Tuesday, July 11
10:48 p.m.
After catching up on some much-needed sleep on Monday, I’m back in the cockpit and firing on all 8 cylinders again. The past week has gone by in such a blur that it’ll probably take a column or two to catch you up in full, but today is mostly about the trip to NY I took this past weekend to do some reshoots for The Bunker. More on the actual shooting can be found on http://www.sightunseenpictures.com on my film blog there. This is about the rest of the trip.
Which, not surprisingly, started off in jeopardy of not starting off at all. Just like last October (when I was supposed to shoot the two scenes we shot Saturday) weather threatened to wreck the trip. Last October, it was a hurricane (Wilma I think). This week? Friday we were hammered by thunderstorms, and I was already on the packed 2:30 p.m. flight. After more than an hour and a half wait on the runway to get the Okay to take off, I was considering what to do if this flight was cancelled. Would I even be able to get on a flight now? It was nearing 4:40, and I was pretty sure the 6 o’clock flight was sold out when Judy booked me on the 2:30 p.m. one. Finally, we did take off, and wound up getting into NY’s crummy JFK International Airport a little after 6:00. Eventually (I am always the last one taken off the plane when I fly solo) I hooked up with Joe Ianniello, who had not been given a gate pass to meet me because Jet Blue (the best airline flying, in my opinion) is having a terminal built for them, and so they need to use a shuttle to get passengers from the outerlieing arrivals terminal to baggage claim in the main terminal. Yeah, if you are a New Yorker (or live in Chicago) you know all about crappy airport design and crowded terminals and people working who have no clue. Luckily the Jet Blue staff is not the JFK staff, and they did a fantastic job all the way around. The delays were, of course, not their fault. You can’t do anything about bad weather. But the rest of the hassles and airport bullshit? That’s somebody’s fault and it ain’t mine…
Okay, so we’re late. I mean late getting to my hotel, the Diplomat. I remember this place being a dive way back when I was in High school. The kind of place somebody with a better-than-average fake I.D. could get a room at and get twenty people to chip in two bucks each to pay for it and use it to party without any problems. The only seedier joint locally would have had to have been the old Lynbrook Motel (renamed the Lynbrook Capri sometime in the 90s, I think, though that was about the only upgrade they ever put into it). Of course, there was the old Oceanside Motel (where one of the famous murder cases with a body dumped in the wooden frame holding up a bed occurred) but the old Oceanside was forced out of biz by eminent domain, and is now a parking lot. That would leave the Island Park Motel, always proud to advertise their special three-hour-rates back when I would drive past it on the way to the Long Beach Ice Arena, as the shithole of the area. But since I was not about to pay $200 for a few hours a night just to sleep and park my ass, the Diplomat was about all I had left to pick from.
Despite my less-than-reverent remembrance of the place, the Diplomat managed to live down to even my most minimal of expectations. You know something is amiss when you find yourself thinking, upon sitting on the edge of the bed, “Did they accidentally remove the mattress and leave only a box spring by accident?” But no, despite the low stature of the bed, it was some semblance of a mattress. It just felt like a box spring, and not a very good one, at that. Joe’s exact words upon entering the room? “If I see anything crawl, we’re getting the hell out of here.” Nothing crawled. There was really no place else to go. It had a fridge, it had a closet that they had managed to fit a shower and commode into. The sink had running water. Dripped for an hour every time you used it, but at least both the hot and cold worked. The shower itself was a throwback to Roman era plumbing, and the single water control was the old fashioned metal knob most North Easterners remember fondly. As being the knob on their garden hose tap sticking out of the back of their homes. Yeah, they even saved that $1.89 on a fixture that belonged.
Okay, so while I understood (and I gotta admit, knew in advance) I was not getting the Doubletree or the Marriott Marquis or the Hyatt Regency, I could make do with the worn out Paris Hilton part of this Hilton wannabe. I was only gonna sleep here and store my shit and shower, right? And, I’ve stayed at worse. Oh boy, have I stayed at worse. Maybe Hart’ll read this and post on his own blog about the place we nearly got thrown out of on the Straight to Hell tour. Something like $28 bucks a night and we overslept and no wake up call came and the irate Pakistani running the shithole threatened to call the cops. I think we laughed and went back to bed, and when he made his next threat we got packed and strolled out past him as he ranted and raved at us through his pass-thru check-in window. So yeah, I’ve slummed it. The Diplomat now qualifies as slumming it…only you gotta slum it for $130 a night unless you got some discounts and Triple-A or something and you can now slum it for $99 a night. I wonder if the high school kids now have a fondness for the Island Park Motel?
So, the dump I installed myself in aside, things Friday night started late but wound up great. Joe and Eileen (his wife) and I wound up eating at Pancho’s Cantina, which will never be quite as good as it used to when it was a tiny joint you could barely squeeze into when it was on the bend by Long Beach Road, but is still a fun place now that it has moved on to a space where more than 50 people can sit without being so close you could accidentally pickup somebody else’s fork. Pancho’s was an old fave when I lived up in NY, and Joe I was the one who first introduced me to their older location by the funeral home, and hitting it again with him and his wife and catching up and bullshitting about this and that and remembering working at BlockBuster Video, his working with my sis and Rob C. over at RKO Video when the franchise was still open, talking about his kids, made for a great night. It ended prematurely, of course, because we hadda get up and work, and work hard on Saturday morning, but it was a good way to unwind and let the stress of Friday, particularly after a sleep-free Thursday night, roll off my back. By the time I was pulling back the covers around 4:00 a.m., an 8:00 call time didn’t seem all that horrible.
Saturday morning arrived an eyeblink later. Think I got around 90 minutes of actual sleep. Woke up early, showered, checked and double checked my list, my gear, the shoot notes I had made, then choked down some stale, ancient Iced Tea I had picked up at 7-11 the night before on the way back from Pancho’s. I have a feeling both 32 oz. bottles were bottled back when Snapple was mulling over it’s going public and issuing stock. Should’a stayed with the Diet Coke.
Joe and I roll after tossing all my shit into the back of his truck. We hit Dunkin Donuts, probably the only one in the country that doesn’t take credit cards, and I picked up a dozen bagels, some cream cheese, some doughnuts, a box of coffee, and take care of craft services all in one. Hadda pay in cash, which sucked, but oh well, we’ll write it off when I pile up the receipts on Pam’s desk. There sure are enough of ‘em.
We get to Joe’s. As we had feared, somebody beat us there. I guessed it would be Teresa, which is precisely who it turned out to be. Right on time, beat us by about five minutes. Terry and Regina showed up about five minutes later, along with TJ, who they had hooked up with in Queens. Joe ran out to pick up Ron at the LIRR station, and by 8:30 everybody was assembled, and I was going over the living room to get a feel for it.
After swallowing some breakfast, shooting went great. We wound up wrapping a little earlier than I had expected, which was good considering that Joe had a family function that afternoon, so I got back to my room around 4:00 thinking that I would make some phone calls. I grabbed some food on the way back to the room, left a message with Erin, with my friend Martine, and RobCimino. Then I hit the shower, guzzled some Diet Coke and swallowed a pizza stick (big mistake) and sat on the edge of the bed. It was about 5:30 now, and I figured, I was gonna lay back for a minute, then get back on the phone, check in with Pam and Judy about some comic book issues, etc.
That’s all I remember until I rolled over at about 11:30. The bedspread damp from where I had rested my wet head on it, I kinda got the message that I probably needed the sleep more than I needed to go out and try and chase down J&S pizza. I had a time set with Joe I for the next day to hit the Castle, so I figured, fuck it, a snooze would be time well spent. I had already figured out that connecting to the internet or getting my mail was not gonna happen, for some reason the local concentric numbers would not allow me to connect, so a night without e-mail and making sure my crime list wasn’t being invaded by spammers or trols didn’t exactly leave me feeling like I was missing anything.
More tomorrow, including finding Drake’s fruit pies, hitting some old haunts and catching up with more ghosts from the past…
