The Crack of Dawn

Volume #136

10/23/22

Newletter136

The Crack of Dawn

My movie-watching buddy, Rick, and I were attending a matinee screening of something at the L.A. County Museum.  As we were entering the theater I saw an attractive woman.  Rick and I found our seats and I kept glancing back to get another look at the pretty girl.  Finally, Rick asked me what I was looking at?  I said, “At an attractive woman.”  Rick harumphed.  I asked, “What?”  Rick stated definitively, “Don’t be absurd.  Attractive people don’t come here to see these movies.”  Knowing he was right, I stopped looking.

From 1980-1986 me, Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Scott Spiegel had offices in an old building in Ferndale, Michigan.  This is where Evil Dead (1983) was completed, and where Crimewave (1985), Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except (1985), and Evil Dead 2 (1987) were made.  Sam is a big baseball fan, as evidenced from his later film, For Love of the Game (1999).  So, Sam organized us, as well as a number of others, into a softball team he called the Ferndale Sluggers.  We played at our former junior high school and it was very informal and fun.

In 1986 we closed up shop in Ferndale and all of us moved to L.A.  Sam decided that the Ferndale Sluggers had to keep playing and I suggested Poinsettia Park in Hollywood.  Perhaps ten of us Detroiters showed up at Poinsettia Park with our balls, bats and mitts and found a bunch scraggily-looking guys on the field already playing.  We immediately termed them the Hollywood Stoners, and challenged them to a game.  This ragtag team: black, white, Latino, fat, skinny, all pounding beers and smoking weed, kicked our ass so bad it was humiliating.  We actually did this weekly for a couple of months.  Since I drove a big old Cadillac, everybody kept their equipment in my trunk, so I had to be there.  I any case, we never won a game.  I usually played outfield, but Sam, our fearless leader, had me playing third base, for which I am unqualified.  One of the Hollywood Stoners, a big fat bearded white guy, walloped the ball straight down the third base line.  I raised my mitt and my right hand and the ball hit me directly in the end of my right middle finger.  My fingernail completely blew off my finger and it became a geyser of blood.  It remains one of the most painful moments in my life.  That fingernail has never grown properly ever since.

Finally, the attendance of the Ferndale Sluggers was so poor that Sam stopped showing up.  I was having so much fun that I joined the Hollywood Stoners.  Unlike playing the Ferndale Sluggers, however, the Hollywood Stoners got their ass kicked by every other team.  I finally found that sufficiently humiliating to stop going.  But it was fun while it lasted.

I find this little encounter portentous, and variations of it have happened to me a number of times now.   I was talking to a young man of about 21 and I said that I don’t like cell phones (even though I have one).  He became defensive, as many others have too, stating both the importance and convenience of the cell phone, except that he didn’t have his cell phone with him so he was pointing at his empty hand, and said, “Why should I know anything when it’s all in here.”  I said, “Because if you don’t know anything, that’s what our society terms ‘stupid.’”  Anyway, it didn’t turn into a fight, and it was about to, but the image of him pointing at his empty hand in defense of ignorance seems appropriate to me.

Have a great day, and don’t take any wooden nickels.