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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.
"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
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
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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
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
