HUGE CIGARETTE OUTLET

Say what you want. North Carolina is pretty. I’m in Charlotte. An actual city. They have football, basketball and hockey.
I’m staying in this upscale hotel/shopping plaza with its own movie theater. After a bowl of noodles that could smother a little league team, I checked out a scary movie, The Fog. Part hilarious/part real-bad but mostly just bad, it has some of the low-fi-est special effects I’ve ever seen. Lots of victims getting thrown through windows. John Carpenter must think broken glass is terrifying. It’s what you do in case of emergency.
I saw it by myself. There was one couple also there. We all laughed. We laughed at the foot-long fish hooks that hung in the most dangerous places imaginable. We laughed at the limpest shower scene in the history of horror. We laughed at every one of the seven times someone asked “What the hell was that?” That’s a total of nine laughs by three people. Twenty-seven laughters.
The fog itself killed off relatives of a group of men who ripped off some lepers in 1871. Sometimes though, the leper-breath rolled in and killed people who had nothing to do with the scandal. This is never explained. Still, just know if you’re drinking beer on a boat while wearing a bikini and dancing for dudes holding a mini-dv, you’re as good as dead.
Afterwards I tried desperately to have “uh beer” before bedtime. Finding your way around Charlotte is tasking. None of the roads stay the same name for longer than one block. After two full hours, I finally found this Irish pub called Ri-Ra or something. The bartender was super cool, he even let me order a beer. We watched Pujols smack that monster homerun in the ninth inning. Pujols. Pu. Jols.
This little, tiny pot-bellied Mexican guy sat next to me. White paint brush strokes on the right side of his face. One tooth missing. He kept laughing at something on his cellphone then looking around to see if anyone concurred. I know Spanish un poco pollo, so I said, “Whaddya playing, Tetris?”
I’m gonna keep this short. Turns out he was sex chatting on “Chh-otmail” and wanted my number. After I told him I was here to be in a movie, he related that his cousin, the bartender, was “like this” (hands about a foot apart) and made porn movies. Then he bought me a beer. I excused myself, and only myself, but he followed me to the bathroom. I stayed back and hit the trivia machine. By the time I had returned he and his cousin were Audi. Yessiree, an actual city. They have football, hockey and a gay Mexican sex trade.
Right now, I’m in sunburnt make-up getting ready to do a comedy scene with Matt Besser from UCB. We are at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. United we stand.
We did the scene. Besser was hilarious. Really jamming. I played a straight man for the most part, but McKay was trying to get me to say some ridiculous stuff, feeding some silly lines. No point in me trying to top that guy.