I don’t remember if I’ve said anything about this, but I’ve been working as a “Star Driver” lately, driving an actor (who shall remain nameless) to and from the set. I typically drop him/her off at the set or the lot, depending on where they’re shooting on the day, and then I take off and come back to pick him/her up at the end of the day to drive him/her home.

Stupid job, I know, but what are you gonna do — I’m trying to crack the Teamsters any way I can. This may or may not do it, but it’s a paycheck and I’m making Teamster contacts, so…

Anyway. Occasionally I stick around if s/he has a short work day instead of taking off, and that means lots of down-time while I’m waiting. Down-time can lead to trouble, as it did for me the other day.

Let’s paint the picture first. I’m hanging out by the honeywagon, which is parked next to the wardrobe trailer, and I’m sitting in the truck’s shade. Problem is, this shade is disappearing as time drags on and the sun climbs higher, and the shade on the seat of a nearby golf cart starts looking pretty good. It’s a cushioned seat, so comfier than the folding chair I’m in, and the golf cart has a roof so the moving sun isn’t an issue. So I climb into the golf cart.

The golf cart happens to be parked nose-to-nose with the wardrobe trailer, which is a big 53-foot box trailer normally towed by a big rig except the rig is parked somewhere else. The front of the trailer comes down to just about a foot above the body of the golf cart, then angles back toward the rest of the trailer — this is where the big rig would be if it were hooked up. You could just barely drive the golf cart under the nose of the trailer if it weren’t for the windshield and roof supports and roof and steering wheel and everything else that sits taller than the bottom of the trailer’s apron. (That’s called “foreshadowing.”)

So I’m sitting in the passenger seat of this golf cart, hanging out, enjoying the shade, and generally just killing time. I’m reading a book for awhile, and I’m bullshitting with other crew members for awhile, and I’m daydreaming and working out a solution for world peace for awhile. Time is passing. Slowly. And at some point I vaguely remember noticing and registering the fact that there was no key in the golf cart’s ignition.

This, to my mind, made the golf cart “safe.” I’m very careful around the golf carts and always conscious of the gas pedal and making sure I don’t step on it. I know it’ll never happen, but I always have this fear that I’m going to accidentally step on the gas and crash one of these stupid things. (More foreshadowing.)

So I’m sitting there. And sitting there. And sitting there. And at some point I went to change position, to shift my butt on the seat. I put my foot down and pushed against it to brace myself and move my fat ass–

And the golf cart shot forward. Into the trailer. Hard.

Crunching noises ensued. The windshield shattered and the crunching noises continued. My brain totally locked up with confusion:

What the fuck is happening? Why is the trailer moving? Holy shit, why is the windshield breaking? Holy shit, the golf cart is driving under the trailer and it won’t stop! Am I doing this? Holy shit, the trailer is getting closer! Holy shit, the golf cart won’t stop! Ack! Cue sparks flying out of my ears, etc…

Stuff like that. I finally got my knee to unlock so my foot would get off the gas pedal that I had obviously stepped on, and the cart finally stopped its relentless advance under the trailer. I was laid back in the seat — over the seat, almost — nearly horizontal, with my legs and most of my body sandwiched under the trailer on top of the golf cart. The nose of the trailer was about a foot from the nose of my face, and if I hadn’t finally stopped it may well have scraped off my face.

I don’t know how that thing ran without a key, but run it did. Like a frickin’ gazelle. A suicidal gazelle. I’m still trying to figure it out.

The golf cart was Fucked. Up. I folded that thing up like a pretzel. The windshield had shattered into a thousand pieces, the roof supports were totally bent back, the steering wheel had been torn off, the roof was peeled back like the top of a sardine can. Stick a fork in it, it’s done.

Me, I walked away relatively unscathed: two bloody gouges to my forearm and a big goose-egg bone bruise next to them, a nasty bruise and scratch to my bicep that I didn’t even know about until I took my shirt off at home that night. That was it. It could have been much, much worse, which is mind-boggling to me, considering that it was a friggin’ golf cart.

I felt like an idiot and I’m still apologizing left and right. I’m still waiting to see what the fallout from this little incident is going to be, but at the very least I’ve earned a new nickname. Now they’re calling me “Crash.”

I’ve been sober for 21 years now, and in that time I’ve taken only two drinks, both accidentally. The first time was at a New Year’s Eve party when I was about 10 years sober and I took a gulp from my Diet Pepsi can that tasted really wrong — because it was a can of beer. I had picked up someone else’s drink. Oops. It was an honest mistake and it didn’t really phase me and I was able to put it behind me without it being a threat to my sobriety.

Last night was the second drink and it’s having a little more of an impact. I was out to dinner with some old friends, one of whom got sober about a year behind me. At one point he said he had started drinking again and motioned to the drink in front of him as proof. I didn’t believe him, I thought he was making a bad joke. Beth assured me that he was telling the truth, but I didn’t believe her either, I thought she was in on it. I think someone said “try it” to prove they weren’t kidding, so I did. I hoisted the glass as Beth and my friend both told me again that they weren’t kidding, then I took a sip and swallowed it.

It slingshotted me back twenty-plus years.

The burn of the alcohol going down, that cool hit at the back of the throat as I took a breath after, the delicate numbness around the tongue… All those things were there and instantly familiar, as though it was just yesterday the last time I felt them. Time folded in on itself and then just stopped. For just a moment. And in that moment I was totally alone, just me and the drink going down and my whole being focused on those feelings.

It was a little bit scary, actually. And I got a little bit angry, just for a second. Angry at Beth for not being more convincing about “he’s not kidding,” angry at my friend for letting me take his drink. But I let it go. It wasn’t their fault I took the drink. They tried to tell me, I just didn’t listen. And how stupid was I to pick up a glass everyone was telling me had alcohol in it and drinking it to “prove” they were lying. Only one person fucked up there: me.

Even now, the next day, I can still feel that warm burn going down that I used to love so well. It’s still on my mind, in my head. I’m not going to let it threaten my sobriety — if anything, I’ll use it as a reminder of how easy it is to fall — but it had an impact on me. It brought back some old feelings and urges that I’m going to have to tamp back down again.

My own reactions and issues aside, I’m also worried about my friend. He says he’s okay, that he’s been drinking again for three years now and that he has it under control, that it’s not a problem. He says he quit drinking back in ’89 because of who he was then, what it meant to him then, and that he’s a different person now. Now, he can drink.

Well. I didn’t make a big thing about it because I didn’t want to make for an uncomfortable evening and I wanted to believe him that he’s fine. I hope that he is. But I know he’s going to be reading this, so I’ll say here what I didn’t say last night:

Ultimately, your sobriety is your own and you are the only person who can judge it. If what you say is true, then more power to you. I won’t judge you or look down on you whether you drink or not because you are my friend and I want the best for you, whatever that may be. But you have to know that I’m worried about you.

I don’t think I can say anything that you won’t see coming. It’s all there in the Big Book, you’ve heard it all in the meetings, you’ve probably said it to others yourself. You know.

All I can do it tell you that I’ve had the exact same thoughts as you: I’m older now, I can handle it. I was a stupid kid then, I’m different now. I’m a completely different person now, I have the maturity to drink responsibly. It was a phase, it was being young and stupid, it’ll be different now that I’m an adult. I’ve had the same thoughts, the same doubts, the same questions, the same temptation.

But the answer I keep clinging to for myself is this: If I’m really not an alcoholic, then why am I trying to find a way to drink? I can’t answer that. So I don’t drink.

I wish you the best, my friend. I’m here if and when you need me and I accept you as you are either way. But I’m worried for you.

Comments are closed because I’ve probably said too much already and I’m not interested in hearing what anyone from the peanut gallery might have to say. If you weren’t there then you don’t know.

Two gays whose blogs I read — I’ve never met them but they’re friends of a friend — got married recently, shortly after the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage and gave them and other gays in California the legal right to marry whoever the fuck they want. The guy performing their ceremony opened with the following statement:

“Dave and Alonso have been fake married on two other occasions and signed domestic partnership papers twice with increasing legal rights each time. But the marriage performed today is guaranteed to be legal for almost five months, hopefully longer, and will be recognized in three whole states — for now.”

While I’m really happy for them that they were able to finally do this, it makes me sad that they were also able to make that statement.

Inspired by Mike Reed over at Man About Murfreesboro, I went over to The Something Store and ponied up ten bucks for … something. That’s their deal: you send them $10 and they send you something. You have no idea what you’re getting until you open the package.

It’s a brilliant business idea. You buy up surplus merchandise from various manufacturers for what I imagine would be pennies on the dollar, then you turn around and sell it to schmucks like me and Mike who are goofy enough to buy into a marketing campaign that makes it sound fun to throw ten dollars into a hole in the internet. We are living examples of the old saying that “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Mike got a pair of sunglasses, which I think was kind of a let-down for him. But me? I scored. I got this:

It’s a Katita Wind Up Gear Box from Kikkerland, and I think it’s totally cool. You wind it up and it sort of dances around frenetically for a few seconds until it runs down. That’s it, the end, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when I ordered … something … without knowing what I’d get. It’s goofy and cool and totally worth the ten bucks I paid for it.

Oh, and that bit about a sucker being born every minute? Include me right out on that. I checked the price for this little baby on the Kikkerland website. Guess how much? Twelve bucks. I paid ten. Who’s the sucker now, somethingstore.com???

Today is me and Beth’s 13th wedding anniversary. To celebrate the day, Beth is insisting that I refer to her as “Bride” all day long. I’ve agreed to this as long as she calls me “Master.” So far nobody’s getting what they want.

So… How about a story from our marriage? Between us we’ve already told a few: Beth told about her “Fuck you” response to my proposal in Will You Marry Me in her old journal. I told the story of losing my wedding ring on our honeymoon in the Ringwrecked entry of my old journal. In It Seemed It Was About Time Beth talks about finally getting around to taking my name after 10 years. And Beth tells what may be the best story, of our song and the night we fell in love in Have I Told You Lately? But this time around let’s talk pictures.

Look around most couples’ houses and you’ll find at least one wedding photo somewhere. Maybe off in a corner or on a stairway wall or in the guest room, but you’ll find a picture somewhere of the bride and groom back in the days when they were 10 pounds lighter and wore lavender ruffles and had big hair and thought looking like total dorks looked totally cool. But not in our house. There is absolutely no photographic evidence that we were ever married. Oh, there are wedding pictures, they just aren’t here.

Beth’s dad sprung for a very nice, very lavish wedding for us, and everything was beautiful. He spared no expense, and he even hired a photographer and pre-paid the whole picture package. He made sure we’d have more wedding photos than we’d know what to do with, and extras to pass out to friend and family and even strangers. We had the super deluxe wedding package all wrapped up.

The photographer sent over two books of proofs after the wedding. All Beth and I had to do was go through them and pick which ones we wanted him to print. It sounds simple when you say it like that — “all we had to do was pick” — but that task had layers of complexity. Beth’s parents are divorced. Beth’s father and step-mother also divorced. My parents are divorced. There were grandparents from both sides. And we somehow got it in our heads that we needed to create a unique collections of photos for each of them. And then we decided the best way to do that was to send the proofs to each person and let them list which pictures they wanted in their own personal book, then send the proofs along to the next person for them to make their list, and so on and so on and so on.

This still hasn’t happened. After thirteen years.

Every time we drive past our photographer’s office — which is frequently, since it’s about two miles from our house — I point to it and say to Beth “Hey, let’s get our wedding pictures.” Beth laughs (or sometimes ignores me — more of the latter lately) but we don’t stop. We don’t order the pictures. We leave them hanging out there.

I think we’re afraid of them. Superstitious. We’ve been married for so long without the pictures now that we feel like getting them might jinx us — especially now, in Year 13. We’re both halfway convinced that if we actually did bite the bullet and went in and got those pictures, we’d be divorced within the year. So we have no photographic evidence of our wedding. First by laziness, now by choice.

Thirteen years together. We must be doing something right — despite all evidence to the contrary. Or lack thereof…

This is my second Father’s Day without a father. It still seems weird and wrong even now, a year and a half since his death. From time to time I still sit up with a start thinking, “Oh hell, I have to call Dad!” just like I used to because I wasn’t very good about keeping in touch. Then I remember that those days are gone.

I don’t feel sad that he’s gone, really, it’s sort of a sense of… Emptiness? Misplacement? I feel sort of un-anchored without my dad in the world. I miss him. I’ve been thinking of having a memorial tattoo done for him. I have a vague idea for a design, I know where I want it, I think I know who’s going to do it. I’ll probably have it done on or around his birthday at the end of July.

This is me and my Dad the last time I saw him in July of 2006. I think I knew then that it would be the last time. I think that’s why I brought my camera with me.

With my dad gone Father’s Day is now about just me, and I celebrated it with my family. Beth and Zoe gave me a motorcycle helmet I’d been wanting, and Zoe gave me a copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I had given her a copy of Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull recently and we talked about how reading it when I was her age had led me to Illusions and how much that meant to me when I was younger. So it was a really good gift. I’m halfway through it already and it’s holding up well.

Then Zoe and I went out for a ride along the coast. We took this picture in Malibu.

Phase 2.5 of my mission to change careers and get into working in studio transportation is under way … sort of. I’m on a little bit of a … detour? No, not quite a detour — it’s more like an access road paralleling the main highway. I’m traveling right next to the road I want to be on but there’s a fence separating me from it, but a few miles up the road there might be an on-ramp.

I’ve landed a long-term driving position on a major production, working with exactly the people I want to get in with — only I’m not on the call sheet, so it’s not a union position. So I’m on a union show — sort of — but I’m not getting my days toward union membership. I know I’m being cryptic and weird about it but I can’t go into any more detail about it than that.

The cool thing about it is that I’m meeting people who can (and I think/hope will) help me down the road get to where I want to be. It’s a stupid easy gig, too, and the paycheck beats Unemployment. The downside is that what I’m doing is a little impersonal, almost “don’t make eye contact with the bigwigs,” but the relationships I’m making more than make up for it. On the one hand I feel like I’m sort of just marking time doing this and not making any progress, but it’s putting me in the right environment to pay off later. A big part of getting lucky is being where the luck is.

Here’s a couple pictures from the set. This is one of the things I’ve always liked about working in production — going to places you’d never see under normal circumstances and getting paid to be there.

Phase Two of my mission to change careers and get into working in studio transportation is under way. I just finished my first day as a driver on a low budget non-union feature shooting in and around L.A. It’s a tiny little show being shot very much on the cheap and there’s only two guys in the transportation department — me and the guy who hired me — but it’s a start.

One thing that hasn’t changed since my grip days is the long hours. My call time was 9:00 a.m. this morning and I didn’t finish my day and head for home until about 12:30 a.m. tonight. Something I hadn’t really thought much about as I planned this move into transportation but was blatantly called to my attention tonight is that grips may be among the last to leave the set after wrap is called, but transportation leaves last, after everyone else — and often drives every else’s trucks somewhere else before they’re done.

I’m tired, I’m beat, and I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet. It’s good to be back.

After getting laid off from yet another software training gig and having my years of experience pissed on by potential employers because I don’t happen to have the latest set of credentials that say I’ve spent X number of hours in a classroom learning what I taught myself how to do on my own… Well, after all that I decided “Fuck It” and I’m changing careers. So I’ve been back to school. Truck driving school.

The game plan is not, however, to be a long-haul trucker. I may do that if it comes to it, but the ultimate goal is Teamsters Local 399. These are the guys who drive for the TV and movie studios and that’s what I want to do. I’ve held a lot of jobs over the course of my life, and the most fun I had was when I worked on movies as a grip. I think I’m too old and my knees are too shot to try to get back in as a grip, but I think coming back in as a driver is an achievable goal. So… back to school.

I “graduated” yesterday after taking my driving test at the DMV. I now hold a Class A commercial drivers license with endorsements for air brakes, doubles and triples, tankers, and hazmat. That means I can drive anything on the road but a bus, and I’m going back in two weeks with a shuttle van to test for my passenger endorsement so I can do that too.

It’s not easy getting into 399. Hiring is done off their Industry Experience Roster, which has three different levels of seniority: Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3, and jobs are filled from the roster in that order. To get on the roster on Group 3, I’ll need to work 30 days on union shows in a one-year period. That only happens when the town is so busy that everyone’s working and they can’t fill the jobs from Groups 1, 2, or 3. They call that being “in permits,” and that’s when non-union people like me get our shot — when we’re “permitted” to work on 399’s shows without actually being members.

So I’m gambling a little bit in doing this. The writer’s strike crippled Hollywood over the year-end, and SAG’s contract is about to come up for renewal and there’s some fear that the actors will strike too. As a result of that, production is at a low ebb right now — nothing new is in production because nobody wants a strike to shut down their show. I’m gambling that production will spike when the actors sign and that things are going to get really busy — busy enough for me to get my shot to get in, and start a new career as a driver.

Wish me luck.

Driving in the car with Zoe this evening, one of those robotic, generic, breathy, wanna-be R&B songs that pass for music these days came on the radio. The following conversation ensued:

Zoe: Oh, that’s my jam.
Me: You’re twelve. You don’t have a jam.