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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 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 