Remember When #featured #AllStars

Chapter 11

THE GRIFTERS

As it turned out, Trip's scheme entailed the brilliant idea to film our own version of Romeo and Juliet, set in Norman, New Jersey, circa 1990.

We spent the rest of that first afternoon deciding on how we were going to answer some of those questions in Mason's booklet and outlining our filming schedule.

The plan required me to "borrow" a video camera from work, which I did without guilt. It's not like I was going to keep the thing, but at the cost of renting it for the next couple months, I may as well have bought one of my own. At the pathetic minimum hourly wage Totally Videos was paying me, that thought wasn't even a possibility. Because they paid me such a lousy salary, I decided to justify my liberation of said camera as an early holiday bonus. It just happened to be three months ahead of the holiday, is all.

The next day, we found out that Trip had gotten the job at Totally Videos and was scheduled to start on Monday!

Our thoughts on that news were that it was best to keep our association under wraps in order to remain employed. But Martin, sleuthing genius that he was, became hip to the fact that we were friends on that very first day. I suppose we weren't necessarily as stealth about our relationship as we had hoped to be.

Trip had become easily bored with register duty, a detail compounded by the fact that the store was having a slow day. He decided to make better use of his time by hiding behind the display racks of the drama section and flinging Skittles at me.

I tried to ignore him until the candies started coming by the handful, causing me to drop the pile of tapes I'd been returning to their proper spots on the shelves.

I grabbed the empty box of Terms of Endearment off the shelf and chucked it at him, just narrowly grazing his head as he ducked out of the way, knocking over a bin of rolled movie posters.

That prompted him to hurl the entire, theatre-sized bag of Skittles in retaliation, sending a rainbow of tiny projectiles pinging off the shelves and scattering across the floor.

Martin had been in his office during our little war, but he must have been watching us on the security cameras, because he chose that moment to come storming out the door. Upon seeing the two of us laughing our asses off amidst a pile of videos, posters and candy, we guessed the jig was up. He commanded us in a booming voice to, "Clean up this mess before any customers come in and see it!"

At first, I thought that Martin could have refrained from jumping down our throats. I mean, obviously we were planning on cleaning up our mess, and we sure didn't need some dorky kid just out of high school chastising us like he thought he was actually some sort of authority figure. I thought that maybe if he slathered on some Oxy every once in a while and got himself a decent haircut, he could find himself a girlfriend and lighten up a little.

But then suddenly, I kind of felt bad for him. The poor guy was only trying to do his job while having to deal with us two idiots all day.

Trip must have been thinking the same thing, because neither one of us busted his balls and just went about the chore of picking Skittles off the carpet.

But even scouring about the floor on our hands and knees was actually pretty fun. Trip made working there bearable for the first time, even if from then on, we toned it down a bit for Martin's sake. Having him there proved to make work less of a trial and more of an adventure.

Who am I kidding? If I'm going to be honest, I'll admit that Trip proved to make my life less of a trial and more of an adventure!

Week Two of our film collaboration had us trying out the pilfered camera for the first time. It took us a little longer than expected to learn how to use the clunky thing, a task that probably would have been made much easier had I thought to grab the accompanying User Guide during my heist. But after affixing the camera to my father's tripod (also "borrowed"), we managed to get off some very educational test shots of Trip doing cannonballs in my pool. It was at that point that I realized Mason wasn't going to be grading me on my ability to watch Trip Wilmington strut around my backyard in his swimming trunks. I wouldn't have traded that sight for a 4.0 if my life depended on it, but I knew we'd eventually be expected to do some actual work.

Week Three, we decided we were going to need to learn how to edit our film (that we had yet to start shooting). It was my brainchild to "borrow" Bruce's VCR and rig it up to mine. With some advice from Roger Freeland at the AV club, we (legitimately) borrowed some of his cable wires and spent the better part of our afternoon getting the primitive editing station set up and running. We'd practiced splicing our films by playing the raw footage in one VCR while recording selected scenes in the other. But after about an hour of this, Bruce came home from football practice and confiscated his VCR from Trip and me, leaving us back at square one.

Before I could risk the implications of "borrowing" another tape player from my father's room or the den, Trip came up with a way to hook the camera directly into my VCR. That system turned out to be way better than our original one, so we thanked Bruce for his inadvertent help by spending the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen, baking him some chocolate chip cookies.

The following Thursday was my birthday.

*** Did you check out my web page yet? Come see what I'm working on next.  www.ttorrest.com

There are also links for the complete Remember When trilogy if you just can't wait to find out what happens to Trip and Layla! ***