found drama

I’m cast in the role of Luke Duke (a la “Dukes of Hazzard”) and my brother Bo and I are trying to clear our names – – racing around an undisclosed university campus in the northeast. Bo’s girlfriend’s life is danger (possibly she’s dead already) and we’ve been framed for it. She went to a modeling shoot and it turned into some bizarre snuff film fantasy session. We manage to escape our initial capture (Campus Security’s holding facilities were never world reknowned to begin with) and obtain a copy of the original tape of the crimes. With today’s modern special effects, it’s hard to tell if it’s real or not. Certainly there must be an element of “fake” to it because it features us – – and we never murdered anybody! Since our own “General Lee” has been confiscated, we have to improvise on a new one – – a 1987 Chevrolet Nova hatchback. It takes a bit of work but we get it in good enough condition to tear-ass around that campus in hot pursuit of those ne’er-do-wells.

We do eventually catch up to our accusers at the Fisher & Diaz Funeral Home (only the house is a bit larger and far more Baroque in a dilapidated American Gothic sort of way than I remember it). Bo’s girlfriend is laid up in the casket. At first he’s about to burst into a teary-eyed rage but I point out to him that she’s still breathing. How could that be? After some commotion, we apprehend the man responsible (he’s a pretty generic, smarmy villain archetype) and get him to administer some kind of antidote to rouse our reluctant starlet from this phony slumber. Upon awaking, she tells us this elaborate and kind of confusing story about how the modeling shoot turned into a porno turned into a more bizarre bit of smut before she got drugged and stuffed in the trunk of a car. She claims that she went along with it because they’d somehow buried her credit cards in her intestines. (!?!?!?)

Bo says he can pretty much take it from here, which works for me because all this business has my head swimming and I need some water and some air. I try to navigate my way out but I keep getting lost, stumbling through different rooms. By the time I reach the kitchen, the wake has morphed into some kind of child’s birthday party and I’m being pursued by 8-through-12 year olds who all have different queries and urgent requests for me. I grab a 7*Up out of the refrigerator and this one kid is all: “Hey can I have one, too?” Sure kid, whatever… He wants me to tell him about the modifications we made to the Nova (“…because my folks probably won’t help me out much and I’ll have to get something like that, too…”) but I’m not sure what to say to him. (The car got the job done, didn’t it?) I get away from him (still need to get some air!) and burst into this backroom office where proprieter David Fisher is on his cell phone which he has hooked up to this really old school tape recorder through some elaborate means involving a whole lot of cables. He’s eager to get off the phone and is trying to shoo me out but the door beyond him is the only one so far that I’ve found that seems to have daylight on the other side. A small, elderly Korean woman enters to give him a massage and tells him that his shoulders look too tense for him to pass it up this time. He tries to get her to give it to me instead but I just push through so I can walk out that door…

…and into a 7-11? I’m no longer in tight jeans and a too-tight t-shirt. I’m in tight black jeans and a too-tight t-shirt and a black leather jacket. People start to cower. I catch a glimpse of my face in the safety glass. Half of it is blown off. Dammit. I’m the Terminator now. Starting to get my bearings now, the 7-11 is in total disarray – – chips and cookies and emergency quarts of oil and eggs everywhere. Eggs? This isn’t a 7-11, it’s a Quick Stop convenience. (The Quick Stop convenience store.) The cop that arrives on the scene turns out to be the liquid metal cop villain. He starts trying to convince me that the only way out is to join him and wreck some serious carnage. He tears off the skin of my arms to reveal some serious destructive firepower underneath. This (he explains) is his gift to me. The damned Edward Furlong is hiding in the bathroom and jumps out to un-convince me though.

About Rob Friesel