Los Angeles Auto Show, 2008

Ah, conventions: Comic book conventions, Sci-Fi conventions, horror conventions, video game conventions, adult video conventions.

The LA Auto Show, despite its surname, is a convention just the same. The same young men roam its halls, carrying with them the same embarrassing library of product knowledge. Although it is admittedly less of a cultural taboo to be a 'car guy' than a 'comic book guy,' the young men feel the same sense of comfort and brotherhood once inside: "These people understand me. They understand why I would be thrilled - literally thrilled - to see a Gumpert Apollo or a Spyker C8 sitting on the other side of a velvet rope. They understand how I would have heard of these cars in the first place, let alone memorized their horsepower figures or 0-60 times."

I know how these young men feel because I am one of them. I have an embarrassing library of car knowledge. I read an embarrassing number of auto publications. I'm filled with the same young wonder at seeing a Lamborghini or an Aston-Martin - even if, parked in their booths, they are as far away from any actual driving as they could be.

But the Auto Show might be the one convention that non-devotees could enjoy. Families can comparison shop for their next crossover without having to bear the heat of the auto strip mall or the pushy tactics of its salesmen. Girlfriends, dragged around the convention by their car guys, can show momentary glimpses of interest in auto-minutae (example: the Gumpert Apollo generates enough downforce it can drive upside-down).

And yet, the LA Auto Show 2008 is perhaps more a year for window shopping than any in recent memory. The Detroit automakers especially don't seem optimistic that a visit to the show and a stationary test drive will convince many to buy their cars. Chrysler hasn't even invested in overhead lights. Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler sit in darkness across the aisle from an Audi display that has never looked more healthy in brilliant, bright white. General Motors' lone LA debut is a Pontiac econobox that started life as a Chevy Aveo before it was badge-engineered, slapped with a coat of Excitement Red and stuck anonymously in the hall. Ford alone shows signs of a beating heart, with a refreshed Fusion Hybrid that beats the foreign competition in mileage and (surprise) styling and a brand-new Mustang which, if you look hard enough, actually does look brand-new.

As always, the true excitement of the show lies with the real window shopping: Ferrari, Lotus, Bentley, Aston-Martin, Lamborghini. Many an auto journalist waited their turn to sit down in the plush leather of these glorious machines, to run through the gears with their right hands, make rumbling sounds with their lips and pretend.

And that's the point of conventions. To turn everyone - families, girlfriends, old men and young men alike back into kids just at the sight of something so purposely imposing and fast and cool. So that they can forget about the situation in Detroit and the one in Washington DC and just sit and stare with all of the other car guys.


Don't Miss:

• The Ferrari California, making its CA debut.
• The interior of the Volvo XC60, without a doubt the most creative and beautiful interior of the entire show.
• The Chevy Volt
• The Nissan 370Z, which has so much more presence in person than in photos.
• The Mini-E, BMW's first stab at an electric car. Leasing starts at $850 per month (!).

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

The Savior of GM - Bob Boniface

Every day, Bob Boniface is asked the same question: "Will your car save General Motors."

Young people, old people, people with beards, Americans and the foreign press - all of them want to know if the Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid car that Boniface designed inside and out, will rescue the most American company this side of US Steel. "What's good for General Motors," as the company used to preach, "is good for the United States."

Well, the credit crunch has been bad for both and uncertainty at the pump has been worse. The special press preview of the 2010 Chevrolet Volt came on a day of record humility for Detroit's Big Three, with the millionaire CEOs of Ford, Chrysler and GM seated at the same table, petitioning Congress for alms. And the competition has showed no signs of retreat: the Volt was displayed on the eve of the 2008 Los Angeles Auto Show, where Toyota is expected to debut their third-generation Prius hybrid. Worst of all, the pile of money GM has pushed towards R&D for the Volt might have been better spent on keeping the lights on and the plants open: With gas prices as cheap as they were two years ago, nobody really knows if there is a market for a $40,000 Chevy compact, even if it is one that can travel 40 miles without burning any gasoline.

And yet they all came - young people, old people, people with beards, journalists, fathers ready to show their sons a piece of American history, just like the Bell X-1 or the Farnsworth TV - all of them ignoring the free food and booze, all of them crowded around the car, all of them asking the same question.

Boniface's reply is simple: It has to.


Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

Travels With Edna

It didn't work. That's the conclusion of this story.

At the very least, Phase One of the plan was a failure. Phase Two was the travel phase, the phase that was supposed to be slightly humiliating. Phase One was about a girl; Phase Two was about a car.

The goal of the second phase was to drive across the country, from Detroit to LA; from The Middle West across the pressurized airlock of The Middle and back to the West Coast. To reconnect with an America I had avoided since I settled in California. To push the reset button on my time in Los Angeles. To up-rock and re-invigorate. And to ponder the results of Phase One. Which, as I just said, didn't work.

My traveling companion for Phase Two was a cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle Convertible, which in the interest of personifying I named Edna.

I had hope that Edna would spring back to youth when we got to LA. But in pre-dawn Detroit, with her black shawl wrapped around her torso, her two round opera glasses dim in the pre-dawn fog, Edna seemed lethargic and happy to stay in the right lane.

But, Edna had the kind of haunches you would find on a Porsche. Her flower-petal wheels smoothed the road and her stereo was a dedicated fan of late-90s underground hip-hop, which happened to be my favorite era of underground hip-hop, too.

Inside, the only clue Edna was a VW Beetle was her vast dashboard, which had enough space to host a Nativity Scene. Outside, she was an old woman, a patron of the arts. As odd of a traveling companion as if I was actually traveling with a woman and not a car.

_______

Before the girl left, before she ran out of the car at the end of Phase One, when there was still hope, she said, "I hope you know I'm going to write about this."

I said, "Me, too."

As I see it, all the potential for revenge offered by prose was acknowledged, accepted and forgiven there and then.

_______

Gas stations, I saw immediately, would pose a problem.

Our maiden fill-up came before seven on an overcast Detroit morning. I pulled next to what I thought would be a friendly Astro-Van. I didn't notice its owner until I popped the cap and walked over to swipe my card. He stood in a Red Wings jersey, work boots and shorts in the 41 degrees chill, pumping the shit out of some gas while all the time growing facial hair and thinking about construction.

I wished I had pulled up listening to something more masculine than "Moonlight Mile," but I knew that no amount of Rolling Stones could wash the "fag" from my car.

But the Astro-Van Man didn't seem to notice me at all. He talked to his passenger, excited about the prospect of paying $2.10 for a gallon of gas. He didn't comment on the cream-puff color of my car, nor did he break down the buyer profiles for the 2004 VW Beetle Convertible, pointing out that they skewed female. He didn't guess (correctly) that I live in Hollywood. He just pumped his gas and drove off.

Maybe it was just, you know, a fucking car.

_______

Things I Will Never Get To Tell The Girl:

— That I love her or even 'like her' like her. All of that stuff isn't true anyways.
— That, regardless of the above, all it took to get me to fly across the country to see her was for her to ask me. Once. On Facebook.
— That I spent one full month preparing for the trip: Packing, a nightly regiment of push-ups and sit-ups, flossing, lining up a few anecdotes to tell in case of conversational lulls, quitting my job…
— That I was not staying for just one night. That I planned a second phase of my trip, a cross-country road trip in my mother's convertible, so that my response to, “I wish you could stay,” after the first romantic night could be, “I will.”

_______

You come to realize that there's a fine line between creepy and charming. Two people can plant the same platitudes or show up at the same door with the same roses and there's only one way to guess the reaction they'll get. The only difference between the two is attraction: If the object of your affection thinks you're attractive, your romantic pursuit will be charming. If they don't, it'll be one or two surprises away from stalking.

I've thought about this. Readers unnerved after reading the above list can rest assured: I'm attractive. She told me so herself.

_______

Michigan held onto her last breath of autumn for Edna and me. The hunters and their sons trucked along the state's highways and filled up at its gas stations.

As before, I looked at their Carhartt and their mustaches and expected a fight. What I got was all downward looks and indifference. The same as if I had been driving a Ferrari or an F-150.

Their wives, though, would look at the car and smile. And I didn't blame them for it. Edna made me smile. It was a preposterous car, an effeminate marshmallow, a soft joke that certainly made me smile every time I turned the key. No, I didn't blame them for smiling.

_______

The girl wanted adventure. That was the reason I wanted the girl.

She sent me a note a week before the trip challenging me to show her something on campus she had never seen before. That set me on fire, her formal invitation to a romantic contest. I told her I would show her three.

_______

You wake up, realizing that you've spent the last 60 miles behind a tractor-trailer going five under. The road does that—the drive gets in the way of your thoughts, your thoughts make you forget the drive. As you go on, these thoughts become more and more fragmented. There are long stretches where only blank memories are created.

So you clear out the old fast food to make way for the new fast food, you signal for the left lane and move on. You drive away from it all.

_______

The first adventure was on the outside of town. At the end of the 90s, an eccentric millionaire commissioned a sculpture of a spaceship in the middle of a manicured field accessible only by a hike through the woods. Apparently, the millionaire and his wife rode horses to the spaceship pavilion once a year to have drinks with the local wine club. On previous trips, I've been worried that I'd venture there on that same day, but it was the end of October and the only people drinking wine under the stars that night would be trespassers.

I cracked a glow stick to mark our path through the woods. The girl held my hand and we crossed the clearing to the ship. Everything was going so well.

_______

I planned to feel more connected over the drive. But the road divides and separates and pushes you away more than it connects. The only time you feel connected is at gas stations and fast food restaurants.

_______

The second was the roof of the School of Music, a bunker in the middle of the wilderness. To climb to the top, we had to sneak around two levels of floor-to-ceiling windows and a dozen music comp students working late. We went up two rickety staircases and over one concrete ledge before getting to the roof. I carried a bottle of Spanish wine in my jacket. And so we drank the bottle, sitting under the stars, before climbing down unseen.

_______

I'm sure this girl has a side, too. I'm sure she shared it with her friends (some of whom used to be my friends). I'm sure that if she told it to you it would be compelling and convincing. But I was the one who was rejected. That has to be worth something.

_______

I didn't think it could get any better. I was falling in love with me.

The third was at the Museum of Natural History. My friend gave me two keys to the back door, so the girl and I snuck in. It was late by that point, all the curators were long at home, with only the research students and the night watchman inside. We ran through the main exhibit hall, revealing the large Tyrannosaurus skeleton with the light from our cell phones. We hid at the slightest sound, spending long moments huddled together among the artifacts. It didn't matter if the sound was researcher or night watchman, or if they even had a night watchman. It didn't matter. I was scared and I was brave.

And then it got better.

She wanted to drive, so we took Edna down for a moonlit drive by the riverside, putting the top down in the still weather. We talked about politics and tried not to crash from all of the wine and revelry.

And then it got better.

Somehow, the night's adventures left us enough time for last call at the best bar in town. We sat at the counter and talked about how rare it was to find someone truly special. In the warm light, the girl never looked better. As we left, I felt a sense of triumph. As if I had given that last full measure of devotion. That everything I could do had been done and had been done well. It felt like victory.

_______

It was getting late and Edna and I were both getting tired. Nebraska was as flat and sleepy at midnight as it was at noon, but at least the cows were grazing in the middle of the day.

_______

The girl and I drove to our last stop, the parking lot in front of her apartment. We kept talking—about her ex-boyfriend (a good friend of mine) and her parents and her insecurities and doubts. We were connecting, more than ever.

It was getting late. The digital clock above the dashboard read 3:46. The time had come—if I could travel halfway across the country, I could at least ask if I could go inside. So I did.

Her response was an unyielding, "No."

I was hit hard, confused. I said that I thought I had done everything right. She said, "Right for what?" Of course, I didn't have a real answer for that. She said, "There's never been anything physical between us." That, I knew.

At this point, I was drunk and tired. I no longer card about sleeping with her; I just wanted to sleep. I asked if I could just come in and crash. She responded, "We both know you have other places you could stay."

She said something about how she still wanted me in her life, that she still wanted to be friends. I remember thinking, "If you thought tonight was just me being a friend to you, of course you would still want me as a friend. Anyone would." She thought I could still take her headshots, that we could still see each other when she came out to Los Angeles. I told her that if she came back to Los Angeles, I wouldn't call her. She got out of the car and ran back to her house. I remember hoping she was crying.

And that was it. I didn't want to wake anyone up at four a.m., so I drove an hour to my family's lake cottage before realizing that I didn't have the key. So I slept in the car.

_______

Back in Nebraska, I was falling asleep at the wheel. Even Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were having trouble keeping me awake. It just wasn't working. I had to pull over and the highway rest area looked like the only place.

At least, I thought, this whole mess would make for a good story. So I turned the warm air to full and switched on the heated seats. The heat would escape from the canvas top in a few hours and the chattering of my teeth would eventually wake me up, but at least, with Edna, I knew I always had a place I could stay.

Bring the Noise

Exhibit A:

The HideAway
Wherein a studio executive, overwhelmed by a budget billowing out of control, his hope of ever making the money back in ticket sales extinguished, stands up, draws the shades in his office, turns off his headset, walks back to his desk and opens the bottom drawer. He pulls out a square of beige fabric, unfolds and unzips it. He crawls inside, bringing his briefcase with him. He pulls the cover over his head and down to his feet, kneeling to the ground and zippering the cover in two disjointed motions.

Outside of the cover, he is a beige burial mound, its contents long since dead. Or he is a machine gun pillbox, its contents camouflaged for greater impact.

Inside of the cover, he is not in an office, corner or otherwise. He is not on set, on the lot, or in a building. He is also not in the middle of the Palm Springs desert, nor on the top of a mountain in Griffith Park. He is nowhere near Los Angeles; he is simply under a cover.

Outside, he is cowering in fear.

Inside, he is safe; he is warm; he is hiding.

This is a real product.

Exhibit B:

The 101, The 10, The 110, The 405
Whereupon many studio executives, not to mention gardeners and failed musicians and production assistants, sit every day.

This is a mischaracterization—they don't go there to sit. They go there, maybe a little late, but not by much, to drive at maybe, maybe 65 ("Can we please do at least 50? How about 45? Any takers? Please?"). They end up barely cresting double digits. They end up yelling and swearing and burning gas, then burning the brake, then burning gas. Or they sink into their car seats, admitting defeat, and rely on NPR droning to tranquilize them.

What they all do is blame it on the city: "Well, that's just L - A," with Los Angeles getting a prefix of varying vulgarity (crazy, fucking, [racial slur], etc. etc.). Any cache the city builds before breakfast with its blue skies and palm trees is blown before work on the freeways. Angelenos park and lock their cars, walk 30 healthy paces to their desks, late, miserable, and wanting only escape.

Whereupon the studio executives will go into their offices, walk over to their desks, and take out squares of beige fabric…

Exhibit C: 

The F-Yeah Fest
Wherein 40-odd bands got together at the (violent) last throes of August to do something very honest—to make noise.

If mothers and grouchy neighbors and middle school music teachers are to be believed, noise is the antithesis of music. It also can be the antithesis of organization and structure, so it was no small irony that the festival was so well-organized, with noise bands playing next door to comedy acts and DJs and boyfriend–girlfriend two–pieces all on a block of Sunset far removed from the more famous (and now more corporate and tourist-y and boring) rock clubs in Hollywood.

But this section of Sunset was to make its own fame. Noise, understandably, has had trouble establishing itself as a viable music genre. Certainly there was an element of the college radio subset that saved their pennies for the Merzbox, but it wasn't until the F-Yeah Fest that the popular youth culture showed their support for Noise music.

They were wrapped around the corner of the Echoplex and down the block, hipsters waiting in line for Japanther and for Fucked Up and for No Age.

Los Angeles wanted to hear Noise.

___________

I remember a thought I had upon first visiting L.A. with my friend Alex. We hit the midday rush on Santa Monica Blvd. but, as tourists, the traffic didn't bother the two of us. It must have been a Bentley Continental GT convertible that passed us going Eastbound (but who cares about specifics, right?) that made me think, "L.A. must be the best place in the world to live if you're rich and the worst place if you aren't."

Somehow, it wasn't until last week, after almost a year spent struggling in Los Angeles, that I remembered having this thought. Maybe I couldn't have known how right I was until I found out for myself: It isn't much fun to be young and poor in Los Angeles.

It's the internships that pay less than unemployment, the $12 hamburgers, the Bluetooth headsets we all now have to buy to talk on the phone in our cars and the $200 fines if we don't and, oh yeah, the shockwave traffic jams to greet us when we just want to go home and drink enough cheap beer to get us through the night.

And we wake to waves of financial uncertainty. And we try to keep from looking off into the valley to avoid a glimpse of humanity that resembles aTron-era computer print-off rather than a sea; 256k colors of urban sprawl and overcrowding. The competition stretches for miles.

There are, of course, glimpses of success, of standing out in a city 45 miles wide. There are Sunday afternoons spent on the roof, watching sunsets and palm trees. We are, after all, living in paradise.

And we all are, when we ignore the competition, on the same team. In a way, the rabid social networking that makes L.A. so infamous, the let's-be-friends-so-I-can-take-advantage-of-you-later kind, is what ties the city together. Angelenos are united in the goal of one day, beating L.A. Of being famous or wealthy or content enough not to care about the price tags or the freeways. The goal, in other words, is survival—together.

The only way to survive is to come to terms with reality. With those that are skinnier and wealthier and happier. With the smog and the earthquakes and the fires and the traffic. To stand and be swallowed by the wave.

To turn the volume up and make the Noise even louder.

And so the young and poor of Los Angeles crowded the F-Yeah Fest not necessarily to illuminate the inequities of life or to rally against them, as with previous movements. No, they stood in line to accept them. To react to the overwhelming exterior with something truly honest and paralyzing: Noise. And it was loud—as loud as the kids of L.A. were brave to listen to it.

After all, the alternative would have been to escape. To face the realities of the city and respond with a beige cover, pulled from a desk, with room for a briefcase.


Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/bring-the-noise

Going On A Holiday - Deb Olin Unferth

I cannot tell you how many people I know who detest Dave Eggers for his self-indulgent meta-prose and presumed self-righteousness. And I cannot tell you how many more hate him for showing up early to the publishing party and ruining it for everyone else. The jig is up; now any author who sways too far towards the parenthetical is accused of being the next Eggers.

And if this were not annoying enough for the young and the bitter to boycott Eggers' website or magazine or publishing company or national chain of tutoring centers, there remains the fact that Eggers has made enough money from his writing to support a mini-empire that comprises a website, three magazines, and a publishing house.

The latest author in the “McSweeney’s Rectangulars” line of original fiction is Deb Olin Unferth, a creative writing professor at the University of Kansas.Vacation is her first novel. It begins with an opening salvo of despair and depression so thick that escape appears unlikely, no matter how many reasonable pages lay ahead. You will find characters who don't know why they do what they do, characters who have muddled motivations not for lack of writing skill or story construction from Unferth, but because you just can'texplain neuroses or obsessions. The only thing you can do is fog your prose with loneliness, and Unferth wields a mighty fog machine.

It is loneliness (and despair, and confusion) that holds the wife of Vacation's main character, Meyers, on the trail of a man she doesn't know, tracing his steps through the city for long hours. And it is confusion (and anger, of course) that drives Meyers to follow this same man down to the coast of Nicaragua in a vacation that is as much about vengeance as it is about understanding. Sure, the book is about greater things: The tedium of obligatory love in a marriage, the paradoxical necessity of that same love, the joy of travel, the comfort of plans (even illogical ones), dolphins, secrets and natural disasters. But the real star is the prose.

An example (Meyers has just arrived in Nicaragua and is sending his estranged wife an email):

My dearest wife, he began again, with a slight shake in his hand.
        It is beautiful here, somewhat like Florida but shaped differently, more squat than long. Splotchlike. Imagine ink spill. Water spot. Broke yolk. I did have fine eggs for breakfast.
        Having a good. Thinking of. Sending you. Farewell from. Warm wish. Weather.
        Deleted.

Or this passage (explaining why the man Meyers' wife follows moved from the city back to his family, leaving her somehow more alone than before):

Why did he do that?
    In order to stand by and take advantage of the rights bequeathed to him by the court: ninety-six hours divided in two and renewed monthly to visit with the product of his strife, a very small child, whom he first bundled in a blanket and carried home in the car, later picked up from the floor where she sat sucking her arm, and later led out by the hand.

Vacation does not feel conversational, as if it flowed to the page in one feverous night. It feels like the product of endless refinement, of nights instead spent watching the cursor retrace its steps to begin again, sharper and more focused this time. Unferth has created a book of sentences just substantial enough to stick to one's ribs while still sufficiently sharp and poignant to stab between them repeatedly.

It is in this style that Unferth has found something special, something unique, of a cast sharing nothing (not even narrative perspective) in common save for their emptiness. Meyers, then, is the perfect hero for the book. A man with a plan; a man who knows of a path out of the hopelessness.

And, in that sense, Unferth is a hero as well. She tactfully and selflessly avoids the criticisms commonly levelled at Eggers while still pulling off the same trick: She has shown up early to the party with a book's worth of undeniably unique prose. All there is left to do is to sit back and wait for the imitators.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/going-on-a-holiday

Magic

We had all of the elements of a great magic trick. Let's see: One large stage umbrella, five LED lights, tripod, camera, lens cards, two lovely assistants and, of course, one able magician.

We also had one very difficult location: A mountain overlook above the San Fernando Valley, the lights of the grid finally turning on. But the nighttime sky was black; the distant mountains at the edge of the grid, counterpart to our own, were barely visible.

The wind was picking up. The magician, David, a man who would soon become a close friend, fought to keep the umbrella afloat.

I called him a few days before, trying to get a guest invitation to the Magic Castle, the real-life haunted mansion of the Hollywood Hills. Somehow, I thought that a strictly-exclusive, hundred-year-old mansion filled with magic shows and artifacts and secret passages would be a great spot for a first date. No, that idea didn't seem at all absurd.

The only way inside the Castle was to be invited. And the only person who could invite me was holding an umbrella weighed down with the five magnetic LED lights, his right hand cupping a small pool of water, ready to release on the count of one … two…

When I saw David for the first time, this trick was the one to stand out as completely his, a product of four years of imagination and practice. He began with an old theatre trick, his audience tasked with creating the sound of a rainstorm, building from a soft patter of the hands to a loud drumming on the knees.

But sound can only take you so far. So David rolled up his sleeves, rubbed his hands together and produced rain - water first dripping out of one hand, then the other, into a black vase that (of course) held a rose a moment later. The audience turned their drumming into applause.

It's the kind of trick that would be as effective at a Halftime show as it would be in a living room. And it's only showy in the sense that magic itself, the idea of pulling something out of thin air, is showy. But there are no Bengal Tigers or puffy chest hair or explosions or magic declarations. The "show" is that David can make water pour from his bare hands. That's enough.

Three days prior to the photo shoot, a very well-known street magician offered to purchase David's rain trick. The other magician would get the secret behind the trick and the right to perform it as his own and David would get a pile of money and the right to remain silent. The famous magician would stay famous. David would have another four years to go back to the drawing board.

So David had an unbearable decision to make. I've thought about it, and I don't know if any other kind of performer, entertainer, or artist has to make such a decision. A painter can sell her paintings, but the buyers usually don't want to sign their own name in the lower right. A great performance might inspire an actor, but very few cruise the local theatre scene and try to buy them permanently.

There is an art to performing a magic act, that much is undeniable, and it is most assuredly a performance art, but it is a performance that ideally cannot be duplicated by any other magician. If the performance is airtight, no other magician can figure out the secret. The secret, then, is what separates a magician's performance from that of an actor.

The secret also serves as protection. But David was worried about this as well. If the popular magician figured out how to do the rain trick, there wouldn't be much to stop him from performing it as his own.

A few months ago, David performed 'Rain' in front of about 1,000 magicians at an annual conference. The magic community, David told me, polices itself. If a magician performs a trick that isn't theirs, they'll be shunned, forced to do magic for birthdays and bar mitzvahs. If one thing will allow David to keep his trick, it would be the power of live witnesses.

That, of course, and the photographic evidence we were creating on the side of the mountain. David released his hand and the water came falling down, illuminated by the lights in the umbrella and the lights of the city below. I set up my camera and tripod, guessing at the focus and spraying the shutter, hoping for the best.

The first images were a blurry mess. But Liam and Lily, my two lovely assistants, kept pouring on the water and the light again and again. Ten-and-a-half frames per second. Compact Flash cards filled in six seconds. And David in the middle of it all, standing on the side of the mountain, resolute.

I thought of David, faced with the decision between staying the course and quite literally selling out. Either choice a gamble; one on the quality of his trick to make him a success, the other on the quality of his imagination to come up with new illusions. Either way, his path to becoming a famous magician himself would not be easy. But if he kept 'Rain', he would have at least one companion to call his own.

So David called up the well-known magician and politely declined. The true magician, I suppose, never reveals his secrets.

I Spy A Celebrity

The first question they ask you is always the same: "Who have you seen?"

As if my time living in Los Angeles wasn't complete until I locked eyes with at least one celebrity. As if I collected star maps. As if I watched TMZ. As if I waited just outside the gates, standing with the other insects, for a profile, or maybe just a silhouette, in the backseat of a black SUV, driving away.

I've been here for six months, and the only celebrities I've seen are what’s-his-name, tip-of-the-tongue, and might-have-beens.

I've seen that guy from Boston Public. You know the one I'm talking about—that one with the hair. He was at an outdoor mall. But it doesn't really count because I didn't really see him, someone else recognized him, stopped him mid-stride and asked if he really was the guy from Boston Public. The one whose name I can't remember.

But this morning, I saw a real one. A big one. One you would know.

Celebrity sightings have inspired people to create their own celebrity blogs to blog about celebrities, and finally become celebrities so they can blog about themselves blogging about celebrities. This happens all of the time. It's like writing a sad poem after the death of a grandparent. Everybody does it.

My friend BJ was leaving town last night after a summer in LA as an intern for a celebrity director. I offered to drive him to the airport this morning before work—one of those tipsy favors you're willing to offer at a quarter after midnight. Usually, you're still just as willing at 7 a.m., but by then you've realized that, for instance, a trip to the airport also necessitates a night on a mattress in Crenshaw, a morning spent in traffic, and a bit of creativity: some creative toothpaste (Wrigley's chewing gum), a creative shower (Banana Republic cologne) and, finally, some creative wardrobe (yesterday's, but without the collared shirt).

Those additional favors weren't on the table the night before. But I went along with them anyways and they led me to a Starbucks on Venice, about an hour early for work. I sat down near the window, drinking my coffee, reading a book about a man who goes to Nicaragua to sit by a window and drink coffee (and also kill a guy). It was boring, really—the type of experience Starbucks works so hard to create, so naturally my eyes wandered off the page and searched the room until I found something interesting.

And interesting she was—a short girl with a baggy flannel shirt and skinny black pants. She was a dichotomous one, this girl. Her hair was almost white and her face strong. Her fashion was at once old and new, nostalgic and fashion-forward. I couldn't look away—she was either the youngest old person I'd ever seen or the oldest young person. Like the world's tallest midget.

I stared at her as she walked in. I got the faintest impression she was staring back at me through her sunglasses. She ordered, paid, and walked past me again. This time with her sunglasses in her hand, waiting for her coffee to percolate. This time I could see that my beloved, beautiful old/young girl was in fact Ashley Olsen. Or Mary-Kate. One of the two.

The most obvious advantage of being a writer is that you have complete control over how the story is told. For instance, I could write that I gave the Olsen sibling a defiant and strong look, meeting and holding her gaze as she met mine. I could say that I looked rugged and awake after my night away from home.

If she were writing, the Olsen twin would probably describe how I stared at her in a way that revealed a lack of anything resembling manners or class or taste. How I was obliviously sucking the frosting from an apple fritter off my thumb. How I looked like I hadn't taken a shower yet. How I was just another guy who thought the nature of celebrity was preposterous and wrong and yet just … could not … look away.

Maybe she has a blog I could check.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/i-spy

Open Doors

Goddamnit, we were happy.

My uncle and I were finally leaving the Sierra Madre mountains, finally giving up the fight against gravity and letting Manuel, our 4-door Korean econobox, coast.

For the last untold number of hours, we were stranded in Simojovel, straining the transmission up and down the dirt one-ways, trying to find our way out to the next town. Part of the problem was our map—we still didn't have one. Almost a week in and we were still following the very small, very inaccurate map inserted between pages 664 and 665 of last year's Lonely Planet guide.

As you might imagine, this wasn't going well. Especially when we figured out that Simojovel was a town with a very lovely entrance and no exit.

It must have been an hour driving through the mountains to reach Simojovel and at least an hour trying to find our way out. Three more hours wasted behind the overflowing busses, sweating through road construction, always dead at 30 miles per hour and always running out of gas. And now we were running out of daylight. But, we didn't want to think about that. We were out of the mountains. We were happy, goddamnit.

Aside from a small stretch between Palenque and Agua Azul, I occupied the passenger's seat, doing my part to guess at directions and keep the conversation afloat. In turn, my uncle fought with the steering wheel, fought with the manual transmission, fought to keep the two of us out of a ditch and, because of all the fighting, fought to keep a cool head. I suppose I was getting the easier share of the workload.

Actually, it was worse than that. I spent an annoying amount of time in the front seat, camera in hand, my telephoto lens blocking my uncle's view of the road, straining to take photographs of the continuous explosion of color and form and shape and life that was happening for the split second we were driving by, never to be seen in exactly that way again. So, naturally, I had to capture it. Naturally, I had to be annoying.

But, as we pulled into our 10th Pemex gas station to refuel, none of that mattered. The need to capture every fleeting moment faded with the sun; my camera was safely tucked away in the trunk. We were safe; we were happy; we were full. It was the perfect time to break the rules again and drive off into the night. Only this time, I was behind the wheel.

We set off with an impressive slide from reverse to 1st, not too much on the throttle and no stalling. The headphone cable from my iPod swung between us, the right earbud in my ear, the left in my uncle's. Finally, we had music. Sure, we looked ridiculous, two thin men in a thin car with thin tires, but it was dark outside and you probably couldn't see that much anyways. I know I couldn't—it started to softly rain on the windshield.

I told my uncle he could play whatever song he wanted, I was content to finally be of some use on the trip, content that my uncle could finally stop fighting and rest. And I was more content when Pink Floyd's "Time" came through my single earbud, the volume too loud in the interest of rocking out.

Driving was fine, just fine, except for the massive truck in front of us and the lightening and the small, two-lane road that we were driving on. But it was fine—David Gimour was just getting to the guitar solo …

And then the crash happened. A thud so loud from the right side of the car that it couldn't have been just a pothole. It didn't feel like we just hit a pothole either; it felt like we hit a trench. The car was straining just to turn the wheels around. And now we had a flat tire. At night. In Mexico.

_____________

When I was a kid, I used to dream that all of the windows in my life were just television sets. The traveling back and forth between parents wasn't really travel at all. I would sit in the car for an hour or so while they changed the set, my parent's homes switching off every other weekend in an endless tide of custody visitation.

Of course, I figured out their secret. If I ever got up enough courage to open the door on one of the long and quiet car rides, I would see a black stage, my father making friends with all the crew members, or my mother directing the stagehands to plant the dogwood tree in the backyard to shade the swing set.

When we were driving street-by-street in Simojovel, trying to find a way out, when we were running out of gas in the Sierra Madre mountains, I thought of this. I thought of the two of us, impenetrable and air-conditioned, exploring from a distance, sometimes not even bothering to roll down the window before taking photos.

Now, with one flat tire, we were quite penetrable. Now, I had to get out of the car.

_____________

There was no blowout lane, no side of the road. A black VW, likely flattened by the same pothole, stopped dead in the right lane, orange safety reflectors already dispatched fore and aft. My uncle opened his door.

"It's both of them. They're both flat." I wanted him to be joking. He wasn't.

In under five minutes of driving, I managed to paralyze the entire right half of our car. Both cheap alloy rims were caved-in from the impact of the pothole. Now we would have to decide which tire to change; we only had one spare. Our Huyndai had to be front-wheel-drive, it just had to be.

There wasn't much time to think. The men from the VW had finished changing their tire and were now walking over to our car. My uncle and I tried quickly to think of a Spanish approximation for "Fix-A-Flat" in case they had some to spare. But before we could ask, they deflated their orange reflector, stuffed it in the trunk and drove off. We were alone again.

We had two flashlights, and both were flickering. My uncle balanced one in his teeth to change the tire. I waved the other one behind the car to warn the traffic coming on. The stars were out. The ornamental grasses on either side of the road swayed between the trucks. It was impossible to be detached now; we were outside.

And then my uncle called me back to the car. The tire was bolted down. We threw the tools and the two defeated tires in the hatchback and drove on, my uncle reclaiming his place at the wheel. The car started slowly, a long line of drivers growing behind our hazard lights, our back right wheel dragging reluctantly before them.

My uncle pressed on the accelerator, too much for comfort, as we drove through dark towns and over dark hills, the next one hopefully containing a Vulcanizadora, the small-town Mexican tire repairmen that dot the countryside, their telltale tractor trailer tire signage painted and hung from telephone poles. The next hill crested with no hope in sight. Now there was no more acceleration, only momentum.

We sailed up the next hill. In the distance, next to a bar, there stood the painted tire sign. I spotted it long before my uncle and yelled, thrilled to finally get something right. The Vulcanizadora's tin shack was closed, but the bar standing next door was still loud. We both hoped he was still inside.

The bar was loud but empty for a Saturday night. A lone couple danced next to an old electric jukebox producing an unlikely amount of bass. They stopped dancing long enough for us to shout for the Vulcanizadora over the music. They went to the back of the bar to get the proprietress who, in turn, woke up the Vulcanizadora, drunk and asleep from his Saturday revelry.

Dressed in a very clean Polo shirt, the Vulacizanadora shuffled through the parking lot, opened the front door of his shack with a flourish of keys, allowing the harsh lamplight and bugs access to his tools, his bed and his roommate, who was asleep on a cot at the edge of the dirt floor. He found a large sledgehammer and took to banging our bent rims into a circular submission. He couldn't have been older than 25.

I couldn't help but thinking that this was his one night away from the tin shack. Away from the rubber and the hammer and his one roommate, even if 'away' just meant 'next door'. Saturday night was his one night of culture and style, a night ended the minute two gringos pulled into the parking lot with their two flat tires. All hope for escapism vanished when the young Vulcanizadora took off his Polo shirt and got to work.

After a half hour of exasperation and sweat, the news wasn't good. During our drive, the ragged edge of the rim dug into our sinking tire, grating the rubber into a black, industrial powder and rendering the tire undrivable. The solution was to combine the one salvageable rim with the one tire we didn't destroy.

For his after-hours, overtime, half-asleep, mostly-drunk manual labor, the Vulcanizadora charged us about $5. This was a man who lived his life outside our car. A man who we never would have met until my clumsiness forced the car door open, exposing not a set or a stage but the Vulcanizadora himself, his Polo shirt still clean and his door open, just like mine.


Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/open-doors

The Spit Bucket Article

Sometimes, I worry that nothing else interesting will happen to me. I'm not going back to Mexico anytime soon. My life isn't going to be in any real danger in the foreseeable future. I'm frightened of the day when my new stories will be about products for which I waited in line; the day when my new adventures are merely adventures in consumerism.

This is largely the reason I moved to Los Angeles—to escape mediocrity. L.A. might be fake, it might be expensive and superficial, but it is rarely boring. There's always a fire to photograph or an undercover cop shooting to keep me from getting to work on time. Excitement! Adventure!

At least, so I thought. For almost two full weeks, my life has occurred without incident. I would wake up, go to work, come home, have a beer and go to sleep—mostly in that order. Mediocrity, it seemed, chased me across the country and found me in L.A.

And then I held the spit bucket on a commercial for a fast food restaurant.

Let me back up a bit. I came to L.A. to work in commercials. Not as an actor or a director or even as a producer—I wanted to create the concepts behind the commercials, to come up with the ideas. I still want to, actually.

As you can imagine, this is a tough business to break into, so I sought employment on the other side of the industry—with a commercial production company. My company organizes the crew and the casting, rents the locations and pitches the directors to the ad agency.

I started working in production six months ago. Since then, most of my work has been office work; I still hadn't gotten my hands dirty with any actual work work. You know, all you would imagine commercial production to be—staying up past your bedtime to get those last shots, feeling like you're part of a real team. This was the kind of excitement I'd been lacking.

On the morning of the fast food commercial shoot, my mom woke up early to drive me to the set. I'd been a bit nervous about the shoot—my first time as a production assistant, getting above the desk and out of the office at last. My mom was in town with my brother to look at colleges and needed the car for the day, so there we were, driving into the Valley as if it were my first day of school. Mom even offered to make me a bag lunch. I politely declined.

The set was crowded early, with grips and gaffers and production assistants all moving to build the shot. Of course, this being a city of professionals, none of them looked excited. In fact, they all looked old. As if all of the Runaway Dads in America wound up in Hollywood after deserting their families, destined to carry heavy objects and wear surf-related clothing. For the rest of the day, they sat around on apple crates, defiantly checking their iPhones. At one point, they used gaffer's tape to make paper footballs and spent about an hour flicking them around the set.

That's not to say the commercial was worth more of their attention. I really shouldn't mention the name of the fast food restaurant, but I can say that one of their sandwiches is making a triumphant return (I hope that I didn't spoil the surprise for anyone). To celebrate, the ad agency cast the typical spectrum of actors under 30 and had them dance with the sandwich, look longingly into its eyes and eat the shit out of it for about eight hours.

Now, when this commercial finally interrupts your favorite program, you'll see our cast of seven enjoy about one sandwich each. But on the day of shooting, the actors needed to consume about 25 sandwiches for the sake of coverage. Close-ups, wide shots, two-shots—every take meant a new sandwich in the hands of the actor.

Obviously, if the agency wanted the actors to eat all of these sandwiches, they would have just cast Joey Chestnut. So, every time the director yelled cut, the actors would spit out the remains of their undigested sandwich into a red bucket. And it was my job to hold the bucket.

As you would imagine, this is an overwhelmingly disgusting process. The sandwich in question is smothered in onions and barbecue sauce, creating a red paste, threaded by strands of chewed meat. The smell was unexpectedly clinical, as if I could smell the preservatives and the Red Dye # 6.

If you ever find yourself holding a spit bucket, expect to do some deep thinking. Expect first to recall the strength of your college degree or, if you don't have one, maybe just a challenging crossword puzzle you completed. Expect to be confused—do your qualifications make it more or less depressing that you're holding a spit bucket?

Expect to start a list of all the degrading episodes in your life—every shitty job, every moment of embarrassment. Expect to be surprised that the spit bucket episode, as bad as it might seem, inspires more boredom than disgust after a few hours. They say "Cut," you thrust the bucket upwards, the actors spit, you avoid looking at it and cover the top with a paper towel, creating layer after layer of a tedious lasagna.

Expect to reflect on the preposterous nature of your job. You'll probably be very well paid (about $30 an hour). Of course you will feel that you deserve this but, likely, you will still find it strange that such a job exists in the first place.

I wouldn't advise asking, "Why was I chosen to hold the bucket?" Generally, that question doesn't have any satisfying answers. It's more like: Because you were there and looked reasonably cheerful, because you were new, because they felt you wouldn't say no.

On a happier note, expect to grow an unnatural bond with all of the actors. On the sets I've visited, actors usually spend their time sleeping or trying to flirt with the girls in wardrobe. You, providing them an extraordinary service with your bucket, are a new experience entirely. You'll make friends quickly. You'll also gain respect from the crew members, as everyone respects the person with the lowest, crummiest job on set. But don't expect them to actually be friendly with you.

If your mom happens to drive you to the shoot, expect that you will be a bit cross with her when she picks you up. In truth, holding a spit bucket for a few hours isn't a bad way to make $225. But to give the story more weight, you'll want to seem upset and offended. Try not to get too grouchy.

And, finally, expect to spend much of the day putting together an article in between takes. Trust me, you'll realize that you're doing something interesting, an adventure finally worth writing about.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/it-really-is-the-city-of-angels

Stealing Souls

"Chumal? You don't want to go to Chumal."

My aunt was helping us plan our trip in the relative comfort of our rental beach house in Cancun. This was before Palenque. Before the military checkpoint that nearly cost us the trip.

"There's a sign on the city gate: no photography allowed. If they catch you, they put you in jail for three days."

Oh! How these words would seduce us! How they weighed down the backs of our minds, following us around the pyramids and down the lonely Mexican highways, nagging us, never letting us forget that the photos we were taking, no matter how intricate or inspired, would never compare to those taken inside the gates of the forbidden city.

"And they'll take your camera." This part, my uncle and I chose to ignore.

Let me pause for a brief confession. There's a fair amount of guilt involved in travel photography. We land in far-off countries and walk around with our $5,000 soul-stealing JPEG file creators, profiting from the misfortunes of the misfortunate. A large print of a fruit market sells for more than all of the fruit contained therein. A photo of an elderly homeless woman, weathered by age and apathy alike, could be worth a half-year of alms.

My uncle found a way around the guilt years ago. Now, he mostly photographs colorful (sellable) doors and windows, neither of which have souls to steal. I had no such out. I flew to Mexico to photograph people, a goal that I would admittedly allow to briefly trump my morals.

This was what I was thinking about as we drove into San Cristobal de las Casas, the town that would be our base camp for the expedition into Chumal. San Cristobal was interesting enough in its own right. Back in 1994, the Zapatista movement organized in San Cristobal and for eleven days waged a very real war against the Mexican government and globalization. If another Mexican revolution were to begin, we were told its source would be San Cristobal.

The city certainly seemed different. The higher we climbed in elevation, the closer the people came to resemble their Mayan forbearers. Girls not old enough to vote nursed children of their own in roadside shacks. Boys bearing machetes followed their fathers to work, scaling the mountainside in neat rows.

"If you want to understand San Cristobal, you've got to understand the Flower People and the Wool People." This was Scott, an Australian transplant—a big, red, sandy man with a nose that had been mashed purple by too many fights or drinks or both. When asked why he chose San Cristobal for his home, he replied, "The culture" with a wink that meant, "The women."

My uncle and I were at Scott's shop to rent a pair of bright yellow scooters. Having the kind of mobility and speed you could get from a scooter made definite sense. Making the two of us more conspicuous didn't, really. To make matters worse, I hadn't ever driven a bike any more motorized than a ten-speed. I decided to make up for my inexperience by completely lying about it, though I think Scott might have caught on when I crashed into the sidewalk outside of his store a few minutes after he'd handed me the keys.

I was terrified as we cut through traffic on our way out of the city. But there was one upside to renting the scooters from Scott—while we were filling out paperwork, he told us about the Flower People and the Wool People. Only four kilometers apart, the twin cities of Zincantan and Chumal produced two completely different cultures.

The Flower People dressed in intricate purple garments and were excessively friendly to outsiders. Scott claimed that they would surround the scooters, wanting to cook meals for the tourists and talk with them about their travels. The Wool People were a nasty bunch, historically violent and stoic in demeanor. They derived their name from the long, black wool skirts worn by the women in both summer and winter. Take a wild guess which culture came out of Chumal.

After two more minor crashes and a bit of positively treacherous mountain road, I parked and locked my scooter near the town square in Chumal. The square itself, guarding an ancient Catholic church that was permanently robbed of its priests during a local uprising, looked empty and overcast. The street vendors looked like they had been turned down so often they no longer had any hope for a sale. We looked around for any other tourists to see if they were taking photos but, predictably, there weren't any.

We bought our tickets for the main attraction—the ex-Catholic church—and walked inside, our cameras still safely in their bags. What we saw was agonizing beyond belief: The church had no pews and dozens of families were lined up, kneeling on the floor in front of rows and rows of candles. Their faces were lit with an even light and I assumed that they were praying until the candles burned down to a single pool of flame and wax. The agony, of course, came from not being able to photograph it.

If I had, it would be easier to believe what I saw next—each of the families had a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. The father of the family nearest me uncapped his Coke and started pouring it out into identical glass cups for each of the family members. The family paused their prayer and started to burp. Scott would tell us later that the burping released evil spirits. The Coke was used to facilitate the process. And because there was a Coke bottling plant in the region, we only saw one family drinking Pepsi.

The altar was covered by a haze that looked more like smog than incense. In the back of the church, light from a window curled the smoke around a wall of statuettes, stacked on top of one another in ornate boxes from the floor to the ceiling. Looking closer, the statuettes were all of traditional Catholic saints, but they were all wearing necklaces holding several tiny mirrors. We learned later that these mirrors were to ward off the evil spirits.

The altar itself was quiet, the Wool People inside the church quiet, though perhaps a bit annoyed at the touristas. Scott told us a story of a wedding he attended inside the church that culminated in the sacrifice of a chicken, the bird's blood sprayed over the processional. But that day, it was just the two of us, freezing in the snow next to a pile of tinder, our unopened bags filled with matches.

We got brave after stepping out of the church. Young kids selling woven belts and colorful pencils surrounded us once again, even though I hadn't bought anything the entire trip. But this time I had something different in mind. I had been talking in broken Spanish with one of kids before I went inside the church—a young girl named Rosa. Rosa talked to me about being 13 in Chumal, about selling woven cinturons and about photography. We negotiated for a bit and then I dug all of the pesos out of my pocket and handed them over.

I had always read about travel photographers buying poses from the locals. From the comfort of my high horse, I thought it was a bit repulsive—an affront to the skill and patience and luck necessary to take an honest, journalistic photo. But something changed in my mind during the long car ride. Morally, it was far worse to just take the photo covertly, to slip back to the States unnoticed with a full Compact Flash card and a heavy conscience. But paying for a photo was a simple exchange of goods. And it wouldn't interfere with my goal.

The price of Rosa's photo added up to be about two US dollars, the sum total of change in my pocket. I dug my camera out of my bag and snapped two quick frames of her in front of the cathedral.

The photos themselves are not remarkable. Rosa looks far older than her thirteen years would suggest, but her eyes show a generous bemusement. My composition was as much created by nervousness as it was anything else. But I will always look upon them as a turning point; photos taken inside a forbidden city by a young man just getting over a bad case of traveler's guilt.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/stealing-souls

The Explosive Family

On the playground, if a child's parents had any personality quirks or unusual hobbies, it was usually grounds for merciless teasing. I can remember a friend of mine whose mother raced horse-and-carriages and was mocked for three consecutive grades.

These days, I'm happy when talking to someone whose parents weren't pharmacists or accountants. Anything to extend the conversation beyond the usual pleasantries. A horse-and-buggy racing mom would be worth at least five minutes of genuine interest, an easy four minutes and 50 seconds more than your typical doctor mom or lawyer dad.

On the other hand, a conversation about the Casey family could last all evening. For 60 years, my family has owned and operated Jim Casey's Fireworks on Rosewood Dr. and Kilborn in Columbia, SC, down the street from Hardee’s ("Yes, ma'am, if you've gone to Midlands Tech, you've gone too far"). I have talked to people on the floor of Madison Square Garden in New York and at the Green Door lounge in Hollywood who have been to and fondly remember my family's store.

Having grown up sacrificing all of my Fourths of July and New Year's Eves to fireworks, I have a few memories. I started work as a bagger—stuffing bottle rockets with their long, pink stems and fragile rolling tanks into paper bags until they would tear at the seams—at eight years old. I've been writing this article ever since.

I've worked with people named Crazy Mike, Crazy Ben, Tony (and, later, after he got fat, Fat Tony), DJ Met, Rosie, Dad (or "Your Father", as the other employees would call him), Sonny, Fuller, and Jarmin Thomas.

I've received possibly the most casual bit of fortune telling in my life as I was pricing some Ground Bloom Flowers ($.30 or six for $1.49). An employee not much older than I am now said, "It kind of sucks after you graduate high school. But then you get a job and you can start buying stuff. It gets better then."

I remember all of the milestones as I worked my way up, from not being allowed to work on the Fourth of July and having to sit in the office next to bagging and stocking shelves, to finally being able to use a box cutter and a cash register; from being out on the floor and selling hundreds of dollars of fireworks to where I am now, able to sit back and take it all in as a working visitor.

The worst I've ever felt was after I started actually selling—you know, starting covertly with a, "Can I help you find anything?" and hopefully ending with a $300 purchase. Looking back, I must have inspired an odd combination of pity and trust in my customers, being a bit young, perhaps, yet a member of the Casey family nonetheless.

I'll never forget the family of four whom I greeted, convinced and cajoled into buying the most expensive fireworks assortment in the store. When I went behind the counter to give them a total, I had to watch the mother sigh to the husband, "We could have bought a new washing machine for $300," as their young children, dirty from playing outside, looked up at their parents, mentally preparing themselves for a divorce. I was 13 years old.

Every year, old men, sweating in the air conditioning, would approach the counter: "I knew your granddaddy."

"Yessir?" Everyone in Columbia knew Jack Casey.

And then the stories would pour out: how my grandfather helped them out of a bind, or campaigned for them during their failed attempt at public office, or even just showed them a fat smile and offered them a discount on a Grand Finale Assortment.

There were bad stories too, of course. The Jack Casey who would demand to speak with a governor because the poor governor made the mistake of endorsing the wrong successor. The Jack Casey who you could hear straight across the parking lot of that den of sin on Rosewood Dr., usually yelling at my father. Hell, the Jack Casey who would even build a den of sin south of the Mason-Dixon; the owner and proprietor of a red-light bar, video poker casino, internet cafe, voting machine distributor and fireworks store, all sharing that same cracked parking lot (because who wants to walk far when boozing and gambling and looking at pornography while blowing things up and voting, among other sins).

But my brother and I came after the yelling (mostly) and the other sins were overlooked easily enough after a trip to Best Buy.

Yessir, we were born after the yelling. When my brother and I were coming up, my daddy and his daddy weren't talking much at all. Half a decade ago, my father struck out on his own, taking the Casey name and buying four garden sheds out of which he hoped to make a firework fortune of his own. “Jim Casey's Fireworks” became “Casey's Fun Fireworks” and my brother and I became its first employees. We were gone from the legitimacy of the 60 years of business, of the air conditioning and the South's Largest Selection. We were building countertops for the garden sheds out of plywood and rusty shelves found in a K-Mart Dumpster. We felt like pioneers, hitching our covered wagons up to gas station parking lots off of I-20 and converting them into firework stands.

Then “Casey's Fun Fireworks” became “Casey's Fun Fundraisers” as my dad began listening to self-help tapes in his den, trying to unlock his inner millionaire, trying to keep that magic Fourth of July crowd around a little longer. He dreamt of school bands dropping their magazine subscription fundraisers to go door to door with firework coupons.

He convinced the only Buddhists in Columbia, SC to work his stands in exchange for a donation at the end of the season. For a couple of years, we sold fireworks alongside a monk from Tibet. Within a year, the Dutch Fork High School Marching Band was unenthusiastically selling firework coupons in the Food Lion parking lot in Irmo. Soon enough, high school clubs and groups would be unenthusiastically doing the same across the state.

But it wasn't working. My dad spent two months working and the rest of the year scheming. Four shacks became two and then just one. The owners of the land my dad rented grew wise and set up firecracker shacks of their own.

My dad, however, grew quiet. Now it was us who weren't talking much at all. I would visit to find him on borrowed land around the corner from his one remaining stand, loading up finished firework assortments into three grounded tractor trailer compartments, preparing for the next season, the fundraiser that was just around the corner.

And then my grandfather died and everything changed.

Suddenly, my father and his two sisters started sitting alone when we went to a restaurant to discuss the estate in privacy. Casual conversations would turn without warning into discussions of the estate tax and property values. Before his death, my grandfather gathered a collection of properties and businesses, even outside of the complex on Rosewood. Dividing the estate between the three siblings proved to divide my family instead. It took two years for my dad and two aunts to talk again with any civility.

With time, the heirs to the Casey fortune realized that the best option would be to give in. My aunts recognized that they didn't want to spend their holidays thinking about fireworks. So my dad got his retribution, his chance to prove to his own father that he learned something in his shed with his tapes. This was his first year in over 40 to manage the store without my grandfather or my aunts next door. It was his year to get things wrong; his year to be idealistic and to win. And guess what—he did. 2007 was a record year for Jim Casey's Fireworks

-------------

People ask me all of the time if I'm tired of fireworks. After we're done, after we've turned away the late customers, sent home the security guard and walked to our cars, we take the long drive home down I-20. As we merge onto the freeway, over the pine trees lining the road we can see golden palms with silver tails, blue chrysanthemums, triple-break mortar shells and three-minute fountains—we see fireworks and not just products priced and lined on shelves and we feel useful and satisfied. And even in those long, tired seasons we were working out of the sheds, we would roll the windows down and smile; the better to feel the fireworks exploding around us.


Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/the-explosive-family

Down Mexico Way

There are some rules that go along with driving in Mexico:

1. Do not ever drive at night.
2. Do not ever drive without a map.
3. Make sure your car has robust tires.

I realized on the way to LAX that I'd already broken the second rule, having left my road map to the Yucatan Peninsula sitting on the kitchen table.

My uncle broke the third rule at Dollar Rent-a-Car when he signed off on a four-door toaster oven of a Hyundai Atos (with engineering by Dodge). Pulling out of the lot, we christened it Manuel. Manuel had a manual transmission, manual windows, no power steering, no radio, no interior light, one side mirror, zero floor mats and—the worst part—tires so small they would be the spare on other, safer cars.

In the interest of spreading the blame around, we broke the first rule together.

A day earlier, I got off the plane at Cancun. You also can't drive the streets of Cancun at night, not because of the danger, but because there are too many touristas. The aim of the trip, however, was not to run into civilization, but to run away from it—to crash through the backcountry in a red Jeep, rooting out the forgotten villages and photographing the locals.

Instead of that, we were dragging Manuel down a two-lane highway…at night. It seemed as if the rest of the country knew about the first rule—our only highway companions were huge 18-wheelers and potholes. We were pointed towards Palenque, the hidden jewel of the Mayan civilization, unearthed only a hundred years ago from the surrounding jungle. In retrospect, it's more likely that the roads into Palenque were empty because the locals were as bored with the ruins as New Yorkers are with the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building.

We weren’t alone for long, though. As we crossed the border into Chiapas, we ran straight into a military checkpoint. Orange flares brought traffic to a halt. Teenagers with Uzis stood around in camouflage, looking bored. Their twentysomething captain headed straight for us, all business. This was the other reason you never drive at night in Mexico.

As the captain approached our car, he pulled a black device, no bigger than a flashlight from his belt. By then, one of the other soldiers started talking to us, asking the obvious questions: Where were we going, what we were going to do when we got there, etc. etc. But we were too fascinated to answer convincingly; the captain pulled a lever on his flashlight and out came a silver antenna, like a single rabbit ear on an old television set.

The captain pointed the antenna straight ahead and paced steadily beside our car, step after slow step. The silver antenna moved, to our abject horror, slowly to the left, pointing toward our backseat. I tried to catch my uncle's eye with a confused look, but he turned away, watching as the captain reset himself and walked again, slow and straight, past our car. Once more, the antenna turned and pointed us out, American criminals in a foreign land.

A commotion blew through the roadblock. The young guards woke up. The old guards ushered Manuel towards a thatched hut with their submachine guns. With no hesitation, our bags were unloaded on a long table underneath a lone light bulb, one bag after another in a long line of expensive travel accessories.

My uncle told me to keep an eye our belongings as the captain came back with his dammed flashlight. Again, the captain walked his slow walk, but this time the antenna was more precise, picking my uncle's black camera bag from the line-up.

By this time, my curiosity was overwhelming, so I turned to one of the young men standing at idle and asked him just what was happening. Roughly, he explained to me that the black device was a molecular smell detector. In 200 yards, it could pick out the smell of one molecule of marijuana, cocaine or heroin.

The captain finally spoke, asking my uncle if he had any drugs. No. They started pulling apart the bag and the captain asked again if we had even a small amount? No. Nikon lenses started coming out of the bag, their caps removed and glass elements examined, the collection of my uncle's entire professional career smudged and twisted and turned before him. The captain spoke again, saying that the detector never made any mistakes: If it pointed to us, we had to be carrying drugs. So, he asked, where were they?

My uncle looked at me finally. I could see in his face that he expected The Choice next: between a police bribe that neither of us wanted to pay or detour to a Mexican jail that we might not come out of. This, really, was why you never ever drive at night in Mexico. We prepared ourselves to pay for our mistake.

Just then, a swarm of bugs came out of the night. Big bugs, small bugs—every bug in the lowlands flew towards the sole source of light in the darkness, the bare light bulb hanging above our bags. Within a few seconds, it was hard to breathe. In a few more, it was hard to see. And it wasn't just the two Americans who were uncomfortable; the guards started putting down my uncle's camera equipment to better swat at the bugs.

The air underneath the hut became unbearable. A few of the guards started to leave. Then more. Soon, we were standing alone with the captain, who was so disgusted he told us to leave.

And as quickly as the danger had risen, it dissipated again. We packed our bags back into Manuel and drove off into the night, lucky and foolish enough to drive on for a few hours more.


Originally published in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/down-mexico-way