Bike Riding on Fenwick Island, DE

On a recent vacation to southern Delaware and Maryland my wife and I were looking at shore houses to buy. This wasn't one of them.

Plane Truth to Bollywood's New York

Joseph Tornatore(blue shirt) filming an action scene in the movie New York.

Having filmed only one day on a hundred day shoot, it s a minor achievement to make the final cut as a recognizable actor in the Bollywood movie, New York. Playing an FBI agent, the camera captures my harrowing reaction to a terrorist attack in close-up during its signature scene about 1 hour 22 minutes into the film. You can also see glimpses of me pointing, holding my arms on top of my head, and running like a scared kitten out of an FBI building as pictured. I was surprised to find this movie New York already posted to You Tube.

This preamble leads me to an interesting outtake from working on this movie, which epitomizes how art imitates life.

Background actors stood in the middle of the city street aligned with NYPD cruisers blaring flashing lights. As the precision heavy trample of an armed SWAT team moved, a crowd stared up at the Federal Bureau of Investigation high tower building with our necks cocked. We were told to act panicked. Act like your worse nightmare is happening is the directive I kept in my head.

The wide lens camera captured the chaos on our faces. With yellow caution tape weaving through a wooden horse barricade, a police cruiser skidded right in front of our position. A faux news reporter broadcasted the staged event.

While giving the take my best impending doom stare, a low flying passenger plane flew low over the city. The jet flew horizontally between the top floors of buildings. I spocked it heading in the direction of the FBI building under siege in this exact scene. Since I have been in movies where the crew purposely does not let actors know scene elements in the hopes of capturing their raw emotion, I paused.

A few actors gasped at the unlikely notion that the production company has somehow recreated the infamy of the events of September 11th. A chill casts over me and I fall out of character. I leap frogged from pretend panic to real dread and finally back into character. Alas, it turns out to be a coincidental optical illusion. A better actor than myself might have carried the more intense natural look without a Big Apple lump knotted in their throat. Here is the Boeing 767 plane truth of the matter. It is hard to act accordingly in New York during the exact moment the world changed.

A Set to Behold: Aniston in The Bounty

Jennifer Aniston

The holding area for actors on a closed movie set is comparable to the park bench occupancy next to Forrest Gump. Once people claim their seats in the holding area of this decadent casino, every box of chocolates opens for the movie The Bounty starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler(300, PS, I Love You).

Radioman, a Hollywood icon whose life story inspired the lead character in The Fisher King is here on set with his working papers. A former homeless man, Radioman's ubiquitous character is a welcomed background staple for motion pictures. I entertain the faint memory of Radioman attending the posh Oscars alongside the actor who played him on film, Robin Williams. It looks like another culture clash as I observe Radioman’s beard catch scrambled egg morsels while sitting on the floor of the Taj Majal.

Queen Laqueefa, a burlesque dancer whose extraordinary Kegel control can manipulate inserted objects, spouts her vaginal feats to any actor who will listen. After a decisive wardrobe change, Laqueefa is wearing about as much fabric found in a hand towel for her aptly cast part as a streetwalker on the boardwalk. As far as I can gauge, the props department never equipped her.

There is a four foot something actor here from the Bronx who would look undersized as a horse jockey. He could play a child in this movie if they close shaved him. Another actor strikingly resembles Doogie Howser. An actress, whom Harrison Ford actually said reminded him of Carrie Fisher, is here as an extra. As I sit in holding, I actively wonder their degree of dilemma resembling another actor verses my getting chosen for a scene resembling myself.

On the set, we film as fillers for a boardwalk scene for most of the day. Eventually, the returning rain pattern chases us indoors for interior scenes. I’m standing near sultry Jennifer Aniston at the bottom of the escalators underneath the Taj Majal's signature chandeliers. There is extended down time as the crew methodically sets up this scene by the escalators.

Hundreds of fans held precariously behind yellow caution tape implore freestanding extras to autograph casino chips, cocktail napkins and even bare flesh because they think we might become household names. I imagine the lampoon of myself photo shopped out of thousands of pictures after computer upload or my worthless scribbled signature rubbed off under scolding hotel tap water the morning after. Sharpie markers pass amongst the crowd as much as Visine drops does on the set. Actors hear the word “wrap” in the fifteenth hour.

Just when I am ready to leave set, the first AD pulls me aside and tells me that playback footage prominently captured me behind Aniston so I am invited back the next day to finish filming the scene. Alarmingly, I’m so deliriously tired that I do not remember much of the hour ride home in solitude with my Bose speakers blaring to keep me awake.

After a blink of an eye nap in my bed, an abbreviated shift spent at the day job, and a return commute, I’m back the next day on set in Atlantic City. I meet a new regime of actors but I sit for several hours before I am used. About two hundred actors take their turn filming scenes over umpteen hours. Along the way, the acting world loses Farrah Fawcett but the show must go on. I digress to thinking of this sex symbol’s iconic bathing suit poster hanging on my bedroom wall. I inconceivably dismiss Jennifer Aniston as cameras roll with the Fawcett running in my resonating mind. In between takes and production stops, I use my cell phone to access the Internet where I discover rumors swirling that Angelina Jolie is sending Jennifer Aniston nasty text messages to leave Brad Pitt alone. I cast a surreal look over to Jennifer Aniston for evidential proof but nothing is happening on my watch.

Cutting through my tastefully seasoned prime rib during break, actor Jeff Goldblum is reported dead. Sometime later, many actors report difficulty being able to connect to the flooded wireless Internet. A boisterous female crewmember stands on a folding chair and tragically confirms the death of Michael Jackson. Sadly, nobody asks about actor Jeff Goldblum anymore. I don’t remember Goldblum having any serious character issues to demote his sudden death this far south of the Jackson headliner.

Back on the set with live actors, lady luck and the right wardrobe place me next to the hero table to shoot the next scene at a craps table. A spiked haired actor nicknames me mobster Frankie Brown Eyes because of my sparkling gold on black sequin casino garb. I play craps as the camera films Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler's point of view, both of whom are directly across from me. I don’t know how to play craps but my pantomime acting is enough realism with the camera rolling. My thoughts are fleeting, however. I have trouble concentrating due to sleep deprivation. In this game of craps, I could be called the fader right about now. I misread the next roll of the dice in the scene because I am admiring Jennifer Aniston's flawless features….The dealer's voice pierces my eardrum as he claims the casino has the advantage in this game. I beg to disagree. What a set to behold.

Nick at Night

Joseph Tornatore on the set of The Warrior.

The cruelest truism about acting is that it promotes a safety net of self-confidence until proven otherwise. While nobody reports to a movie set without entertaining the notion of being upgraded to a bigger part, be careful what you dream about.

I was hired to film as a background extra for an establishing scene in the mixed martial arts drama called The Warrior. From a hovering helicopter, an eye in the sky camera films extras along the Atlantic City boardwalk. I imagine looking like a dubious raisin on planks if I make the final cut at all.

While minding my own business, I get plucked from the throng of 250 background actors for reasons I do not understand. Whisked to the director, he looks me up and down before giving his nod of approval. I am taken off the set by a crewmember who escorts me to a parked trailer.

A Mary Poppins of a wardrobe lady swinging a measuring tape greets us. “Well, who do we have here?”

The crewmember replies, “He’s the guy we spied for Nick Nolte’s stand-in.”

From this point forward, it becomes surreal and my personal experiences seem to be somehow placed inexplicably into a vault the moment they happen. The sun has set long ago. I’m wearing another man’s clothes. I’m sitting in a golf cart waiting to be taken to set. Somebody congratulates me on making the A-team. An army of crewmembers work around a yellow cab like it is in a NASCAR pit stop. Eventually, I’m placed inside the backseat of the cab that is raised on a trailer and attached to a process truck that will pull it though city streets behind the swirling cherry topped police car of a pace vehicle. The cab driver, who will do no actual driving in this scene, is an actor from Pittsburgh. He relaxes in the front seat. He and I chat about Atlantic City's schizophrenic divide between the Rich Man, Poor Man while Hollywood's best camera lenses, microphones, wires, lights, and measurements occur both inside and outside the car all around us. I run scripted lines for a sound check of the microphone hard mounted between my legs. A voice over my walkie-talkie instructs me to exit the no meter running cab. The left rear passenger door swings open and I am helped down from my perch. Nick Nolte brushes by me, nods then climbs aboard the raised cab with equal awkwardness. The first thing that really strikes me is that I am identical in physical dimensions to Nick Nolte.

Nick and I constantly switch spots throughout the night like alter egos. It is either he or I sitting on an apple box on the sidewalk. It is my warm water bottle in the cab next to his cool perspiring one. Since piped air conditioning interferes with recorded sound quality, it is Nick’s hand towel for perspiration, my napkin for sweat. After filming multiple point of view angles, the scene concludes halfway through the night. I’m eating shrimp fajita wraps next to Nick Nolte amongst undesirable riff raff just off set. The crew does there best to conceal Nick’s identity by posing as human shields while people pass by but I am left hanging by the wind. Seeing a stationed film crew, drunken vacationers venturing from the boardwalk or leaving the casinos demand me to pose for pictures with them. Nick has the night off from paparazzi.

Wranglers escort background actors to the set to film another scene. I workout the blocking and the timing as the camera and light crews make fine tuned adjustments. We move to rehearsal. If not for being the stand-in actor, it would be an ego boost to have numerous extras following your lead then performing synchronized motions around you. Alas, the director gives me humbling grades as a stand-in. Faster here, slower there, more stoop as you move, hail the cab driver earlier, wait two beats not one at the hotel door before leaving, etc. I try to shelter myself from the recesses of my mind but it is only a matter of time before the inevitable occurs. So I watch with microscopic eyes as Oscar and Emmy nominated actor Nick Nolte absolutely nails down the scene overtop the skeleton one I struggled to create in flawed rehearsal takes.

Shortly after dawn, Nick Nolte’s scenes wrap. A glorious and inglorious twelve-hour Nick at Night ends in a saltwater trail. I realize that I have spent an entire night trying to convince both Nick Nolte and high-heeled hookers exiting the casino that I am working.

Summer Survival Tips for the Northeast

Summer is officially here although you would not know it by the abundant overcast skies that have cast gloom over our lives over the past month. Here are some survival tips for this summer.

• Seasonal Affective Disorder has been extended until further notice.

• Stop tracking weather forecasts. Every day is contrastingly dreary.

• Cancel scheduled vacation time from work until August.

• If you are hosting an outdoor event, rent a tent or canopy to pamper your guests.

• If you see the sunshine, drop to both knees and worship it because it won't last long.

• In the even of continued overcast benefited by the absence of rain, start mowing your overgrown lawn. Chances are it is almost one foot high.

• If you have yet to turn on your underground sprinklers as a homeowner, you might not need to.

• Do not replace your solar powered landscape lighting. The gizmos will eventually jump start the first nightfall after the return of the sun.

• If you were considering joining a water park this summer, it may be coming to you.

• If your tomato plants are not water rotted, register your magic garden in the next Farmer’s Almanac.

• If you are a shoobie vacationing at the shore, the word “sucker’ now appears on your purchased beach tags.

• Along with a $10..00 non-refundable deposit, reservations are now being taken for new windshield wiper blades at your local autmotive parts store.

• Mostly cloudy is now considered an awesome forecast.

• Dollar Store umbrellas are not made to work for thirteen straight days.

• For you sun worshippers, SBF 3 sun tan lotion may be enough UV ray protection.

• If you ever ruled out moving to Seattle because of their wet weather, now is the best time to change your mind.

A Bright Idea

I received a ritz pair of designer sunglasses for Father’s Day. It might be a long time before I seize the opportunity to use them becaused this spring sure has turned out shady. With the deluge of rain and overcast skies I doubt solar powered landscape lights are working.

Eminem..Melt in Your Mouth, Stick in Your Ear

My stepson hurriedly hooked up his Ipod to my swank car stereo. He wanted me to hear Eminem’s new album driving out on the road broadcasting thru Bose speakers. After a few minutes of listening to Eminem’s rap songs blurt out catchy hip but vile expressions, my hands uncomfortably gripped the steering wheel. It wasn’t just the sheer number of Eminem’s curse words that made me uneasy, it was the x-rated carnal knowledge that he was singing deep throated about. I was embarrassed for my stepson who accompanied me driving his young girlfriend home. As I drive,I realize that I am the only one who feels this way. His generation does not even blink at the streaming downloaded culture in which we live. It knows no taboo.

My stepson comments about the lyrical screaming overtop the music. “It’s just not rap without the cursing.” I muse about what the moral compass of Bill Cosby might say to all this: Talented Eminem diluted by his cesspool potty mouth.

Just the previous week I heard my stepson school me on the merits of heavy metal music…”It’s not heavy metal music unless they belt it out angry.”

My stepson knows infinitesimally more about music than I do but this seemed to be an issue disregarding of taste and deserving of tolerance. I harkened back to when I was just two years older than him. On a slimy spool of a cassette tape, we listened to Tom Petty with rolled down windows in my first car. The image of Tom Petty’s shoulder length hair locks made him anti-establishment in my vanilla world. We thought we were so coooooooool..

Thirty years passed me by like a petty concern. Somehow, the memories of the angelic soft voice of my best friend’s girlfriend got consumed by a radically changed world that now hung on my stepson’s girlfriend’s voice. “Could you please turn up Refugee?” had been brazenly voiced over by “Crank that shit!”

Mos Definitely Audition

Actor Mos Def

Yesterday, I went to an audition for a small part in the movie Stringbean and Marcus. The screenplay had the fiber to win a Pew Fellowship at the Sundance Lab. The full length movie is slated to start filming this July staring Mos Def(16 Blocks, Next Day Air) and Sophie Okonedo, who got an Oscar nomination for her role as Tatiana in Hotel Rwanda). Each actor has more than 35 film credits.

Set in 1978, Stringbean and Marcus is a drama about the severed love affair between two Black Panther members as the story is told through the eyes of a adolescent girl.

My videotaped audition for a police officer went well. Although there is little loyalty in the acting business, the casting agency pulled me aside and double-checked my availability. Since I came to the audition fully dressed in a police uniform, I replied that I am ready to shoot now. Ah, it always feels good to leave them laughing, Mos Definitely.

Making Scents in Atlantic City

I spent the better part of three days in Atlantic City on vacation. It was so relaxing that I did not want to checkout of the stately room inside Bally's casino. I purposely gave the casino only a handful of my money yet I came away with so many cherishable scents during my stay from the boardwalk to the spa.

-The splendid aroma of my 32 ounce morning coffee.

-The penetrating menthol smell of the aromatheraphy inhalation room.

-The charged ionized air before a dark clouded thunderstorm.

-The chlorinated water of the indoor heated hotel pool.

-The smell of fashion trendy women’s perfume carrying across the casino floor.

-The refreshing salt-water smell of the spritzing Atlantic ocean.

-The clean smell from a Noxema facial wrap.

The Greek American Movie Website

The official website for The Greek American movie is now online. Click the link and you can view the trailer. The full length movie stars Kenneth McGregor, Ryan Tygh, Joey Trantos, Andrea Langhi, and Peter Patrikios.

As for its cast, Kenneth McGregor's acting was top-notch stellar. McGregor has had movie scenes with prolific actors such as Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. It was an absolute honor for me to exchange dialogue with him in rolling film that made the final cut.

Mcgregor's co-star lead, Alysia Maltepes, also directs the film. The beautiful innocence of Maltapes' character is something worth fighting for even after you thought that love was long lost.

This happens to be the second movie I was in with sultry Andrea Langhi. We both had small roles in The Nail, which is airing on Showtime later this summer. At the premier of the The Greek American movie, I thought I congratulated Andrea on her noteworthy performance in the Oscar nominated film, The Wrestler but, as it topsy-curvy turns out, it was her closely resembling attractive sister.

The comedic character Joey Trantos played fit him like a snug glove or should I say a cast iron skillet.

Actor Peter Patrikios stole some scenes playing an unorthodox Spiro in The Greek American. Far and away, Peter proved to be my favorite actor in the film. Before I landed the part of bartender in this movie, I actually did a cold reading as a stand-in for Peter Patrikios in one scene to get the blocking right for the camera. Peter's unique adaptation of the character Spiro supplied more energy and dynamic interest than my vanilla reading. As it stands on film, surrounded by better actors than myself, I got four lines in five scenes as Gus, the bartender. If I deserve any props, I can make faux ouzo drinks out of milk droppings in water tending bar with the best of them.

Death Wish in the Driveway

As I put my car in reverse, I hear thump, thump, thump. Curse words erupt from my leather cockpit because this was the definitive sound of a major flat tire. I sling myself out of my God-forsaken car, fully expecting the worse in the indignity of my own driveway. I circle the vehicle. Curiously, the air pressure in each of my tires looks more than adequate.

I get back into my car and try again. The same repetitive thump follows me halfway down the driveway. Exiting the car, I check inside my trunk for something rolling around. Everything seems secure. At my wit's end, I literally stand around my vehicle while scratching my head.

Not knowing what else to do, I get back into my car. This time I reverse faster than normal while dismissing the lunacy of expecting a different outcome at a higher rate of speed. Thump, thump, thump. I put my cursing aside after concluding with a gulp in my throat that I have repeatedly run over a defenseless toddler. Manslaughter charges run rampant through my active imagination, one that comes complete with the soundbite of a Judge's gavel.

I lay down in the driveway where I literally shimmy underneath my car. As I lay on my back staring at the empty undercarriage, an adult possum jumps from my wheel well overtop my prone body. Claws and fur fly in slow motion over my defenseless body before I catch another glimpse of him scampering away through a brush thicket.

The possum had been running atop my moving tire like a personal treadmill. This possum wasn’t playing dead. Nope, this one had a death wish. It is not everyday you wheely come across an endangered species.

The Big Picture

Joseph Tornatore at the premier of Bazookas, the Movie.

Last night, I went to the premier of Bazookas, the Movie. Sitting in the front row of the sold out theatre to view the high definition film, equisite bare-naked DD cup breasts supplanted the big screen from the opening scene…on a racquetball court. The bevy of buxom actresses going topless in risqué scenes juxtaposed by the campy comedy seemingly mesmerized me. Sterioid injected chicken seemed like it had found a home in tinsel town.

The full-length movie, no pun intended, was so entertaining to view that I literally forgot that I played a fully clothed bartender in this film. I was almost surprised to see myself, however brief my part. Appearing in one scene, fleshy cleavage and comedic laughs were not enough to distract me from serving my single line. As an able bartender my juices were flowing. The breast is history.

I linked local press coverage from the Maplewood Patch on the movie’s release and how to order a DVD.

Taking A Stance

Too old to do push-ups on the beach, I could only assume the stance - Memorial Day weekend in Atlantic City, NJ 2009.

Backyard Bounty

More backyard splendor. I can almost hear the trickling water.

A Bird's Eye View

This is me on a bird watching jaunt right in our backyard. A member of the Audubon Society, my tour guide identified over 25 different bird species on our wooded property. Our acreage is on landlocked protected wetlands so the pristine woods has been virtually untouched and unchanged from the way nature shaped it. What sights I beheld.

A Mountain Called Ozark

Danny Ozark with Joe Tornatore

Former Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark’s passing this week at the age of eighty-five was a life that spanned extra innings. His stellar managerial career came within a big inning in a decisive playoff series of ultimately managing a champion. Almost tragically, the Phillies team he built, spoon-fed, and managed from basement dwellers to perennial contenders won the 1980 World Series only a year after his firing. This is how the ball bounces in the fatality of life.

I met Danny Ozark on a gorgeous day for baseball in 1997. By age seventy-three, however, the rawhide of baseball had been woven through his life yet somehow his forty-something inch waist still proudly stuffed into the pinstriped Philadelphia Phillies uniform like a throwback to yesteryear. As I approached the dapper uniformed don in a hideaway restaurant, Danny was hungrily eating his way through a stack of flapjacks perched in his counter seat.

I introduced myself then said, “Danny, I just came from the park. There are no children, no spectators for the charity softball event.”

As he fathomed this scenario, maple syrup seemed to suspend drip from his fork. Showing his genial leadership qualities, Danny Ozark expressed to me in parental tones that the game must be played. Unfulfilled charitable contributions aside, two dozen former major league baseball players did not travel across the country to not pick up their gloves or grab a bat.

During the ballgame, it was an awestruck sight watching the old man bearing red and white pinstripes register putouts from infielders Al Oliver and Bert Campaneris on a lumpy field of weeds and clay. I knew firsthand that Ozark would be taking to the grave his lifelong love for baseball. Like any fallible human being, it would not be without regrets.

With Ozark’s death, I only have my own personal memories of him to hold onto. I can almost hear him smack his floppy first baseman’s mitt on this day, field the sea of criticism he endured for not making a late inning substitute for fielding liability Greg Luzinski after Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, or uttering classic malapropisms during post-game interviews.

If I ever visit his gravesite, I might be tempted to draw chalk lines atop the dirt that buries Danny Ozark because this was a thoroughbred baseball man. Rest(in Peace) assured, Danny Ozark is asking dearly departed Harry Kalas now if half this afterlife is ninety percent transcendental. Life like baseball contains errors, the least of which are syntax.

Danny Ozark 1923-2009

The Cocker in Spaniel

Brandy Tornatore

About twenty years ago, an adorable picture of my dog Brandy disappeared from the desktop of my office that was located in a sheltered workshop. Soon after surrendering hope that my dog picture would surface, Desmond J. Brentwood sauntered from the bathroom looking rather ragtag even for him.

After reminding him to pull up his zipper and tuck back in his shirt, I made the mistake of asking Desmond if he had dollar bills to make change for a ten spot. He stopped and removed his wallet on a chain. Behind a row of worn dollar bills, his fingertips grazed across something conspicuous. His eyes flashed mine. He is all thumbs now as the beloved picture of my dog falls out of his upside down wallet. My photo had wound up in the hands of a wayward mildly retarded young man who often admitted to engaging in acts of bestiality through a crooked smile. Our minds both race ahead to the unfolding event. Desomond picks up the picture as if it were his and not rightfully mine.

“Desmond, you stole a picture of my dog?”

“Joe, I know what you're thinking. I should have asked you to bring me in another picture from home. That’s all.”

“No, that is not what I'm thinking and that's not all. Desmond, you weren’t….Oh my God…you weren’t….to my dog?”

Desmond showed about as much remorse as boundaries. “I'm afraid so, Joe. You got a nice looking dog here. I love Cockers.”

I swiped the worn picture from his active clutches. I mouthed incredulously, “Leave Brandy alone.”

“I didn’t touch your dag gone dog.” He head nods back to the bathroom he vacated. “I only use the picture like a normal guy would a girlie magazine.”

“Oh my God!”

"Joe, you look like you're going to barf....Do you need to use the bathroom?"

Spring Blossoms

Taking this picture in front of our house may have been the last I saw of the sun.

Lunch Brake

A corner liquor store receiving a truck delivery of alcohol to fuel bloodstreams ensnares traffic. The oversized truck plugs the narrow One Way Street and prohibits passage. I am the last car in the gridlock. After a few minutes into the waiting game, the car in front of me suddenly starts to reverse but there is no place to go except through me. I beep my horn but the impatient driver keeps coming. I shift my car in reverse mode to avoid collision. An SUV rounding the corner unexpectedly turns onto the same street. I tap my brake but swipe the SUV behind me at about two miles per hour.

Three males get out of the SUV leaving a young child inside and unattended. The situation goes from bad to worse. For some unknown reason, residents start throwing things at the idling first car from their stoops. A football is hurled hard through a passenger side window of a car parked two ahead of me. After the glass shatters, the occupants exit their affected car. Feeling like a sardine in tin, I look around at the grit of my dire surroundings. This is the same bad section of town that entrenched gang members killed one of their own for missing chapter meetings.

With all that is going on around me, the paws of three males try to gain entry at my doors. The driver is as big as a refrigerator. He shouts, “Man, open up. You hit my car.”

I shake my head in agreement but do not open my car doors. Instead, I push a button that closes my moon-roof because I am afraid they might try to eject me from my seat. Emotions but not myself shoot through the roof.

A second male comments, “Oh, no, he didn’t.”

“Eugene, he’s dissing you.”

Eugene looks upset. “Don’t do me like this! Man up.”

I crack my driver’s side window like a minimalist. I explain, “If you haven’t noticed all hell is breaking loose. This ain’t no hit and run. I’m sorry for hitting your car. I’m not going anywhere but I’m not exiting my car either. It’s not exactly safe at the moment.”

The men who had vacated their parked car begin fighting the residents in the street. Women and children run and scream. Everyone male from teenage years and up is either a hooting and hollering sightseer or a combatant. Rocks hurl. I am worried that guns will be drawn. The men surrounding my car pay little attention to the danger.

Eugene orders, “Watch him. Don’t let him leave.” His complete attention now turns to the melee. He shouts at the fight spilling down the street. I incredulously watch him head towards the fisticuffs. I hear Eugene offer a street fighter a vote of confidence.

“That’s how you hit him, Akel!”

My cell phone is inside a jacket pocket that I left in the trunk. My car is being guarded by men who I do not trust. After about the fourth time Eugene's loyalists remind me that I am not going anywhere, Eugene returns to the scene of the accident. He apprises his friends of a recent development.

“Dang. They just crashed my sister’s car on the next street.”

"Damn G, what are you gonna do?"

Fear twitches my face at unsavory angles. My voice crackles. “This is a riot.”

Eugene talks through my cracked window while the two others send out text messages. “Dawg, they listen to me on this block. Don’t be scared. I run this block.”

As Eugene offers me reassurance about his positive influence in the neighborhood, my focus shifts from his imposing presence to the action spilling behind him where a vexed man swings an ax at a rabid man hell-bent on taunting him. In between his ax missing and sparking the street, he is hit by roundhouse punches. Sweat cascades down my forehead. With all of this unlawfulness, I do not know what is taking the police so long to arrive and restore order. For some strange reason, I think about Tracy Chapman's song Across the Lines. I start calculating probability odds of Eugene owning a valid driver’s license, carrying car insurance and vehicle registration without any arrest warrants or drugs in his possession. The possibilities prompt me to feel him out on his commmittment to reporting this accident to authorities.

I reason, “G, let’s call the police. Use your cell phone.”

Eugene wants to parley my transgression into a shakedown. “Nah, money talks.”

I argue, “I don’t have any money on me to settle this.” My streetwise talk is like a survival instinct taking over me. “Ugh, I just hocked a gold chain for lunch money.”

He barks instruction. “Leroy, go into Millie’s house and fetch some gasoline.”

The thoughts that race through my mind in my parked car could have gotten me a speeding ticket. Leroy hustles from Millie’s house with a red container of gasoline about the same time I check for my running shoes. The direct sunlight reveals gas swishing around the container like it is itching for something combustible. Eugene pulls a white tee shirt from the back of his vehicle. He bunches it up then soaks it in gasoline. I convince myself that he is going to torch my car with a homemade molitov cocktail. Everything seems to be going up in flames and I will be burned alive unless I can outrun three men twenty years my junior across ground of their own choosing.

Eugene stands between the two vehicles now with the gas-soaked rag. As I plot my next move, he does the unthinkable. In a circular motion, he buffs the paint marks off his SUV. He then walks over to my car. I shed actual embarrassment as he literally cleans my car. He asks me to step out of the car to admire his work. I hesitate but muster enough courage to finally venture out of the vehicle not knowing if it is the right move but hoping meeting him halfway will offer closure to the incident. His car is no worse for wear and my car carries none of his paint now but shows a small dent.

A middle-aged woman comes over and talks to Eugene as if I were not there, a proposition to my liking.

She asks, “What’s his story?”

“He’s shitting bricks because he hit my car.”

“G, what’s he doing around here?”

“He made a wrong turn.”

“I’ll say.”

Eugene clarifies, “He said he was going to Donkey’s bar for a cheese steak.”

I add, “Two cheese steaks.”

“Whatever." replies Eugene. "Stop trifling. I told you I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“You were right about that. I was wrong about that. G, are we cool now?”

“Yeah, we cool.”

“I’m driving off if you're cool with that?”

“That’s cool.”

I hand wave. “Thanks for accepting my apology.”

I get back into my car and quickly lock the doors as all of my G's turn to willikers. I start my car then put on my right turn signal. As I slowly drive around two bleeding adversaries combating in the street, I realize my psyche is withstanding a greater dent than my car.

On A Roll Like That

As I gently rolled my gym bag on wheels up the pitched sidewalk to Bally’s gym, I heard grunting sounds. When I rounded the corner, I saw a young man manually pushing a mid-sized car without its engine on across the width of the gym parking lot. He struggled mightily but seemed determined.

I hollered, “I have jumper cables, buddy. We can turn over the engine that way.”

No response followed. The man continued to expel vast amounts of energy pushing bulk metal. He cried for water.

I thought better of what I asked the moment after the words escaped me. “Do you want me to help you push it?”

I heard another man’s stern voice coming from inside the car. Wearing the crimson garb of a gym employee, he shouted through the downed windows. “Don’t help him. He paid for this personal training session.”

I stood there dumbfounded like the middle-aged out-of-shape person. When I workout, I just don’t roll like that.