Allow me to say first of all that Jacksonville, Florida is a beautiful city to just stroll up upon in the middle of the day.
As soon as I stepped foot off of the poverty express and planted my beatup size 11 1/2 Nike Dunks on solid ground, I was greeted by none other then Jacksonvilles own resident cult film junky Ed Tucker who was kind enough to give me a lift to my room at the Wyndham.
After relaxing briefly and discussing everything from our expectations of the convention to the confusing dimensions of original theatrical posters. We eagerly rushed downstairs for a quick peak inside of the convention hall and wound up so overwhelmed by the greatness surrounding us that we decided to sneak in as much as we could before it was time to meet fellow fanboy Jon Haughton at the Amtrek Station.
Once inside I had reverted back in time to some toddler like mindset, waddeling around in a hurry eager to open presents on a Christmas morning.
"Look Ed, it's Sid Haig!, Look Ed, It's Fred Williamson!" I'd shout while tugging on Ed's arm while demanding he hault everything to snap my picture with them. It took Ed slapping me across the face with his polar bear sized mits and shouting, "gadzooks man, pull yourself together and quit acting like a little bitch. You're embaressing me!" to calm me down.
Ed is a pretty big dude with a presidential prescience, the kind of guy that grabs life by the short hairs and doesn't take any guff. A renegade of sorts. I could see it in his eyes that he was determined to not allow this once in a lifetime weekend to slip through his finger tips. He was going to make this the best gosh damn fanboy experience of his life or die trying and I was right there along side him ready for wherever this crazy journey would take me.
After collecting pictures from the likes of Sid Haig, Fred Williamson, Camille Keaton, John Amplas and Jim Kelly I browsed the room a bit and encountered a conversation taking place between the original hot punk chick, Mink Stole and Day Of The Deads Gary Klar over the crappiness of CGI and other anti-mainstream Hollywood retorict.
When the conversation ceased Mink Stole turned to face me and like some virginal fanboy fresh off of the banana boat the most creative conversation starter I could muster was, "wow your Mink Stole, I'm a huge fan, I just watched Desperate Living a few nights ago". Obviously a seasoned pro at handling overly anxious nerds such as myself she responded with, "oh yeah, there's alot of shouting in that movie, everybodies screaming. You should come by my table and talk to me whenever".
Thats when it occured to me that I really had nothing to talk to these guest about. Sure I was a big fan and had seen most if not all of their popular films. But truthfully everything I had ever wanted to know about them I have already learned off of the internet or in a magazine.
By the time I did get around to talking with Ms. Stole I had realized alot of the stuff she was telling me I had already heard in a interview done decades ago by John Waters. But none the less, how fucking cool was it that I was holding a conversation with her? Strangely, she is either nothing like the charectors she portrayed on screen or she grew out of that faze of her life a long time ago because she striked me as being, well, normal.
There wasn't really much selection in terms of collectables but I did notice a few cool t-shirts and some awesome og theatrical posters that I had determined I would size up later when I had more time.
I'm not going to front, I will admit to being a little star struck over being in the vacinity of so many actors who's work I have admired for so long and never thought I'd have the privaledge of meeting. The worst being when Jim "The Dragon" Kelly intiated a conversation with me regarding my shirt, which had a poster for the classic blaxploitation film The Mack on it. "Aiiight man, The Mack!" he said.
They must call him the dragon for a reason cause it felt like the man had just breathed fire upon me and I was nothing more then a standing statuete of ashes ready to float off into a trillion pieces if confronted by the slightest breeze. I just stood there doing a Terry Schiavo impersonation, the only thing my brain would allow me to do at that point and smiled for the camera.
I've been fortunate in my lifetime to have met many a famous person and the celebrity factor doesn't really get to me that much anymore. I guess maybe it was the fact that these were stars who don't get around this way very often, many of which I suspect will be in no condition sooner or later to make it out to these events at all shortly enough, giving the whole experience much more importance then that of just some convention.
At this point, roughly a half an hour into the Cult-Fiction Drive-In convention I can very easily say with no bullshit that this trip should have been any fanboys wet dream come to life.
With a day and a half left for me in Jacksonville and having already accomplished much of what I had came here for I had to wonder how things were possibly going to get any better after such an amazing start.
Showing posts with label fred williamson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fred williamson. Show all posts
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
The Jacksonville Summit Part 2: The Professional
Ofcourse, as luck would have it, the Shrek looking soul-brother I had just pissed off turned out to be none other then the bus driver. Which seems kind of crazy to me that not only would the lady at the counter be completely useless and void of any sort of customer service skills, but the bus driver, the guy I was depending upon to deliver me safely to Jacksonville, was also a miserable cocksucker that strutted around as though he were only making $4 an hour. Great.
Scared out of my mind at this point, hating myself over the possibility that I had made some idiotic mistake or misread the instructions on the original Greyhound paperwork, I shuttered to think how I was going to explain this one to my family. Especially my sister.
How would I sound on the phone trying to explain that a trip I had been planning for months on end was killed off pre-maturely with money flushed down some figurative tubes before it had even had a chance to get started. With several years of bad luck and poor decisions behind me, this moment seemed in my head as though it would be the one that would finally change things, cause people to look at me differently, etc. etc.
Luckily for me it was the exact opposite, by the time I had reached Clearwater my sister had called to check up on me and eagerly rushed to my defense against the evil Greyhound empire.
She made several phone calls, getting answers and pressing the issue so hard that by the time I did get to Tampa the manager in the corporate office was there waiting to shake my hand, offer an appology and lend me his personal assistance in resolving the matter.
Pretty impressive stuff, I mean, my sister is smart, super smart. She's like the Derrick Rose of brainiacs. Listening to her on the otherend of a three way call was like hearing, well, I dont know quite what to compare it to but it was pretty damn awesome. She had these nitwits tounge tied and flustered, they didn't know what to do and I could tell they were scared.
What I should have done before leaving the St. Pete station was say to the woman (if you want to call her that) at the counter, "bitch, aiight, you wanna get nuts? I'm calling in the big guns, yeah, I'm gonna call my sister! My sister is so bad, that by Monday morning she will have you selling Greyhound tickets to escimo's in Alaska, so dress warm".
At the ticket counter in the Tampa station the woman helping me on the computer had told me that the issue with my ticket wasn't that it was printed. It was that a schedule change had been made in the bus route and the computer system did not recognize it.
Whatever.
By this point I was ready to just file the damn complaint and move on with my trip to Jacksonville. The woman at the counter, who happened to be black of all things, seemed disinterested with my attempts to impress her with the information that I was traveling to meet none other then Pam Grier, Foxy Brown herself.
On the otherhand the the raggedy old white chain smoker I was trying to weisel a hand job out of turned out to be a big Pam Grier fan and recognized her instantly on the poster I was carrying around.
Now securely seated on this gigantic tin can of a cargo ship designed to transport poor people I was finally on my way to Jacksonville, eager to rendezvous with fellow fans and mingle with my hero's.
Scared out of my mind at this point, hating myself over the possibility that I had made some idiotic mistake or misread the instructions on the original Greyhound paperwork, I shuttered to think how I was going to explain this one to my family. Especially my sister.
How would I sound on the phone trying to explain that a trip I had been planning for months on end was killed off pre-maturely with money flushed down some figurative tubes before it had even had a chance to get started. With several years of bad luck and poor decisions behind me, this moment seemed in my head as though it would be the one that would finally change things, cause people to look at me differently, etc. etc.
Luckily for me it was the exact opposite, by the time I had reached Clearwater my sister had called to check up on me and eagerly rushed to my defense against the evil Greyhound empire.
She made several phone calls, getting answers and pressing the issue so hard that by the time I did get to Tampa the manager in the corporate office was there waiting to shake my hand, offer an appology and lend me his personal assistance in resolving the matter.
Pretty impressive stuff, I mean, my sister is smart, super smart. She's like the Derrick Rose of brainiacs. Listening to her on the otherend of a three way call was like hearing, well, I dont know quite what to compare it to but it was pretty damn awesome. She had these nitwits tounge tied and flustered, they didn't know what to do and I could tell they were scared.
What I should have done before leaving the St. Pete station was say to the woman (if you want to call her that) at the counter, "bitch, aiight, you wanna get nuts? I'm calling in the big guns, yeah, I'm gonna call my sister! My sister is so bad, that by Monday morning she will have you selling Greyhound tickets to escimo's in Alaska, so dress warm".
At the ticket counter in the Tampa station the woman helping me on the computer had told me that the issue with my ticket wasn't that it was printed. It was that a schedule change had been made in the bus route and the computer system did not recognize it.
Whatever.
By this point I was ready to just file the damn complaint and move on with my trip to Jacksonville. The woman at the counter, who happened to be black of all things, seemed disinterested with my attempts to impress her with the information that I was traveling to meet none other then Pam Grier, Foxy Brown herself.
On the otherhand the the raggedy old white chain smoker I was trying to weisel a hand job out of turned out to be a big Pam Grier fan and recognized her instantly on the poster I was carrying around.
Now securely seated on this gigantic tin can of a cargo ship designed to transport poor people I was finally on my way to Jacksonville, eager to rendezvous with fellow fans and mingle with my hero's.
The Jacksonville Summit Part 1: Da Funk Bus
Anticipation was high as I casually strode through the early morning streets of Downtown St. Petersburg, pre-dawn before the hordes of rotting vagrant flesh could awaken from their inebriated slumbers to grub some pocket change out of me.
The streets at this time of morning are so robust with the odor of the damned that city workers are assigned to come downtown and spray City Hall with a deoderizing foam to mask the stench.
A stench I bullied my way through to arrive an hour early for a 7:20 am meeting with the Greyhound Bus that was scheduled to pick me up and haul all 180lbs of magnificence known as John Miller up to the city of Jacksonville in north Florida where I would converge with other die-hard fans of cult / horror / grindhouse / drive-in / exploitation cinema for the first (and maybe last?)end all, be all of conventions for weirdos such as myself known as Cult-Fiction.
Arriving before the doors opened allowed me time to be talked at by a brother / sister combo that wreaked of unwashed clothing and beer cans after they have been mildewing in the summer heat for a few days. Apparently the pair were catching the bus for a trip up north to Daytona where they would give a final good bye to an old friend on her death bed due to cancer. Not that I particularly cared for their stories, a part of me was selfishly thinking to myself that if I sat next to this haggard old bag of wrinkly dried out skin that I may be able to negotiate a hand job or something out of her on the bus.
Unfortunately no such luck, before I knew it the doors had opened and the brother was requesting to the lady at the counter that he be seated next to his dear ol sister. He would be my first of several encounters with a cock blocker this trip.
Carrying a Tampa Bay Rays duffle bag around my neck, resting it along my chest and a black Jordan backpack on my back, while still carrying around two cardboard poster containers I made my way up to the front counter beaming with excitement over the possibilities that were to come over the next several days. "Here to pick up my ticket", I said with a rare smile.
As I leaned forward resting my elbows on the counter anxiously awaiting my tickets to print I noticed the biggest, ugliest, blackest son of a bitch I have ever laid eyes upon. The best description I can give is that he looked like the lost siamese twin of Charles S. Dutton, the guy who played Roc and the annoying preacher in Alien 3.
The woman working the counter that morning looked up at me with a straight face and said, "your ticket has already been printed". Taking this as some sort of correctable mistake I calmly asked this diarrhea faced whore for a quick resolution to arguably the stupidest fucking crisis I have ever been mixed up in. Especially after I flashed her my million dollar smile and said, "well, you see that is impossible, I don't even have a printer at home". Her response, "doesn't matter, your ticket has already been printed and I cannot give you another one".
After several exchanges of trying to understand the situation I realized that talking to this braindead twit was an excercise in futility of biblical proportions. I could barely barely get a blink out of this comatosed bitch let alone a straight answer. With the bus's departure minutes away I somehow managed to argue a 1-800 number out of the Terry Schiavo of customer service reps, which ofcourse only worked on CENTRAL TIME!.
When I heatedly asked the woman to speak to her superior she blinked at me one last time before I nervously shouted, "miss, what the fuck is it that you do around here? You have absolutely no answers to any of my questions, you refuse to be helpful in any way besides occassionally blinking to show me that you are atleast a notch above comatosed, I need to get on this damned bus, can you please print me another ticket or something! Anything?!?!"
She blinked at me again and before I knew it Charles S. Duttons ugly siamese twin decided to chime in with his two cents by telling me very boldly, "man, you need to chill the fuck out!".
I'm sorry, but the last thing I am wanting to hear minutes before a $80 round trip bus ticket slips through my fingers and causes me to miss out on the hotel I spent roughly $250 for the weekend to stay in, is the guy from Alien 3's brother boldly telling me I need to, "chill the fuck out".
That's right about the time I completely flipped a gasket to the point that I was ready to just say fuck it and spend my weekend in the 49th Street County Jail.
Without thinking I turned to Charles S. Duttons siamese twin and said, "excuse me motherfucker? How much did you spend this weekend on a hotel room in Jacksonville and a bus ticket to get there?" He calmly continued eating his scrambler bowl (a combination of grits and other assorted breakfast foods)as I ended with, "exactly, now shut the fuck up please unless you have a solution to offer".
Finally, from out of nowhere at the very last possible second the incredible blinking woman opened her mouth and recommended that I just get on the bus outside and go to the corporate office over in Tampa where they would find a way to resolve my issue. Which, logically, a somewhat coherent person would have offered that suggestion from the start instead of walking around for twenty minutes blinking and occassionally muttering on about how she could not give me any assistance. Dumb ass heffer.
The streets at this time of morning are so robust with the odor of the damned that city workers are assigned to come downtown and spray City Hall with a deoderizing foam to mask the stench.
A stench I bullied my way through to arrive an hour early for a 7:20 am meeting with the Greyhound Bus that was scheduled to pick me up and haul all 180lbs of magnificence known as John Miller up to the city of Jacksonville in north Florida where I would converge with other die-hard fans of cult / horror / grindhouse / drive-in / exploitation cinema for the first (and maybe last?)end all, be all of conventions for weirdos such as myself known as Cult-Fiction.
Arriving before the doors opened allowed me time to be talked at by a brother / sister combo that wreaked of unwashed clothing and beer cans after they have been mildewing in the summer heat for a few days. Apparently the pair were catching the bus for a trip up north to Daytona where they would give a final good bye to an old friend on her death bed due to cancer. Not that I particularly cared for their stories, a part of me was selfishly thinking to myself that if I sat next to this haggard old bag of wrinkly dried out skin that I may be able to negotiate a hand job or something out of her on the bus.
Unfortunately no such luck, before I knew it the doors had opened and the brother was requesting to the lady at the counter that he be seated next to his dear ol sister. He would be my first of several encounters with a cock blocker this trip.
Carrying a Tampa Bay Rays duffle bag around my neck, resting it along my chest and a black Jordan backpack on my back, while still carrying around two cardboard poster containers I made my way up to the front counter beaming with excitement over the possibilities that were to come over the next several days. "Here to pick up my ticket", I said with a rare smile.
As I leaned forward resting my elbows on the counter anxiously awaiting my tickets to print I noticed the biggest, ugliest, blackest son of a bitch I have ever laid eyes upon. The best description I can give is that he looked like the lost siamese twin of Charles S. Dutton, the guy who played Roc and the annoying preacher in Alien 3.
The woman working the counter that morning looked up at me with a straight face and said, "your ticket has already been printed". Taking this as some sort of correctable mistake I calmly asked this diarrhea faced whore for a quick resolution to arguably the stupidest fucking crisis I have ever been mixed up in. Especially after I flashed her my million dollar smile and said, "well, you see that is impossible, I don't even have a printer at home". Her response, "doesn't matter, your ticket has already been printed and I cannot give you another one".
After several exchanges of trying to understand the situation I realized that talking to this braindead twit was an excercise in futility of biblical proportions. I could barely barely get a blink out of this comatosed bitch let alone a straight answer. With the bus's departure minutes away I somehow managed to argue a 1-800 number out of the Terry Schiavo of customer service reps, which ofcourse only worked on CENTRAL TIME!.
When I heatedly asked the woman to speak to her superior she blinked at me one last time before I nervously shouted, "miss, what the fuck is it that you do around here? You have absolutely no answers to any of my questions, you refuse to be helpful in any way besides occassionally blinking to show me that you are atleast a notch above comatosed, I need to get on this damned bus, can you please print me another ticket or something! Anything?!?!"
She blinked at me again and before I knew it Charles S. Duttons ugly siamese twin decided to chime in with his two cents by telling me very boldly, "man, you need to chill the fuck out!".
I'm sorry, but the last thing I am wanting to hear minutes before a $80 round trip bus ticket slips through my fingers and causes me to miss out on the hotel I spent roughly $250 for the weekend to stay in, is the guy from Alien 3's brother boldly telling me I need to, "chill the fuck out".
That's right about the time I completely flipped a gasket to the point that I was ready to just say fuck it and spend my weekend in the 49th Street County Jail.
Without thinking I turned to Charles S. Duttons siamese twin and said, "excuse me motherfucker? How much did you spend this weekend on a hotel room in Jacksonville and a bus ticket to get there?" He calmly continued eating his scrambler bowl (a combination of grits and other assorted breakfast foods)as I ended with, "exactly, now shut the fuck up please unless you have a solution to offer".
Finally, from out of nowhere at the very last possible second the incredible blinking woman opened her mouth and recommended that I just get on the bus outside and go to the corporate office over in Tampa where they would find a way to resolve my issue. Which, logically, a somewhat coherent person would have offered that suggestion from the start instead of walking around for twenty minutes blinking and occassionally muttering on about how she could not give me any assistance. Dumb ass heffer.
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