I was sitting in my living room during the weekend before the shoot when the glitches started showing up.

The first one was a warning shot. My partner called up and asked how much video tape we needed. Let's call him "Pard'ner" (a la "Paint Your Wagon") since he's still in the process of deciding on his "nom de porn."

"We had a Looooooooooooooooooong talk about that two weeks ago," I said. "We'd decided on 8 hours."

"I don't remember that," he said.

There had been a long discussion of this "special" digital tape we had to special order, that was tough to get, etcetera. (I was once married to a photographer, and, as a result, I will ALWAYS feign ignorance of ANYTHING about cameras unless there's no way around it. Leave cameras to cameramen, that's what I say.) Now, two days before the shoot, we don't have this precious, impossibly rare,
hand-crafted-by-Nordic-Elves-in-magical-workshops STOCK??!?

Visions of canceling the shoot dance in my head. People will be pissed at me, friends won't ever talk to me again, but at least I won't have lost any of the investors' money. Jesus H. Christ in a handtruck!

After a little more calming discussion, I breathe deeply and decide that it doesn't matter if we ever had the conversation he doesn't remember. We HAVE to have tape stock, no matter what. He goes to the supply house. Several hours later he calls back. They have it. No problem.

Whew! Life returns to normal.

But not so fast. His friend who works for Fox in LA (and who has supposedly offered us accommodations) is out of the country! We have no place to stay.

Time for Plan B.

I call an old friend from The Business with two extra bedrooms, and grown kids. I beg. I cajole. I plead poverty. I shamelessly make up stories about the ill health of my faithful dog, Vernon. Finally, either through my persuasive powers or simply to shut me up, he says that he'll do *something.* The next afternoon, he calls back. "We don't have room," quoth he. "But I've booked you a motel room around the corner from us." "I've already paid for it," he says. "Room 24."

Wow! That's what you'd call a loyal friend.

Our mojo seems to be working. Glitch #2 over and done with. We have accommodations. And I have forestalled an ulcer for another day.

[BTW: I don't have a dog named Vernon. I don't even have a dog. I just have adrenaline and desperation, and, evidently, a smidgen of mojo.]

Pard'ner calls back again. "I don't know if we have a car to take down," he says. Inwardly, I groan. He's responsible for tape, for vehicle, and for beds. That's the hat trick. But the mechanical problems are real -- gremlins are doing their best to ruin my weekend.

Then, on Saturday, the 15th, my wife informs me that she has forgotten to go to the bank on Friday. Now, instead of taking off (I have a backup vehicle, just in case) at 4 am Monday morning, we can't leave town until AT LEAST 7:30 am, when the banks open. We won't hit LA until AT LEAST 2 am. I predict we'll get there at 3:30 am.

It's gonna be a VERY ROUGH Tuesday.

Oy.

Why are we shooting in LA? It DOES seem kind of loony.

Two reasons: first, the law in this state is vague regarding making porn films. We have decided (aided and abetted by our wives) that we don't feel like being the ACLU's poster children for 1998 by furthering the Attorney General's political career as his "test case" on the legality of shooting here.

Second: we can't trust that we'll have enough bodies for the shoot. Shooting in LA, we'll have an ample supply of beautiful people; they'll KNOW what they're there for, and we'll be following cut-and-dried California Law on Model Releases, AIDS tests, and proper ID. We need to minimize the random madnesses as far as we can. The other problem is that Pard'ner has NEVER been on a porn set. I'd hate to see us get all the way to the shoot and him freak out -- or the actors freak out. Or, all of the above.

Nope. LA is the only way to go. But the trip will be a bitch. In fact, I don't realize just WHAT a bitch it's going to be, thankfully. Ignorance CAN be bliss, after all: famous last words.

Saturday: wife informs me that we CAN'T take the Plan B vehicle. Plan A had better come through. It is a long day.

Sunday: Pard'ner calls. We HAVE a vehicle. He has dragged himself from a long night's shooting and worked all day on a Japanese mini-pickup they just bought. Service above and beyond, think I. He's running low on sleep and high on fumes. Still, any vehicle is better than none.

And now, I watch the Weather Channel intently. It looks like the first major winter storms are now heading for the Cascades and the Sierras from the Gulf of Alaska. This is not good. [Thank god for weather satellites!] Camera-Man in LA suggests that we hit I-5 and try to outrun it. Pard'ner suggests the same. In fact, everyone suggests this course. I am most definitely NOT feeling lucky.

I think that the safest bet is to run the backside of the range, on US 395 -- down through Klamath Falls and Alturas, through Reno, and via Mono Lake and the Owens Valley to LA. The rain-shield effect of the mountains should cut down on the rain/sleet/snow. I propose this route.

I am alone in this opinion.

I spend all day Sunday convincing everyone that this is the safer course. I agree that we'll bring a 2.5 gallon gas can as an emergency tank. Since he just bought it, Pard'ner doesn't know how many gallons the tank holds. Not a good thing to run out of gas a million miles from a station, and 395 is not notable for a having a glut of gas stations.

Monday morning the alarm goes off at 6:30. I go through my checklist: I'm taking as little as I can. Briefcase, Dayrunner, two small gym bags (one for clean clothes, one for dirty) and a bag of tapes. I turn on the Weather Channel. A major storm is blowing in. Wife heads for the bank at 7:30. If they don't have the cash on hand it's going to be a long day.

We luck out. Pard'ner arrives. Wife returns with the cash. We decide to get the hell over the pass and to the back side of the range as quick as we can. Growing up in the Rockies taught me a healthy respect for winter storms at the passes.

We stow our gear. The back of the pickup is covered with a Velcro-attached plastic tarp. This will be a nightmare through the whole day. We bag up our stuff in trash bags to waterproof them. And then comes the greatest joy of the trip:

How to describe this vehicle? It's a LOW-RIDER! Why this is, no one can say. Some happy fellow from LA, possibly, got up here and decided to sell it. We have a ground clearance of two inches.

Custom pin-striping, strange custom sunshade and tinting. The speakers are inset in the doors so that we CAN'T roll the windows more than 2/3rds of the way down. And my seat is exactly 1.5 cheeks wide, with upturned edges. My head barely misses the ceiling: I'm going to feel like a stork trying to hide in a glove-compartment the entire way. Whatever.

We gas up, and by the time we're ACTUALLY on the road, it's 10 a.m. Surprise! The pass is clear. We run into a little frosting of snow at the top, but we've missed the storm. At noon, we cross over and begin the long, flat run down the backside.

The seat is torture. The Velcro doesn't hold. We keep having to tamp it down. Finally, with screws and washers, we secure the rear to the tailgate. It doesn't trouble us anymore.

The radio doesn't work, and the cassette player eats the first tape put in it. So much for entertainment.

We eat dinner at a Denny's in Carson City. It's 4:30 in the afternoon, and we've had dry roads all day, but it's already SUNSET!

Outside of Carson City, the siren blares and lights flash. We're pulled over. Pard'ner gets out and is ordered back in. Now, we get to go through the fact that the title hasn't come back, the VIN numbers don't match, and the various paperwork is spotty. Finally, the Nevada Trooper lets us off with a warning. We didn't see a "55" sign, even though we've been anal retentively sticking to the speed limit all day.

These weren't the `droids he was looking for. Move along. Move along.

Two gringos in a Lowrider pickup going through Nevada is *no* way to maintain one's anonymity. It looks suspicious, AUTOMATICALLY. Great. Just great, thinks I.

I ask the Trooper if he knows what Dead Man's Pass conditions are (as long as he's there to ask). He hands me a laminated card with Nevada and California road condition numbers on it. It will prove a Godsend.

Over the passes. We get to Mono Lake with a waning gibbous moon rising over it. We walk down to the beach, take a quick look. Then, we're on our way.

Dead Man's Pass is the last hurdle, and we've only had a couple of drops of rain all day. We make the long drop into the Owens Valley. At 10:30 we pull into the Denny's in Bishop. We've seen maybe ten cars in the last three hours.

Very bad: the Lowrider bottoms out on the curb and holes the muffler. "La Bomba" will now haunt us for the rest of the trip.

We call home. We call ahead. I check with the motel, and with my friend. Pard'ner calls his wife. She tells us the news: five minutes after we left, I-5 was closed in Roseburg, Oregon by a major semi accident. Chemicals. You get the idea. Shortly after that, the pass at Ashland, Oregon was closed by snow.

We have taken the ONLY possible route. Mojo's still working, but my back is killing me, and my knees are sore from miles of bumping against the dashboard. From here on in, we'll be serenaded by a blow out muffler. We eat and take off. This is when we hear the happy sound. Shit. Nothing to do. Blap, blap, blap! for the next 200 miles.

Frosted and gleaming in the brilliant moonlight, Mt. Whitney looms above us, the tallest point in California. Named after the crooked geologist who certified the entire Sacramento Valley as "mountainous terrain" so that the Southern Pacific Railroad could get zillions of subsidies-per-mile from Congress back in the 1860s. There is a metaphor in the fact that the tallest mountain in California celebrates bald-faced larceny, but I'm just too tired and sore from the ride to figure out what it is.

We ride through the empty stillness of the Owens Valley. There's actually a little water in the drained lake-bed. Go rent "Chinatown" if you need to know WHY the once-fertile valley is now an arid and desolate desert. We're at the city limits of LA when we get to Lone Pine (near the infamous Nisei Internment Camp from World War II). LA Water District trucks are parked in the Yard by the highway. LA is still 200 miles away. From here on in, we follow the Aquaduct.

In Mojave, Pard'ner wants to pick up a couple of beers before liquor sales end at 2 am. As we're pulling into the last gas-station, we're being followed by a Kern County Sheriff. The Sheriff pulls around us and into the gas station. "For the love of Christ DO NOT pull in!" I screech to a very surprised Pard'ner. I stammer out something to the effect that County Mounties out in the High Desert LOVE to roust people, and that I may be paranoid, but PLEASE trust me on this one.

He doesn't, but then, I probably wouldn't either.

Understandably, he's not convinced, and, by the time we hit Lancaster, it's after 2 am. No beer. My fault. An icy silence fills our bleating La Bomba. Shit. I've promised an endless oasis of gas stations in Lancaster and Palmdale. Turns out I'm full of it. Everything we see is closed.

If, at this moment, I took an Ex-Lax, I'd probably melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Turns out that we've got a 10-gallon tank. We just about run out of gas out of Palmdale. We see a Texaco station in Lancaster, by Edwards AFB, but there is no exit to it that we can see. At 2:55 am, we gas up at a Chevron. Now it's into LA. The station attendant gives our deafening Lowrider the Hairy Eyeball. Who can blame him?

Little traffic (the last time we'll see clear freeways) and easy enough to get to our North Hollywood motel. Still, we're VERY worried about being two gringos carrying a lot of cash in a Lowrider with a blown out muffler.

[The whole trip, I cannot shake this feeling that we're two Mormon farmers, come to the big city with our family's savings, to buy that newfangled John Deere tractor so's we can up our soybean production. We shall not be seduced by the wicked ways of them big city folk. No siree. Yee-haw.]

Beyond its appearance, the little Japanese Bomb has performed admirably. No oil loss; excellent gas mileage; uncomplaining. It just sounds like a bomb and rides like an Iron Maiden.

We pull off the Hollywood Freeway at the Magnolia exit. Amelia Earhart's statue is still there in the park, holding her propeller. Some things stay the same in LA, after all.

Somehow we make it to the motel without being rousted by the LAPD (which I've experienced more than once in this neighborhood: two gringos in a Lowrider with lots of cash? Nahhhh. Nothing suspicious about THAT.)

It is 3:32 am. I've predicted our ETA to within two minutes -- a good omen, methinks. Me HOPES. I am a block from Cahuenga and Magnolia in North Hollywood, which was the first place I landed when I got to Hollywood in 1976. They've painted my old duplex: forest green and canary yellow. Magnolia is "Melrosizing": half stucco ghetto, half yuppie high rises. And then ....

Welcome to the Cucaracha Arms: after giving my $2 key deposit to a VERY weary-looking Taiwanese motel owner (named "Emi Lee"), we discover that the motel is cockroach-infested, and very much the worse for wear. What the hell, we're not there for fun. We just need to sleep.

Pard'ner finds an empty cocaine bag the size of a postage stamp under his mattress. The toilet takes forever to fill up, and there is only the tail-end of a roll on the dowel. The linoleum follows no discernible pattern, just cut, piece by piece by someone who was trying this for the first time in his life, evidently. Whoever grouted the bathtub must had been in the middle of an epileptic seizure that day. Grout is everywhere BUT the tile: on the tub, the sink, the floor. There is a piece of brown gum (we HOPE it's gum) on the floor that may date back to the Pleistocene. It doesn't come up, either way: gum or not. The cockroaches are massed in an invading horde behind the toilet.

I decide not to worry Pard'ner with this news.

A model neighborhood. We collapse into a fitful slumber. It's been an ass-grinder of a day.

Hart Williams wrote and worked in the "Business" from 1977 to 1987. He wrote for, among others, HUSTLER, ADAM, FILM WORLD REPORTS, VIDEO X, OUI, VELVET and many others. His film credits include "Caught From Behind III." His video credits include "The Other Side of Lianna," which was, in 1985, the runner-up to "New Wave Hookers" for XRCO's "Video of the Year." After ten years "away" from the business, Williams suddenly found himself doing what he'd sworn he'd never do again: writing, producing and directing an XXX video.