Pirate Cinema

Chapter 9

Is that legal?/Cowardice/Shame

Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste to heaven to (it's the epigram from Wasabi Heat, the deservedly least-known of Scot's rom-coms).

I really dressed up for Letitia's office this time. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's cos I spent so much time in weird-looking rags that were carefully calculated to half-offend people from the straight world, like Letitia Clarke-Gifford: middle-class, ultra-respectable, law- abiding. If I was going to be spending my life eating garbage, squatting in pubs, begging, and making illegal films, I wanted to be sure that the people I met knew what an ultra- alternative, cutting-edge type I was.

But now that Parliament was apparently on my side, I felt like I should at least turn up looking like I'd made an effort to meet them half-way. Lucky for me, slightly out-of-date formal clothes are common as muck in the charity shops, since fashions change so often. I was able to score a very smart blazer-and-slacks outfit with a canary-yellow banker's shirt made out of cotton with a thread-count so high you could use it to filter out flu viruses. The previous owner had scorched the back with an iron, so I reckoned I'd just keep the blazer on.

When I met 26 at the Maida Vale tube, she looked past me twice before recognizing me. Then she clapped both hands over her mouth, crinkled her eyes, and made a very large show out of not laughing at me.

“Come on, it's not that bad,” I said. “She's an MP, after all!”

26's shoulders shook. She took several deep breaths into her palms, then straightened up and put them down at her sides. She gave me a kiss and squeezed my bum.

“Do I look that stupid?” I said.

She shook her head. “That's what's got me horrified! It suits you! In another life, you could have been a junior banker!”

“Now you're just being cruel,” I said. I felt self-conscious all the way to the MP's surgery.

At first, Letitia didn't even want to talk about the bill. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the films.

“I can't stop watching them. They're like popcorn! I download one, then there's another one I want to see, and another, and another -- before I know, hours have gone by. Did you make the one where that Scot Colford is driving a black cab around London, describing all the landmarks with out-of-context lines from his actual films?”

I nodded. “The video was dead easy. I just took a matte of the back of Scot's head and some videos shot out of the windows of the Google Streetview cars, and stuck 'em into a taxi interior I'd cut out. The tricky part was finding dialog that worked with all the neighborhoods. 'Course, I was able to cherry-pick the streets and landmarks I had good dialog for, so it was a bit of a cheat.”

“God, I loved that bit about 'made of ale!'”

That had been inspired. The first time I'd ridden out to see 26 on the tube, I'd listen to the announcement as we pulled into Maida Vale, but heard it as “The next station is made of ale.” Which got me off on a whole tangent about some lost Victorian art of ale-based construction out of thick brown bricks and so forth. Well, one night, I'd been watching Scot in Barman's Holiday, mixing up exotic drinks for thick Americans in a seaside bar in the Honduras, and one of them says, “What's this one made of?” waving a mug in his direction. Scot deadpans back, “That is made of ale.” When the two clicked together, comedy was born. From there, it was just a matter of picking out some other Scot lines -- “That shop. That is made of ale. That bike. That is made of ale. That boy. That is made of ale.” I was worried the joke would get less funny with repetition, and I think it did, somewhere around the 0:30 mark. But by 0:45, it had gone through stupid and out the other side, which is an entirely funnier kind of funny, and the first time I showed it live at a Pirate Cinema, they'd laughed like drains, howling. Even now, people liked to point at random things and say, “That is made of ale.” It made me feel brilliant.