Mark Allen

Black helicopters are so September 10th. Case in point: view this “shakin’-shakin’-shakin'” YouTube archived footage of David Thompson of Charlotte, NC, speaking his peace at a local city council meeting – conveniently captured on tape and broadcast live on the local community access channel. I hope the rogue pilot who flew the white helicopter over David’s house on Sunday afternoon was watching, so he could learn that the reason there’s no ice in the arena is because somebody had their hand in the pie. But rest assured, if John Walsh and his FOX-TV program “F.B.I.’s Most Wanted” [sic] doesn’t start the nationwide manhunt to flush Mr. Helicopter Pilot out of his hole, David Thompson will be ready to explode like Mount St. Helen’s all over that chameleon, lemon-headed, coward, terrorist pussy …even if it means frightening all the boy scouts in the room (oh, and you better believe they have a right to be scared!) GOOD-NIGHT!!!

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Grindhouse sweet grindhouse? So the boxes had barely been unpacked in our new house – when Jim and I got this strange, official-looking notice on our front door. It was sealed in plastic and looked like some government notice. It turns out it was from a film scouting company and said that Mary Stuart-Masterson and her production company were interested in looking at our home as a possible location for Stuart-Masterson’s first-directed film called “The Cake Eaters,â€? which starts shooting this Summer. We called the number and talk to the scouting company. Then a few days later Mary Stuart-Masterson and a total Hollywood clan of cinematographers and camerapeople and assistants and assistant’s assistants and assistant’s assistant’s assistants and city-types with cell phones grafted to their heads came to our home. Everyone was very nice and inquisitive. They looked it over and loved everything about it and thought it was perfect, discussing shots and certain scenes and measuring the light and length and widths of a few rooms and the porch using these weird computerized measuring things. They loved the toilet in the living room and talked about working it into a scene, as well as a lot of our other furniture. Mary Stuart-Masterson was totally cool and funny… real sharp – noticing my Dead Kennedy’s albums, and laughing about Jim’s paintings. So then later Jim and I talked to a bunch of people who have dealt with this kind of thing and the legal angles, compensation, etc. Our landlord got involved (who’s a friend of ours and has been through this). We had to negotiate compensation from them and everything, work out the number of days, get legal advice, take stuff we had to sign to lawyers, and then sign it, and blah blah blah. We learned a lot about what to ask for and what to look out for and what to expect. A week or so later, it’s action: our house is going to be used as a set in the film! Weird huh? I kept telling friends I’d send them pictures of the new house, now I’m just going to tell them to go see the movie when it comes out. The story is a quirky drama about two families that have all this weird stuff happen to them when one of their estranged sons re-appears.

The film has Bruce Dern in it (gasp!) and also stars Jayce Bartok, Aaron Stanford, Thomas Cavanagh, Kristen Stewart, Elisa Pugliese and Elizabeth Ashley. The film is actually shooting in various places all over town. It’s so weird to leave the “world� of New York City and escape to the country… only to have that world not only reach out it’s tentacles and find you and knock on your door, but move into your house. I can’t wait to be interviewed on the red carpet while Jim and I are wearing our holographic scramble suit (with live birdcage hat) outfits, which we have decided will be our Oscar ceremony ensembles, which we will obviously have to pick out when we are inevitably nominated for an Oscar category that will doubtlessly be created; “Best Owners of a House Used As a Set in a Film,� once the academy is totally blown away by our dazzling house in the film’s background.

The location manager told us that she picked our house because the character that lives there is a single mom in a small town who’s kind of poor and down on her luck at the moment, and she doesn’t have time to keep up a big house properly… so our house was “…perfect.� Then she went on to to assure us at one of the meetings that even though our house was a little run down that the crew would treat it with just as much care and respect as if it were a nice house. The location manager is Jim and I’s new best friend. We joked that it would be funny if they used CGI animation in post-production to make our house look even more destitute. During one of their visits, I asked how “overgrown� they wanted the grass in the lawn to be. Mary said about seven days growth would be great if we could manage it. So now we just have to remember to cut the grass seven days before they start shooting… which will be the first time we’ve cut it since we moved in.

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Did I mention how many insects we have in the house? Apparently living in the country is a constant indoor entomology exhibit – something you just kind of put up with, especially in an old house. On an unrelated note, Jim pulled a muscle in the back of his leg while jogging the other day. It wasn’t a big deal – he could still function. We thought it would heal up on it’s own over time so he didn’t worry about it too much. But it seemed to get slightly worse every day over the period of about a week. He spent yesterday in bed (with plans to go to the doctor) because the pain was in the back of his leg really bad. Sounds logical, right?

So this morning at the creak of dawn I woke up to what I thought was an earthquake with full bed-rattling action, and what sounded like the shrieks of the damned. I literally have not bolted out of bed so fast since I heard the first plane hit the tower outside my window on 9/11 while still living in Manhattan. As soon as I realized the screams were not a flock of pterodactyls waking up in the woods outside (I swear I saw one out there the other day).

I pulled the layer of centipedes that had spent the night on my face off of my face and, instead of witnessing The Rapture (which I expected), I noticed instead Jim doing a full-blown Regan MacNeil impersonation. In my twilight, coffee-less blur, I tried to find out what was wrong. His extremities were numb and he couldn’t move his hands, or parts of his face (insane!) and the pain was so bad all he could do was thrash around and yell. I immediately called 911 because I thought he was having a heart attack! Within minutes, the ambulance shows up and I’m out in the lawn running around going downright Paul Lynde-shouty-crackers. The EMT workers wheeled Jim out on the lawn over the bumpy grass (he had toned-down his Linda Blair bit and was now channeling a drooling, droopy-headed Geri Jewell) with me running shrieking behind them, my toupee flapping against the back of my head in the country breeze. Oh what a glorious morning it was.

You see, we haven’t met most of our neighbors yet, and an ambulance at your residence at the crack of dawn tends to jar people out of bed. Neighbors in pajamas and slippers and curlers were coming out to see twitching Jim in a wheelchair, being led by a screaming me, stone-faced EMT workers in tow. “Hi, nice to meet you! We’re the new gay couple that moved in next door!” No welcome muffin baskets? Oh lord, what a scene. We get to the emergency room and it turns out he’s fine, technically. He has Sciatica – a weirdly pinched nerve (severe) cause by an injury (running). Early morning attacks of it are actually common. Tons of painkillers and re-checkups and advice about how to let Sciatica heal is what he gets, unless it comes back.

So with Jim fully numbed and morphined and briefed and checked-out… I literally poured him into another wheelchair (we had to make two trips from the doctor area to check out, twice because while I was dealing with the check-out lady, a drug-addled Jim decided to literally crawl out of the chair and start inch-worming, Helen Keller-style, back to the ER bed). On the second trip out, Jim looked at the check-out ladies and as he wheeled by and said “I’mm ssuurry ffuurr myy Cuuurrt-knee Luvvv impersin-naa-shunnn…” I wheeled him out into the sun and parked him on the sidewalk (being sure to set the chair’s brakes) and went to get the car. As I pulled up I saw him sitting in the chair there, almost asleep but smiling. He looked like one of those children burn victims you always see wearing Disney caps sitting in wheelchairs at charity fundraisers.

What was weird, is that as Jim was being checked out and tested by all the doctors, in the bed next to us were two filthy guys in camouflage jumpsuits. One of them had accidentally shot the other one Cheney-style with some sort of rifle, and the doctors where picking all of the little pellets out of his face while they both sat there smiling and telling hunting stories. You could see the X-ray of the guy’s head on the chart next to him, and it had all these while bullet fragment dots all over his skull. They had been turkey hunting. There was also a teenage kid in the bed across from us wearing a Radio Shack employee uniform, hooked up to an oxygen machine. The emergency room also had free coffee.

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Three months ago I left New York City and moved with Jim into the mountains of upstate New York. The area we live in is mountain-y, cliff-y, with rivers… and big gaps where there are giant, lush rolling meadows lined with borders of thick, dark woods. Most of these areas you can just wander into and be all alone with not a soul around. Lots of space and time to really think. Our house is a Victorian-style old house, ancient actually, with a big wrap-around porch in the front and side, on which we have old rocking chairs and piles of dead, drying poppy flowers (which we use to counteract the smell of the skunk that sometimes lives under the porch) and glasses that are always full of red wine (which we use to try and blur the sense of the skunk smell out of our brains – who knew, it works!) We love our breezy, smelly porch. We spend our evenings there, frying in the neon orange sunset lightwhich blasts right onto the front of our home at sundown everyday (we’re on the top of a hill), and casts all kinds of weird patterns on the hallways and rooms of the inside of the house through the old, wavy natural glass windows. Very nice. We have an ample front yard. Weirdly, the person that lived here before was a tulip-maniac (maybe he was a descendant of the deadly Tulip Wars). So anyway, without us doing anything, as soonas we moved in all these multi-colored tulips just sprang up all over our yard. People walk by and say “Great tulips!â€? and we take all the credit.

Our house is a very, very very old house (ancient actually), full of mystery and intrigue and horror – the interior layout resembles the home in the film “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?â€? which is an inner projection on my part and a refraction of our inner worlds. Did I mention there is a working toilet in the middle of our living room? There’s a long story about how and why it’s there (involving the former tenant) which perhaps I will share with you some breezy, poppy-filled night on the porch over a glass of skunk-scented red wine. The former tenant actually still occupies the home sometimes, we think. He keeps getting in through some sort of afterlife, inter-dimensional portal – which is hidden somewhere in the house (hmmm… maybe it’s the toilet). Anyway, regardless – there is a brand new working toilet smack in the middle of our living room, with nothing around it, just out there for anyone to use who wants the whole house to see them take a crap. We were going to have the landlord de-intall it and knock it down, but we’ve decided to keep it there. Not only is it an homage to Marcel Duchamp, and a great conversation piece – but actually… it’s kind of a liberating experience taking a crap in the middle of a massive foyer/living room/den/dining room/breakfast nook area. Especially when other people are around (and an inter-dimensional portal to another dimension is massaging your buttocks). We don’t have a septic tank, our human waste is transported metaphysically to another universe. Jim and I are over trying to save Earth, we’ve already moved onto screwing up a parallel one. So anyway, we’re going to build a bookshelf (which will hold only old Mad Magazine paperbacks) on the wall behind our little white porcelain flushing Freudian aversion therapy nightmare conversation piece, and maybe a little lamp and some pillows.

The town we live in is 33% white trash and 33% rich old gay antique dealers, 33% ex-NYC burn-outs and 1% Grendel-headed Slew-foot Monsters. It’s a mad town nestled in the most lush, old-fashioned, nature-overloaded environment imaginable – right on the Hudson river. The other night we went to the drive in, which was right next to the county prison, which itself was next to the town dump, which was next to the Grendel-headed Slew-foot Monsters family cave nest (convenient). We have a really intriguing war vet club/pool bar/biker-hang-out kind-of place right down the hill from us. I have yet to get up enough cajones (it takes about five) to actually go in there… but I’m thinking it may end up like that scene in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventureâ€? where he dances on the bar in those big shoes.

At night, we sit on the porch amongst the crickets and frogs and listen to the night wind rustle through all the big trees in our yard – that’s my new favorite sound – wind rustling through trees – a la David Hemmings traipsing through a London park. Very soothing – with an undercurrent of imagined menace. The only drawback is, there’s a road leading right up the hill to our house that people drive up on and turn right or left. So at night, their headlights (usually on brights for the country) shine right on us as they decide to turn right or left. It happens so much that we’re thinking about getting some glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth and putting them in our open mouths and holding our hands up to our faces, finger’s splayed, and hissing “Eeeaauugghh!!!â€? while staring wide-eyed at the driver every time it happens. Maybe we’ll shave our heads and wear pointy ears too.

Our backyard is a very dense forest, which all goes down the side of a steep mountain (which is all our property). It’s actually acres and acres of mountainside, which is all covered in dense trees, and smells like pine, and looks fantastic in the foggy mornings. I think I’m gonna get a red-hooded cape and a picnic basket for traipses to grandma’s house… and bring a gun. Speaking of, there’s also lots and lots of animal life here, insects, woodland creatures… insects mostly. In our back yard we have wild turkeys walking around, no joke… full wild turkeys just strutting around… as well as the usual squirrels, deer, rabbits, birds (some really bright-colored robins of different varieties, geese, hawks, etc.) garter snakes, frogs, wild cats, chipmunks, possums, bears, hogs, narwhals, bigfoots, chupacabras, mothmen, giant squids and a dalek. Did I mention insects? Yep… lots and lots of insects. As I am typing this right now, there are about seventeen… no make that about seventeen billion moths, in my room, bumping over and over into the light, walls, even me. Humans may have the animal kingdom beat in the realm of brain power… but animals certainly have us outnumbered in the population department. All animals and insects in this part of the state appear in swarm form. I’m afraid to walk out the back door sometimes because I’m afraid that I’ll get attacked and eaten by an instantaneous panic cluster swarm of owls. My friend Pseu says that fear or perception of swarms = paranoia. Like the world is conspiring against you. Yes… and? It’s kind of like that creepy feeling you get where you start to think that you are the only actual human being in the universe, and that everyone else is part of some super-robot-alien conspiracy army drone population that monitors your every move and reads your thoughts through invisible wires and conducts tests on you while you’re sleeping, and that your whole reality is just a fake hologram world created just for their experiments. Everyone gets that feeling sometimes, right?

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If I could just say a few… *cough!* *cough!* …uh, okay this *cough!* *h-a-a-a-c-c-k-k!* *harf! harf!* Oop! Okay… uhhhh- a-a-a-a-c-c-c-k-k! *ahem!* *ahem!* *a-HEM!!!* *spu… uh… ewww!* (dribble) (wipe) *poot!* *fart!* …oops. Excuse me. Okay… sorry. Now… um… ow! (drop) (flutter) (flutter) (whisp) (fly) (fall) (flutter) Oh god! (bend over, pick up) (grab) (paper-cut) Ow! God! Geez! *crinkle* *crinkle* (collect) *shuffle* *shuffle* *tap!* *tap!* I… (stand up) *hurumpf!* *hurumpf!* I… *cough!* *cough!* *ack!* *w-h-e-e-e-z-z-e!* *w-h-h-h-h- eeeeeeeZZZ!* Ack! Ack! *cough!* *grizzle!* *wheeze!* (gasp) (inhale) Oh… *kaf!* oh, who… oh, thanks! (reach) (take) Thank you. (twist) (pop) (tilt) *glug-glug-glug- glug-glug-glip-glip!* Aaahhh… *fart!* Whoops! Heh heh. (place) Okay… allright um… I… *burp!* Eek! Whoops! Oh I’m so sor-*b-u-u-u-u- r-r-p-p!!!*-ry! Auugh!!! *fart!* Oh! Oh! Sorry.. so… *cough!* *cough-fart!* Augh! *cough-fart!* Oh …augh! No! Excuse… (slip) Whoops… (drop) oh god… my pencil again (bend over) (pick up) *jab!* Ow! Oh… my eye! augh! *fa-a-a-a-r-t!* Oh my god! Ow! Ow! Ow-ow-ow-ow! Wow-wo-wo-wo- wo-o-o-o-w-w-w!! Ow!! God! Oh… o-o-o-o-o-u-u-u-u-g-g-g-h-h… whew. *gulp!* God… that hurt. *harrrumpf!* *gasp!* Okay… uh… (drop) …oh god not again. (bend over) (pick up) *bump* (tilt) (l-e-e-e-a-a-a-n-n-n…) Oh god no! (tilt) *C-C-C-R-R-A-A-A- S-S-S-H-H-H-H-!-!-!* *smash!* *crunch* tinkle!* *rattle!* *S-S-S-M-A-A-A- S-H-H-H-!-!-!* (roll… roll…) *tip-tap-tip-tip-tip-ip-ip-ip!* Oh… god! Uhhh… oh… geez. Okay… oh, hi… oh yea.. thanks. (help) (smile) (bend) (grasp) Oh thank you. (gratitude) (l-i-i-i-f-t) *grunt!* *ugh!* (l-e-e-e-a-a-n) *thud!* *tump!* *thud-thud-ud-ud-ud!* (walk back over) Um… geez… sorry. Okay… *smooth* *smooth* *brush* *brush* *flick* Okay… *tap* *tap* *russle* *russle* *tap* *tap* oh… hey it’s wobbly now! Cheap piece of… oh never… *cough!* *cough!* ugh… *cough!* can I get my wat… oh, oh… never… oh… okay. *cough!* Alright… make a note here… my pencil… oh… (bend over) (pick up) Okay then… write down something here… *snap!* …oh… oh god! My pencil tip broke… oh, does anybody? Huh? Oh wait! Ah-ha! (lift) (reach into) Ah-ha! Pocket knife… *flick!* Haha! No… wait, that’s a magnifying glass… oh (close) *flick!* ah-ha! Hee! Ha! Ha! *gleem* The big one! Mmm… sharp! Okay… (reach down) *whittle!* *whittle!* *whittle!* *STAB!* AAAAUUUUGGGHHH!!!! (drop) (grab) AAAAAAAHHHHH!!! No!! AAAuuuuggghhh!!!!!!! *spurt!* *spurt!* *bleed!* Auuugghhh!! Nooo!! *spurt!* *red!* *spurt!* *bleed!* Auuuggghhhnnnooo!! Blood! Augh! (bump) (panic) *spurt!* *bleed!* Blood! (red) Auuugguguuuuh huhuhuuuugh!! No! *cough!* (lean) *B-A-A-A-A-R- R-R-R-F-F-F-!-!-!* (bump) *H-U-U-U-U- R-R-R-L-L-L-!-!-!* (clutch) *gag!* (tilt) *C-C-C-R-R- A-A-A-S-S-S-H-H-H-H-!-!-!* *smash!* *crunch* tinkle!* *rattle!* *S-S-S-M-A- A-A-S-H-H-H-!-!-!* (roll… roll…) *tip-tap-tip-tip- tip-ip-ip-ip!* Auuuggghhh!!! *bleed!* *spurt!* (grab) (run) (scream) Aaaaaahhh… *blub-blu-bluber!!!* (run) (spin) *sob!* (slip) (slip) Aaauuu… (slide-kick) aauuu… aauuu… (slide-kick) aauuu… (slide-kick) (spazz) (airborn) …uuaack!!! (fall) *CA-RAAASSHH!!!* *THUUUDDD!* *tap-tap-tap-tap-tip- tip-ip-ip-ip-ip…* *gurgle* *exhale*

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