Vote for Ela

I don’t know what a real junkyard looks like.  I’m not the kind of person who hangs around at junkyards shooting rats like my hillbilly cousins.  I did film a movie about a woman being terrorized by a slasher in a junkyard.  They still had the junkyard set they used for Dream Warriors and they wanted to use it for something before they tore it down.  So I know what that looks like.  According to that set a junkyard is a maze of stacked cars.  I doubt that’s true to life but I don’t know that it isn’t for a certainty. 

The director, who was coked out of his gourd during the entire three-week shoot, told me eighteen to seven hundred and fifty times how his vision for the film was a “modern reimagining of Theseus and the Minotaur”.  I’m not super up to date on my Greek myths but if Theseus was running around in a thong and the Minotaur was a chain-smoking stuntman in a Batman mask with the ears ripped off brandishing a meathook I think the director realized his vision to the fullest extent possible.   As I recall Martialla got tetanus on that shoot.  Or maybe it was hoof and mouth disease. 

What does this have to do with anything?  I’m getting to that, hold your horses.  As we got closer to the thing we realized what we were heading for wasn’t a ruined city at all but a massive, massive, MASSIVE junkyard.  Miles and miles and miles of junk. 

I read a script for a movie, some sci-fi future bullshit that centered around people living on an entire planet of garbage.  The twist at the end was that the planet was EARTH! It was Earth the entire time! Nooooooooooo!  Biting social commentary!  One of the many things about the script that made no sense is that a garbage planet isn’t logical.  Wouldn’t it cost way more space dollars in space fuel to haul everything to a certain planet rather than just flinging it into space?  Maybe I should run for space sanitation commissioner.   I could save the space government so many space dollars.

Despite much wild speculation from Lucien and Martialla , no one would come up with any plausible reason why a giant city-sized junkpile would exist.  But there it was in front of us.  Remember that scene in Star Wars when they fall into the trash compactor?  Me neither because I’m not a nerd, but the thing we were looking at was more akin to that than the car-maze from Meathook Massacre. 

What it reminded me of is when you shave your legs and then run the water and little hairs get swept into a circle by the drain.  It was like that, only instead of leg hairs it was everything under the sun.  Well that’s not true, it was all junk rather than garbage.  You know what I mean?  It wasn’t like a landfill, it was like a salvage yard.  A salvage yard the size of Chicago.   

As we approached trash mountain two things happened.  One, the land-whaler vehicles turned away and stopped shadowing us.  Before they left they did come close enough that Martialla and Lucien were ready to shoot them as need be.  The whalers appeared to be considering launching a rusty harpoon our way as a parting gift but ultimately they must have decided against it because they sped off into the hills.   

Charlie Sheen asked me to give him a Rusty Harpoon once on the set of Bad Day on the Block so after we wrapped I had Martialla cut the breaks on his Miata.  Not to kill him, just to scare him a little, you know fooling around.  I think a lot attendant got fired over that but he and Charlie Sheen are both long dead now so I don’t need to feel bad about it anymore.  Also I never felt bad about it, do you job lot attendant guy. 

That did allow us to get a closer look at the land-whalers themselves.  They were all covered up with Welkino furs like they were mummies wrapped in heavy furs instead of strips of linen, staying with the apocalypse fashion trend of everyone either being covered head to toe or being nearly nude.  I can’t understand how they can live like that, it’s a hundred damn degrees all the time, they have to be broiling in their own juices under all those pelts.   Maybe even bribeling. 

The other thing that happened is we noticed that there was a town on the edge of the great junk sea.  The town was tough to spot at first because it blends in very well as it merely looks like slightly more organized piles of junk.  Perfect camouflage because that’s essentially what it is.  Eventually we realized that there was a junk peninsula off the main junkpile that had people moving around in it and doing people stuff.  There were some vehicles coming and going as well – both coming and going to the north.  I’m starting to get the hang of identifying the different styles of junk-machines and I think they’re similar to the ones that the Antolpians convoy that the Invincible destroyed them back west. 

This inevitably led to a debate between Martialla and Lucien regarding the topic of if we should approach the junk city and how he should approach it if we should and this and that and the other which was all pointless because we don’t have a choice.  We barely have any supplies and we even more barely know where the hell we’re going.  We can’t just walk by a town.  I told them as much and they gave the stink-eye like they do whenever I point out that all their jibber-jabber is a waste of time.  This is like dialog from a badly written movie, of course the characters are going to engage with the only thing there is for them to engage with so what’s the debate?  Otherwise there’s no movie.  You can’t have a movie where nothing happens.  I’m looking at you Excess Baggage starring Alicia Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro.