Bloody Good Film

April 8th, 2005 Posted in 2005

When I woke up yesterday morning I decided not to go to work. I had a few sick days saved up anyway (I’ve been unlucky enough so far this year to unfailingly come down with something on a weekend, ensuring I miss no work). And besides, it was a fucking beautiful day today. It was my first summer in LA. I wanted to go out and explore a little.

One hasty call to my boss and another two hours sleep-in time later, I went for a nice long walk, soaking up the sun and checking out the beaches. After a few hours I found myself in front of a mall movie theater and, deciding it was “Jay Day” and giving into the impulse, stepped inside for an afternoon showing of Sin City.

I walk onto the escalator to the second floor, where the Cineplex is located. I should mention I’m wearing a pair of $10 sandals that are garbage; they always trip me up, and bend in half when I’m walking. As I’m climbing the escalator, in fact, this is exactly what they do, and I manage to give my big toe a pretty serious whack off the metal escalator stair.

“Mother shit fuck,” were my exact words.

“Watch your manners,” said a disapproving mother behind me on the escalator, kids in tow.

“Mother shit fuck PLEASE,” I correct myself, hobbling over to the ATM-style ticket computer.

As I’m cycling through the choices on the screen, I glance down and notice the tip of my sandal is a glistening reddish-purple—which is odd, because normally my sandals are a rather flat blue.

“Hmmm,” I think. “Did I bust my toe open?” I make a mental note to find a bathroom before I find a set, so I can make an impromptu toilet paper swab.

My screen choices made, I reach behind me to grab my wallet, look down, and notice that the reddish tint of my sandal is no longer a reddish tint. My entire sandal is filled with blood. It’s actually dripping off the sides and pooling on the tile around my foot. I’m sure it was deceptive, but it looked like someone had poured a cup of plasma into my sandal. I was beginning to realize both that I might have dinged my toe up a little worse than thought. Secondary thought: I may have a problem on my hands.

I quickly finish up my transaction, grab my ticket, and head for the
theater. My new plan is to make a beeline for the napkins by the concession stand, wad a handful into the sandal, and hopefully plug up the flood in time to make it to a bathroom to perform more lasting bandage-work. I take one step and am confronted with an entirely new set of problems, as a long snake of blood shoots out of the sandal and lands like a water balloon in a messy two foot streak ahead of me. I look around, but nobody seems to notice.

I take another tentative step, this time slower and more deliberate, and manage to reduce the outpour to a dozen or so drops. Congratulating myself on a successful experiment, I proceed to walk into the theater in a kind of slow-motion penguin shuffle, dripping gore behind me.

I walk to the ticket ripper with caution. I’m trying both to contain the contents of my sandal and to try and walk like a normal person, so as to not arouse suspicion. The last thing I need at this point is any kind of impediment to the napkin holder just beyond the entrance. I hand the guy the ticket, and try not to look down at my mangled foot. To my profound defeat, the ticket ripper hands my ticket back to me.

“This isn’t a ticket,” he says.

“What?” I say, confused. “Of course it’s a ticket. I just bought it from your machine.”

“This is not. A ticket,” he repeats. As we argue I idly guess at how much blood I’ve lost in the thirty seconds I’ve been standing here. Would I get in faster if I directed his attention to the damp puddle of gore congealing into the theater carpet? Or would that hold things up worse?

“This is just the receipt,” he explains, holding up what I thought was my ticket. “Your ticket’s probably still back at the ATM machine.”

“Look, I’ve been arguing with your for a minute here,” I say, not adding, “while I bleed out in front of you.” I make the case that my ticket has most likely been swiped by someone else now; that the very purpose of a receipt is that it proves a purchase; and that for all intents and purposes he is now holding in his hand an irrefutable paper trail of my ticket purchase.

“That’s true,” he agrees. I nod happily and make a move to walk past him. He stops me. “But it isn’t a ticket,” he adds.

Grumbling, I turn myself around and carefully penguin-walk back out to the wall of ticket ATMs, propelling a few fresh streams of rancor out of my sandal as I turn.

I follow my trail of blood back to its origin. (This makes an admittedly faster chore out of identifying which ticket ATM I’d used among the wall of ticket ATMs.) The trail leads me to an ATM, and in the return slot I find my ticket. It hasn’t been stolen in the ten minutes it took me to drag my bloody stump of a foor into and out of the theater. I grab it and walk back in.

At this point, the wound is severe enough that no careful penguin-walks in the world are going to stop my bodily contents from gushing out all over the place, so I throw discretion to the wind and opt for speed. Once again I hand the ticket ripper my ticket. I look down at my shredded toe. He follows my eyes, and we both arrest gazes on my foot, blood soaked into the cuff of my pants, a deepening black pool around the sandal, my toe a Don Martin caricature of swollen infirmity.

He nods and rips the ticket. “First door on your left,” he says and lets me hobble past. I grab some napkins from the concession stand and wad them into the sandal, which gives me enough absorbancy to limp to the bathroom. I perform surgery in a stall, leaving it looking like a murder scene.

The movie was actually really good.

Anyone want to buy a pair of sandals?