We stepped out of the car at The Wayfarer Hotel located on the infamous shit hole strip of Myrtle Beach. Cutter jumps right out, box in hand and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I was not so fast. I had to spend time prying my hands out of the door handles and seat. As we walked to the office, I could not help but notice that I had been shaking my left hand for about two minutes and it had really become sore from gripping the proverbial oh shit handle for the last three and a half hours. We got a room and actually, managed to score the one we had always gotten on any of our excursions down. From Senior Week to Just for the hell of it, we managed to score Room 201. It was the biggest room and overlooked the road that at night would become a sea of white trash in bathing suits.
The room was just like we left it years before and after I moved the twin bed on the right, I found that our names had been preserved from where we carved them in the wall next to the girls we had mounted in the room from the years earlier. That brought the first smile to my face of the trip. Cutter was already in the bathroom powdering his nose. He came up for air just enough to tell me to fix us a shot of Cuervo. I knew mixing alcohol in Myrtle Beach with Cutter, an automobile and meetings was going to be the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but after that death defying trip with Satan behind the wheel, I felt it to be the best decision I would make. Cutter exited the bathroom. His nose was already becoming raw with glimpses of redness and irritation around the edges. He was just one of those guys that could not stand anything but fast and furious when it came to his unstable health. He had said he was getting it all out of his system before little Ashton comes. That was a fucking excuse. He had always had a reason. I chose not to be Sister Mary anymore. I agreed and that was that.
Lets go grab a steak, he exclaimed, swigging from the bottle. Apparently, my drink pouring had not been up to his gluttonous standards.
OK, so for anybody familiar with the effects of cocaine, doing six lines, (of what I had counted him doing,) and grabbing a steak fit together like mayonnaise on a biscuit. When you do coke, you would be lucky to manage a whole bottle of water passed your esophagus. And when was the last time, you saw a coke or crack addict that was hefty around the edges sporting a triple chin, talking about being rock bottom? I had not done any coke so a steak was not going to be a problem for me and I will be honest, I Cutters fat ass didnt have a problem with it either.
We were half way through our steaks before I decided to cut the small talk.
Do you have a plan, I asked him.
Plan on what?
I mean, did you bring the pie charts I made you. The spreadsheet, the business proposal, did you bring them?
Nah. This is an informal meeting, he assures me.
I could not believe my ears. You know, dudeI worked my ass off on those and you are talking about an informal meeting? There are no informal meetings when you are talking business. You come with your plan. You sell your plan. You are not Martin Luther King, you dilldo. You cant just walk in and tell them you have a dream.
I was just gonna walk in, meet them, tell them my plan and show them some examples of what I plan on doing, he said so non-shalantly.
Then you were going to give them the proposal after they tell you no, I hit back with sarcasm.
You know me better than that, Garrick. Im a salesman. I know how to work them.
Out of at least seventy business ventures of his, he had not worked one. I chose not to say anything at all. He ordered two more drinks for us. I was reluctant, but went ahead and drank it. I in the years after college, had trained myself to have a little restrain when it came to this. Cutter, well, he had not.
FAST FORWARD to 3:00am.
We had hit three bars. Cutter had passed out the last of his thirty business cards and I find myself on the sand getting really pissed that I am still up. Granted, the tequila shots had gone from three to about nine, but I had stopped around one. They were still taking effect. Cutter had gotten in one of his down on himself moods, probably to the excessive drinking, smoking and snorting he had done through out the night. When he got into these moods, he had always scared me, because instead of shaping up and getting it together, he would continue to binge until he would end up in a diabetic seizure, so I sat with him, biting my tongue. Through out the night, I had kind of juggled the idea of my prospective meeting in a couple of hours. Almost like a break through. In the past seven months of attempting to get this porn made, I had become a father, rekindled my friendship with the guy I had aimed to impress by doing the movie and learned some hard lessons about trust, dollars & sense, (yes, I meant to spell it that way,) and the real bullshit way of reality. I had always put off making a real film, justifying it by not be able to raise money for a market that has become oversaturated with shit movies by the abundance of high end digital cameras.
So many wannabee filmmakers had put stars in old golfing business mens eyes only to end up pissing the money away on yet another Pulp Fiction remake. There are no more suckers out there and if there are, they are investing on the web.
This was my excuse or my cop out if you want to look at it that way, but here I was out talking to suckers trying to raise money to make an adult film. The only difference in the two was that it was easier to guarantee money back on an adult movie. I had hit snag after snag and the only guy that put a check in my hand was more interested in my mainstream movie anyway. Maybe I didnt have to shoot a porn. Maybe I could pull one of my scripts out of mothballs and start dual selling my first idea with my real dream and just see what happens. I would not be back tracking I thought to myself. Suddenly, the idea of shooting a bunch of strippers for a couple thousand didnt sound so good anymore.
.WOW I was real tired. Money was money. This meeting had to happen and looking at my phone which was almost out of battery due to the abuse it had taken when Mandi kept hanging up on me and I kept calling back a couple hours earlier, and it said 4:30am, I knew I had to get salesman on his feet and get a couple hours. I looked over and he was out. Mouth open and snoring. I wanted to drop a jellyfish in it. I knew Cutter. It wasnt just a bucket of water to the face or a honey, its time to get up. It was starting a gasoline bonfire under his ass to get him to open an eye after a night of binging.
I looked around. The beach was empty. There was always a call to the police on semi-powered phone. There was leaving him there, knowing the tide had already gone out. There was pulling, dragging and carrying him-------
Or I could just push him out to sea..
Sunuvabitch, I said to myself, Im gonna need a couple hits of that coke just to get the strength to haul this beached whale back to the aquarium.
I looked in his pocket, opened his vile, only to verify what I already knew. He had already done it all. I guess I was going to find out what its like to be an ant.
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