Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (15 page)

R
ecently it came to my attention that I was one of the eight remaining Americans who had not seen
The Blair Witch Project
.

In case you’re one of the other seven, I should explain that
The Blair Witch Project
is a hugely popular movie that was featured simultaneously on the covers of both
Time
and
Newsweek
(mottoes: “We Both Have the Same Motto”).
The Blair Witch Project
stunned the Hollywood establishment, because it proved that, to make a hit movie, you don’t need big stars, an expensive production, and a huge promotional budget to generate hype. All you need is a huge promotional budget to generate hype. The movie itself can cost $34.

Not wishing to be a cultural holdout, I went to see
The Blair Witch Project
, which tells the story of three young film students who attempt to make a documentary without a tripod. This means the camera constantly moves around, as though it is strapped to the head of a hyperactive seal. (For some reason, the camera is often pointed more or less at the ground, as though the seal is hunting for ants.) The effect of this technique is to create a mood of intense realism for several minutes, after which it creates a mood of intense motion sickness.

The three movie characters are looking for the Blair Witch, who according to legend is a mean witch who is never actually seen because of the high cost of special effects. The characters set out and almost immediately become lost in the legendarily huge uninhabited
forests of Maryland (motto: “The Endless Vast Expanse of Wilderness State”). They respond to this predicament exactly as Lewis and Clark would have: by holding long whiny arguments wherein they wave the camera around and repeatedly shout a very bad word that I cannot put in the newspaper, so let’s just call it “darn.” Much of the dialogue sounds like this:

The characters are all so busy arguing and yelling “Darn!” at each other that, in the entire movie, they actually travel a grand total of maybe 75 linear feet. You get the impression that if they’d just shut up and
walk
, in 20 minutes they’d come to a Wal-Mart. But they don’t, and after several days they run out of food. They do NOT, however, run out of electricity for their cameras, which apparently are powered by tiny, highly portable nuclear generators.

And thus they are able to keep videotaping, which enables you, the viewer, to experience the terrifying things that happen right outside their tent at night, namely: It’s hard to say. Apparently SOMETHING terrifying is happening, but you can’t really tell what it is, because pretty much all you see is the ground, or total darkness. Much of the footage near the end appears to be shot deep inside a sleeping bag.

I won’t reveal the terrifying and shocking surprise ending of the movie, because I don’t want to spoil it, plus I have no idea what it is, since it’s not actually IN the movie. The characters all get killed and are unable to videotape it. But at least the darned camera stopped moving.

I hope I don’t appear to be criticizing
The Blair Witch Project
. I happen to think it’s a great film, because despite its flaws, it meets the ultimate artistic test: It will make over a hundred million dollars. This
inspires me. In my college days, I spent my summers working at Camp Sharparoon as a counselor for disadvantaged youths, and one of my key counseling techniques was terror. When we were out in the woods at night, I could make the youths at least briefly stop hitting each other and making bodily sounds by telling them scary bedtime stories. Not to brag, but some of my stories were a lot scarier than
The Blair Witch Project
, as determined by the standard unit of measurement for bedtime-story scariness, which is Bedrolls Wetted.

So I’m thinking I can cash in on my Camp Sharparoon stories by turning them into terrifying low-budget films. I’ll start with
Hunt for the Latrine Demon
, which will be about an ill-fated attempt to make a documentary about an entity that dwells, according to legend, in a primitive hand-dug campsite toilet facility. I’ve already got a script written (“It’s got me by my darned ankles!”). All I need now is some unknown actors, a video camera, and a huge promotional budget. And of course a seal.

S
o get this: I partied with Mick Jagger. Well, OK, perhaps “partied with” is too strong a term. Perhaps a better term would be “was in the vicinity of.” But still. Mick Jagger!

The way this happened was, back in December I got a fax from a public-relations agency inviting me to a party being given by a person named Chris Blackwell, who is very famous although I honestly still don’t know why. The fax said that the purpose of the party was to celebrate the “new incarnation” of the Marlin Hotel, which is a swank night spot in an area of Miami Beach called South Beach, a chic, avant-garde jet-set sector where you never see a woman who is under six feet three or weighs more than 83 pounds. This is a place where Barbie would look like a middle linebacker.

The invitation said: “Among the guests expected are The Rolling Stones, as they’re in town for their concert this Friday.”

Of course I wanted to go to this party. I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War. In college, I was in a rock band called The Federal Duck, and we performed many Stones songs, and at the risk of tooting my own horn, I will say that we sounded exactly the way the Stones themselves would have sounded if they were not all playing the same chords.

On the night of the party, my wife was out of town, so I asked my 17-year-old son, Rob, if he wanted to go with me. You can imagine his
excitement when I offered him a chance to meet the Rolling Stones IN PERSON.

“No thanks,” he said.

Like many young people of today, my son does not appreciate classical musicians such as the Stones; he is more into bands with names like “Heave” and “Squatting Turnips.” So I asked a friend, novelist Paul Levine, if he wanted to go to the party, and he courageously said yes, despite the very real risk that I would, in this column, mention his forthcoming book
9 Scorpions
, which Paul describes as “a story of seduction and corruption at the Supreme Court.” (I just hope that this description does not cause anybody to envision William Rehnquist naked.)

Paul and I arrived at the Marlin Hotel and immediately determined that we were the oldest people who had ever set foot in there by a good 30 years. The party featured very loud music and many avant-garde people lounging around amid the new, reincarnated hotel decor, which included, among other sophisticated touches, window treatments that looked like gigantic shower curtains. We did not see any Rolling Stones. But there were several famous people on hand, including:

Paul and I got this information from a 20-year-old woman hair stylist named Nate (pronounced “Na-TAY”), who also gave us both free advice on what to do with our hair. She told Paul to use gel. She told me—and this is a direct quote—“You should rock the Caesar.”

“I should rock the Caesar?” I asked.

“Definitely,” said Nate.

“You really should,” said Paul.

It turns out that “rock the Caesar” means getting the style of haircut worn by the Roman emperor Julius Caesar and the TV actor George Clooney. I definitely plan to adopt this style, just as soon as William Rehnquist does.

So anyway, Paul and I were sitting in a corner, a pair of fossils with outmoded hair, when the front door opened, and guess who walked in, in all his rock-idol glory? That’s right: Elvis.

No, seriously, it was Mick Jagger. When I saw him, I felt a thrill, and I will tell you why: Because suddenly, there was somebody at the party who was even older than I am. He’s only a little older if you calculate it in normal human years; but he has been living rock-star years, which take a much greater toll. In person, he looks like Yoda wearing a Mick Jagger wig.

But he seemed like a pleasant enough person, as near as I could tell from watching a crowd of avant-garde people trying to get as close to him as possible while pretending not to. I considered trying to push my way in there and strike up a conversation with Mick, maybe try to find out the correct chords to “Under My Thumb.” But it seemed like a lot of work, plus it was 10:30
P.M
., way past my bedtime. So Paul and I left. But I enjoyed the evening. The way I see it, I was, briefly, hanging out with an actual Rolling Stone. If you see it differently, get offa my cloud.

I
have exciting news for anybody who would like to pay a lot of money for coffee that has passed all the way through an animal’s digestive tract.

And you just know there are plenty of people who would. Specialty coffees are very popular these days, attracting millions of consumers, every single one of whom is standing in line ahead of me whenever I go to the coffee place at the airport to grab a quick cup on my way to catch a plane. These consumers are always ordering mutant beverages with names like “mocha-almond-honey-vinaigrette lattespressacino,” beverages that must be made one at a time via a lengthy and complex process involving approximately one coffee bean, three quarts of dairy products, and what appears to be a small nuclear reactor.

Meanwhile, back in the line, there is growing impatience among those of us who just want a plain old cup of coffee so that our brains will start working and we can remember what our full names are and why we are catching an airplane. We want to strike the lattespressacino people with our carry-on baggage and scream “GET OUT OF OUR WAY, YOU TREND GEEKS, AND LET US HAVE OUR COFFEE!” But of course we couldn’t do anything that active until we’ve had our coffee.

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently
view it as some kind of recreational activity. I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts. I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles.

The reason some of us need coffee is that it contains caffeine, which makes us alert. Of course it is very important to remember that caffeine is a drug, and, like any drug, it is a lot of fun.

No! Wait! What I meant to say is: Like any drug, caffeine can have serious side effects if we ingest too much. This fact was first noticed in ancient Egypt when a group of workers, who were supposed to be making a birdbath, began drinking Egyptian coffee, which is very strong, and wound up constructing the pyramids.

I myself developed the coffee habit in my early 20s, when, as a “cub” reporter for the
Daily Local News
in West Chester, Pennsylvania, I had to stay awake while writing phenomenally boring stories about municipal government. I got my coffee from a vending machine that also sold hot chocolate and chicken-noodle soup; all three liquids squirted out of a single tube, and they tasted pretty much the same. But I came to need that coffee, and even today I can do nothing useful before I’ve had several cups. (I can’t do anything useful afterward, either; that’s why I’m a columnist.)

But here’s my point: This specialty-coffee craze has gone too far. I say this in light of a letter I got recently from alert reader Bo Bishop. He sent me an invitation he received from a local company to a “private tasting of the highly prized Luwak coffee,” which “at $300 a pound … is one of the most expensive drinks in the world.” The invitation states that this coffee is named for the luwak, a “member of the weasel family” that lives on the Island of Java and eats coffee berries; as the berries pass through the luwak, a “natural fermentation” takes place, and the berry seeds—the coffee beans—come out of the luwak intact. The beans are then gathered, washed, roasted, and sold to coffee connoisseurs.

The invitation states: “We wish to pass along this once in a lifetime opportunity to taste such a rarity.”

Or, as Bo Bishop put it: “They’re selling processed weasel doodoo for $300 a pound.”

I first thought this was a clever hoax designed to ridicule the coffee craze. Tragically, it is not. There really is a Luwak coffee. I know because I bought some from a specialty-coffee company in Atlanta. I paid $37.50 for two ounces of beans. I was expecting the beans to look exotic, considering where they’d been, but they looked like regular coffee beans. In fact, for a moment I was afraid that they were just regular beans, and that I was being ripped off.

Then I thought: What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was NOT pooped out by a weasel?

So anyway, I ground the beans up and brewed the coffee and drank some. You know how sometimes, when you’re really skeptical about something, but then you finally try it, you discover that it’s really good, way better than you would have thought possible? This is not the case with Luwak coffee. Luwak coffee, in my opinion, tastes like somebody washed a dead cat in it.

But I predict it’s going to be popular anyway, because it’s expensive. One of these days, the people in front of me at the airport coffee place are going to be ordering decaf poopacino. I’m thinking of switching to heroin.

R
ecently I was lying on the sofa and watching my favorite TV show, which is called,
Whatever Is On TV When I’m Lying on the Sofa
. I was in a good mood until the commercial came on. It showed an old man (and when I say “old man,” I mean “a man who is maybe eight years older than I am”) helping his grandson learn to ride a bicycle.