freedomclub
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2006
- Messages
- 162
Me and Shaun used to work at the New Orleans Convention center. I got him the job actually. Let me go back. It was around July 1998, in a fairly small town in South Louisiana. I had recently been fired from my waiter’s position at the Cajun tourist trap restaurant that did huge business across the street from the Convention center, next door to the Riverwalk shopping mall where the huge cruise ships dock (those days are a whole other barrel of monkeys,mind ya). Tourists, New Orleans number one cash cow and the convention center, at almost a mile long and 3 floors high in places and actually the 2nd largest in the world, The Ernest “Dutch” Morial Convention Center in New Orleans is the biggest money maker for the state of Louisiana. Now imagine how much crooked shit has gone down and continues to go down to this day! And Shaun and I had our own little punk rock fiefdom, complete with our own labor crew we had the luxury of choosing and electric carts to transport us and our gear and dealers willing to deliver to us (Shaun went through a little coke phase but mostly it was Oxy’s) if we couldn’t make it to out to them during one of our “breaks”. I’m getting ahead of myself again. Where were we, ah yeah the summer of ‘98, I was trying to do something with my degree in video production, applying at television stations and production companies. I had lived in this little town from ‘87 to ‘96, I graduated college here and now I’m back a couple of years later after having almost gone “Hollywood” upon moving to New Orleans early in ‘97. I did a lot of work on a “cult classic” ghetto rap movie and the director of that was bragging how he had just spent 3 days filming with Jim Carey for his new movie and he asked me to act in this other project he was directing in New Orleans. I did and it was a huge piece of shit and his scene in “Liar, Liar” is real quick and non speaking. I consider myself an actor nevertheless, as I can link myself to Kevin Bacon within 3 people as Jim Carey did a Batman with Mr. Bacon. Needless to say they aren’t handing out juicy roles to someone with that as a credential and besides I got fired for some stupid shit at the Cajun hell hole (I was a union member doing film work, well paying, yet sporadic at the time) and I needed to do something full time with my degree and applied at the local cable access television station over in Lafayette cause my girl at the time was pursuing a degree in nursing and saw an ad for an experienced production worker, was interviewed by my soon to be friend, Shaun, more like I interviewed him as he was taken with my personality (see, Shane was a wanna be punk rocker and he thought of me as the real thing.) during the interview I told him how I had prank called one of the regular programs ,during a live broadcast when they say “let’s go to the phones”, you know, and messed with the host real bad. It involved both me and my loquacious schizophrenic friend calling in and verbally harassing a psychologist who was promoting his book and I had a copy of said show if he wanted to watch it some time just to lemme know. Of course we ended up hosting a show after hours on the channel we both worked at. It was very funny and our boss hated it and after huge success with just 3 shows he found a way to fire us. Shane was in love with a black girl we worked with and his parents couldn’t handle it. Shane and the girl fought often, Shane was a horrible drunk and he even threatened suicide on a couple of occasions. I was taking my girlfriend’s Vicoprofens at the time and didn’t go out drinking with the gang. After one ER visit for slashing his wrists, he said they gave him pain medicine but he didn’t get it filled. I berated him for this and told him that was the good stuff. I have huge regret for turning him on to opiates but there is a long crazy and often hilarious story before the bad part. After we got fired I moved back to New Orleans and pretty much lost contact with Shane until I got a job part time with the Convention Center as an a.v. tech/stagehand. They were opening up phase 3 of the center which has contained a huge conference center with a video production room back stage and multiple cameras and projectors and they wanted me to come on as a full timer. Problem was, I wasn’t going to be involved with the new toys in the new room so much, they needed someone to work with Paul, this disgusting smelly alcoholic wretch who was doing an impossible task, him making it even more so, of “reconfiguring” some huge dinosaur piece of shit institutional lighting system within the behemoth of a building. I said since I’m not the one for this job maybe you could interview my friend? It was twice the pay he (Shaun) was getting and he moved to New Orleans to accept the position. I was telling our immediate boss, weighing in at 400 lbs, a true mama’s boy yet inherently a techno genius whiz kid (not kidding, South Park’s Cartman in human form) about my habit of using and abusing pain pills. He was cool enough to be able to “share” that with, he was our age and kind of “partied” and knew where to get this new mega dose of the pure form of generic Percodan, you know, Oxycontin. Right around this time, Shaun and I had found a key to a forgotten locked door within the center. An storeroom within one of our storerooms. We quickly converted it into our rehearsal hall. Shane played guitar and I can scream real cool sometimes. We were in our pyschedelic rock period, calling ourselves 2 Eyed Cyclops. I came up with the name after watching a particularly weird looking defendant on People’s Court. More later…
