Home for Thanksgiving

After I had a few days to unpack from the trip, and get our footage processed at the office, I was headed home for Thanksgiving.  I arranged to carpool with H to save gas, since we our schedules aligned.  We left late Tuesday night, and arrived well after midnight.  She provided the car, so I provided the driving, and she slept most of the way.  My parents still had my old car, so I had a vehicle to use for the next four days.

 

Even though my parents were living apart, the plan was to celebrate the holidays together.  My mom wanted us to all go to the fairgrounds for Thanksgiving, to attend the large community meal that I used to work at as a Boy Scout.  So my dad reluctantly agreed to forego the usually feast at our house.  On the day of, my mom canceled for some reason, so it ended up being the rest of the family meeting there, none of whom had any interest in being there.  Unfortunately the event had declined in the years since I had worked at it, and was even worse than I remembered.  So no one was real happy, and it was a pretty rough day all around.

 

The next day I connected up with Rockstar, to hear his perspective on the events surrounding his wedding.  We had a six hour talk about all sorts of things, but it was a really good one.  I found it very interesting to compare the stories.  They agreed on all of the actual facts of the matter, and the events that took place.  But they still told totally different stories, and had very different views and analysis.  I felt a whole lot better after hearing the other side of the story, concluding that conflicts like that don’t just strike at random, they occur as a result of the decisions made by the people involved.  And therefore I didn’t necessarily have to go around concerned that something like that might happen to me, at some point in the future, without any prior warning.

 

The drive home with H was a bit tense at times, and I don’t pretend to understand girls, or what causes that.  That next week, D came up to check out my Bible study.  I had been offering up the fairly anonymous prayer request there that two of my friends were having some major relationship issues to deal with.  So when the topic came up, I was giving a quick update when I realized that it wasn’t anonymous in front of D, who was going to have been the maid of honor at the wedding.  It was one of those strange awkward moments where you stop mid sentence and re-evaluate things before continuing.  But it ended up being perfectly fine, and she even added a few details when we paired off to pray together.

 

When I got back to the office, I discovered that we had gotten a contract with the Marines to do a major shoot for two weeks in December.  It would involve four separate crews filming six amphibious assaults with twenty four cameras on two ships and four bases on the East Coast.  I would be on one of the land based crews, but oversee the footage and data for all of the crews in the operation.  I came up with a new creative way to organize the footage from that many cameras, and setup a new logging system.  I had done all of my onset work for the SEAL movie on my own volition, without any extra pay over my normal office salary.  But this was different, and I knew the time and stress involved, and now had the experience to justify a full position on the crew, including the usual pay.  But inquiries about how my company wanted to handle that were put off until my return.

Towing a Trailer in the Desert

Once we finished in El Centro, we drove up to Lake Havasu for a day, and then the last day of the shoot was out in the desert above Baker.  I had my roommate along to help with the drive for those two legs of the trip.  At one point, I was getting low on gas when we approached the only buildings for miles, at the intersection of two highways.  I pointed out that we would need to stop for gas, but we had to get through the agricultural inspection checkpoint first.  That is a bit nerve racking, because they seem to ask you a lot more questions when you are towing a trailer.  Once we had gotten through that, and I had made the turn onto the new highway, Shaun reminded me about gas, right after we had passed the entrance to the gas station.  I took a quick look around, but there was no other way to get into it, and there were cars behind us.  So I continued ahead, hoping for a place to turn around.  But the road was graded above the desert floor, and it would be a foot drop to go over the side, and I couldn’t pull a U-turn with the trailer, especially with semi trucks blowing by in the other direction every thirty seconds.

 

The next gas station was in Needles, about thirty miles ahead.  My truck told me I had 20 miles of range left, and I didn’t know if that compensated for the 7MPG I had been getting while towing the trailer.  So we had to continue onward, and I was just praying that the tank had some reserve fuel available.  The first 15 miles was flat as a board, but a constant slightly uphill grade, that felt like it was sucking up gas.  The top was visible the whole time, but felt like it would never come.  Eventually we reached the summit, and I felt a bit more comfortable now that we were heading down hill.  We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the Needles City Limit sign, only to discover it was another seven miles before we saw our first building.  We eventually made it to a gas station, and it took two transactions, and $130 to fill the tank with 32 gallons of gas.  I have never put in more than 25 gallons before or since, and have run out of gas on less than that since then, not that I am complaining about how it worked out.

 

That night we stayed at Stateline, and headed out into the desert the next day.  Our “set” that day was a barren stretch of desert in the middle of nowhere.  One of our actors arrived in a taxi from LA.  I don’t want to know how much that four hour cab ride must have cost.  We had two cargo planes land there for the scene, and got the shots we needed.  One of the planes was based in Santa Monica, and took most of the cast and crew back to LA when it left.  After take off, it did a low pass over the production trailer camp.  I saw out the window that it was aiming right for us, but I only heard it fly over as I ran out of my trailer.  I was told by others that the large plane cleared my trailer by “about ten feet.”  I guess the stunt pilot enjoyed watching everyone dive for cover.

 

My roommate was one of the people on that flight out, so I had lost my co-pilot for the trek home, through the heart of LA with my trailer on a Friday night.  The first step was to get gas, and I nearly got stuck in the station as I worked myself farther into a corner.  I took a deep breath, said a little prayer, and then finally managed to back it out of the corner, and right to the pump in a single shot.  Once that was over, I just had to get through LA, in construction traffic on Interstate 10 all the way to Culver City, and made it to the office without further incident.  But I had had enough trailer driving for a while.

Breaking in my Trailer

I was soon preparing to take my trailer on its first real excursion.  I was looking forward to having more space to work, a powerful workstation under my desk, and better monitors to use to view the footage on.  I was a bit apprehensive about towing my trailer straight through downtown on the busiest freeway in LA on my first trip.  But once we got out of town, driving in the desert seemed to be idea conditions for getting acclimated to towing it.  I had one of the guys on the camera crew join me as a copilot/navigator for that first leg of the journey, and we didn’t have any significant problems.  Once I got on the freeway, I just didn’t stop until I was well outside the city.  It was about five hours to get to El Centro, where we would spend the next ten days.  I dropped off the trailer near the set, and headed to the hotel.  They were having another budget overhaul, and they decided to return the production office trailer to save money.  I had brought my trailer on my own and wasn’t planning to charge them for this first experiment with it.  But when Haggart proposed moving the whole production staff into my little trailer, he promised that they would pay me for it.

 

So while some of the production managers worked out of their hotel rooms, for the rest of that shoot I had at least ten people working in very tight quarters in my 24’ trailer.  There were usually two or three of us sharing the back desk, four people working at the dining table, and three more using their laptops on the couch.  Occasionally there would be more people sitting on the front bed.  The first two days it was like a solar oven in there, in the 115 degree heat outside.  Until I moved the trailer into a spot that was shaded by a large building, and then I had the only spot on set with air conditioning.  And since that was where footage was being reviewed, it was a pretty popular place for people to be.  And since this shooting location was the closest big one to LA, various members of the post-production and support staff came out from the office to visit the set, basing out of my trailer as well.  Ironically I ended up charging the production more for the use of my trailer than they saved by canceling the rental of the much larger fifth-wheel production office trailer, which is exactly what the production crew prompted me to do.  It came to $300 a day, which was a reasonable number for a piece of equipment like that.

Back Up North

I had arranged to make a trip north for my Mom’s birthday, when they rescheduled the next shoot for the movie, this time in San Diego.  There was some confusion over whether I was supposed to go, but I eventually declined, in favor of my first trip back home since that summer.

 

I hadn’t talked to P since I left camp that summer.  I hadn’t gone out of my way to resume our dialog online, and thought that maybe decreasing our level of communication would help me align my emotions toward her with the type of relationship she wanted us to have.  I can’t really say that worked, but it was worth a try.  At the end of my journey north, as I was driving into town, I passed her on the freeway.  It was the first time I had ever seen her anywhere besides at camp.  Once I realized it was her, I had a totally different perspective on my approach the last few months.  It felt like I had been running from the issue, which is something I usually pride myself on not doing.  It was not like our paths weren’t going to cross.  We were from the same small town, knew a lot of the same people, and she even lived at the camp I dreamed of moving to.  It wasn’t like not talking to her was going to improve things.  So that incident prompted me to resume our conversation, and I made a point of seeing her when I went to visit all my friends out at camp that week.

 

I stopped by camp one afternoon that week, and spent a few hours helping Sunshine clean all the windows and screens in the lodge, while she gave me a detailed story of the circumstances surrounding her aborted wedding.  Her perspective on the events led me to question how one could ever try to get married if something like that could randomly happen at the last minute.  She also suggested I look up D, a mutual friend who now lived down near me.  After that, I headed over to talk with P for a few minutes, and then up to Wild Oak, to hang out with Buddies, Eclipse, and Doodles for the evening.  Camp was not in session that week, so it felt very dead there, and didn’t have the vibe that I was accustomed to during the summer.

 

We celebrated my Mom’s birthday, and then I headed back down south, to be ready to receive footage in the office from the shoot in San Diego.  Our next shot was going to be two weeks out in the desert in Southern California, so I would finally get a chance to take advantage of the trailer that I had built.

Shortly after I got back, I connected up with D, and joined her and her friends at a movie down in Long Beach.  It was good to see a friendly face in LA, and I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year.  About that time, a newly married couple joined our Bible study in LA.  Greg and Jen had an interesting story about how they had ended up together, that shifted my mindset a bit.  They had worked in the same ministry together at UCLA, and commuted together every week to volunteer at some location in downtown LA.  He told us he had been trying to get her to date him that whole year.  She had declined every time, and they were just friends.  It wasn’t until the next semester that she finally changed her mind, and agreed to give it a try.  Her perspective was that she wasn’t ready then, but eventually she came around, and a year later, there they were.  It was an interesting story about how initial repeated rejection eventually had a happy ending.

Dealing with MRSA

The next morning I woke up to discover that the infection had spread to my face.  I had a huge lump on my neck, and my upper lip was incredibly swollen.  I went straight to the doctor’s office.  Kaiser has a policy about not usually making same day appointments, but I just walked up to my doctor’s section of the hospital, went up to the registration window, and said: “I don’t have an appointment, but the doctor took me off my medication yesterday, and I woke up looking like this!”  “Oh!  The doctor will see you; just give us a few minutes.”  I paid the regular $110, and I soon found myself waiting in an examination room.  After a few minutes the doctor walked in.  He just stood there looking at me for about fifteen seconds, then said “Well, that was a bad judgment call,” and then turned around and left.  I sat there waiting another fifteen minutes before he returned.  “I’ve been up on the fourth floor talking with the Head Neck and Throat department, and they are going to see you right away to take care of that.  And then we have a new medication for you to try out.

 

So I went up there, registered and paid again, and was taken in for what I guess is called outpatient surgery.  After my experience in the Navy infirmary, I was a bit apprehensive about what was coming next.  But they gave me some localized anesthetic, and I hardly felt what they were doing.  They slit my lip open, drained the wound, and cleaned up the infection.  They didn’t do much with my neck, although they did examine it a little bit.  When I left, I expected to look like Frankenstein, but when I stopped in the bathroom, I was surprised that you could hardly see any evidence of what my lip had looked like an hour before.

 

I went down to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription, and was pretty surprised at how much it was going to cost.  The amount they wanted was more than my annual deductible, regardless of the fact that I had spent quite a bit of money at the hospital the last few weeks, and even twice earlier that morning.  They acknowledged that it was clearly a mistake, but that I would be refunded the difference once the paperwork was processed.  This ended up taking over six months, and they over-refunded me, leading to months more phone calls and frustration, to get it balanced out.  The new drug they gave me was Zyvox, and the bottle said it was Batch #002.  I started taking it immediately, and by the next day, it had totally killed the infection.  I still had to cut the dead material out of my neck on my own.  But things improved dramatically from that point forward, and I finished out the prescription.

Getting Back to the Mainland to Recover

We did two more nights of shooting after that, and I survived the process, working twenty hour days, with lots of medication.  The last day we were on the island, the SEALs took the crew out to their shooting range, and we got to fire their weapons.  I got to shoot a good sized handheld machine gun, and am told I actually hit more with it than most of the other crew members did.  I then got to shoot a silenced M4, which I liked much better.  The silencer was so heavy that I could barely hold the barrel up, but the lack of painful noise when firing it was much appreciated.  I didn’t get to shoot the sniper rifle because we ran out of ammo for it, but I did get to look though the scope, and see what they had been shooting at a mile away.  My boss was pretty excited to have actually hit something with it at that range.

 

The next morning we headed back on the airstrip, ready to fly home.  The directors and producers had flown home the night before, to prep for the next location.  As I was watching our SEALs drive forklifts around the airstrip, getting the cargo ready to load on the plane, it occurred to me that this might make good footage about the real guys in the movie.  But requesting a camera from our packed gear would not have made me any friends in the camera department, and that relationship was already strained, since my job involved pointing out things they had done wrong when I reviewed the footage every day.  So I kept my mouth shut, and passed up the opportunity, but that probably would have been a useful thing to do.

 

We were taking a C-130 military cargo plane back the mainland, which seemed like it would be an interesting uniquely Bandito adventure.  I found out much later that while waiting on the landing strip, my boss had been filming interviews with the SEALs and crew, and for some reason the topic of my interest in our upcoming C-130 ride came up repeatedly, and eventually made it into the behind the cast and crew video.  The flight was not nearly as exciting as I had hoped.  It was just a really uncomfortable ride, smashed tightly into a really loud cargo hold, between two oversized guys from the electrical department.  Thank God it was only a 35 minute flight; I can’t imagine flying halfway around the world like that.

 

As soon as I got back to LA, I got an appointment with a doctor, and headed to the hospital.  They did a few tests, and told me I had MRSA, which basically means medicine resistant staph infection.  It wasn’t getting any worse, so they told me to finish out the antibiotics I was on and gave me some different ones to try after that.  At my boss’s insistence, I took a few days to recover from the shoot before going back in to the office.

 

None of those drugs seemed to solve the problem, or make it go away, but they did keep it from getting much worse.  I ended up in the emergency room a week later, when the infections caused some other separate issues as well, but those were resolved in a few days.  But not much else happened while I was on the antibiotics.  I emailed the doctor the day the prescription ran out, to tell him the infections hadn’t gone away, and he said to wait and see what happened.