My lethal weapon's my mind

Movie making in New York City

I like movies, but I pretty much hate Hollywood. Not the place as much as the institution. Those privileged douchebags that spend staggering sums of money to churn out sub-par bullshit. I think the best art is created when one is working within a limited set of parameters and produces something unexpected, beyond those boundaries. But when you can throw bundles of cash at a project to justify your mansion and a yacht, what you get is some predictable crap targeted to the most lucrative demographic. They might as well be slanging bootleg Rolex watches in Rockefeller Center, for all of the thought and care that goes into many major motion pictures today.

What really annoys me is when moviemakers get permission from the Mayor’s office to shut down areas of New York City to make this garbage. It’s completely unnecessary, and it’s an obnoxious way for a movie producer to say, “Look at me! I’m a big shot! I fucking shut down Fifth Avenue in the middle of a work week!” And while these retards set up their little ten-minute shot, you’ve got production assistants running around the periphery of the set, shooing people away and acting like you’re bothering them. Motherfucker, I work here. I don’t get to stand around with a walkie talkie, telling the lighting designer how I got a handjob on the set of Evan Almighty while directing an underling to pick the sprinkles off a dozen donuts so the movie’s primadonna star won’t have a shit fit. I know every second costs you oodles of dough, but that’s not my problem. If I were running the show, you’d still be down at the bus station positioned at the glory hole in the men’s bathroom.

Hippies that try to get me to register as a Democrat

I’m not technically a Democrat, but I sure as fuck ain’t a Republican. I normally vote for the Democratic candidate in local and federal elections because my opinions are more in line with those candidates’. But nothing turns me off to the party more than some unwashed, bearded pothead standing around on the street with a clipboard, trying to get me to sign up for the Democrats so he can feel like a political crusader. It’s enough to make me go conservative and smoke a carton of cigarettes while popping off my handgun, preferably at one of these dickheads. You want to make a difference for your party? Take off that Superbad t-shirt and put on a suit. Act like you are representing a political party and not some righteous frat house with a seven-foot bong in the foyer. Give me more to think about than just being “against Bush,” because that was the last presidential election’s tactic, and it didn’t work then. Bush is fired in oh-nine no matter who wins next November, so come up with a better platform than “Dems ROCK!”

I really believe that the Democratic party doesn’t want to win. They certainly don’t act like it. I mean, here you’ve got an election that should be a lay-up. Democrats already control Congress, the president’s approval rating is in the shitter, and even die-hard Republicans profess a desire for change. All they’ve got to do is pick a moderate liberal with a decent haircut, and the Dems should be in like Flynn. So who are the front-runners? A leftist black guy and a conservative, abrasive woman. Why don’t you run Martin Lawrence dressed in drag and Jokey Smurf while you’re at it?

People that refuse to acknowledge another person’s skin color when it is pertinent to the conversation

I love how people will often say, “My friend Jerome, who just happens to be black…” In the words of George Carlin: is his mother black? Is his father black? It didn’t just “happen,” did it? The guy is black by design. And while people will often interject a person’s ethnicity or hue into conversation for seemingly no reason, if it’s going to help me understand what the fuck you’re talking about, then by all means, be descriptive. Case in point: a friend of mine was telling me a story about how he and his co-workers got new uniforms. He then fell all over himself to say, “This one guy…he’s black…I don’t even like to mention it…I mean who cares if he’s black…but he is a black dude…anyway I say to this guy…this black guy, whatever…’hey, you’re looking cleaned up!’ And this guy…the black guy…he says, ‘What, you’ve never seen a black guy in a suit before?!’” Now here’s a story where the person’s skin color is integral to the tale. I’m going to find out he’s black by the end, anyway, so why not be up front about it from jump? It’s not like you’re saying he was dribbling a basketball and eating watermelon while the story’s events took place.

I get the same kind of shit in my office. “Oh you know Mary…she’s about five and a half feet tall, always wears these red shoes, has thick-rimmed glasses…she’s always on the third floor…you know who I mean?” Then, after five minutes, “You know…the Hispanic woman on the third floor.” Well why didn’t you fucking say so? Are you so blind to skin tone, you haven’t noticed the office is ninety-eight per cent white? Because if you did, then you would understand why pointing out a non-white person’s skin color would be the first and best description to give. And you never hear the shit in reverse. No one ever says, “Oh yeah, Keith Van Horn from the Dallas Mavericks…you know, the bearded guy…the one with the close haircut…the guy that runs fast…” No, you say, “The white guy on the Mavericks.” You don’t even need to say his name. I’m not pro-racism, I’m pro-clarity. I don’t have time for your self-effacing bullshit.

New York City living

My first apartment was probably the best apartment, all things considered. It was right around the corner from my parents’ house, the second floor of a two-story, two-family brick house. The apartment was described as a two-bedroom, but it really only had one usable bedroom, a tiny “sewing room,” and another room that could be used as a den or something. That last room opened out onto a nice patio which looked onto the roof of a pocket protector factory and the backyard of a local dive bar. It had a lot of windows; the front of the house was an almost solid wall of glass. The whole place was newly-carpeted, had a large living room and dining room, and a full bathroom.

I shared the place with a friend of mine from the neighborhood. We got along well with the landlord and his family instantly, and we were able to talk him down two-hundred bucks in rent. I don’t know why they liked us so much, since we treated the apartment like a frat house. The local dive bar became our second living room, and my roommate and I would spend four or five nights a week down there. Sometimes, we’d go in on a Saturday afternoon and stay until closing. My roommate was able to get us a glass top dining room table, which was mainly used to break up weed. The front of the house looked onto a corner that had a twenty-four hour deli and the local bus stop, and sometimes my roommate would shoot paintballs or throw eggs at people waiting for the bus. Even though the rent was incredibly low, we moved a third friend in about six months after we started living there. He took the den room. We were a bunch of guys in our early twenties living behind a bar, and it was a pretty good time altogether. Eventually, my first roommate started to get fucked up on drugs, and the guy living in the den and I decided to strike out and get another place after about a year and a half.

The second apartment I lived in was a real dump. We took on another roommate, a round, little man that looked a lot like the “time to make the doughnuts” guy from the old Dunkin Donuts commercials. This place was billed as a three-bedroom garden apartment, but it was really the basement of an apartment building in a Queens neighborhood called Sunnyside. The rooms were big, and there was a backyard strewn with garbage, but the living room was separated from the building’s boiler room by a thin door and the place had cockroaches. Not those little, innocuous cockroaches, either, but cockroaches you could strap to the bottom of your feet and skate around on. The hot water would sometimes come out completely scalding, and in fact an upstairs neighbor successfully sued the building manager when his handicapped son was severely burned. One night, the three of us went out to see a movie, and when we came back we discovered our place had been robbed. One weekend, the boiler died and it was so cold indoors that you could see your breath; I had two frogs and a fish in a twenty-gallon tank that died as a result. Also, the Dunkin Donuts guy was a real whiny bitch, which was actually the second most unpleasant thing about the situation.

The first most unpleasant thing about this apartment was that, about six or seven months into living there, the side and back yard would fill up with sewer water and create a kind of shit moat around the building. I remember that I didn’t want to believe that the sewer was backing up into my yard, and I pretended it was “laundry water,” which makes no sense at all. One couldn’t deny the turds and toilet paper and steam rising from this stinky pond, however, and once this happened, preparations to move began again. The Dunkin Donuts guy went his own way, and my original roommate and I went to a real estate agent, determined to live in a decent place. The best thing about the apartment in Sunnyside was that it was half a block from the subway, and, from that point on, proximity to the subway was a major consideration in getting an apartment.

We got a decent one-bedroom in Astoria, Queens, just on the southern side of the Grand Central Parkway. It was on the first floor of a decent four-story apartment building, which was part of a larger complex of four-story apartment buildings. My roommate took the living room, and outfitted it with a false wall for privacy. The apartment was okay, not great, but miles ahead of where we had lived in Sunnyside. To my memory, we never had any problems that weren’t taken care of in a reasonable amount of time. The kitchen was pretty large, and the bathroom was decent. I only lived there with my roommate for about four months, though, then he moved on for a variety of personal reasons. I moved my girlfriend in, and she helped to make it very cozy. We stayed there for two years, I believe, then we decided to move on to another, larger apartment.

We used craigslist this time, and to great effect. We were able to get a two-bedroom apartment about ten blocks away, the second floor of a small townhouse, with utilities included, and a driveway space and backyard. The landlady was taken with us immediately, being that we were a young white couple, and my girlfriend and I didn’t have to have credit checks or anything. It came with a brand-new air conditioner and a very large eat-in kitchen. The drawback here was that the landlady and her nephew seemed to feel that they could come into the apartment at any time for whatever reason, which perturbed me and drove my girlfriend berserk. I lived there for about a year and a half, then we split up and I looked to move back closer to where I had previously been in Astoria.

A friend of mine was doing real estate in the neighborhood, and after a few places, he eventually got me a very cheap basement apartment with a backyard, right off a major thoroughfare in the neighborhood. I was dead against taking another basement apartment, but as time went on, I was getting desperate for a place, and this one was pretty big and right where I wanted to live. Ultimately, it was a big mistake. I quickly learned that I had no desire or ability to take care of a backyard, and the place was always damp with periodic cockroach sightings. The bathroom was tiny—so tiny, in fact, that the sink was in the shower stall—and it had no ventilation to speak of. The windows were larger than casement windows, and so it got a lot of light, for a basement, but that only highlighted the fact that the place sucked. After a few floods caused by inordinately heavy rain, I determined it was time to move.

Which brings me to my new place, about five blocks away from where I live now: a clean, sunny one-bedroom on the first floor of a small, three-story apartment building. The rooms, including the kitchen, are very large, and the bathroom is reasonably updated. It has a bathtub, a sink outside of the shower, and, best of all, a window. I’d like to think that after five apartments, I’ve figured out where and how I like to live, but I know that I’ll eventually move from this new apartment to another one, maybe to a bigger and better place in another neighborhood. This is New York City, after all. You don’t take space, you only rent it.

I did my part

Most people are satisfied to go with the flow. They never make waves. They never offend anyone. Most people would rather do the easy thing than to do the right thing. Not me, though. I believe that anything worth doing is probably going to be difficult. It might not make you any friends. Your actions might be detested at first. But if you’re morally right, you’ll be vindicated in the long run. That’s what I believe, anyway. This is why I did not hesitate to correct my grandmother when she used the phrase “colored guy” during last Sunday’s dinner.

I remember it clearly: grandma was talking about a recent trip to the bank, and said she struck up a conversation with the fellow behind her in line. Without reason or provocation, she casually mentioned that he was a “colored guy.” I dropped my fork, still loaded with mashed potatoes. The entire family turned their heads towards me, alarmed by the clash of silverware on china. I stared at my grandmother, who stopped her story mid-sentence, for a full minute. Then I declared, “Grandma, it isn’t ‘colored guy.’ No one says ‘colored’ anymore. The phrase is ‘African-American.’” I sat back in my chair and folded my arms, pleased with my admonishing but necessary blurt of truth. I felt as if the spirits of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were standing behind me, nodding in approval. The family went back to eating and my grandmother continued her story, but I know my words were heeded because my grandma didn’t mention this gentleman’s ethnic or racial affiliation for the rest of the evening.

This isn’t the first time I have taken steps to quell racism. I recall another time, when I was in the candy store with Ralph, captain of our school’s basketball team. He just happens to be African-American. A store employee, who just happens to be Asian, was hanging around Ralph and eyeing him closely. I strode right up to this Asian person and, loudly enough for Ralph to hear, explained how unfair it was to shadow Ralph just because his skin shade is darker. I defined the term “racial profiling” and said it was more than immoral, it’s unlawful, and Ralph could sue the establishment for harassment. It turns out that the Asian guy wasn’t an employee at all, but a friend of Ralph’s. But I think I made my point that day. I certainly gave them all something to think about.

I feel it is my duty to expose and condemn racism wherever I see it. I may have only been on this planet for sixteen years, but I know racism is wrong, and I know it’s up to my generation to put an end to it. That’s why, as shameful as it might be, I have no compunction about putting members of my own family in their place if they show themselves to be racist. We’ve all got to pitch in and do what we can to make the world a better place to live. Otherwise, it will continue to be run by corrupt Mick cops and Dago politicians.