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Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 24: NYC to Baltimore
NOTE: This journal entry was written about twelve months after shit happened. Would it have been better if we’d written this shit as shit went down? Maybe. But we didn’t, so quit beating yourself up about it. And really, your expectations are unrealistic. Nevertheless, enjoy as we fake like we wrote this shit way back when.
December 24, 2010
8:00 AM – BOB
I’m not proud of it, but I wake up to an 8AM phone call. I’m still drunk from the night before. My mouth tastes like toilet bowl cleaner. There’s fair chance of a good and/or other reason for that. The toilet is smack dab in the kitchen. I regressively sat/leaned/slouched up until 6 am drinking beer and whiskey, smoking weed and watching The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.
Thankfully (?) the phone rings me awake at 8 in the A-fucking-M. I’ll be on the air in 10 minutes. On the air in Baltimore for a radio interview, that is. They’ll call back. We’re screening down in Charm City in about a dozen hours. Also, I gotta move the car or we’ll get towed. Currently, we’re parked on the street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This is also where I woke up. Always a good sign.
8:25 and no luck on a new parking spot. The radio station calls back and I’m still driving around trying to ditch the car. At some point during the circling, the interview happens. I’m not sure what I said, but I remember repeatedly proclaiming “Boston sucks” and then took that gem and proceeded to plead for a couch to crash on while in Baltimore tonight. I’m certain that I just charmed Baltimore’s pants off. We’ll see how that turns out.
11:17 AM – CHAD
We got up in New York and drove down to Baltimore for our show there. I don’t know what to tell you about the drive, except that Bob and I took a wrong turn at one point, and ended up at the Newark Airport. When I say we wound up at the Newark Airport, I mean we were literally stuck in a line with all the cars trying to pick-up and drop-off folks at the main terminal there for a little bit. I’d say we were way off course.
BOB 6:47 PM
We seem to be in Baltimore. I think we drove here. Either way, we get to The Patterson and it has a Marquee large enough to honor our presence. Flattered as I am, I fear this joint is a huge 1200 seat events center. I hate those. I’ll take tight and rowdy over big and swanky any day.
The pad was actually pretty cool. Here’s a tour of the art they done had put up for your intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment.
Chad tried his luck at the lottery. The problem was, he tried his luck.
Chad’s terrible luck didn’t jinx us. It turns out that the night was a big-ass party. We packed the house for both Total Badass and Hell on Wheels. We even enjoyed some sweet home-team support courtesy of the Charm City Rollergirls. And that radio station (WTMD 89.7, thanks!), on which I puked up something akin to an interview by drunkenly, relentlessly shit-talking Boston, they gave away some tickets and helped drag in a noteworthy chunk of the crowd. Baltimore is looking good!
We also got this cool write up:
Bob Ray’s Down and Dirty Austin Film Tour @ Creative Alliance Tonight
We’ve never been to Austin, TX.
We suspect we’d like it very much if we ever had been. We like Baltimore very much, after all. We like New Orleans and Richmond and Charleston, and even liked Galveston when we went there. So we have reason to believe that we’d get along just fine in Austin, and that when Austin filmmaker Bob Ray brings his Down and Dirty Film Tour to the Creative Alliance tonight he’ll feel right at home.
Total Badass screens at Creative Alliance tonight. 7:30.
The Chop can’t sell you on this. Much like Kesey and the Pranksters, you’re either on the bus, or off the bus. There’s no middle ground here. Just take one quick look at the movie posters and you’ll know right away that this is something in which you either have no interest at all, or something for which you absolutely need to clear your calendar and go see right now!
Hell on Wheels is the second half of tonight’s double feature. 9:30.
For those of you who are on the bus, here are the details. Doors and drink specials start at 6:30 (and show up on time, because the CA screening theater is of modest proportions) and Total Badass begins at 7:30, followed by a Q and A with Bob Ray and Chad Holt.
The Charm City Roller Girls will then host the second half of the double feature, Hell on Wheels with another Q and A after featuring Ray as well as some of the finest real life bruisers in Baltimore.
If your lame schedule and crappy life don’t permit you to see both films for a paltry $10, you can check out either one for $7 at the door. We say watch them both. You’ll be glad you did. Now get on the goddamn bus and hang on for dear life.
8:40 PM – CHAD
Just to put things in perspective, this was December 3rd, 2010 that we were in Baltimore. That was exactly a year ago today from when I am typing this. Here’s what I recall for sure: The Baltimore Ravens were about to play The Pittsburg Steelers for the second time that season. The Ravens had won earlier in the year in Pittsburg, and now the Steelers would be in Baltimore two days later, on Sunday. There was a certain fervor in the city of Baltimore you could feel with the game coming up, with a lot of Baltimore Ravens signage, flags and other memorabilia hanging everywhere. I saw a taxicab drive by the theatre right before Total Badass started, and a little Baltimore Ravens window flag fell off of it, into a puddle of water. The cab driver got out and ran and picked it up real quick. The damage was done; I already knew the Steelers were going to beat the Ravens when they played. I’d have bet everything I had on it. I didn’t have much…
I also remember that a couple named Chance and Sue were there. They had won tickets to the screening on a local radio show, and were very excited about it. I was probably more excited than them that anyone had even bothered giving away tickets to anything associated with me over a radio station in Baltimore, Maryland. The fact that the guy who won the tickets was named Chance was not lost on me.
The movie played at a place called The Patterson in association with The Creative Alliance. This was in a really nice part of town. I remember this, because every time Bob or I would comment on how nice things were in that neighborhood, a local would be like, Yes, Baltimore is very nice in this little five block radius, but PLEASE GOD, whatever you do, don’t go anywhere else in this city. I’m not exaggerating when I say we heard that upwards of ten times.
Here’s the intro to Total Badass in Baltimore:
11:15 PM – CHAD
Ok, so as soon as the movie was done, we did the question and answer as usual, and I could just tell by the back and forth with the audience that one lady in particular had taken an interest in us. When we were done with the Q&A, she walked right up to me, and was like; You know what question I really wanted to ask? So, I said what and she goes, Whip out that fucking cock!! And I remember thinking that was more of a command than a question, but I knew where she was coming from, all the same. The thing was, she pronounced cock like there was an “a” in it… “cack”. Whip out that fucking cack! That’s all I could think about the rest of the night… I had cack on the brain.
It reminds me of this one girl I met here in Austin over the internet. She had a boyfriend or a husband or something, but somehow we ended up talking back and forth over facebook and deciding to meet up over at Barfly’s and have sex in my car. Maybe it was her car, but still, I remember us hanging out inside Barfly’s for a drink or two, acting like we were there to do anything other than go out and fuck on the street. We got out to whose ever car it was, and she unbuttons my pants and goes “Wow, you’ve got a fucking stuntcock!” She said “stuntcock” like fifty times while we were fucking, and I’ve got to tell you, it kind of grew on me. So much so, that to this day, I think of her as “Stuntcock” whenever I see her. I’ll be at a bar and see her there with her boyfriend and think to myself, “There’s ol’ Stuntcock… Should I go say hi?”
Anyway, homegirl in Baltimore was named Birdy. Me, Bob, Birdy, Chance, Sue and a host of forgotten others went to a couple of different bars and Birdy wouldn’t stop talking about my cack. It was like brainwashing. Everything was a mixture of my cack and the fact that I was staying with her and we needed to leave soon. I finally gave in and left with her. I mean, I intended to leave with her all along, but I kind of wanted to stay out late and shit because that might have been the only time I’ll ever be in Baltimore. Nonetheless, I told Bob I was splitting for the night and let her drag me out of there a couple hours early. We walked out the door of the bar and the second, I mean the second my foot hit the sidewalk outside, she goes “We’re not doing anything, by the way. I’m not touching you.” And I was just like…. But what about my cack? You’ve been talking about my cack all fucking night, don’t you at least want to see it, or let me get it off for you or something? I kind of wanted to walk right back inside the bar, to be completely honest. It wasn’t the fact that homegirl didn’t want to mess around, it was just the way she had led things on so strongly and insisted that I go with her right then, and shit. If I hadn’t been accused of rape just a day earlier, I would have walked right back in the fucking bar, I assure you. As it was, I decided to try and better myself. I went with her and she had a very nice place and cooked me a couple of good meals. No cack, though…
BOB 3:33 AM
Somehow, I managed to turn two badass screenings into me hanging out at a bar long enough that, out of pity and maybe the kindness of his heart, the bartender let me sleep on his couch. Well played, me. No cack, neither.
Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 23: flee Boston, drive to NYC
NOTE: This, and the remainder of the tour journals were posted nearly a year after the tour wrapped up. The reasons for this are many. If you’d read the last entry you would have an idea of this, but let’s just call it a combination of laziness, apathy, drugs, booze, rape accusations, lack of drive and an acceptance of a job half-finished. Also, Bob didn’t want to post his journals without Chad’s $.02 worth. That’d be no fun for anyone involved.
December 2, 2010
10:01 AM – BOB
Where the fuck are we? I woke up next to a pond. Chad’s here. That’s good, I guess. Canadian Geese are honking around and trying to fuck and fight one another.
Come to think of it, it’s actually kinda nice. Better than jail, anyway. The honking and fucking and fighting in jail might not be as pleasurable.
10:18 AM – CHAD
Day 23 of the trip was an off day, a driving day. We drove down to New York City from Boston and went out on the town one more time, apparently with Rafael Vargas, Eric Payson, and Bryant Jackson, according to my notes. I have no idea what we did, but feel free to enjoy some video from another night we went out in NYC (back on day 11) which I forgot to post earlier in the journal. Here’s me finding a dollar bill in the street, bringing my grand total of money found in the street during this trip to eleven dollars:
Here is one of many signs of the apocalypse we witnessed on our travels:
And finally, here is a video of me rambling on about the unisex bathroom phenomenon that is apparently sweeping every state in the country except Texas, and why I’m not a big fan. You can actually skip the video and read a written diatribe I have prepared below. Whatever you do, don’t watch the video and read the diatribe. That would be a horrible waste of time. Also, I’m not sure if you can write a diatribe. By definition, you might have to speak them out loud. In that case, the video would actually be the diatribe and the shit I wrote would be more of a… never mind, I looked it up diatribes can be written, as well.
Unisex Bathrooms- When we did the West Coast tour last summer, I encountered a fair share of unisex public restrooms in the bars and restaurants out there, but dismissed it as some kind of left coast progressive bullshit that would never fly elsewhere. When we went on the East Coast trip last winter and I saw the same thing in city after city there too, I realized what a sheltered life I have been leading in Texas. I’ve got news for you folks, I am not adapted to live in this brave new world of non-gender specific shitting and pissing. To be clear, I’m talking about regular, everyday bars and restaurants with average citizenry on the premises where everything seems completely normal until you get to the restrooms where, instead of having your traditional “Men’s Room” and “Ladies’ Room”, they’ve just got everybody going in and shitting and pissing in the same place like a bunch of fucking animals. Here’s why that sucks:
First of all, you’re making women go in and use the same restroom as men, who are generally much filthier creatures. By design, men are going to go in and piss all over the place and then women are going to have to nest in it. The rebuttal to this is that women hover above the toilet in public restrooms anyway, but it’s that very type of thinking that shows you far we’ve regressed already, as a people. Even in really nasty places with equally nasty clientele, the women’s rooms aren’t going to get as dirty as the men’s room. In fact, if a guy ever gets trapped into having to shit in a public restroom, he knows he can slip into the women’s room and do so under much more sanitary conditions. Well, that’s all gone now.
Secondly, the whole social aspect of Men’s and Women’s restrooms, where the two groups used to be able to retreat away and regroup amongst themselves, is now a thing of the past. When I was a young man hanging out in bars, entire groups of girls used to all go to the bathroom together and talk about my dick while peeing and putting on lipstick. Now, they can’t all go to the bathroom and talk about my dick anymore, because I might be in there. Even worse is the whole “bust-in” factor, where the thought of someone coming in on you while you are on the toilet used to be horrifying enough in segregated bathrooms, but now it’s enough to put you in therapy. Plus, let’s say you come out of the bathroom and there’s a fine-ass girl waiting to come in after you. You have now inherited all of the sights, smells and sounds lingering in there from hours before and will be held accountable in her mind. I guess the one positive of all of this is that you no longer have to pass off your cocaine to people of the opposite sex when you’re at the clubs, because you can all go in and snort it together. Go ahead and take a shit, while you’re at it.
This is how unsuited I am for a sexless society: When I get in line to use the unisex restroom, even if there is nobody else in line, when a girl gets in line behind me I always let her go first. That seems like a simple little courtesy that shouldn’t lead to any problems, but the next thing you know, there are three girls in line behind me, then a dude, then two more girls. I’m such a maladaptive fuckup, I’ll seriously sit there and let all three girls go to the bathroom, then the dude because I’m not going to sit there and try to explain to him how we should both wait until all the women are done and plus, it’s nothing to kill someone over despite how quickly things could escalate to that point and then after all that, I have to let the last two girls go and hope to god nobody else has to take a piss. The whole time, people are like, are you sure you don’t want to go, and I’m all no, no go ahead. I realize how fucking crazy I look to these people, standing there in line for the bathroom for twenty minutes but refusing to go in, but I’m the sane one, goddamnitt, this is a world gone mad.
Anyway, all of that was already old news the night I was in the bar where I made the previous video. I was already a staunch restroom segregationist, stuck in my ways. Then, I went into a bathroom that night, and there was this nasty bloody tampon floating in the toilet like some hideous turd from outer space that I’d never seen before. The whole thing was just a disgusting shock, because I’d never been exposed to such barbarism in my entire fucking life.
11:33 PM – BOB
We made it back to NYC. Surprising I know, but we partied with my NYC friends again. Bryant Jackson hosted us again. Big thanks to Bryant! Here are the photographic highlights, as best I can’t remember them:
Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 22: Boston, in all its Glory
NOTE: For all future peoples who might read this (that would be ALL peoples, because first of all, that’s how linear time works and secondly, I haven’t even written this shit yet, so how in the hell could you read it in the present?), these tour journals have been delayed a bit. It’s actually November of 2011 and we’re finally getting back to writing this thing. You might have noticed that on your own, what with the time stamp and all. But in case you didn’t, I wanted to give you a heads up. Some of my (Bob, that is) journals were partially written as the tour was in-progress. And what wasn’t written as it happened has surely been forgotten. Much like all of this will be forgotten moments after you read it. So yes, please do notice that this here journal is popping up about eight months or so after the last entry and nearly a year after the tour wrapped up. Why you ask? Seriously? You are asking why? Do you not know us at all? Okay, perhaps you don’t. Well, the reason why is a long story. In a nutshell (and like every other problem or hurdle that has delayed or undermined us), it’s all Chad’s fault. So, without further delay, here is the tour journal:
December 1, 2010
11:14 AM – CHAD
Wow, what’s it been, six months now? Or eight, if you want to get technical. I guess I’ll go ahead and finish up the tour journal… So, as I was saying, I passed out at James in Boston’s house within about ten minutes of Bob and me arriving, even though the question of whether or not James in Boston was going to kill us was still very much unanswered. Looking back now, I think the deal was that this wasn’t James’ regular house. This was like, his buttfucking party pad. The place had obviously belonged to an older lady with a Kennedy fixation at one point, but now James was the custodian. In fact, I vividly remember James’ face just lighting up when he was telling us about how Bobby and Jack Kennedy had run around that very apartment as children. My theory now is that James is actually partially convinced that he is the old woman (his mother, perhaps) who used to live in the house and that is why everything seemed so odd to us. Half of the place is completely emptied out for jello wrestling and fashion shows, but the other half is like a living shrine to the woman whose life he took over. I see this kind of shit all the time.
Anyway, we get up the next morning and he is gone, so of course we immediately go through the whole place with a camera, documenting how weird everything was. The refrigerator had nothing but beer in it. Sure, that sounds normal, but this was a hodgepodge of all different types of beer in various sizes and denominations. It was like a bunch of people had brought beer from different places and left it all there. It was obviously remnant beer; the leftovers from countless raves, or perhaps the last traces of generation after generation of travelers who had stopped to stay the night, never to be seen again. There was way more jello in the pantry than you would see at a normal house. This was exacerbated by the fact that jello was the only thing in the pantry, at all. Nothing but boxes and boxes of jello. While most of the rooms were totally barren, others were frozen little snapshots of time complete with postcards and knickknacks and shit that all hearkened back to the days that Bobby and Jack Kennedy had spent there, growing up. The whole set- up made my butthole itch.
12:11 PM – BOB
After a jello and beer breakfast, we hit the road. First thing out of Jim James’s apartment, I notice that neither of us were dead. Things were looking up. Aside from our dashed hopes of a romantic scenario and a grinding curiosity to learn the true nature of Jim James’ nefarious intent, we were in top form (this would get the better of us soon enough).
The second thing I noticed was that my car had been nailed with a parking ticket. We’d indeed been fucked in Brookline/Boston. In order to preserve the precious and unspoiled impression I have of Boston, I immediately decided that I’m not gonna give the knotted shit-hole any of my money. That would seem cheep and tawdry. Like a whore. The ticket remains unpaid.
2:53 PM – CHAD
Sometime during the morning, we got word that Jeff Pinkus was up in Boston visiting his son, Jefferson. We went and picked the two of them up over in Brookline and went to a Thai restaurant that was pretty good. We told the waitresses it was Jefferson’s birthday, and that set off a dramatic birthday celebration that can be seen here:
Right around the time our entrées arrived, I got a phone call from the New Orleans area code, and I knew right away it was going to be some kind of fallout from our rampage through the city a couple of weeks earlier. I took the call at the table, excited to find out what the latest drama was, hoping to share it with Bob and Pinkus vicariously via them overhearing the conversation. Well, I answer the phone and it’s Detective Vernon Haynes of The New Orleans Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. This had exceeded even my expectations, I assure you. I excused myself from lunch and went outside to talk to him. This is by no means to be taken as any indicator of culpability, but I knew exactly who he wanted to talk about the second he told me who he was. Again, I’m not saying I did anything wrong, I’m just saying that I had sex with a finite number of women while I was in The Crescent City, and when this motherfucker told me who he was, I knew exactly which one he was calling about. Anyway, he tells me who he is, and asks me if I know so-and-so. I say yes, she’s been a friend since about 2006, and yes, the last contact I had with her was a couple of weeks ago, back in New Orleans. He tells me he needs to ask me some questions, but that I don’t have anything to worry about. I remember thinking what an odd part of his job that must be, calling people up out of nowhere, telling them that he’s a rape detective and needs to ask them some questions about the women they’ve been having sex with, while at the same time assuring them that there’s nothing to worry about. Well, I was hesitant at first, but the guy was really professional and open through the whole conversation, so I took his word for it and talked to him for a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I knew there was a full blown sexual assault investigation going on and that everything I was saying was being recorded and shit, but something about the way he was talking to me made me feel like I could just tell him the truth (without touching on any topics of a sexual nature, of course) and everything would be fine, just like he said. One of the first things he asks me was, “Are you in this movie, Total Badass?” and I felt like either I was part of one of the greatest practical jokes ever, or someone had horribly overestimated what I’d be worth in a civil suit. I told him yes, I am, but I know so-and-so from real life and I don’t see what a movie has to do with anything. Well, he tells me that so-and-so looked up some stuff on the internet, and apparently she found out that I was, as he put it, “Traveling around all over with this movie, going crazy in one city after another, having sex with all these women.” And I’m thinking to myself: Dude, you’re not a cop, you’re my fucking biographer. I went on to tell him how I had come across the lady in question to begin with, what places we went to and how we got there, everyone else who was with us, and how I eventually ended up over at her house. I left out all of the intimate details, for legal reasons, just like I’m omitting them right now out of some kind of newfound discretion. The horrible irony is that those same intimate details are so juicy and so outrageous, that they are the very things that could have either (a) cleared up any legal questions about consent that might have been on the detective’s mind, or (b) made this one those good old fashioned nasty stories I used to write and everyone loved so much that I can’t seem to write anymore. All I can tell you is that at one point, I fancied myself an old witch doctor, working with magical salves and ointments. That’s all you get, though.
So, after I’d laid out everything to Detective Haynes, he basically told me that based on what I’d said to him and what he already knew, he was dropping the investigation and I’d never hear from him again. He did go on to add that since me and the lady were friends, he felt like I should know how things had gotten to that point with me and him being on the phone, because he didn’t want me to feel like she was trying to get me in trouble. Apparently, he told me, she had gone online a few days after we had sex and I guess maybe googled me or the movie and watched a few things, then called her friend to come pick her up and take her to the emergency room in order to, as he put it, “Make sure you didn’t have any babies in her or give her any diseases.” That’s exactly how he said it. “Have any babies in her.” (plural) as though I reproduce by the litter, like some kind of hound or demon. While at the hospital, in the presence of the screening nurse, the friend apparently asked her why she ever had sex with me to begin with and she said she was so fucked up she doesn’t remember anything about the night at all, so that bound the nurse legally to report the event to the police. This all made me feel a lot better, because it was like, so you’re not looking at me as so much a sexual predator, but more like a public health crisis? Because for a minute there, I felt kind of bad, you know? Like a bad person. But really, it was more of a deal where as soon as a girl I slept with realized who I was, she went straight to the fucking emergency room, thanks.
I got off the phone with the detective and called up my lawyer, Adam Reposa, to let him know about the incident because it seemed like the type of thing you should tell your attorney. When he answered, I could tell he was partying somewhere with a bunch of his work buddies. I got about halfway through the story and he just cuts me off and starts yelling to everyone, “Hey, everybody! Everybody! I got Chad Holt on the phone over here and he’s all fucking scared because some bitch told a nurse that he raped her!” I hung up with a table full of drunk defense attorneys laughing at me. I hate to make two Goodfellas references in the same tour journal, but you remember the “You really are a funny guy.” part where all the mobsters are laughing in the restaurant? That’s what these fuckers sounded like.
Anyway, this whole thing really ended up bothering me for the rest of the trip and even after I got home. Initially, I was touting this incident as the official reason I got so far behind on the tour journal, because I really didn’t want to write about it, but how do you write a tour journal without including all the rape allegations? In all seriousness, what I think happened is that I basically hurt homegirl’s feelings with things I said and printed in our journal or perhaps said in the press or at question and answer sessions. I certainly mentioned that I had sex with someone in New Orleans, but I felt at the time like I did it in a way where nobody would ever be able to tell who I was talking about, and that should make it acceptable. In retrospect, it’s obvious to me that regardless of the way I did it, it upset the woman involved in this particular incident, as well as other women I spent time with in New Orleans, so I really wish I had said nothing at all. I’m apologizing for the initial comments, the ensuing investigation and this current rehashing of events, all at one fell swoop.
9:00 PM – BOB
Hey look! We’re screening in Boston.
10:30 PM – BOB
One-quarter of the Butthole Surfers came out to watch Total Badass. And then there was the guy who owns a slew of Super Cuts all across Boston. He was there. An unprecedented 100% of the crowd was important people. This screening was about quality, not quantity. If you’re math-dumb, that adds up to two people. An all time low. And yes, both were friends of mine. What’s also funny was that there were two people sitting outside of the cinema, all dolled up in 30’s garb. Apparently, they were waiting for the hordes of people to file out of the theater so that they could stuff into their grabby hands a handbill promoting their alt burlesque show. They did a hell of a job and promo-ed to 100% of our audience. All both of them. To y’all young go-getters, I apologize for not providing you with a larger crowd to whom you could promote your surely awesome show.
You could blame the lack of a crowd on freezing-tits weather or a lack of promo or Bostonians not giving a shit about us or our movie (for no other reason than consistency, I fault Chad). The blame-the-mainstream-media angle won’t hold much water as there was this misinformed, misquoted write-up from whatever the hell a Patch.com is:
http://arlington.patch.com/articles/new-regent-doc-shows-musicians-struggle-for-redemption
Later in the eve, we met up with my actor/filmmaker pal Lance Greene. I first encountered Lance in Phoenix at the super-fun Phoenix Film Festival (I’ve somehow managed to keep up with nearly all of the other filmmakers I met in PHX). Lance has a hardcore-wicked Boston accent that has me cracking the fuck up every time he opens his mouth. We had some damn good fun. Here are six pictures that will save me the effort and you the pain of reading an additional six thousand of my words:
Aside from that fun, we got lost in Boston about eight times and pulled about 14 u-turns today. I subsequently learned that the streets were designed by cows. Fucking cows! Leave it to a bunch of drunk Irish hicks to allow the cows to lay out their streets. Nice planning, Boston. Since I’m getting all educational and shit, dig this: if you check out the About Boston page you can learn of the slave-rum trade and a bunch of weird stuff about Irish folks and beans of some variety. They probably mentioned this stuff in high school history class or something, but nevertheless, it was news to me. And hey, wanna start a fight? Say some shit about the potato famine. That’ll do it. These fuckers are angry drunks.
Then there’s this: I’ve seen more cops in the last ten minutes than all the cops in the Rodney King circle-jerk combined. Fuck, if you count the whole day, I’ve seen about 17 cops. Boston makes me nervous. And even if we didn’t have a car packed with weed and illegal pills, these cops would make ne nervous. They’re fucking cops.
It’s all very colorful and exciting, but my gut is telling me that Boston sucks.
8:15 PM – CHAD
Ok, so I know I’ve mentioned a couple of times here in the journal about how I went out on such-and-such a night and get really fucked up, but those times weren’t shit, ok? This night, and every night from here on out, in the aftermath of the rape investigation, I really let myself go. Pinkus was with us all night, and I’m not blaming him, but he does like to drink hard liquor from a bottle, and I’m just not cut out for that shit. I pretended like I was for as long as I could, though. I know that Pinkus and another friend of Bob’s were the only two people at the theatre, which seated about five hundred people. I know we went to several bars and drove around lost, a lot. I know I made about two-hundred rape jokes throughout the night, most of them in the form of “What’s my favorite…” as in: What’s my favorite Steve Albini band? Rapeman. What’s my favorite Steinbeck novel? The Grapes of Wrath. What’s my favorite fairy tale? Rapunzel. Who’s my favorite singer? Ray Parker, Jr. and so on… Here are some videos from the bars, the second of which features a jug band of sorts covering John Prine:
2:11 AM – BOB
It’s 2AM. We’re pulled over trying to figure out Pinkus’s GPS on his smart-phone. I kill the engine and shut down the lights moments before a cop approaches, his lights blasting our faces. He pulls a three-point u-turn right behind us. My ass starts to self-lube as I’m sure that we’re about to be royally fucked. I’m really hating Boston right now. The copper creeps by and drifts off. False alarm. Luck. I am part Irish, after all.
3:01 AM – BOB
We dropped off Pinkus and have nowhere to go. We are desperate, tired and maybe bi-gay curious so we call Jim James.
Chad is too wasted to navigate and I’m in no shape to attempt driving AND navigating. I rolled the car up a house down from where we dropped off Pinkus. I figured we’d crash in the car for the night and that Pinkus would walk out in the morning and we wouldn’t be the first thing he saw, but maybe the second or third. And that’d be funny.
5:26 AM – CHAD
When we dropped Pinkus off at home that night, I was already passed out and had been for quite some time. I know Bob got me up and tried to get me to help him figure out what we were going to do and where we were going to stay, but I was making my best case for staying right there in the car by drifting in and out of consciousness. Eventually, we did decide to pass out there in the car, and I settled in for what should have been about an eight-hour coma. A couple of hours later, I became vaguely aware that I was attempting to have a conversation with someone in my sleep. I didn’t know who they were, or why I was talking to them, but I woke up trying to explain the last time I had ever seen “The Macarena” performed in public, which had been about a decade earlier with Jim Isaacs at a wedding reception at Jasmine Hall in Lake Jackson, Texas. I heard myself saying all this as I came into consciousness, but I had no idea why, or to whom. I opened my eyes and there was a cop hanging in the passenger window, trying to talk to me. I remember concentrating on him really hard, and trying to grasp the situation as a whole, but all I really took away from it was that he was a mulatto, and it was really working for him. You know how some people will be half-black and half-white, and they look like somebody just took all the negative qualities of both races and dumped them into one person? Well not this guy, this guy looked great. I didn’t understand who he was, or why he was trying to talk to me, but I remember feeling like he was an excellent example of inter-racial bioengineering. Eventually, Bob’s voice entered into the conversation, and although I had no idea who he was either, or what he was saying, I knew there was some sort of comfort to be had in his words. I felt like it was now acceptable for me to go back to sleep, so that’s exactly what I did.
5:27 AM – BOB
That didn’t happen. In order to sleep, I chomped a soma and a valium. I got about two good hours of ZZZs on that dose. Then I heard a knocking on the glass. I looked over and Chad’s window was down a hair. A cop’s face was squeezed in the crack, like a drop a of syrup dangling from the bottle. Chad was chewing on his tongue and his teeth seemed to be made of rubber. He was bouncing unintelligible syllables around in is mouth and occasionally something you might call words would stumble out. The situation was dire. Then the cop asks “What are you doing in Brookline? What do you think you’re doing?”
I scraped my wits from the floor and managed to put forth an impenetrable defense: “We’re sleeping.”
“Not in Brookline, you’re not.”
He might be right. Or at least half right. I’ve no idea where we are, but I’m certain that we were sleeping. Or at least passed the fuck out.
“What are you doing here,” he asks. I thought I’d already explained that. He was unimpressed with the “we’re sleeping” angle, so I figure to impress him with our awesome credentials. I explained that we were world famous artists on tour and had to make it back to the big city of New York by tomorrow and that we were just being thrifty and thought it was okay to sleep in the car. “Not in Brookline. Not in my city.”
He took our IDs and retreated to his car to further investigate. Even with the brain being completely fucked with booze and drugs, the stakes of the situation became clear: We have a ton of pills in the car, three different strains of kind-bud and a pipe. That’s the shit that we know about. Who knows what a thorough search would turn up. Basically, we’re looking at: felony, misdemeanor, misdemeanor and maybe some etc.
Somehow, Chad got wise and kicked the pills up under the dash in a hasty effort. The cop returned, poked the IDs through the cracked windows and said, “I’m gonna take you some place that might not be as comfortable. Follow me.” This is a weird as fuck way to take us to jail, I thought. Or maybe we just lucked out. Irish?
He led us to a pond where I parked between two cars that apparently were packed, circus clown-car like, with gypsies. The car in front of me had a busted window and a trunk held closed with a bungee cord. It felt right. For a couple of fucked up fuckups, this felt safer than the posh town of Brookline, which had so far, been nothing but kind to us. So be it. Back to sleep.
Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 21: off Providence to Boston
November 30, 2010
12:11 PM – BOB
So yeah, basically we had three people for Hell on Wheels and five for Total Badass last night. It was freezing tits cold, so there’s that excuse. We also got zero press and had no derby support here. I’m sure I could make more excuses for the lack of a turnout, but why bother? However, all five stuck around for the Q&A. You might argue that they only stuck around out of fear of being rude by walking out or that they were just over-courteous, but all of them chatted it up with us after the screening. So, if you look at it this way, 100% of the crowd hung out and talked with us after the flicks.
Today, we split from Ally’s house (she had a badass quilt made up of old socks, btw (thanks, Ally!!)) and holed up in the downtown Providence library. We’re uploading vids, emailing, promo-ing, taking shits, fielding questions from cinemas, etc… in short, we’re partying balls.
Library in Providence:
12:31 PM – CHAD
We woke up in Providence and went to what is bound to be the main library downtown and spent a couple hours working on our tour journal. I’m confident that the work we did there will have us caught up with everything in no time. The truth is, I think Bob and I both are in no hurry to get anywhere, because we have no idea where we are going to stay for the next two nights. We have a showing in Boston tomorrow, and know nobody there. We stayed here in Providence with a friend of a friend last night, but without even speaking with each other, Bob and I mutually concluded that we had probably imposed enough and asking to stay again would be simply… indulgent. Besides, whether we know anybody or not, we’re convinced Boston is going to be a blast and are eager to check it out.
8:49 PM – BOB
We made it to Boston. We haven’t been here long and already I’ve done more u-turns in Boston in the last three hours than I did on the previous 20 days of the tour.
12:31 AM – CHAD
Boston Sucks. I might just now be typing that phrase for the first time in this journal, but you must believe me when I tell you that it eventually becomes our mantra over the entirety of our stay in the city. I don’t want any place to suck, ok? I’m a firm believer that you can go anywhere and it will all just be one big adventure and you’ll meet all these wonderful people and do all these amazing things but I’ve been to Boston twice now and it sucked both times. I want to apologize to all the good people of Boston too, and assure you that I’m certain that I’m wrong about this and the only reason I think Boston sucks is because I haven’t met you yet. I think part of the problem might be that both times I’ve gone to Boston, it has been straight from New York City, and maybe it just sucks by comparison. I’m fully aware that saying that might even be worse than simply saying “Boston Sucks” but I’m trying to offer explanations, so as to soothe the masses in Boston. I’ve got to tell you though; Bob and I seriously talked about printing up “Boston Sucks” t-shirts at one point.
Anyway, when we rolled into town, we went to this Irish bar that Davis Comeau suggested we go to, and told them that he sent us. I think our Texas accents may have been a big part of the problem, and maybe the folks at the bar thought I said “Albert DeSalvo” instead of “Davis Comeau” but we didn’t exactly end up pounding rounds of Irish Car Bombs into the night at this motherfucker, ok? On top of that, we had no idea where we were going to stay, and it was looking like we’d be sleeping in the car because we’re both too cheap to even split a hotel room. At some point I suggested to Bob that we place an ad on craigslist which would explain that we were two filmmakers on the road looking for a place to stay for a couple of days, promising free admission to the screening, tons of memorabilia, and just a great time, in general. I specifically posted the ad in the “men seeking women” and “strictly plutonic” sections of the site, and assured Bob that we’d be hearing from hordes of hyper-sexed gay men, in no time.
2:02 AM – BOB
It’s late. Were driving from a bar to a dude’s house that we met on craigslist. The roads here are fucked. The signs are fucked. The layout of the city is fucked. If you wanna get riled up, drive in Boston. On top of that, there’s a fuck-ton of cops. Those two elements came together in a fearful moment of dread followed by a momentary panic as I was making a weird turn at one of Boston’s finer seven-way intersections and bounced across some sort of bump/curb/train track thing in a weird fashion. The cop was headed the other way, but he could pull a u-ey any minute, right? And did he see what surely appeared to all civilized folk in the vicinity to be a drunken driving maneuver? We didn’t know. But we did panic. “Ditch the car?” Chad asked. Let’s think: car full of drugs, Texas plates, beer in car, cops looming. Answer: yes. I swung the car over to an empty parking spot between two bigger cars and we bailed the fuck out. We strolled down the road a bit acting nonchalant. After a few blocks, and nerves calmed by time, we made our way back to the car and headed over to the craigslist dude’s house. His name was Jim, or James. We took to calling him Jim James.
Upon arrival at Jim James’s pad, everything was weird. It would be wrong to assume that Jim James was a gay man intent on raping us, gutting us and replacing our vital juices with gallon upon gallon of Jello™, but the circumstantial evidence was mounting.
2:12 AM CHAD
Had I written this journal on a day-to-day basis as planned, it probably would have been cool here to post some of the responses that Bob and I got from our craigslist advertisement. In reality though, this shit all happened back on about November 30th and it is now roughly February 8th of the next year, so I’m not going to go digging through my emails looking for the shit. You’ll have to make do with me assuring you that most of the replies were about dicks, and whether or not we sucked them. There was one guy, however, who rose above all the petty vulgarities and suggested that we could come crash at his place with no strings attached, though he did leave the door open for shenanigans if we decided that was the way shit was going to go down. His name was James.
We get over to James’ house and he lives in this really nice part of town and his “apartment” is like the third or fourth floor of a… I don’t even know what the hell you call this type of place; they don’t have them in Texas. It was like four houses stacked on top of each other with a stairwell running up the middle… one of those. We get up to his level, he lets us in and the when we walked through the doorway, the first thing I notice off to the left is that the living room is completely empty… no furniture, no pictures, no rugs, nothing. This was one of about four times in my life that I’ve walked into a situation and realized immediately that I’m likely to be killed. If you’ve seen Goodfellas, then you remember the part where Joe Pesci walks into the house with the old mobsters, thinking he is about to become a made-man and then he sees that the place is empty and almost has enough time to say “Oh No!” right before they blow his brains out. It was exactly that type of moment. I mean, I saw this shit and literally maneuvered myself away from Bob to where I felt like if there was some sort of attack, maybe at least one of us could react, fight back, or run while the other was being killed. Like I said, this is about the fourth time I’ve ever been in such a situation. Two of the other times were on drug deals, and I think I might have written about them in an old article that I pledge to post here in the journal sometime down the road on a slow news day (believe me, there are going to be a lot of slow news days coming up). There was one time though, that I’ve never told anyone about, so I’m going to go ahead and tell that story now before I carry on with this James in Boston situation.
Ok, about ten years ago, right around the time I started writing for Rank and Revue Magazine, I was online surfing yahoo chat and I run across this couple over on Riverside Drive who invite me over to come have a threesome with them. Now, I had pretty much grown out of threesomes involving men at that point in my life, but this was a really fine black girl and they swore that there would be no interaction between males… the girl just really liked getting fucked by two guys, or so the story went. I go over and meet them at a convenience store across the street from their apartments so we can all three make sure we’re comfortable with each other before we go to their place… this is all normal protocol when setting up threesomes over the internet, I assure you. It’s important that I mention this initial meet-up, because I think it lends credence to my theory that these two were planning to kill me, all along.
Anyway, I meet them at the store, and it’s a black girl like I said, with a white boyfriend. The funny thing is; they were a complete role reversal. She was a college student over at UT and was almost sorority-like in her speech and mannerisms while he was a ghetto-acting thug with a bad case of nigger-mouth. Not to be confused with trench-foot or pink-eye, nigger-mouth is an ailment that strikes one-in-four young Caucasians, causing them to insist on talking like a black person, and it bothers the shit out of me. In fact, I’m not ashamed to tell you that whenever I encounter this phenomenon, there is a little trigger in my brain that, the second I hear a word come out of the affected party’s mouth, it simply “switches off” and I never listen to or process a single fucking word they say for the rest of my life. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the way black people talk. In fact, I consider their command of the English language to be at the very least unique if not downright admirable. I don’t mind the way white people talk either… I’ve been talking like them for years. It’s just when a white person talks like a black person that I have an issue. The odd thing is, when a black person talks like a white person, it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I find it rather refreshing. Why is that, you figure?
Let’s not get hung up on semantics here, ok? The point is, I pass their initial inspection and am invited back over to the apartment. We get over there and all three walk in the door, and I can’t help but immediately notice that they have pulled up all of the carpet in every room, obviously in a bid to kill me without any of the troublesome bloodstains that are always getting people busted for murder on the TV shows. They tried to put me at ease by explaining that the carpet was all pulled up because of their dogs. You see, they had a whole bedroom full of pit bulls that they were going to chop me up and feed me to over time, in order to dispose of my body. We go back to their bedroom and begin watching Scary Movie 2… the one that starts off with James Woods spoofing The Exorcist. They started smoking crack, you know, to get themselves all amped up for the kill, but I respectfully declined because I’ve never smoked cocaine, only snorted it. Basically, I spent the next several hours trapped in their bedroom, trying to stay in their good graces so as we could either all fuck, or they at least would decide not to kill me. I was doing whatever it took to be charming… I even told homeboy that I was pretty sure I could get the magazine to publish some of the drawings that his friend had been mailing him from prison. The thing is; the issue of sex never came up. I mean, we were obviously not there to do anything of a sexual nature, so what else does that leave? I mean sure, maybe I just wasn’t their type, but the whole point of having an initial public meet-up before random internet sex is so that you can just tell the person right there on the spot not to waste their time or yours. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I was ninety-percent sure that these two intended to kill me, ok? But the girl was so fine; I was willing to risk my life for a ten-percent chance of fucking her. It actually got to the point where I had played out my own private screening of Forensic Files in my mind. In that particular episode, the police were able to go back and look at the archived conversations on my computer and that would lead them to the convenience store, and then eventually to the video surveillance footage of me and the last two people to see me alive. From there, it was simply a matter of sifting through dogshit to secure a conviction.
Anyway, obviously I escaped and went on to survive long enough to encounter this James in Boston situation, a decade later. Now, as I was saying about an hour ago… When Bob and I walked into James’ house, the bare-empty living room took what was already an awkward social situation and turned it into a potential double homicide. James ended up being a bit older than us, and not quite as in shape, so we weren’t in any danger of a bull-rush type situation, but that didn’t rule out treachery involving firearms, poisons, or sneak attacks in the darkness of night. Don’t think I didn’t have this in mind when I never drank a sip of the already-opened Heineken James gave me before I went to bed. Actually, since it was almost three in the morning, I was already so fucked up; I didn’t need a Heineken any more than James needed to drug me to make me pass out. I fell asleep on a couch within about ten minutes, leaving my life in Bob’s hands. The next morning when I woke up, Bob was curled up like a watchdog, sleeping on the floor next to my couch even though he had a bed available in another room. It was the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me. Incidentally, this might all seem like exaggeration and humor, with just a smidge of blatant homophobia mixed in, but when we woke up the next morning and did a thorough inspection of the premises, it became quite obvious that something was seriously amiss about our surroundings, so stay tuned for the next episode.
2:52 AM – BOB
I’ve seen enough war shows on the TV to be familiar with the divide and conquer technique. I know Chad secretly wanted me to sleep in the other room so his fantasies of being molested after his death could finally come to pass, but we still have screenings to attend. And I want to attend them not as a ghost. For a man who intended to murder us, Jim James was quite nice and cordial. So nice in fact, that he politely offered and re-offered to share his bed with me. There’s plenty of room, he insisted. No need to sleep on the hard floor, he pleaded. Have more booze. You have nice veins. Don’t bother with the beer, have some of this whiskey, he offered as he dug out a bottle from way back in an empty cupboard. My keen eye noticed that the half empty bottle had previously been opened and had bits of pills floating in the booze. Well, potentially, anyway. This is when I began to suspect that Jim James wanted not only to murder me, but to gay sex me as well. I’m not sure if the sex or the murder was to be first, but later I realized that he’d also intended to pack my corpse full of Jello™. Not to sound like a huge wuss or anything, but murder kinda scares me. Have you seen Auto Focus? The movie where Bob Crane gets his head caved in with a tripod while he sleeps? The shunned “group grope” got him killed, but good. Group grope or not, gay sex just disinterests me. Too much penis and not enough vagina for my tastes. And I don’t think it makes me a homophobe just cuz the idea of a couple of dudes rolling around all sweaty and stabbing each other with their penises is not a turn on for me. Hell, I don’t even get why hetero dudes get so riled up about lesbo sex porn. I like the gays and the lezzies just fine and all, but sex-wise, I’m keen on the idea of cute, naked, sexy girls. And if there’s a sexy naked gal having awesome sex with a penis (specifically, MY penis), all the better! That’s exciting! And if it’s porn with a hot gal having penis sex, at least I can imagine that it’s my penis and totally beat off to that. But, having never tried the gay sex, maybe I’m being closed minded about it. Actually, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Jim James never specifically offered gay sex, just a bed to sleep in alongside him. And I was too much of a pussy to take the gentleman up on his offer. Fingers crossed he doesn’t murder me for being rude. My apologies, Jim James.
Badass Film Tour 
