The Headless Bikeman
or: something about how "You can never have Too Much Grips"
My gym is closed for renovations, so hopefully the new sauna/changing room will give us all sorts of interesting content once it’s done in a few weeks. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with some of the “shenanigans” I’ve seen elsewhere around town.
A couple of weeks ago, they (i.e., some big studio) were filming a TV show a few blocks from my office. It’s in kind of a residential area, so it’s tough not to notice when a fleet of vans and trucks and trailers move in carrying A/V equipment, props, apparatus for large-scale catering, portable generators, and all the other far less glamorous things these large productions need, most of which we film/tv-watchers take for granted/have no knowledge of.
A dozen or so of these trucks and vans lined the hill I walk down on my commute, with a few security guards stationed every 50 yards or so, and lots of harried-looking people with clipboards and walkie-talkies scurrying around; there’s one big house halfway down which is where the crew were shooting. As for the actual road itself, though, there was still just about room for two cars to pass each other between the rows of trucks (spoiler: this fact becomes relevant).
As I was walking home (uphill) I saw a couple of said trucks had pieces of A4 paper taped to the back, and had a few words printed in large comic-sans font:
‘Too Much’
Grips
What kind of butchery of the English language was this?
If “grip” was being used as an adjective, the error was a little too obvious to miss, unless it was a foreign production - maybe this was a google translate fuck-up.
Or perhaps “grips” was a noun: i.e. Joe is a grip; he and I are thus “grips”…? I was pretty sure I’d seen the heading “Grips” before in film credits; maybe this was its own distinct role. As far as job specifics, though, I had no idea. (Perhaps it had something to do with folks who helped out with “gripping” the camera equipment…?)
Whatever the case, the sentence still didn’t make sense; there remained the fact that “grips” was bookended by a pair of apostrophes. I concluded, then, based on the data I had, that the top line was a separate clause, rather than any sort of critique/modifier of the noun below. What was this “Too Much” malarkey?
I pulled out my phone to find out, googling something like “Too Much movie film tv series in production london.” Right as I did so I heard a thunderous, metallic bang. It sounded like a deer colliding with the front of an all-wheel drive pickup truck (or at least what I’d imagine that sounds like). It was the kind of flesh-on-metal sound that makes it clear to those in earshot that the “flesh” - and the flesh’s owner, probably - did not come out on top in this particular meeting.
I turned around to see what had happened. The eminently-very-stoppable force in question was not a deer but a cyclist, it turned out. He was sprawled out on the concrete, directly behind the truck I’d just walked past and whose sign I was now researching. A few workers (grips, I’d assume?) were around, but nobody moved or said anything for a few seconds, as we were all in shock or still trying to piece together what’d happened. It (the truck) had been parked facing downhill, and still had its metal loading ramp sticking off the back, fully erect, protruding several feet at roughly neck height; its slain foe was prone, directed away from me, downhill, so I couldn’t see his head. It dawned on me what had happened: the poor fellow had been guillotined, his head struck clean from his body. No helmet in the world was going to prevent that one. We were talking about a “hot knife through butter” scenario. The only chance he could have withstood such a blow was if he was actually an honorary/aspiring member of one of those African tribes who wore metal neck rings. White guilt does make people do some crazy things (such as relish getting mugged, which is something I explore in my book).
…but the odds of him being saved by neck-elongation rings seemed slim.
I looked down the hill, to try and see the disembodied head rolling and tumbling down the concrete. Someone really should go collect it for his widow’s sake. But I couldn’t see it; maybe it’d gotten wedged under the tire of a car/truck further down the hill.
Just my luck. I’d been minding my own business had just wanted to make it home without any trouble, but had gone and gotten myself mixed up in what was surely going to turn into a hefty civil lawsuit from the bereaved family - if not some sort of criminal investigation (gross negligence, 2nd degree manslaughter, etc.) Why me!?
How was I going to get out of being embroiled in months of trial proceedings? Called up as a witness, cross-examined, having my character and credibility brought into question by the film studio’s high-powered legal team.
I knew I needed to flee the scene stat, before anyone else realized what’d happened.
TBC…
