The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  I worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings and all day Sunday. Sunday’s were fun for a couple reasons: 1) no one rented a movie on Sunday, it was all returns from the previous day, and 2) Dana worked on Sundays. The seventeen-year-old was vivacious and pretty and she knew it. We got along swell. Every Sunday we put on our favorite movie, Grease, and danced around the store singing every song as we returned movie boxes to shelves. Regular customers returning their Saturday rental joined in on the chorus. Sunday’s were hydromatic, ultramatic–they were like greased lightning!

  Renting pornos can get awkward. One of my regular customers slipped into the double swinging doors and emerged with Switch Hitters 2. It was one of the two bi-sexual films we carried; obvious to me, not so obvious to him apparently. I didn’t know whether I should point out that the film wasn’t your average porn film. I decided to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. That is, when in doubt, don’t say a damn thing.

  Half an hour later, the guy stormed back in the store and threw the movie on the counter. “This movie is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen! Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Uh … I haven’t actually watched it. I stick to the more traditional films. Sorry about that.17 Go ahead and pick out something else. No charge.”

  The guy glared at me before slipping back into the porn section.

  In April, I received a call from a casting agency. Turns out that the overpriced headshots I had blanketed the industry with actually paid off. The gal told me to report to a high school in Whittier–I was going to be an extra in a movie.

  Fighting two hours of southbound I-5 traffic, I arrived at the location at 6 a.m. as instructed and joined a couple dozen other bleary-eyed teenagers in an empty classroom.

  We waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  We talked about the three “principals” (the “stars” of this particular movie) who would be on set that day: Jill, Donovan, and Brad. The general consensus was that Donovan was the next superstar.

  At 8 a.m., a crew member rushed in and said that the hallway shot was setup and she needed background people. Twenty four arms shot up in the air. I immediately thought if the lady needed someone to eat a turd on screen, twenty four arms would have shot up (mine included, sadly). The lady randomly picked four of us, including me, and we followed her like baby ducks following its mama toward the bright lights of the set.

  She placed us on marked Xs on the floor and instructed us to have the liveliest mime conversation we could muster.

  And … action!

  With the camera pointed directly at our foursome, we began a comical silent movie routine. The “principals” entered the scene (the next big star Donovan, the unknown Brad, and the unknown Jill) and began their conversation in front of us. The scene was filmed at least a dozen times and, with each take, the absurdity of the background performers grew. By the twelfth take, we were doubled over in silent laughter, silently pounding each other on the back like we were reciting Dice Clay nursery rhymes.

  With the director finally satisfied, we were told to return to the “holding tank” to wait for another opportunity. Enamored with the lights, cameras, and boom (the microphone suspended just out of camera view), I lingered behind and watched the crew setup the next scene. In strolled a face I did know–hey, that’s Roddy McDowell from Planet of the Apes!

  And … action!

  Roddy, and the female lead, a pretty brunette with a gravelly voice, (Jill Schoelen) spoke their lines (a play on the word principle. Roddy was principal of the high school) over and over and over again. As the takes added up (“Cut! We’ve got an airplane passing overhead. Cut! We’ve got an ambulance siren in the background. Cut! Let’s do it again faster.), I leaned in closer to the Panavision camera.

  Roddy was so focused on his lines that his face was still turned toward the scene as he walked out of camera view.

  WHAM.

  His faced slammed into mine, knocking me backwards. My eyes flooded with tears from the sudden impact.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. McDowell,” I whispered as he cupped his nose in pain. He looked at me for a moment as if deciding whether to have me thrown off the set. Finally, he smiled, said nothing, and they set up the scene again. No one noticed his bright red nose.

  At lunchtime, a large tent was set up by an army of caterers. As the group of bored extras filed into line, we were turned away–this was the lunch for the Screen Actors Guild card-carrying members.18 They handed out sack lunches to us silent-types and told us to get lost for an hour. As I walked off feeling underappreciated and a bit stupid, a girl in a cheerleader uniform argued with the guy guarding the catered lunch area. “I am not an extra!” she snorted and shoved him aside in disgust.

  A traveling circus was setting up a tent on the adjacent football field, and I strolled around the swirl of activity.

  Seeing her stopped me in my tracks.

  The black panther paced back and forth in its small confines. Its large, muscular tail smacked the bars of the cage. It hissed and spit in rage. I looked at my half eaten ham sandwich and thought, If that cat escaped, I would be its half eaten sandwich. It was the most intense animal I’ve ever seen.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Without looking to see who asked the question, I breathed, “Awesome. Totally bitchen.”

  I turned and there stood the star of the movie, Donovan Leitch, son of the British singer Donovan of Mellow Yellow fame. He wore a black suit and–get this–bowling shoes.

  I said, “So all the extras say you’re going to be the next big thing.”

  He smiled modestly, never taking his eyes off the big cat. “I don’t know about that. We’ll see what happens.”

  “So what’s with the bowling shoes?”

  “Oh, don’t you know? I’m a psychopath. At one point I kill someone with a bowling ball and mumble, ‘Strike!’”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  We both laughed.

  “So who’s the other guy in this morning’s scenes? The blonde haired guy?”

  “His name’s Brad. Brad Pitt.”

  “Huh, never heard of him.”

  He smiled then finally said, “Well, I guess we should get back to work.” We walked back to the high school together.

  I worked a total of two days on the set and was disappointed to discover, years later, that the scenes I was in ended up on the cutting room floor. Cut out of Cutting Class, what a drag.19

  1988 Fun Fact #2:

  Actor Haley Joel Osment is born which is important–he’d later see dead people in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller, “The Sixth Sense.” Did I get the twist at the end? Hell no! And neither did you! Be honest now. One of my favorite cinematic lines of all-time: “I didn’t know you were funny.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I returned to Sacramento for the summer hoping to land a job at the California Department of Fire (CDF) station in nearby Placerville. Any hope went out the window as I waited my turn. There, in the front office sat my competition: three volunteer firemen and a pretty girl in her early-twenties. Hell, I thought, I’m in last place already.

  I had no fire fighting experience. The committee of three guys, dressed in olive green CDF uniforms and dirty black boots, leaned forward and asked, “How well can you cook?”

  Before I could answer, one guy mumbled, “Everyone takes a turn cooking around here and most guys can’t cook for crap.”

  I said something about BBQ chicken, thanked them for their time, and made a hasty retreat for the door. A few days later, I received the postcard thanking me for my time. I wouldn’t have hired me either.

  Longs Drugs wasn’t hiring so I signed up at a temp agency. When asked what skills I possessed, I wrote, acting ability–having recently performed in an as-of-yet-to-be-released major motion picture. When I handed the form back to the chubby lady in the cheap flowery dress, she scanned down my application and burst out laughing.
/>   I made another quick retreat as she passed it to a co-worker, pointing at it in glee.

  A few days later Chubs called and said she had a job at the local Pepsi Cola bottling plant.

  “They filming a commercial there?” I asked brightly.

  “Uh, no.”

  “They need a typist? Did I tell you I can type forty eight words a minute?”

  “Uh, typing jobs are filled by the ladies, Sport. If you want this job, you’ll need work boots, long pants, and a long sleeve shirt. The job starts at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Now, do you want the job or not?”

  Faced with the prospect of another day watching The Price Is Right and General Hospital, I reluctantly said yes.

  Early the next morning, I reported to the Pepsi plant along with two sleepy black dudes. It was still dark and cold as we stood outside the warehouse door in silence, our hands stuffed in our pockets. The door swung open and out popped an overweight, unshaven, agitated white guy in a hardhat.

  “You’re on the clock. Let’s go!”

  He looked at the three of us like we were slime.

  “Only three of you today, huh? Well, LET’S GO LADIES.”

  We followed him in as rows of overhead florescent lights flickered on. Forklifts fired up. Machines whirred to life. What little respect I had for the foreman quickly disappeared.

  “You mooks20 are working on a conveyor belt today, see?”

  The three of us yawned in unison.

  “You’ll unload empty glass bottles onto the belt, see? The belt runs them through the washer. From the washer, they go through a dryer, then they get refilled. You’ll need to work fast.”

  I think the mooks could handle it.

  “One last thing,” he barked. “This is a Pepsi plant, see? Doesn’t mean that the occasional Coke bottle doesn’t come back to us. You let a Coke bottle past you and we have to stop the line. Don’t make me stop this line!”

  With that he climbed into an elevated chair next to the belt and, with the push of a button, the conveyor belt sprang to life. Forklift drivers began delivering pallets of empty sixteen ounce bottles.

  Perhaps the most well-known episode of I Love Lucy is the 1952 “Job Switching” where Lucy and Ethel take a job packaging candy on a conveyor belt. In no time, they fall behind and resort to all kinds of shenanigans to keep up. That is what the long morning felt like. Our supervisor must have thought his hardhat made him the Grand Poobah–either that or Chief Asshole–because he controlled how fast the belt moved. And we couldn’t move fast enough.

  The quicker we unloaded heavy cases of sticky, empty bottles, the quicker he’d run the belt. Occasionally, a rogue bottle slipped through–a Coke, or a Sprite, or a Mr. Pibb–and he’d slam the red button halting the line, leap down off of his perch, and shove the offending bottle in our faces.

  “How’d this get through, huh?”

  The three of us shrugged.

  “I wish I could dock your pay for every one of these that slips by,” he muttered then resumed his perch on his elevated throne.

  The morning passed slowly.

  Over the lunch hour, my two fellow temp workers walked off and never came back. The Grand Poobah squealed with glee, “We don’t pay for half-days so those guys just worked for free! HA!” He looked at me like this had personal meaning to me. I suppose that it did, since it left me one-on-one with the guy for the rest of the day.

  “Since it’s just you, I’ll have you work the belt for another hour or two than you can push a broom ‘til quitting time.”

  “Uh, thanks?”

  True to his word, I unloaded empty bottles for another two hours then he shoved a broom in my hand. I reckon he did this more for his sake than mine–with only one person to crack the whip on, he struggled to stay awake on his perch. My guess is he excused himself to a bathroom stall with a girly magazine for the rest of the day.

  Pushing a broom wasn’t the sexiest job in the world, but it beat working the conveyor belt and gave me a chance to look around the large warehouse. The place was full of motion–forklifts zipped up and down aisles, machines washed empty bottles, machines filled clean bottles. The sweet smell of syrup hung in the air.

  I watched a large piece of machinery–what I’d call an auto-stacker–stack pallets of freshly filled bottles vertically. When it hit three-stories high, and the spire began to lean, I turned and ran.

  Behind me, the groan of stressed plywood gave way to the loudest explosion of glass I’ve ever heard. A wave of Pepsi, three inches deep, rushed past my feet in every direction.

  When I turned around, the scene was total chaos.

  Hundreds of bottles had crashed to the floor. All machinery ground to a halt as workers rushed to the scene. Now I’m not a mathematician, but here’s a good exercise: If a warehouse is three hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide (just my wild guess) and a bottle of soda is sixteen ounces, how many broken bottles does it take to cover the floor of the warehouse in three inches of soda? (I guess that’s impossible to solve without knowing how many pallets are on the floor, displacing the soda. For sake of this exercise, let’s pretend there were twenty five pallets with a footprint of 48” by 40.” If you’re smart enough to figure this out, please e-mail the answer. I’m dying to know.)

  Now I’ve smelled some nasty things in my day (the mix of a petroleum plant amidst pineapple fields in Hawaii, my brother Lorne’s belches, are two examples), but there’s nothing like the sickening-sweet smell of Pepsi syrup and forklift exhaust. The combination, in the sweltering heat, makes me want to puke to this very day.

  My supervisor-for-the-day splashed through the soda and screamed, “Well, don’t just stand there! Start sweeping up this glass!” And there was glass everywhere.

  After a long, dissatisfying day of conveyor belt work and one near death experience,21 Fat Boy had the nerve to ask, “So, you coming back tomorrow?”

  Snatching my signed timesheet, I replied, “Not hardly.”

  Throughout the summer, I made the four-hour drive south to Porterville. One regular stop was Nina’s house even though we were no longer dating. Much to her frustration, her parents and I enjoyed a mutual adoration. On one such visit, Ray asked me how I liked going to school in Los Angeles.

  “I like it a lot,” I said matter-of-factly, “but I’m pretty much broke all the time.”

  “How would you like a job at the hospital next summer?”

  My pulse quickened. I hadn’t even thought of hitting him up for a job.

  “That would be great! But … what would I do?”

  He took a drink of St. Pauli Girl and thought for a moment.

  “The highest paying department you could work in would be the maintenance department. You’d make more than most of the nurses.”

  “I … I don’t know what to say!”

  “Say ‘Yes’”!

  “Yes!”

  This seemingly innocent conversation turned out to be a pivotal point in my life. I’ve worked in healthcare ever since.

  After a long night of partying, I found myself in the backseat of Joe’s brother’s Mustang. Joe and Ted cleaned houses in their spare time and thought nothing of driving the two and a half hours from Porterville to northern Los Angeles County for a day’s work. Having nothing else to do and always in need of extra money, I went along as a hired hand. We left Porterville at 4 a.m. with Joe behind the wheel and his brother in the passenger seat.

  In no time, Ted and I dozed off. Not long after that, I awoke to the world in a slow spin, my ears filled with the shriek of squealing tires and Ted screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  I believe that no one can truly predict how a person will behave under extreme, life threatening stress and I was surprised at my response.

  “It’s cool! It’s cool! It’s cool! It’s cool!” I spit out these two words, in rapid fire sequence, over and over again.

  Joe had fallen asleep on a steep downhill grade midway through the
Tehachapi Mountains (better known as The Grapevine), and the car had drifted into the shallow ravine separating north- and southbound I-5. As the car dipped and slid into the ditch at eighty miles an hour, Joe awoke and jerked the wheel to the right, severely overcorrecting our trajectory.

  Thus, the spin.

  On a dry road, the Mustang would have rolled with nothing but a two-foot-high barrier separating us from Pyramid Lake some 1,500 feet below. If the tumble down the mountain wouldn’t have killed us (though it surely would have), splashing into the lake and drowning with massive internal injuries would have been just as effective.

  As the world spun, and Ted shrieked, and I patted Joe on the shoulder repeating my two words (“It’s cool! It’s cool! It’s cool!”), Joe sat with both hands gripped on the wheel. An odd sense of serenity emanated from his glazed-over eyes and goofy grin.

  I remember these finite details because I am convinced that the brain micro-processes moments such as these. Death had a grip on our car and I watched the barrier, and the blackness beyond it, come closer and closer …

  WHAM!

  The passenger side door smacked the barrier and we spun in the opposite direction.

  The guardian angel looking down on us saw the car do a three sixty spin then a five forty (another three hundred and sixty degrees then a one eighty) so that when the car finally came to a rest and stalled, we were looking up at the darkened freeway pointed in the wrong direction.

  The sound of light rain against the windshield was broken by Joe’s utterance. “Whoa.”

  Ted, having fallen silent, looked at his brother then looked back at me. Seconds passed as we wrapped our minds around what had just happened. Joe looked back at me and said in perfect monotone, “Well, that was fun.”

  A thousand yards up the hill, headlights appeared. I jammed my finger into Joe’s shoulder and screamed, “Start the car right now! Start the car! Start the car!” The brothers turned and realized that, while we may have just escaped death thanks to a stubborn guardrail, we were moments away from getting creamed by a big rig bearing down on us.