Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 16: Thanksgiving in NYC

November 25, 2010

6:08 PM – CHAD
 Here it is, the sixteenth day of our trip, which also just happens to be Thanksgiving. Seeing as how I was up in New York City, this ended up being the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever spent without people in my immediate family (parents, sister, kids and whatnot) so I had to make alternate arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner. Say Bob, that reminds me… Next time you’re jotting down a list of the very few things you ask me to do on these trips, along with write the tour journal, change the music and keep the weed flowing, I feel like you can beef it up a little bit with shit such as pay to be on the road for two and a half months, ditch my son on a dog piss couch for weeks on end, miss shit like Thanksgiving and the better part of my kids’ Christmas and summer breaks, break things off with the only one even close to a girlfriend I’ve had in years, willingly go out and invite criticism and ridicule of my life and be a bad reflection on my entire bloodline in some people’s eyes… just little shit that probably doesn’t seem like a hassle to you or our fans who read about our exploits, but when recognized, they make me feel like I do more than ride shotgun and write funny stories. That being said, you’re absolutely right in that I’ve completely fucked off writing the tour journal and for that, I apologize. Furthermore, it obviously doesn’t break my heart too much to do any of the things I just listed, or I wouldn’t have gone on the trips to begin with, so yes, I’m completely full of shit and can’t wait for our next adventure. Where we going, Europe? That should be both easy to explain to my family and light on the old pocketbook…

Now, what do you need, some funny stories? How about this one… Like I said, I had to make alternate arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner, so I went with Raphael Vargas and Lara Pan over to the home of a couple they know in Manhattan, named George and Virginia. Raphael had explained to me that George was ex-special forces, and had gone on to be a bodyguard for Reagan and Bush Sr. Now, as a person with a notable reputation of his own, I know that you don’t just come right out and ask people about the stories you hear about them, you simply listen to what others have to say and learn what you can first-hand over time. So, as much as I wanted to, I made sure not to question George on how a Mexican (as in born in Mexico) could be whiter than me while also claiming to be Dutch, yet somehow rise to power in the United States Army and go on to protect two of our more notable presidents in recent history, but he did voluntarily tell me a story about how he bit off a guy’s nose in a bar fight and got charged with cannibalism. I mention all of this because it actually sorted out a lot of confusion I’ve had in my life. As you know, I’m a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger fan and love all of his movies. How much do I like him? Well, I typed out his name without using spell-check, if that tells you anything, but there has always been one thing that nags at me about his work. In many of his movies, he plays, like an FBI agent or a police detective, or even a member of the special forces and despite many other questionable plot points in these films, the one that always got to me was how an obvious foreigner could wind up with such a job. Well, meeting George put all of those doubts to rest for me. I mean shit, in Predator, Schwarzenegger played a special forces guy named actually named “Dutch” so for all I know, his whole fucking character was based on George.

In continuance of the complicated demographics involved with this household, Virginia is from British Guiana (I think the whole thing might be called Guyana now) which, as you know, is a South American country that used to be a British colony largely populated by people originally from India, which was a British colony too, at the time. So ethnically, Virginia is of Indian descent. Throw in Raphael, born in Mexico City, masquerading as a Clear Lake, Texas socialite, and Lara Pan, who is a Croatian art dealer by way of Paris, France and you get what is probably the most multicultural event I’ve been a part of since the sensitivity training class I was forced to take as an incoming freshman at The University of Texas. Keep in mind; this is on Thanksgiving, of all days. I mean, the only thing missing was the Indians, unless of course you count Virginia, who is the wrong type of Indian, but uh…. not if you ask me.

Thing is, Virginia has a daughter who was there, as well. She is in her early twenties and is absolutely fucking beautiful. Too beautiful, in fact. You see, I had to take a shit really bad the whole time I was at George and Virginia’s house, but Virginia’s daughter was so fucking fine, I made a blood oath with myself that I would never take a shit as long as she and I were in the same building. Before I elaborate on this particular conundrum, I want to explain to you how this is actually part of a much larger problem that Bob and I have dealt with on these trips… the problem of where to take shits when you’re in constant “guest” status.

First, I want to throw an idea out there to the general public that any of you are welcome to take and make millions from. There needs to be an I-phone application for every major city that tells you where you can go take a shit… not just a public restroom, mind you… but a public restroom that is suitable for sitting down and taking a shit in. The way I envision it, it’d be like a google maps view of the city with a little GPS of where you are and then all the places you can go and take a shit in peace are mapped out.     In our travels, we’ve learned some tricks, I assure you. Libraries, for instance, are a great place to start. Just ask a bum, because apparently the only people who go to libraries anymore are bums and/or travelling filmmakers who need a safe haven to shit in. When Bob and I stayed at Bryant Jackson’s house over off Houston Street, we adopted the Mulberry Street Branch of the New York Public Library for just this purpose. See, Bryant’s apartment is laid out in a linear manner, to where you have the living room (where Bob and I slept) then the kitchen, then Bryant’s room, then the bathroom. To complicate things even further, Bryant’s shower is in the kitchen… something I’ve never seen before, to be quite honest. Now, I’m not giving Brant shit for his shower being in the kitchen; I’d love to live in his place, ok? But what that does is makes it impossible to even do the shit/shower combo where you go in and turn on the shower, take a quick shit and flush it, take your shower and then just hope that the steam of the shower and the fragrances of soaps and shampoos and the psychological reboot you get from bathing all combine over the amount of time you’re in there to cover up all signs of a shit being taken. Faced with this, Bob and I would just walk down to the Mulberry Street Library in the morning to do our bidding, because the only alternative was to basically go into Bryant’s room while he was sleeping and take a shit on his nightstand. I remember the first morning, Bryant woke up and we were gone, so he called me and was like, do you guys want to go get coffee and breakfast and all, and I told him sure. Then he asks, where are you guys, anyway? I told him we were at the library. He’s like, the library… are you checking out books, or what? I’m thinking, yeah we’re checking out books, alright… I’m thumbing through the Encyclopedia Shittanica as we speak.

Anyway, the other place we were staying, Eric Payson’s high rise apartment over next to the Empire State Building, was a really clean, sanitary environment, ok? Especially the bathrooms, which were sparkly white and to be quite honest, I don’t know if they’d ever been shit in. Well, Bob goes and takes a dump one day, and thank fucking god, I was the next person to go in the bathroom because there were just shit smears all over the inside of the commode. I mean, it looked like they’d just run the Indy 500 in this fucking toilet. I came out and was like, Jesus Christ, man… who taught you how to shit, Linda Blair?  He goes I know, but what the fuck am I supposed to do, so I told him just keep flushing big wads of toilet paper down that motherfucker until it’s back up to first-world standards. Apparently, he’d never heard of this trick and was content just going through life as Yakov Smear-noff.

Ok, I feel like the point has been made that taking shits on the road can be tricky business, especially in New York City. So, I’m over at Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of wonderful people, and I have to take one of the biggest shits of my life, but am refusing to do so because there are fine girls in the house. What made it worse was that the food was excellent, but it was just killing me to eat it because I was about to pop like a fucking tick. I forced down one plateful of food, but everyone knows you’re supposed to eat at least two or three helpings at Thanksgiving, because that’s really the point of the holiday… to sit around eating profusely, not being able to believe how much fucking food we have in this country. I honestly feel like having to shit so badly and suffering like that added a human element to the holiday that completely changed my perspective on things for every Thanksgiving to come from now on.

Eventually, Virginia’s daughter leaves to go have Thanksgiving at her boyfriend’s place somewhere outside the city, but I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. First of all, I wanted to make sure that I waited long enough for her to be completely off the island of Manhattan, lest she double back to retrieve her sunglasses, mittens, you know, whatever. Secondly, and even more of a problem was a fact that the bathroom was just right there in front of everybody, so it’s not like you could just slip off to it and take your sweet time. You’d have to get up, walk right into the bathroom in front of everybody, and basically the clock would just start ticking from the minute you closed the door. I decided to break up the whole ordeal into a series of micro-shits, each one lasting no longer than it would take the average man to go into a bathroom, piss and wash his hands. After about my fifth micro-shit, it started to dawn on me that perhaps I was being a little oversensitive about the whole shitting in other people’s houses thing.

Seeing as how this was Thanksgiving, The Longhorns and The Aggies played each other in football on national television later that night. Needless to say, watching the game this year was quite an unpleasant experience, and not just because George farted right in my fucking face. No, but seriously, I was sitting on the floor down at the foot of the bed and George and Virginia were up on the bed itself when George got up (I’m assuming to go to the bathroom) and as his ass passed over my head, the physical act of hopping to his feet allowed a fart to slip out right on top of me. We all thought this was very funny… me, Raphael, Lara, George’s Army buddy, Forrest, but Virginia got a particular kick out of it, because leading up to that moment, George had totally been the life of the party. He was extremely animated, making all of these puns and sexual innuendos, cracking the girls up and shit, totally on top of his game when his fart just brought him crashing back down to earth. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he hadn’t sunk nearly as low as me, having just had my face shit in, but he was right down there only a rung or two above me in the social pecking order after the incident. In conclusion, The Longhorns lost to The Aggies, capping off their worst season since at least 1997. There was a time when a season such as the one UT just had would have seriously ruined my entire year, but no longer. In fact, I wrote an article once about how everything is different now. I’m going to repost that article for you here in the tour journal, but not today… I’m going to wait for a day further down the road when maybe not so much was going on and Bob and I are short on material, so be on the lookout for it.

11:41 PM – BOB
I drove out to Long Island last night and had Thanksgiving with family today.  Nice.  The beach was cold as tits.