average life

I raced down the interstate at a speed that was much faster than what I normally would drive.  All I could think of was how I wanted to put as much space between Los Angeles and me as I possibly could before stopping for the night.  I had spent all day finishing up paperwork for the television show that I had worked on during the previous five weeks and was probably too tired to be driving ninety miles an hour at night.

But I didn?t care.

I wanted to get out of LA and back to the south as fast as I could.  My attitude surprised me.  I had spent much of my life wanting to leave the south and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent away from it.  But LA had been different.  Something just felt wrong there.  As I drove east on the 10 I felt as though I had just narrowly escaped something, but I didn?t know what.  I tried to tell myself that I was thinking irrationally and myself agreed, but I didn?t slow down.

When my boss had mentioned the possibility of me joining the crew of the TV show that he was slated to direct, I conveniently ignored the word ?possibility? and replaced it with the words ?assured certainty?.  By the time production was to start, I had backed my boss into such a corner that, to him, telling me that I would have to stay behind would have been like taking candy from a baby and then promptly killing a kitten in front of the child.

I had dreamed about working on a national television show since I was a kid.  When I was thirteen I commandeered the family video camera as my own personal plaything.  True, my younger sister Beverly also laid claim to the Panasonic Palmcorder, but I didn?t think that the twenty-five minutes of tape devoted to following our overweight dachshund mix was a worthy use of the camera?s time.  Watching my sister?s tapes was like watching a mixture of a PBS nature documentary and TMZ.  As she followed Penny around the front yard, the dog would look into the lens with an expression of desperation that I would years later recognize on the face of young Hollywood starlets on the covers of the tabloid magazines.

Our mom had allotted us one tape each and I refused to fill the 30 minutes that the VHS-C cartridge allowed with such banal nonsense.  I created entertainment.  My Hotwheels cars and track set the scene for a high-speed pursuit, followed by a fiery explosion.  I created the explosion with the camera?s built in titling function and added the explosion noise vocally.  I edited the scene in camera, starting and stopping the tape for each shot and shooting in chronological order.

Soon, I realized that to do anything more in depth than a car chase, I needed actors and, faced with the crippling boredom that only preteens can feel, Beverly and my cousin Beth were easily talked into participating.  With their help, I told the Christmas story using ornaments and a flashlight for the star in the dark upper hallway of our home.  I loved horror movies (which was amazing considering I had never seen one) and this inspired me to direct a short in which Beverly was stalked and chased through the woods by an unseen monster.  The monster was played by the stuffed monkey my grandmother gave me when I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed.  I created the sounds for the monster by breathing into the microphone as I chased my sister through the pine trees that stood next to our home.

My most elaborate production was probably the afternoon I concepted and shot my own hidden-camera prank show.  My home-made reality show resembled what Ashton Kutcher would years later release on MTV as ?Punk?d?.  But instead of popular celebrities being the target of my surprise attacks, I focused on more accessible victims: my sister, Beverly, and my cousin, Beth.

I decided to call the show ?Tricks of the Trade? which displayed, even at that young age, my fondness for alliteration.  I felt clever that the title of my show carried a double meaning, although I never really knew what the other meaning was.  I had no idea to what ?Trade? I was referring, but I figured having the word ?Tricks? in the title was sufficient for most people to get the idea of the show.

Episodes of Punk?d started off with Ashton excitedly talking straight into the camera and explaining the concept for the prank to be performed.  My precursor show started the same way, but with a slightly different effect.  I was smack dab in the middle of puberty and me excitedly talking into the camera resulted in a shrill noise that caused Penny to react as if someone had blown a dog whistle.  I was small for my age and very thin.  I wore a teal Arizona Jeans Company t-shirt that was so large if I weren?t careful, it likely would have fallen off over my shoulders.  Self-conscious of my size, I thought that wearing clothes that were a couple of sizes too large would mask the fact that I was smaller than most of the other boys in my class.  It would be years before I would realize that they had the opposite effect.  Instead of puffing me up like an angry cat, the shirt made it look like I was the incredible shrinking man, only hours away from bathing in a spoon or sleeping on a cotton ball.  I completed my host?s outfit with jam shorts and bare feet.

The nature of the pranks was another way in which my show differed from Kutcher?s ratings success.  Instead of elaborate hoaxes involving trained professionals and actors, I merely filled a cardboard box with stuffed animals and set it precariously on the top of my bedroom door.  I placed the camera on a tripod in the corner, out of site of the doorway to prevent my victims from seeing the cameras and becoming self-conscious.  (The show would only work if I got natural reactions.)  There was a bed next to the door and I decided ? as a failsafe in case the box didn?t fall ? that I should hide under in and grab their ankles as they passed.  This was sure to get a reaction.

I smiled into the camera and with a thumbs-up that I would later find excruciating to watch, I yelled downstairs to my Beth and told her to come into my room.  Ever the good host, I gave an eye roll to the camera when she initially refused.  It was an eye roll that said, ?girls?.   After a few seconds I heard footsteps and I quickly tucked my head back under the bed and waited.  When Beth came into the room, she tripped the stuffed animal trap.  It didn?t go quite as planned and, instead of dumping out the stuffed animals, the entire box fell down on her head.  She wasn?t hurt by any means, but the shock of having a cardboard box on her head definitely killed the surprise of my under-the-bed attack.  She then saw the camera and started to laugh and I crawled out form under the bed to stop the tape.  We probably watched it twenty times that afternoon, each time picking out new elements that we found particularly hilarious.

I reflected on this as I pulled off the interstate in Banning, California.  I wondered if the clerk who checked me in was legally working there because she looked so young.  She was pleasant and smiled as she gave me the wifi password.  I thought back to LA.  What was that the problem?  Had I hoped deep down that LA was a bunch of 13-year olds in jam shorts with their parent?s video cameras?  Was I hoping that by helping to create an alternate reality, I was trying to get back to a point in my own?  Whatever the expectation, I found myself at the end of the job bitter and decided to start looking for work in another business as soon as I got back to Atlanta.

I drove to a nearby IHOP and ordered pancakes.  I noticed the waitress, who smiled as she placed the short stack in front of me, and I wondered what she did with the rest of her time: the time she didn?t spend giving people their order of Rooty Tooty Fresh ?N Fruity.  What if she was a superhero and she merely used this job just to pay the bills?  Not all superheroes could be eccentric millionaires, after all.  That would be a great idea for a sitcom, I thought: the daily lives of c-list superheroes.  I decided that I needed to write the pilot episode.

Maybe when I got back to the hotel.