-riddled unlicensed soundtrack collage technique as later found in MONDO TRASHO (1969), the film is rough around the edges — very rough, an aspect not at all helped by the dodgy video transfer — but briskly-paced and amusing. It also definitely already has the signature feel and trashy aesthetic of Waters's later work. Oh, and it should also be noted that there is neither a hag nor a black leather jacket to be found anywhere in this film.

ROMAN CANDLES (1966)   40 minutes

Freshly kicked out of NYU film school and influenced by Andy Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), Waters aped Warhol's split-screen technique, only going it one better by intending its three free-form non-narratives to be projected onto a trio of individual screens. The result as seen on video at Lincoln Center was a screen composed of two upper tiers of imagery atop a third, with each running a series of unconnected clips and stock footage, including snippets from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1958) and THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (1956). It's dizzying and somewhat headache-inducing if one tries to follow each tier at once, but it's impressively well-constructed and never boring (which, frankly, I expected it to be), unlike many short films that bear the mark of film school influences.

EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968)  45 minutes

The short opens with an anguished young woman crawling across sand dunes toward a shirtless young man while she repeatedly screams, "Makeup! Makeup!!! Makeup!!!"— an hilariously overwrought performance that elicited gales of laughter from the theater audience — until the mysterious man throws her a plate full of beauty products that she greedily devours. Following the credits, the short shifts location to a Baltimore park where a crazed-looking black-clad woman (Maelcum Soul) has her underlings kidnap young women off the street and take them into the woods, where they are forced to wear ridiculous outfits and repeatedly stalk a bargain basement outdoor catwalk until they model themselves to death for the amusement of a drugged-up and violent throng of spectators. The crazed modeling is periodically interrupted by the models being force-fed makeup, and diversions into fantasy and other odd attractions in what is revealed to be a boardwalk-like setup. The fantasy comes in when a wigless drag queen, played by a seventeen-year-old Divine, arrives to chat with the black-clad mistress of ceremonies and imagines herself as Jackie Kennedy riding and waving in the ill-fated motorcade as canned laughter brainlessly guffaws on the soundtrack. The sheer balls/bad taste of doing such a sequence even five years after the real-life event that shocked the nation and the world screamed Waters, and it was amazing to see something so intentionally transgressive and offensive so early in his catalog.

Dangerous filmmaking: a parodic reenactment of the Kennedy assassination — with a laugh track, no less — some five years after the dire real-life event and featuring an obese teenage Divine in drag as the First Lady. I'm amazed Waters and company were not tracked down and stoned to death for this at the time.

The boardwalk element includes a Horror House ride (whose signage proudly proclaims "It'll make you sick") that drives a patron to terrified, shrieking apoplexy and apparent death with its depictions of mundane and wholesome suburban life and American values, and would be harkened back to and inverted for the "Cavalcade of Perversion" in MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970). It all wraps up with a "happy" ending cribbed from a mashup of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty's stories, and is once again accented from start to finish with music Waters didn't bother to get the rights to use. Of the three shorts, I would name EAT YOUR MAKEUP as the most accessible of the lot and the one where Waters's later tropes first begin to coalesce. 

Totally worth paying to watch yet kindly screened by Lincoln Center at no cost to the audience, the three early Waters films are a must-see for Waters fans, provided you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch them. Waters has stated that they will never be made available on home video because obtaining the music rights would be prohibitive, and also, reportedly, because they are simply too embryonic and relatively crude when compared what came later. I get where he's coming from when it comes to their stylistic/aesthetic primitiveness, as he is a filmmaker whose growth in assuredness and skill is visibly trackable on a film-by-film basis, but it would still be nice to have the shorts readily available for scholarly perusal and also to make Waters completists happy. Too bad about the damned music rights, though.