It wasn't the only problem September 10, but it may have been the easiest to solve at John T. Bone's Cream Entertainment - a small, shadowy figure creeping along the base of a far wall.
Kid Vegas chased the creature, which turned out to be a possum. After finding itself cornered against a chain link fence, it chose quickly to climb and found itself tangled in the barbed wire on top. The stuck possum glared at its viewers from top of the fence, perhaps wishing we would simply go away.
Not my ideal way to spend a Friday night, but I managed, somehow, to get myself involved with Kid Vegas on his party relocation project. The idea, initially, was to save the party, keep Kid Vegas and Dominic from kicking the crap out of each other, and return the master tapes of Cocksucking Skank Whores to John T. Bone.
Perhaps I should have listened, when Dominic told me at nine that morning not to get myself involved; perhaps not.
Bone wanted his tapes, the masters to a video he paid Kid Vegas to shoot. Vegas wanted to throw his party at Bone's studio. Dominic wanted to sleep - he had been released from prison only 28 hours prior and had spent most the previous night getting shit-faced. Unless the tapes surfaced, the party was off.
At 9 a.m., Dominic was threatening to throw punches at Vegas if he continued to "talk shit." Bone was breathing down Vegas' neck for tapes he had expected returned and edited from Dominic's editing bay weeks before. Little did anyone know - save, perhaps, Dominic - the black hole the bay had become.
Kid Vegas picked me up. Weeks before, I spent a weekend in Las Vegas with the Kid, shooting Fear And Loathing With Kid Vegas for Legend. With Herschel Savage and Nina Whett, we took a bizarre drug-filled journey through the desert and the City of Sin, and got the royal treatment at the Bunny Ranch.
Kid Vegas, I thought, might have actually made a jerk-off tape this time. And I couldn't help but find myself endeared to his loudmouth, self-aggrandizing, life-is-a-party attitude. I wanted to see this drama settled and the party go as scheduled.
Together, we got Dominic and followed a wild goose chase of a trail that ended in the late afternoon at a motel owned by a guy named Eric. Eric, an average-sized man in his late 40s, owned the editing bay Dominic ran and the apartment in which Dominic slept. Weeks earlier, due to arguably justifiable disputes, he had changed the locks and evicted Dominic. That is where the trail to the tapes ended.
When we pulled into the motel, Eric was outside in the parking lot. Dominic jumped out of the car ready to explode and the conversation quickly turned into a shoving match. Motel guests peeked their heads out. "I saw him threaten you," one old lady crowed.
Eric bravely (or foolishly) got in the car with Dominic and Kid Vegas to go search the bay for the missing tapes. Twenty minutes later they returned empty handed. Really, what was left to be searched in an editing bay that had been cleaned out weeks earlier?
With our options exhausted, Vegas dropped off Dominic and went to face Bone. Bone had given Vegas a key to his house and was letting him shack up there. At this point it seemed obvious their business and personal relationship would be flushed down the same toilet as the party.
Bone was cordial, composed but pissed, like a father whose son had driven his Porsche into the lake. Vegas wanted to wipe his hands clean of the situation, give the key back and get his stuff. Bone impressed upon him the gravity of these tapes.
"People don't get paid this month," Bone said, with regard to his salesman, art director and others. "And I'm out $8000."
We promised to go to the police and file a report on Eric as having stolen the tapes. But halfway there, that idea got squeezed out as Vegas considered the people who would be arriving at the studio requiring party assistance.
"Fuck it," said Vegas, "it's Dominic's problem."
