Who Asked Me?

The weather broke in New York City yesterday and a two week span of ninety degree days shifted in to something cooler and more palatable. This morning’s light rain and upper sixties temperatures felt like San Francisco – with an added boost of perspective, coming on the heels of everything that a Big Apple August can imply : stagnation, suffocation, and the kind of sweat you scrape off your body with the dull edge of a credit card.

I made a pasta meal Wednesday night for my long-time east coast acquaintance and Boom Operator To The Stars, Kelly. After dinner we went on a short digestion-facilitating walk that blossomed into an eight-mile test of endurance and included the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, an almost militantly separatist Hasidic neighborhood, and Steiner Studios by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Upon reaching the film lot, I queried Kelly as to whether he knew the guard at the front gate, and he responded in his always-caffeinated and nicotine tempered Mickey Rourke baritone “No! But I’m a card-carrying member of Local 52, and rest assured we will be acquainted in short order ..” Kelly has a kettle-drum quality to his vocal accentuation that makes his chosen vocation as boom operator more than appropriate. Sure enough, in no time we were traversing the cavernous, deserted enclave at one in the morning as he barked out a wandering narrative with violent emphasis on particular words: “Studio Six ! That’s where I boomed Flight of the Conchords ! ..”

Though he claimed that it was just an “average night’s walk” for him, and really no different from sitting in front of the TV, by the time we crossed Bushwick Ave he was more than amiable to my offer to buy him a cold drink, and we hoofed it another several miles from there, Gatorade and Lemonade in hand, to the Williamsburg G Train and back to my neighborhood. Kelly’s pointing himself in the direction of California soon, both for film work and a medicinal marijuana card to address some chronic pain issues. ( And, I suspect, to remain consistently and astronomically high. ) He appears and disappears at different points on my horizon, often punctuating some unconscious shift in my own mental and physical landscape.

As the cooler weather marks yet another September transition, my buddies Tom Myers and Scott Miller will be visiting in a few weeks. Scott changed his name to “Coleman” several years back, to better distinguish himself from the legions of Scott Millers out there keeping celluloid relevant in an experimental manner. He celebrated a significant birthday last month, and Tom and I purchased him a Wrigley Field seat back, autographed by the greatest of Cubs, Ernie Banks. Miller seemed appreciative, and noted that the seat came with a “letter of authentication” signed personally by Mr. Cub. “I was thinkin’ about those letters of authentication,” he remarked to me, “and wouldn’t it seem right that they’d come with a letter of authentication themselves? I mean, doesn’t a letter of authentication need a letter of authentication to be worth anything? And where does the cycle end ?”  I didn’t have an answer for him, but the speculation was pure Scott Miller, and nothing that anyone named Coleman could ever come up with.