Empire of Light (29 page)

I lean up into the front seat and blink the Audi’s headlamps. Rocco starts the van and rolls up on the gate. Giacomo appears at the guard’s now empty station and he hits a switch. The gate swings open and Rocco accelerates and speeds through it.

He’s away!

Giacomo calmly exists the building and heads back to the car. Seconds later, the girl and the guard return to the desk. She dangles a massive chain full of keys, bobbles, charms and trinkets, as if to thank him for helping her finding them. She gives him a kiss on the cheek, and I can see the sap blush from here. She leaves him with a huge grin on his mug, oblivious to the fact that a one hundred thousand dollar production van has gone missing from his lot.

Giacomo hops into the car and stares at me in the rearview mirror.

“What?” I ask.

“Would you mind getting up into the front seat. I’m not
Driving Miss Daisy
.”

I bolt out of the car and scurry into the front seat as if we’re under sniper fire.

SLAM!

I close the car door way too hard.

“Jason. Chill,” Giacomo says.

“You know, I have enough money to rent you a generator, Giacomo” I protest.

“It was too late for that.” He starts up the car and pulls away from the curve.

“Besides. This kind of thing is expected here. This is Napoli.”

***

“You want me to what?” I ask taken a back.

“I need more power. I need you to pull more amps out of the van’s generator. Override the breakers, flip the switches, suck its dick. Whatever you need to do to get us up and lit, do it,” Giacomo demands.

“You do realize that the last time I pulled something like this, I got the entire production shut down, right?”

“There will be no fire department visiting us here,” he says confidently. “Do you have a problem with doing what I ask?”

“It’s not a problem,” I say, snatching the gloves out of his hand. “Give me ten minutes.”

A second chance. This is absolutely the last thing I expected out of this trip, but I suddenly have a chance to cancel one of the most scaring incidents of my life.

Hell yeah. Let’s make this happen.

I put on my gloves as I march in the direction of the van. I can’t help but feel like the undercover cop who’s been ordered to kill a hostage to prove he can be trusted, donning gloves to mask my finger prints.

I have a friend, a Feng Shui bible thumper, who believes that inanimate objects have energy about them. I believe her. Before I slide open the van’s cargo door, I think about how native hunters will sometimes give thanks to their kill. They’ll give their prey mad props for giving up their lives to nourish the hunters and their people.

I gently rub the van’s side door. “Easy, girl…I just need a little more energy from you,” I say calmly to it. I slide open the door and get to work.

I swap out the fuses with dummy taps and yank out every safety measure I can possibly find that will regulate the energy flowing to the lights. By the time I’m done with her, she’ll give us all she’s got, no holding back. I just have to keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t explode.

“We’re hot!” I scream from the back of the van.

The skeleton crew of guerilla filmmakers fire up the lights, and within seconds, a small piazza is set a blaze with an array of movie lights.

The crew cheers!

They applaud me as I leap out of the van and head back to the set and yank off my gloves. I walk with the swagger of a cowboy porn star named Buck.

They love me because I put an end to their darkness.

I’m a giver of light.

Fear me, mortal fools, for as quickly as I give light, I can also take it away, without mercy.

Women love me.

Men envy me.

Children struggle to spell my name in their alphabet soup.

A guy could get used to this.

After a slap on the back and thanks from Giacomo, he finally decides to give me the down low on what his project is all about.

“
The Zax Parable
,” Giacomo says with a smirk, as he whips out the script stuffed in his back pocket.

“
The Zax Parable
? Why does that sound familiar?”

“Because your mom read it to us when we were kids,” Giacomo says with a grin.

He points to the south end of the piazza where a rider is sitting on a blood red motorscooter. “The North-Going Zax.”

Then he points to the north end of the piazza where another driver waits on a hunter green motorcycle. “The South-Going Zax,” continues Giacomo.

The literature of Dr. Theodore Seuss Geisel should be required reading by anyone who assumes the position of a president, emperor, or potentate. If this were so, I bet ya dollars to donuts the world would be a better place.

Giacomo and I became addicted to Dr. Seuss stories after my mom read
The Sneetches
story to us.
The Zax
was one of our favorites.

In the story, a North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax meet face to face in a wide-open prairie of Prax. They’re in each other’s way, but instead of moving around each other, they both refuse to move in any other direction except for their respective headings. It’s a fucked up standoff written in beautiful storybook poetry. Giacomo has taken this story and created a lampoon, set it in Napoli instead of Prax, and the two Zax are replaced by two tough guys on motorcycles.

I’m all over it.

Tonight is to be the last night of filming. I take his script and huddle on the stairs of the piazza’s church to study it.

The film opens with a forty-something driver, dressed all in black and sitting on a blood red cycle, tearing ass through the crowded streets of Napoli, from screen right to screen left through the black of night.

He drives in a straight line, causing all sorts of near accidents and chaos, but he doesn’t waiver from his path. A compass is attached to his handlebar that shows his heading.

North. Dead on.

Screaming into town from the opposite direction is another driver dressed in black, also heading straight. The only difference is that his Vespa is hunter green and the compass on his handlebars shows that he is headed South. Dead on.

He’s headed for a collision with his doppelganger in red.

In a dark parody, the narrator, scripted with an ominous deep voice, begins to speak aping the familiar rhyme of a Seuss joint.

One night, blazin’ trails,

Engines teasing richter’s scale,

Blew a North-Gusting Gale,

And a South-Raising Hale.

Low and behold the two came to a spot

Where they roared. There they fumed.

Helmet to helmet. Breath steamin’ hot.

"Hey!" screamed the North-Gusting Gale. "Get the fuck out my way.

Get the hell off my path. On my trail you do stray!

I'm a North-Gusting Gale and I always roll north.

You’ll retreat, step off, so that I can race forth!"

"Never!" snapped the South-Raising Hale.

"Don’t tempt me, you fool, my anger’s third rail.

I’ll slay you and bolt south on my south going trail.

My bike never strays, ever straight, lightning swift.

Move aside and you’ll live! Thank the gods for this gift."

The North-Gusting Gale grabbed at his junk in haste.

"My nuts," he growled, "Bitch, I own this space.

I will move for no man, come hell or high water

At this spot I will stand, the scene of your slaughter.

Witness my resolve and stare in awe,

I’m dug in as deep, as rooted, like a sharp Devil’s Claw.”

"Cock sucker," snarled the South-Raising Hale.

“
I’ll stand here forever, and I shall not bail!

I’m down by the law that I learned as child,

by my father, the likes of you he surely reviled!

No retreat. My decree. Behold my quest!

I’ll not sway east and sure as hell not west.

The city will stay, for I shall not move.

I stand at bay, in the trench of my south burning groove!”

Well… Of course the city did not stay. It awoke.

In a few of hours, the piazza was packed with all types of folk.

And they ignored the riders standing still on their trail

Their stubborn ways the moral of this bullshit tale.

The shoot was going fast and the actors were nailing their lines. It wasn’t too long before we got to the martini shot, the last set up of the day, a high wide shot of the entire plaza.

To light the set, Giacomo rented a Light Balloon, a giant helium-filled globe of illumination that gently bathes the entire piazza in a brilliant warm glow. It is powered by the van, thanks to me.

After a couple of hours, we were lit and ready to go.

“ACTION!” Giacomo yells.

The motorcycle riders blaze into the piazza, come to a stop in the center, hop off their bikes and begin to act out the scene, brilliantly.

And after waiting for dawn to break, all we have to snag now is the last shot of the day, a high panorama of the piazza full of folks starting their day, not even aware they’re on camera as they pass our actors sitting still on their bikes.

We roll camera, sit and watch as the Neapolitans fill the piazza, almost oblivious to our actors sitting in the center of their natural mayhem. As if their sight is soley based on movement, the actors are almost invisible to them as they move around the cycles like water around two stones planted in a stream.

“What the FUCK!” Giacomo suddenly screams, snapping me out of my reverie. He leaps from his director’s chair and runs through the piazza.

The entire crew is stymied by Giacomo’s behavior. That is, until we notice that Giacomo is running in the direction of the van, stationed in the nearby park, smoke billowing from the doors.

The van is on fire!

21 

A Muse of Fire

I CAN’T HELP BUT 
think about that footage of the Hindenburg going up in flames.

Oh, the humanity…

Giacomo dashes inside the van and then just as quickly leaps back out, rolling to the ground holding a fire extinguisher cradled in his arms.

He pulls the canister’s pin and leaps back into the van, suppressing the flames with a jet cloud of nitrogen.

SKEEEERIIIIIIIISH!

By this time, the generator had only been powering the camera and charging a few batteries. I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Rocco snatches a second extinguisher from the grip truck.

Together, they knock down the flames in seconds while the other crew members fling open the van’s side and front doors to vent the smoke.

I stand there with my thumb up my ass.

Once the chaos dies down, the cast and crew all turn to face me and stare.

“Asshole!” Rocco screams at me.

That guy Rocco doesn’t know a ton of English, but what words he does know seem to all be geared towards making me feel like an idiot.

“I’m sorry. I just did what you asked,” I say pointing accusingly at Giacomo.

“Really? I asked you to set the
goddamn van on fire?”

“I’m sorry, man. Seriously,” I say sincerely.

“Whatever,” Giacomo says under his breath as he hops back into the van to inspect its chard innards.

“Well. It’s a stolen van, right? I mean it’s not like we were going to return it. Right?”

“What are you talking about? Of course we are going to return it!” bellows Giacomo.

“What?”

“We were going to sneak it back in after we were finished. Come on. We’re not criminals, man,” Giacomo says pleadingly.

The subtleness of the Napoli version of
borrowing
is obviously lost on me.

I now completely understand why the dude gave me so much shit when we were kids. I was a screw up then, and I’m still a screw up. While at the same time, Giacomo has all the angles figured out.