Monday, April 25, 2005

the legend in orlando As you can see, the Orlando project went down this weekend.  Although the mission was ultimately accomplished, there were definitely a few snags along the way. First of all,  I got kind of spooked when I pulled into the Econo Lodge (to which the sign is adjacent), and saw hotel employees hauling out junk and throwing it into a dumpster directly below the sign.  One of the hotel dudes looked like he might actually have some authority, and might question what we were doing climbing on their defunct sign. But after sitting for a minute in the truck in nervous silence, Jersey Girl clapped her hands and said, "okay boys, we drove all this way.  Let's hop to it!" And with that we got started.   (Goatbelt Matt was my only helper by the way.  All of my other "enthusiastic volunteers" just kind of disappeared as the project deadline approached.  Even Rachel's college friend, who lives in Orlando and works for the billboard ad agency, stood us up.  Apparently her husband said that it doesn't look good for a school teacher in a small town if his wife gets arrested helping a guerilla billboard artist.) Anyway, our first big curveball came when we drove back into the field adjacent the econo lodge.  My truck sank right into the sugar sand and got instantly stuck.  Me and Matt tried rocking it back and forth and putting boards underneath the tires, but my dodge just sank deeper and deeper.  I really wanted to get the truck unstuck before I got up on the sign (in case we had to make a quick getaway), but with forty minutes already gone by, and a storm front approaching, I decided to just forget about and get on with the job. 7:21:25 PM    comment [] I bought a few sets of "worker dude" safety gear at Home Depot, so we would look like legitimate sign guys.  Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to make the head strap work for our cool yellow hard hats, so I had to ascend the sign with just a day-glo nylon vest. I used my tree climbing spikes to go up the sign poles.  I found out the hard way that my spikes were kind of dull, and that old weather beaten poles don't take spikes as good as trees.  When I was about fifteen feet up, my spikes slipped out and I fell to the ground, and I got my first set of jumbo splinters. 4:54:38 PM    comment [] I made it up the pole on my second try. But as I said before, there was a cold front  coming in from the west and the winds really started to pick up.  The gusting winds made pulling the sign panels up a real challenge.  Once they were at the level of the (rickety) catwalk, I had to pull them up over the edge.  Then when I had them up on the catwalk I had to scurry up to the top of the sign and pull them the rest of the way before drilling them into place. I had put L-brackets on the tops of the panels so they would support themselves while I did the the drilling.  But the sign structure itself wasn't level, so I got some small gaps and overlaps between the panels.  (By the time I could see the gaps at the bottom, I already had already sunk in about 30 screws from the top down, and repositioning them was nearly impossible).  Also, its hard to convey how utterly exhausted I became, even after just the first panel.  My energy just drained out of my body after the first hour, and I became kind of punch drunk, like Rocky in one of his fifteen round fight scenes, and I was just sort of stumbling around, clumsily drilling screws in.  For some reason, I decided not to wear gloves and my hands just got loaded up with splinters.  (The big ones in my fingers got so inflamed and pussed up that they just sort of popped out the next day from all the fluid pressure). Then at one point my drill slipped and I drilled right into the meat of my pointer finger.  Anyone going by on I-4 with their windows down probably heard me scream. 4:52:06 PM    comment [] Of course, when I really started to slow down, and was wondering whether I could actually finish, it began pouring down rain. Jersey Girl sheltered herself in my stranded truck, but Goatbelt Matt remained dutifully down below in his safety gear,  hooking each new sign panel to my rope and helping me hoist it up.  He didn't complain once the whole time, or voice any doubts.  I figured he might put up with being relatively miserable, if he could see that I was about 10 times more miserable.  But, honestly, I was having a great time in a masochistic/megalomaniac kind of way. About five panels into the project my drill ran out of juice, even though its battery was on the charger all night.  Thankfully, I asked Matt to bring his DeWalt, and he sent it up on the rope to finish the job.  I also used up a full box of screws (about 200) before I was done, and had to break into a second one. Apparently, the black paint I used for the background color is just the shittiest paint in the world.  It scratched right off as the panels rubbed against the palm trees and catwalk going up.  I rubbed my finger against one panel to test the paint and it rubbed away like pudding skin. But hopefully it will stay put for a while under the elements. 4:48:15 PM    comment [] I was telling people (that were considering helping) that I thought I could get the job done in thirty or forty minutes.  But it took about five and a half hours in all. Rachel had champagne waiting for us when I got down.  We popped the bottle there in the field and killed it in about four minutes.  When it started to rain again we all got inside of my stranded truck and had a little party listening to my XM radio. Then we got in Matt's truck, got some burgers and more beer and had a little tail gate party until the tow truck arrived. There was only one towing company that answered their phone in all of Orlando, and they wanted $150 to wench us out of the sand pit.  After a few more futile attempts to push or pull myself out, I decided to throw in the towel and call the professionals. But when the wrecker showed up about forty-five minutes later, he immediately sank into the sand himself.  The only way the the tow truck guy could save himself was by using his pnuematic, tow-arm thing on the back of his truck as a kind of clam foot.  He lowered the arm all the way to the ground until it pushed the truck up out of its ruts.  Then, by extending the arm horizontally he was able to push the truck forward.  By doing this repeatedly he was able to walk himself out, two feet at a time. After that little fiasco, the tow truck driver found a harder patch of ground that got him within wench-length of my dodge.  After he got his cable hooked onto my truck, he pulled us straight backwards though the sand at about .02 miles an hour.  Me and Rachel were sitting in the front seat as we creeped along backwards, flattenig wild shrubs and saplings as we went. 4:44:57 PM    comment [] It felt awesome to be unstuck and done with the sign. That night we stayed and partied with (Orlando artist)Andrew Spears and his perennial roommate, Chuck. Andrew was spinning at a club called Knock-knock downtown, so we chilled there with him for a while.  Orlando has a huge club scene, and the streets are absolutely filled with people partying, but Rachel and I couldn't help but notice that an unusually large percentage of them were strange, grubbily dressed dwarves. Anyway, the best part of the night is when we came back to Andrew and Chucks place, after the clubs closed, and me and Rachel danced in their kitchen while Andrew continued the tunes from his computer. We got up around 11am the next day, and I started pounding Heinekens right away.  I drank all day, and when we got back to St. Pete, I met up with John Vitale, Bask, and other local scensters, and drank some more. 4:39:55 PM    comment []

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