ROAD JOURNAL: On a Syracuse Saturday Night

* Below: a dirty trick I played this week, the Econolodge, thoughts on new MLH and Bridge Tunnel writing, my boyhood obsession with Moria

1.1 ECONO: There comes a point when you get past the dinginess of an Econolodge room to the intangible comfort of one over another: there are good bad motel rooms, and bad bad motel rooms.  Take this one: it's dull, cramped -- the television has been set at five o'clock from the the bed; the toilet seat can't stay up -- it won't make plumb ninety degrees as it's too close to the sink counter, (a woman's revenge?); and yet the room is comforting -- you wouldn't live this way at home, but you breathe easy after the first night, and, to yourself, say, "Yeah, this one's do-able; I can live here for a pinch.
1.2 A CRUEL TRICK: The other morning I was sitting in the parking lot of a big-time fencing company, the type that builds a lot of barbed wire and mesh perimeter compound fencing, (the kind you find on cellular tower sites), waiting for them to open for business to make a simple small buy of three eight foot steel posts.  In their yard I can see the company trucks loading with material to go out for the workday, same as me -- twenty or thirty guys strapping down fence on the flatbacks of trucks; coffee, cigarettes, radio playing.  I walked into the office, was greeted by a friendly lady; I tell her what I'm looking for -- the three posts, a simple thing; tell me where they are, I'll load them.  She calls over an intercom, "Randy, a customer in here for you!"
-- A moment later here comes Randy, marching in, right by me -- no talk, no eye contact.
-- I say, "Hi there."
-- No answer.  He comes around me, and stands at his office counter.  "What do you need?" He says with pissed off impatience.
-- "Three posts."
-- "I have my crews loading right now."
-- (You'd think he said, I have three missing from my platoon, and I promised their families I'd get them home safe!, by the way he said it.
-- I said, "So what are you saying?"
-- "Our crews are loading.  You'll have to wait."
-- His attitude was: Who was I to come in here, interrupting the morning for three measly posts; what kind of Goddamn yokel would think to bother Randy, (the Randy, from the fence yard), with this bush league request?
-- I said, "Cool, I'll go somewhere else."  
-- Now I was pissed.  I drove down the street 200 yards, and parked at Fat Mama's diner.  My day is already falling behind, and now I'm searching my phone for fence companies, calling the Boss so he can find me a fence company, and guess what: I have to wait for Randy to get me the posts.  
-- Look, I'm a shallow person.  I'm not going back in with my tail between my legs.  Forget it.  So I sent the next in line in to clean up the mess, and buy the posts we need.  And as I'm sitting there stewing, I'm developing my revenge.  Not only shallow, but shallowly vindictive from time to time.  I call the second in line's phone, he answers from inside the office; I ask him if he can ask Randy to price out three fencing jobs.  Three tower sites: four hundred feet of fencing, twelve-foot gates, three full runs of barbed wire to each -- no three posts this!  Because here's the thing: to me, the kind of guy who will pipsqueak you over three posts, a man who will do a customer predicated on the cash-money involved in the transaction, and not on respect no matter the size of the order, (Like if you ordered one one-dollar hamburger at McDonald's, and through the speaker an enraged voice popped back, "Christ, Buddy, my boys are prepping the nuggets!"); as Neil McCauley would say, "There's a flip side to that coin.", a man who big-shots you on three posts will deny logic in sucking up to you over thirty grand of mesh fence.  I'm saying, as I sat there calling in this new mysterious order, I was betting Randy was a sucker.  He already showed me the attitude of a drowning man; he had thirty guys out their, and he was panicking, lashing out at a customer.  I've seen nine-year-olds on Call Of Duty with better coping skills.  If three posts was a waste of his time, then this dream scenario of three entire sites, and his precious crews hired to build them, would turn his frown upside down.  But you have to understand, I'd already made a plan: in the next month or two, we'll probably need a few more eight foot posts from Mr. Randy, so look, dangle the big jobs if he'll sell posts at 7am rather than 7:30.  Not only that, but, as I am a sicko, in about a week, because I think Randy is a sucker, those three big jobs are going to magically grow to five.  By August I'm going to tell Randy that we have eight.  I'm going straight Jack Falstaff -- there'll be eleven men in buckram suits by the first sniff of Autumn in the New York State air.  
-- Look, I know Randy might be having a bad day, he might even just be a prick -- I can respect that -- but  stay a prick when we bigshot you with the big jobs.  Playing out the scenario, F**king with Randy all Summer, hinged on the answer that came back.
-- Twenty minutes later, as we drove north, three posts in the back of the truck, Maine called.  Mr. Randy had called them -- he was surely interested in these big jobs, he promised a fair price.
-- There it is.  I promise a fair price too.  It's not Randy's fault really; it's just the Econolodge gets boring at night.  We've wagered on how many fictional jobs to paint for Randy while he shows us his good side all summer.  
-- It's ironic that good capitalism depends fully on a guileless disregard for profit, in that you must believe a solid job performed, and dealing fairly, for the sake of both, will yield success, sooner or later; I admire laborers; carpentry, concrete, fence, plumbing -- moreso I admire that kind of businessman who started in a ditch, and built in it a foundation.  The kind that never forgot the ditch they dug from the perch they've climbed to since, may even miss the ditch, romanticize it, but never forgot what it was like.  When a man makes himself the only game in town I admire it until they take advantage of the position, and forget what was serendipitous in their rise -- what went right that was out of their control; if they do forget their luck, they forget the unspoken karmic law of being the big fish in the small pond -- never piss on three measly posts.  
-- Randy won't lose anything but time.  He won't need to lose much of that if he catches on to the trick being played on him.  If he doesn't, and I doubt he will, then tough luck, I'll let him know the "jobs" were given to a different outfit -- after all the talks over the summer we will invariably have had, (hopefully positively chummy will Randy be with me by then), and maybe I'll say, "It's nothing personal, Randy old chap -- thanks for the fence posts."  
-- Creativity can be vindictive; it is a trickster god after all; the highest form of lying.
1.3 MLH/IT'S ALL TRUE 2: I have the second episode written, and I think I will get impatient and post it sooner or later.  There is this whole second cast of characters not introduced in the pilot, and it's their turn.  Writers I admire enough to read their opinions say every character is the author, and I think I understand it.  In the pilot episode there is the character of Charles Ford, who is often, ironically, called "our hero", and to some extent he is standing in, at least for this first forty-five minutes, as something like a protagonist; and maybe he has some part of my way of talking, but he's not me anymore than the rest of them are, at least I hope not, he's not my hero.  My heroes in the pilot are the female characters; it wasn't planned this way, but they seem to be stronger people, for the most part -- they have focus, drive... I aspire to where they are, and the boys in the script have all fallen off a fence, (A fence Randy will sell you), so if there's some secret to read into about the writer, there it is: Women are strong, driven, smart; Men are lost, destructive, desperate.  Just don't read too much into it, not until you meet the Rockland boys in episode two.  I think that's where I still am.
1.4 BRIDGE, TUNNEL: Maybe I've written myself into a corner.  I hope not, but that's the risk, writing and serializing blind. I jumped without checking the parachute.  I will grind out more chapters, and I'm kind of doing rain dances that it works; I'm not expecting greatness, just some cohesiveness to a strange story.  And the truth is I'm hopeful because there is some gnarly metaphor I've put to the first three chapters that I am genuinely proud of.  I like the order I dropped the words in.  And to the obsessive description of smells: it's a prose thing -- sensual in a way a film script can't be.  
1.5 AS A BOY:I think I went an entire year, (13? 14?) falling to sleep listening to an audio dramatization of Lord of The Rings on cassette; and, more obsessive, it was the same episode: The Mines of Moria chapter from Fellowship.  I listened to it every night from the beginning; the next night, rewind, and do it all over again.  This is documented by friends.  Lord of The Rings was the first script I tried to write, at a younger age than this cassette addiction.  With a drawing pad and the paperbacks in front of me, I'd transcribe into whatever I thought at the time might be a movie script.  I think of this because the LOTR Bluray collection commercial just came on the TV in this motel room, and it was spine-tingling.  Lord of The Rings is something people say, I read once a year.  Oh, it's everything, but I've unfolded and refolded it in every way; Read it, tried rewriting it, watched the movies over and over -- I remember going to the Rockland Theater to see the first movie the third time -- it was a matinee, I was meeting Stoney there; I didn't see his car, and I thought I might be the only one there to see it.  I went to the ticket girl, who happened to be a very attractive girl, and I asked her how many tickets had she sold to Fellowship.  She said, "Nine." 
-- "Nine?  Like in the Fellowship?"
-- Dead stare.  My pretty face couldn't save it.  
-- I read the entire trilogy to a girl.  That's a thousand pages.  She wasn't illiterate.  That seems strange now.  Not sure how long that relationship lasted post the final chapter -- maybe something lacking in my performance.
-- My mother is a big reader.  The Hobbit was the first real book she gave me for my birthday -- one with beautiful Alan Lee paintings.  Turns out Alan Lee worked on the movies.  Not bad.
-- So Moria.  When I saw Peter Jackson do it I cried.  I don't cry that much without some alcohol, but I cried.  Not sure for what; just some ferocious bubbling up.  If I had to guess, it was seeing someone come damn close to how I directed it in my head every night I listened to that same twenty minutes of cassette.  Not perfect, but damn close.


                                                                                                                                       NY