"XULCHIBARA VS. THE SHIRT WRANGLER"

"Would you like some frozen yogurt?"

I honestly didn't feel like having any, but Barry seemed insistent upon it, so I begrudgingly accepted a cup to shut him up. He was always trying to grease the wheels, to make sure everyone had everything they needed. "I'm the one that enables other people to make the magic happen" he'd say (sometimes when no one else was in the room to hear him say it). He kept a quart of good scotch in his desk. I guess his wheels needed greasing, too.

"I'm so glad you could fly down" he gushed. "The director was supposed to be here for this, but he's been having a bit of, ah...trouble. Some third-act rewrites. I'm sure you understand.

I nodded gravely. "From what I hear, your trouble goes beyond rewrites," I said.

Barry grimaced. He looked browbeaten, like a dog that had been kicked one too many times. He quickly pulled the scotch out of his desk and mixed a generous amount into his frozen yogurt.

At that point Barry's troubles were the hot talk amongst the who's who of Tinseltown. The film in question was The Reich Stuff, a historical drama about the Nazi's second attempt to launch a bomb-rocket at the moon. It was a summer tentpole movie, and Paramount had sunk nearly two-hundred mil into pre-production alone. But principal photography been delayed, the film was running over budget, and Barry suffered a rare compound ulcer as a result. It all boiled down to one major problem, the same problem Barry flew me down to Peru to discuss.

"I heard about what you did for Brad and it's amazing, simply amazing," Barry said. "I hear he's completely recovered now, hasn't touched the absynthe in nearly three months. Quite the turn-around, quite-"

I cut him off abruptly. "What I did for Brad was a personal favor, I'm not looking to make a career out of this." I casually pushed my half-eaten frozen yogurt onto the carpet to emphasize my point.

Barry sighed. "It's McConaughey," he said. "McConaughey won't keep his goddamn shirt on." His eyes seemed to get glassy and pensive above his yogurt-dipped moustache.

Barry quickly brought me up to speed. 

Much to the chagrin of the rest of the cast, Matthew McConaughey had been cast as a young, time-traveling Joseph Goebbels. But McConaughey surprised everyone. He showed up to the first day of principal photography with a nuanced take on the Goebbels role, and had even bothered to learn a flawless, lilting German accent. He was great, Barry claimed. Seemed to be taking to the role seriously. Ready to break into the sub-genre of authentic period-docudrama sci-fi romance, and seemed primed to earn a few awards for his trouble.

But things got worse once photography shifted to Peru to shoot the climactic Incan temple sequence. McConaughey seemed to regress, taking his shirt off constantly, ruining entire rolls of film in the process, including take after take of the film's musical number ("We're Kristallnach't Gonna Take It Anymore"). 

He began to forget his lines. Every morning he'd start a campfire inside his trailer and began sleeping in a nest made from Kashi boxes and strips of torn, soiled linen. Craft services claimed that he demanded pig's blood instead of his typical wheatgrass smoothies. Things, Barry exclaimed, were "getting a bit out of hand". But as strange as Barry's yarn was, I got the feeling that he wasn't exactly on the up-and-up with me. 

"The studio's sunk a boatload of money into this so far and it's too late to replace him. I could give a shit what he does when he's off-set or in his trailer, but when he's in front of that camera, he's our property, he's our little trained dog, and I need him on his mark and in costume and I need you to help us do it. I need you to help us keep a shirt on Matthew McConaughey."

We discussed my payment. Barry offered to throw me some kind of Co-Producer credit, but I didn't bite, so gave in and offered me an ungodly amount of money. He jokingly claimed he'd put me in the credits of the film as "Shirt Wrangler". I pretended to laugh and signed the contract he slid in front of me. 

He gave me three days to assemble everything I'd need. When I left, he hugged me for what seemed like hours and and came up with a laundry list of different ways to say "thank you", acting like I'd saved his life instead of agreeing to keep a shirt on someones back.

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Four hours later I got a voicemail from Barry. 

His voice was shaky and I could barely hear him over the chaotic noises in the background but he begged, pleaded for me to immediately come back to the set and take care of  McConaughey because there'd been a murder and he just didn't know what to do because McConaughey didn't seem to be McConaughey anymore. Then there was some kind of guttural growl in the background like to sheets of metal scraping together and before I had the chance to think myself out of it, I pulled a quick U-turn in the SUV and headed back to see it with my own eyes.

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The craft service table, overturned. Dozens of croissants scattered across the floor like errant seashells on a beach. Wreckage from broken boom mics and steadycams strewn across the set. No one in site. 

"Barry?" I shouted. My words echoed back from the vertical wall of the nearby Incan Temple. 

That's when I saw the blood. Gallons of it, making set dressings into black curtains with a glossy sheen. I turn and find half of a man's torso wedged between a tv monitor and a foot locker. Bits of teeth and bone, clumpy shreds of scalps complete with raven-black hair. Madness in three dimensions.

A Texas drawl with an out-of-place German lilt called out from the dark. "Was it Barry that sent you?" McConaughey says, stepping out from behind a rough-cut rock pillar. McConaughey, with his square-jawed smile and his unkempt, tangled hair. Strange glyphs and runes drawn across his bare chest with the blood of others.

"Good God, McConaughey, what's happened here?" I hardly recognize my voice; it sounded hollow and fragile like it came from a woodwind instrument. 

"We aren't McConaughey anymore," he said. His voice was different; the timbre and pitch suddenly dropping like a mercury thermometer during a flash-freeze. "We are Xulchibara, the Incan High-Priestess, the Lord of Ether. We are all that was, and all that will be again."

"What happened to McConaughey? What have you done?!"

"McConaughey was weak. An unbeliever trapped in the slow amber of Vanity. We lured him into the temple with the whisperings and trappings of childhood, and took hold of his vessel when he drank from our pool; the Pool of Xulchibara. We are him and he is Us."

Just then McConaughey/Xulchibara's ribcage began to swell. I heard a wet ripping noise, and his/it's sternum cracked and tore open, pulsing and swelling rhythmically, his exposed, yellow ribs glistening like loose teeth set in a strange vertical mouth. McConaughey fought the transformation, his dead hands clutching into tight fists at his sides. A strange velvety light seemed to envelope him, lifting him into the air. McConaughey's face alternated between a twisted grimace of agony and a horrible, cracked smile. 

"What do you want?" I screamed.

"We want...a Co-Producer credit. And a percentage of the gross." 

I paused. 

"We've also got some ideas for a rewrite of the third act," the re-embodied Incan High-Priestess said. "And, we want a trailer. A big trailer, with a hot tub inside of it."

BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF POVERTY: MEMORABLE THINGS I'VE SEEN FROM THE BALCONY OF MY APARTMENT IN GHETTOVILLE

In the late autumn/early winter, the old man living across the road used to give lemons away to neighborhood children. At first it seemed rustic and somewhat nostalgic, but over time I became convinced that he used lemons to lure children into his fruit cellar (which, of course, I imagined with a primitive dirt floor). In my mind, the seemingly friendly old man murdered the children and buried their small bodies beneath the lemon tree, thus recycling them into the lemons which would be enjoyed by his next batch of victims. I'm almost ninety-percent sure that this might/might not have happened.

Every night while I smoke cigarettes on our balcony, I'm forced to listen to the strained conversations between our militaristic neighbor and his out-of-state girlfriend/wife. Like clockwork, he appears in the adjacent parking lot dressed in casual camo fatigues and yells at her via his annoying bluetooth while he pounds Keystones and smokes Swisher Sweets. We rarely acknowledge each other's presence. 

Recently Steve and I developed a borderline-obsession with the gripping sport of throwing poorly-made water balloons at a street sign that's placed about a hundred feet from the vantage of our balcony. This works far better than throwing full beers into the frequently busy road, which is something I've also attempted, and no, this is not a sad indicator of how much free time I find myself with. Anyway, I was making my 60th attempt at hitting that goddamn street sign, and I almost (directly) hit a young hispanic kid on a bike. He gave me the finger, and I laughed. 

About a month ago, I watched an overweight Native American family saunter towards their water-damaged Ford Windstar. Their chubby son must have realized he left a Sugar Daddy in the car or something, because he made a break for it, hauling ass and swinging his sausage-like arms like frantic pendulums. But the grass was wet (courtesy of the sprinklers), and as soon as his feet hit the lawn his legs slipped out from under him. He soared. His back, parallel to the ground in mid-air, before landing. Hard. The air was driven out of his lungs in a quick wheeze, and I roared, laughing hard and slapping the balcony and spilling lukewarm Coors all over.

I'm really going to miss this apartment.