Greatest…Guidance Counselor…Ever

The Jenna Jameson story is not a great success story. I mean, technically, it is a success story with the making of tons of money, and the rising to the apex of one’s field, and all the, well, “success” per se. But still it’s not a “great” success story. I mean, when a woman like Jenna Jameson or Tera Patrick comes from nowhere to create her own media empire you have to admire her determination, and business savvy, and all that stuff. But come on, “super hot chick does well in the porn biz,” I don’t know if that really screams achievement of epic grandeur.

Now Buck Angel on the other hand, that’s a story that impresses me. I came across Mr. Angel (no relation to Joanna Angel) in the pages of the Audacia Ray blog that I have been reading for a couple years now. I don’t know too much about who he is as a person, but based solely on his career path I can definitely tell you one thing. This is a man who has some pretty serious balls. And, of course, by that I mean he has no testicles.

Buck Angel, the burly bald man in the photo (who looks as though he could snap me like a twig if needed), is a female-to-male transsexual. As it happens, people without a Y chromosome who can kick my ass aren’t that uncommon. Somewhat less common though are people born genetically female who have found success in gay male porn.

I fully understand that some people might not be too hip on the very concept of porn. And there are even some people who might not be particularly pumped by transsexuals in general. But if you can momentarily put your own psycho-sexual-politico-moral leanings aside and look at what this man has achieved occupationally, you have to give him some props.

To say I’m a bald man and I’m going to make it in the porn world is one thing, but to say, oh by the way, I also don’t have a penis, well, that’s some moxie. And just how strong was the high school guidance counselor that got to work with this career choice?

"OK, you want to be a porn star, well, I don't know if that’s really the type of career I would recommend to a nice girl like you. But, I don’t know, I guess if you feel so strongly about it, I suppose we can work with that... Ohhhhh.. you say want to be a male porn star, hmmm, OK well...uh, that's going to be a little more difficult. Yep. I'm not sure about... Hmmm... Oh heck! If that's what you really want, and you can tell me that you want it hard enough, then what the hay! Sure, I would imagine there are going to be a lot of people who are going to tell you that you need a penis to be a male porn star, they’re going to try to bring you down. But I'm going to tell you that you have something far bigger than any penis I've ever seen. You have a dream! And no freak car accident can ever take that away from you."

As it happens, I’ve never actually seen Mr. Angel’s work. Nonetheless, I was always brought up to respect the dreamers among us so when I recognize him at the Adult Entertainment Expo I go to congratulate him on his success. For some reason though, I misremember his name. I address him as Mr. Adams, not Mr. Angel. If he is offended by this, or even notices it, he doesn’t let on.

I ask if he would mind if I grabbed a picture. With a hearty and infectious laugh, he lets me know “that’s what I’m here for.” We take the picture and I get a sense that this is a man who, at this very moment at least, is happy to be where he is, happy to be recognized for his work.

In what I would imagine was his ever so subtle way of correcting me for calling him Buck Adams, he simply says “let me give you one of my cards.” And with the business card also comes a broad smile, a smile that seems to say, honestly and unpretentiously, “it’s OK if you don’t get my name right, I appreciate the support anyway”.

Buck Angel, easily and without a doubt, one of the 7 nicest female-to-male transsexuals working in porn today.

Disgusting Philistines at this Year’s Adult Entertainment Expo

So here I am at this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo, and let me tell you, I am learning quite a bit about the state of the American cultural landscape. The part of the Expo that I am exploring consists mainly of various booths for porn production companies. They come every year to show off their wares and they bring their Lucite heeled stars with them. Fans wait in lines that snake all the way up and down the convention floor. 10, 20 minutes they wait in line to get a fast autograph, to simply stand next to a woman they have lusted after from so far away. Hopefully she will smile at them for a couple seconds.

Unfortunately, what I see at the expo doesn’t leave me with a lot of pride for my gender. The problem really comes about when I make it to the far corner of the convention hall, specifically the booth for the Adam and Eve Production Company. When I get to Adam and Eve, the actress on display is a young woman by the name of Joanna Angel. With her copious tattoos and multicolored hair she works in what has been dubbed as “alt porn.”

Now, by no means have I seen all of Ms. Angel’ works. Young Ripe Melons 8, Grand Theft Anal 10, Joanna Angel’s Guide 2 Humping, these are all films that I cannot pretend to know. Nonetheless, I do believe I have seen enough of what Ms. Angel does to be disgusted by what I find at her booth.

What I find at her booth, after having to wade through the trite mediocrity of the other booths, is an autograph line that consists of no more than four people. FOUR PEOPLE! This makes no sense whatsoever. As I’m sure you know, this woman of porn is clearly a national treasure and I cannot describe to you the disgust I feel when I only see 4 people in her autograph line.

Joanna’s Angels, the Charlies’ Angels themed porn that she did: Brilliant. Burning Angels, the Brooklyn based adult website she founded: Groundbreaking. This woman, raised orthodox within a Jewish household, has accomplished so much within this industry and yet the fans of AEE don’t seem to care. Everywhere I look I see these unbearably boring blonde bimbos, every one of them with staggeringly long lines and yet here, before an actual artist, there are no more than four people. Is this really what America has been reduced to, a country of tasteless philistines? For shame, porn fans of Vegas, for shame indeed.

I understand that possibly I should make some allowances for the subjective nature of such things. Maybe it’s even possible that I’m the one who is wrong here. Maybe it’s just a case of rooting for the home team since she’s Brooklyn based. Maybe I like to think that every night I’m not out successfully having copious amounts of random noncommittal sex can be offset by the work she is doing in New York. Somehow she’s working to balance the scales. Whatever the reason, she still seems so much cooler than the throngs of overly-siliconed fembots populating the other booths.

Initially I want to tell her what a disgusting shame it is that she has so few people in her line. I really am dismayed by the wretched taste everyone seems to have. I really want her to know that I feel for her, with the not being as popular as some of the lesser talents that I passed by. But eventually I wonder if this is really the kind of thing she wants to hear from a stranger.

Even if your intentions are in the right place maybe reminding someone about injustices they have no control over isn’t really the nicest thing to do. I mean if you’re a one armed Log Cabin Republican or something maybe you don’t really want some well meaning stranger coming by and rubbing it in with a “Hey sir, I just wanted to say how much it must suck to be a one armed, Log Cabin Republican, with the belonging to a political party that actively strives to prevent you from getting the same basic rights that other people have, and all that, and then when they do successfully pass a constitutional amendment preventing you from getting married you can’t even clap for it (being a one armed man and all), so I just figured you’d want me to tell you how much that all sucks. I feel for you bro!” So in the end I decide not to saddle her with my disappointment.

In all fairness I might just have caught her on a slow hour. And even so it isn’t like she is just sitting there by herself doing Sudoku. I just kind of feel like there is an unjust discrepancy in fan attention at the AEE. I decide that I’ll try to do my little part to make her feel properly fanned. Hers will be the only line I stand in to get a picture.

The kind of strange thing is that I feel this weirdly shy, celebrity intimidation thing as I’m standing in line. This is something I don’t entirely understand. A week earlier when Leonardo Dicaprio jumped into my poker game at the Bellagio I wasn’t uncomfortable at all (in fact I was so comfortable that I took middle set about $2000 farther than I should have against him).

So maybe my uneasiness is not so much a proximity-to-celebrity thing. Maybe it just has something to do with this weird social inversion where I am only just meeting someone long after I have already seen her hoo-ha.

I understand that when you’re in a stage fright situation it’s sometimes helpful to picture the intimidating people as sitting there without their clothes. In this particular case though, I imagine that is probably somewhat unhelpful, unconstructively redundant in fact.

Still I find the courage to overcome my shyness and when I make it through Ms. Angel’s short line she gives me a comforting smile. I tell her what a huge fan I am and, as I am wont to do in such situations, I give her a hearty handshake of gratitude. Much later I wonder if this was presumptuous of me to unilaterally take her hand. I just mean some people might find it kind of gross to be obligated to touch the unwashed masses. I bring this up to Christi, and she tries to explain that if you did have some sort of Howie Mandel OCD thing about being touched, then maybe the porn industry wouldn’t be your primary occupational focus. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, neither my celebrity shyness nor my hand grabbiness seems to bother Ms. Angel. I ask if she would mind if I took a picture and she says that for such a big fan it would be a pleasure. She hops off of her autograph signing chair and I snap the pic. It is at this point that I discover something that I really feel like I should have realized about her but never did.

Joanna Angel, as it turns out, is a tiny, tiny woman. I mean she’s like a mini-person. Like 2 feet tall or something.

Of course that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t have any bearing on how super hot she is. For some reason though I’m always a little disoriented when a celebrity turns out to be significantly taller or shorter in real life than they are in my head. And in Ms. Angel’s case this forces me to rethink a lot of her work.

I’m not sure if they still use it or not, but there used to be an ad for the Rosewood Grille in Vegas that I would always see. If you really understand this ad, what it means and what it represents, you will probably understand pretty much everything you will ever need to know about Vegas.

The ad consists of a picture of a man in a tuxedo, presumably the well dressed maître d’ of the rosewood Grille. This well dressed man is holding up a lobster that is almost as large as he is. If you had to guess you would assume that the lobster must be 4 feet long and weigh 300 pounds. You walk away from this ad thinking, wow, if I wants me some big ass lobster, the Rosewood Grille must be the place to go!

Old friend Dave Avrick, self professed fat Jew criminal and esteemed professor of all things Vegas, was the first person who told me to look a little more closely at the man in the ad. When I did, I noticed something a little off about his fingers. Staring at those stubby fingers I eventually realized what Dave was referring to. That’s no maître d’ in the tux, that’s a midget! (Technically I don’t know if he is a dwarf or little person or even what the contemporary inoffensive phrase would be (bald footed hobbit?), but whatever it is he is it.)

The Rosewood Grille hired the tiniest person they could find that would look normal in a tuxedo so that the lobster would look monstrous by comparison. Of course there’s no explicit lying involved in this ad. It’s not like it’s a computer generated lobster or latex rubber maître d’. No, it’s not a lie necessarily; it’s just that special sort of Vegas magic that allows a man’s pituitary defect to be artfully exploited to create the illusion of a lobster feast for four.

Since the gentleman in the tux looked like the proud maître-d’ of the restaurant, and since steak houses are obviously, by their very nature, viciously size-ist, it was natural to assume that this was an average sized person and a grotesquely oversized lobster. However, once you realize that the gentle man in the tux is so small you have to reevaluate how frighteningly large the lobster is.

In a similar vein, while it was a little strange to realize that Joanna Angel was so petite, it did allow me to reevaluate some of the more frightening objects that seemed so very intimidatingly large in her movies. With this new understanding of who Joanna Angel is I may have to do an extensive restudying of her oeuvre.

It may turn out that, much like Vegas, everything you see in porn might not be exactly as it seems. Live and learn.

Jorge and I

He’s got that raspy casino cough that is almost impossible to avoid if you’re unaccustomed to arid smoke filled Vegas. So he doesn’t sound exactly like Hurley. He looks like Jorge Garcia, but not exactly like the guy you see on TV. I don’t know whether that has to do with the makeup and lighting of TV, or if it has to do with the fact that I’m an idiot and can’t tell the difference between two entirely different people. When I first saw this gentleman walking around the poker room of the Bellagio I thought, wow he’s a dead ringer for Hurly, a character from TV favorite of mine, Lost. I imagine he must get that a lot.

I love Lost. It’s one of those great ensemble pieces where the entire cast is made up of fascinating people. It would be unpleasant to try and single out only one favorite character (that is if you pulled Ben, the empirically best character in the show, out of the equation). Still, if you had to pick the one character that you would feel most comfortable hanging out with, hands down it would be the burly and beloved everyman of the cast, Hurley, as created by the actor Jorge Garcia. So when this person who could be Jorge Garcia joins the table I am at, I can’t help but think it would be kind of neat to play poker with him.

However, since it is New Year’s Eve, I figure that he is not Jorge Garcia but rather someone who simply looks like Jorge Garcia. My logic comes from holding celebrities to a higher standard than I hold myself. While I might have nothing better to do than hang out and play cards on New Year’s Eve, a celebrity of Mr. Garcia’s stature would not enjoy anything so normal.

This makes perfect sense right up to the point that they fill the other two empty seats at my table. Three to my right is Lukas Haas, and directly beside me is a kid with scruffy stubble, a baseball cap, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth that I eventually recognize as Leonardo DiCaprio. I decide to reevaluate this New Year’s Eve logic.

I go to Matt the young floor person for the game I’m in and I ask him what initials the Jorge-Garciaesque player clocked into the game with. Matt says “JB,” which is not the “JG” of Jorge Garcia. Still, in a noisy casino, unless you see it written down, “JB” and “JG” are for all intents and purposes, the same things. Since this doesn’t help, I flat out ask Matt whether JB is Hurley.

Matt thinks this is funny because he wondered the same thing, but he thought it might be obnoxious to ask. In the end though he said it isn’t Jorge Garcia. He doesn’t explain how he came to that conclusion but he seems comfortable with it.

I go back to my table but I’m still up in the air. The simple, sane-person solution is to say “So, umm, are you Hurley?” But unfortunately that isn’t an option.

The day before, I was playing with someone that I remember from Vegas in July, a Ken or Kent someone or another. He was an ex-sports figure, basketball I believe, though with my vacuum of knowledge on all things sport I still have no idea who he is. Nonetheless, he was great fun to have at the table and we got along, so he remembered me when I saw him this time. As we were talking at the table, one of the players next to us jumped in with “You know, I’d really hate to be that guy, I mean I’m not really that guy, I don’t want to bother you, I’d hate to make you think I was that guy … but do you play basketball?”

I wouldn’t say this upset Kent, but he definitely wasn’t going to let this guy get off thinking he was not the type of guy who interrupts famous people to make sure they’re famous.

“Do I look like I play basketball? Look at me, I’m 44 years old! How many 44 year olds you know who can run a court an hour straight? And what are you trying to say anyway. You saying I’m not big enough to be a football player, is that it?! I’m going to tell you something about those football players, they ain’t so big in real, if you catch my drift.”

The “I-Don’t-Want-To-Be-That-Guy” guy meekly accepted this and didn’t pursue the issue.

This is the exchange that comes to my mind when I am sitting with JB. Now obviously, like you, I’m not “That Guy”. I’m way too cool let myself do anything that might make me look like “That Guy” (even though I know with every cell of my body that I’m so totally “That Guy”). So I decide to not actually ask JB who he is. I figure I am way smart enough to slap a read on him. I’ll just play junior detective and figure it out for myself.

Eventually DiCaprio and Haas take off to bang supermodels 4 deep or run covert Afghan missions or whatever the hell I imagine you do to ring in the New Year if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio. At this point someone asks JB if he knows DiCaprio. Now, if the guy asking the question also thinks JB is a TV star then this is a logical enough question to ask. Since I went to the University of Michigan (go blue), it is natural for people to assume that I should know every other person who has ever gone to U of M, ever, at any point in the history of the school. In the same way, every person who lives in Famous Land should know every other person who lives there.

What JB says is something like, oh those guys are way bigger than me. And I figured that settles it. This was the type of question that would be asked of a celebrity, and that was the type of answer a modest TV actor might give. So Matt the floor man was wrong. This is Jorge Garcia. I would feel perfectly comfortable with trying to get Christi to think I was cool for hanging with Hurly.

So there I am hanging with Jorge Garcia playing poker until the wee hours of the morning. And obviously I have a million Lost questions I would love to grill him with: how hot and/or bugshit crazy is Michele Rodriguez in real life, why didn’t Adebisi wear his little hat when he was on the Island, etc, etc. But I don’t want to bother him.

This is possibly strange since bothering people with excessive questions is not something I’m normally averse to. The only sport I ever really liked watching as a child was the gloriously surreal shuffle board on ice sport of Curling. Playing at the Mirage once, many years ago, I ran into the only professional curler I have ever met. I had no qualms whatsoever about grilling him ceaselessly on the minutia of his life as a curler, team rivalries, the groupies and whatnot. I would imagine being at the center of a major worldwide pop culture phenomenon, as Jorge is, would be as interesting to hear about as being a curler.

Still, for whatever reason, I think it would be unseemly to acknowledge Jorge’s fame and pester him with my questions on celebrity and acting. In the end I imagine he probably just wants to be one of the guys hanging out and playing poker. So I don’t bother him and we just play cards.

The next afternoon, after a couple hours of sleep, I’m back at the Bellagio. I see JB, and in the course of exchanging small talk he says something about Vegas not being like Florida or New York. It occurs to me he must actually have been listening to me the night before when I was talking about living in NY and Florida. And that’s when something weird and possibly annoying happens. I feel really flattered. For some reason I’m actually impressed that someone remembers me after sitting with me for hours and hours.

The obvious problem is that if JB was not a celebrity, I can’t say that I would be “flattered” to be remembered. And I have to imagine this makes me superficial. Even if I’m the only one to find out, I’ve just been outed as “That Guy.” And this is all really embarrassing.

In my defense I did enjoy having JB at the table. He was pleasant and well humored. He took his bad beats gracefully and while he’s obviously a competent player not giving anything up, he isn’t one of those guys that is going to jam a screwdriver into your neck every time you turn your head. So that’s good.

I’m comfortable in my belief that I would find him genuinely likable independent of any possible celebrity or lack thereof. So this allows me to feel a tiny bit less superficial.

And then, we get to talking a little more. It comes up that he was actually a prop player (a house player at a poker club) all through law school, which I find really interesting. He acknowledges that propping was pretty tough work, but of course that’s all behind him now that he’s “living the Dream” as he describes it.

Since I don’t know anything about his life outside of his acting I find it fascinating that he was both a prop player and went to law school. So, the next morning I get up and do a little Google-stalking to read more about it. I look at his Wikipedia entry but for some reason it doesn’t say anything about going to law school or ever playing as a prop. Could there really be that large a hole in his online biography. Is this not an age of zero privacy for celebrities.

Wikipedia does talk of Jorge Garcia playing poker on a celebrity show, so he does play poker, but there isn’t anything about law school. I check a couple other sites and read about Jorge Garcia once working in a book store, and how it was a small part in Curb Your Enthusiasm that got him an audition for Lost, and how he had to miss his sister’s wedding due to filming, but nothing about law school.

This freaks me out more than a little bit. I really start to second guess myself. It was a natural assumption to think that when he mentioned that he was “living the Dream” he was describing what it’s like for an actor to land a show like Lost. However, I would imagine that after playing 4-8 limit as a San Diego prop, a lot of people might consider it “living the Dream” to be playing $10-20 No Limit at the Bellagio with Leonardo DiCaprio (and obviously Mike May). It occurs to me that maybe JB isn’t Jorge Garcia after all. Maybe I’ve just been enjoying time with some regular old normal person. For some reason I feel a slightly cheated.

So now I’m really confused and have to reanalyze everything I remember him saying. I remember him saying something about how humid Florida was before I said anything about my living there. If it is Jorge then why would he use Florida as an example of stifling humidity instead of Hawaii where he lives and works? I mean I assume it has to be humid in the rain forests that they film in. Maybe it’s not humid in Hawaii after all. What the hell do I know about Hawaii?

I check out Jorge’s blog and find a picture that he posted a week or two ago. It looks like JB, but he’s got sideburns in the picture that he doesn’t have at the Bellagio. Did he just clean himself up a little bit knowing that he would be in a swanky casino? I have no idea.

I’m becoming honestly concerned about whom it is that I actually like, JB or Jorge Garcia? I thought Jorge’s blog was fun and attributed it to JB. But if JB is not Jorge, isn’t that kind of a bonejob for Jorge? Grand theft literary respect?

And the more I obsess about it the more I keep coming back to a different Jorge: Jorge Luis Borges or more specifically his classic micro story of identity, Borges and I. It’s a little autobiographical one pager about being Borges, an actual guy who likes hourglasses and maps and the taste of coffee, but also having this other Borges who likes the same things but is not him. The other Borges is the one who everyone knows from Borges’ works. I, Mike May, can never know the first Borges. He died in the 80’s. However, I can find out anything I could possibly want about the second Borges, the one that is filtered through his writings and the interactions he’s left upon the world, the one whose stories I have read.

In a loosely similar way, there’s JB and then there’s Jorge Garcia. JB is an actual guy I met playing poker on New Year’s Eve, while Jorge Garcia is the actor who plays a beloved character on TV and who occasionally writes a blog and who, as I learned on his Wikipedia page, used to do stand up. Even if JB actually is Jorge Garcia, they are not the same person.

And the fact that JB could be some random John Bowden, an entirely third person, illustrates this idea as well as anything from my Intro to Philosophical Literature class. With no disrespect meant to him, I actually wouldn’t be flattered that John Bowden remembered me from the day before. I’m not in any way saying I didn’t have fun and enjoy hanging out with him at the table, because I did. I’m just saying that the irrational superficial part, where I was honestly flattered that an actor whose work I have enjoyed so much actually knew that I existed, that part came from the nebulous, public Jorge Garcia that I had draped over JB like a cape, whether it was justified or not.

Eventually this all leads to a fairly annoying realization. It occurs to me that I have to avoid JB if I go back to the Bellagio. I really don’t want to find out whether he is Jorge Garcia or not. To think I sat at the same table with someone as distinctive as Jorge Garcia for two days and still wasn’t 100% sure that it was him would make me feel amazingly stupid. And to find out that I had spent two days with John Bowden and actually thought he was Jorge Garcia is going to make me feel even stupider. It’s Kobayashi Maru. The only chance I have to win this is to never find out who he is, to let him always stay as he is now, existing simultaneously as both a particle and a wave.

Needing to bounce all this off someone who can give me a little outside perspective, I give Christi a ring. I ask her if she thinks this whole obsession makes me “That Guy” and whether this would be an interesting post even if JB turned out not to be Jorge Garcia. Her response is wonderfully Christi, in that it is concise and puts it all perfectly into context. After I explain everything and ask what she thinks, she pauses for a second and then simply says “Uhmm… you’re really creeping me out.”

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

So I originally posted this story on Saturday, January 5^th, 2008. On Monday, January 7^th, 2 days later, I see my first reply in the comments section:

“Yup. You're right it wasn't me. However I did spend the New Year playing cards. It was in Kauai with my uncle and cousins.” Signed Jorge Garcia and coming from the account of Jorges’ blog.

Hmmm.

O.K., in relation to this new information I would just like to make 3 comments.

1) I fully understand that celebrities are much more powerful and well informed than regular people, but still… On a good day, it would take my own father maybe a month or two to find out that I have a new post up. And even if someone held a gun to my head, I don’t know that my mother would be able to Google her way to this blog. So the fact that Mr. Garcia found this post in less than 3 days impressed me more than a little.

While this is not necessarily scary, it is illuminating. So much for being able to slander a celebrity in the privacy of my own blog without them finding out. I assume that I can still write nasty text messages about celebrities (granted they aren’t scientologists), but who knows.

Shortly after receiving Mr. Garcia’s comment, I went to his blog and apologized profusely for my daftness in misrecognizing him. I’m assuming that there shouldn’t be any lawsuits pending.

2) Naturally I would love if people thought that I was not actually stupid, and that instead I simply realized that misrecognizing this poor slob would give me the chance to cram money, celebrity, and existential philosophy into what should have been a boring holiday post, but unfortunately that isn’t actually the case. I actually am just dumb.

and 3) Regardless of who JB actually is, I would like to point out that Borges still comes out of all this as relevant as ever. So, for all of the quantitative types out there who like to keep count of such things, the current score is Borges: 1, Mike May: 0

Almost Cool

I’m at a wedding a while back (Jean-louis and Katie) and during dinner I’m talking to a stranger about blogs. He asks me what mine is about and my knee jerk reaction is to say "poker". However, it occurs to me that this guy is a stranger that I just met, and as a stranger I have nothing emotionally invested in him. For that reason I don’t see any reason to lie to him. So when he asks me what my blog is about I tell him the truth. "It’s about trying to make me look more interesting than I am."

As it so happens there are a lot of reasons that I started this blog. Above most though is the desire to tell self aggrandizing stories in the hope of creating someone interesting. Truth be told, the bulk of my life is spent lying in bed, eating cookie dough and staring at the ceiling, both figuratively and literally. However, occasionally something nonboring might happen and it is my hope that if I put enough of those nonboring moments here I might be able to skew perception of who I am, perhaps help people get the wrong idea about me. At least that’s my hope.

Of course for some people I imagine that interesting things happen quite often. Unfortunately I’ve never really been one of those people. So to supplement this blog sometimes I have to settle for interesting things almost happening to me. As it so happens I recently had a week filled with interesting things that almost happened. So now I’m forced to write not about being cool but being almost cool. I take what I can get.

I’m having dinner with a friend who will remain nameless. This friend happens to be closely related to dork director extraordinaire Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi, whose brilliant Evil Dead 2 ranks among the top five greatest slapstick movies of all time and who also directed a little indie franchise by the name of Spiderman.

As it happens, Sam is in New York to shoot Spiderman 3. With the Raimi’s being a fairly tight family, my friend, Sam’s cousin, is expected to stop by the set to say hi, maybe grab a bite. As I’m having dinner with my friend he gets a number of calls from this assistant or that to coordinate a set visit.
"You’ll be filming where tomorrow?... I suppose that would work... What time is Sam’s meeting?... No, the afternoon would be better for me...Yes, I’d prefer to stay in Manhattan." Etc, etc.

Welllll... my friend has a good sense of what a big comic book dork I am, as well as my reverence for Mr. Raimi’s work. And besides, Toby Mcguire and I go way back (insomuch as I played at his table once a couple years ago when he was just learning to play poker). So it seems like my joining him on the set visit is a no-brainer. Still considering what a coup a visit would be for my blog I figure I can’t afford to be subtle.

"So... you’re going to stop by the set tomorrow?" I inquire.
"I think so."
"That should be fun."
"It’ll be nice. I haven’t seen Sam for some time."
"Yeah, I just mean it would be fun to be on set like that. I mean, especially if you were a big comic nerd. "
"I suppose."
"I mean for someone a little familiar with the source material it’d be even cooler. You know like someone who was really curious how they’re going to present Venom, the villain of this sequel. I mean like someone who wondered how Sam might present the alien symbiote which Peter Parker initially dons as a costume but that later melds with fellow photographer Eddie Brock and transforms him into a psychopathic black mirror image of Spiderman that calls itself Venom, I mean, considering that in the comics the symbiote was originally found by Spiderman out in another galaxy when he was whisked away by the Beyonder in order to fight in the Secret Wars miniseries (not the recent Brian Bendis series but rather the original Jim Shooter one from the 80's). I mean for a comic nerd like that a visit to the set would probably be something that would really raise his street creds in the dork world. A real once in a lifetime kind of thing."
"I would imagine" was his reply, followed by "so, when are you leaving for the World Series?" And that was pretty much that.

Considering that subtlety has never been my strong point I always figured that I would be better at being unsubtle. So much for that theory. And so much for being cool.

But as it turns out that was nothing compared to the almost coolness that came a couple days later.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase "It’s good work if you can get it" and wondered exactly who it was that was getting said work, his name is Peter Alson. Peter will probably come up here quite a bit in the coming weeks due to the publication of Take Me to the River, his latest masterpiece about my time at the WSOP (technically, it's actually about Peter's time at last year's WSOP, but as much as I loved it I tended to ignore everything but the paragraph or two where he mentioned me). For now all I’ll say is that Peter is running pretty well.

It turns out that Chinese uber-auteur Wong Kar-Wai happens to be making a movie by the name of "My Blueberry Nights". In it, Natalie Portman happens to play a poker player, and it happens to be that someone needs to help Ms. Portman understand what it’s like to play poker. As it happens this person turns out to be Peter.

I ask him just what such a job entails.

"You know, we just covered general stuff and watched some video of Jennifer Harmon."
"You were paid to be alone with Natalie Portman in a dark screening room."
"It wasn’t anything so formal. We just went back to the hotel."
"Her hotel?"
"Yeah, there was a VCR in Natalie’s bedroom."
"In her bedroom?"
"Yeah."
"You’re sitting in a chair with Ms. Portman in her hotel bedroom."
"Well, there weren’t really any chairs. I mean, it’s a hotel bedroom"
"So you’re on the bed with her."
"Well, yeah, I guess."
"And you’re being paid. Movie production money... to sit on a bed with Natalie Portman."
"More or less."
"Oh..."

I’m not sure, but at a time like this, when a peer tells you that he’s getting paid movie production money to watch TV sitting on a bed with Natalie Portman, I think the only response that really makes any sense is "Oh..."

I try to think of all the reasons, given his lack of juice in the film world, that Peter might get such a job. And try as I can, I can think of no better reason than it’s the kind of thing that, by association, will make me feel worse about my own life. I know this doesn’t make too much sense, but that’s the way my mind works.

My new found loathing of Peter thaws quite rapidly though when he calls me up a few days later to ask for a favor. He explains that he needs to leave for his summer vacation a little early. He doesn’t think that Natalie will need him for anything but he wants to have a backup for the slim possibility that she needs something poker related while he’s gone. He wants to know if I’d be able to look after her in the off chance she needs something.

Uh-huh. Working in the poker industry I get a fair number of calls from people asking for help. Really not so many like this though. Oh, and I’d also get movie production money for my time spent hanging out with Natalie Portman, talking about myself.

Now I did try to consider the downside here. I did want to consider the possibility that I might be a little intimidated and I might in some manner grotesquely embarrass myself in front of one of the more attractive woman I’d be likely to meet this year. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that she’s far enough out of my league that it’d be hard for me to be intimidated. To feel nervous that you would blow a chance with a young starlet you would first have to be able to believe you had a chance with said starlet. I didn’t think that would be a problem in this case.

Of course I did make the mistake of watching the movie Closer the other day which might have complicated things. Every so often a movie produces an image visceral enough that it stays with you for quite some time. Hannibal Lecter behind glass talking about Fava Beans, Tony Montana and his little friend being gunned down, etc. Closer had a moment that stuck with me as well.

As it so happens, I’d like to believe that I could see Ms Portman as I should, as a three dimensional individual not completely unlike myself, and interact with her accordingly. However, face to face with her, I’m not quite sure I could muster up enough focus to not continually think of absolutely nothing other than the scene in Closer in which Natalie Portman is in a strip club bent over on all fours showing her hoo-ha to Clive Owen. And I imagine that might possibly prove a little distracting. If I was working with her I would definitely make a concerted effort to try not to think about such a thing, but I couldn’t make any promises.

Of course as Peter is telling me all this I know that the true possibility of anything ever happening is probably well under 1.3 percent, tops. Still, if there’s anything poker players understand it’s the value of a free-roll. And for a little while it makes me happy to think about that 1.3 percent. It’s not unlike buying a lottery ticket. You know you’re not going to win but for 1 dollar you get to sit around for a little while and think "yeah, but what if...?"

Not surprisingly, I never get my call from Ms. Portman, which is too bad because it might have made a decent blog entry. As it is I’ll just have to settle for writing about my underthings or jiggly woman parts. But of course if I can’t be cool myself it is a blessing to have friends who are occasionally cool themselves (and from whom I can leech second hand cool off of). I take what I can get.