Episode Report Card Gustave: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Chip of Fools
By Gustave | Season 2 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.21.2003
's desk, and they talk privately about their attempts to track down Kiefer using a variety of Whatever Technological methods. From behind the pierced aluminum wall divider, Bi-Carrie-ous can hear their conversation.Kiefer is in the henchmen's car. He pulls up to the parking lot where he was supposed to meet Cate and PMAA. But they are nowhere to be found. Oh, wait, there's PMAA. In that phone booth. What a "Dark City"! I know "A Few Good Men" who'd be really pissed off to find out that anti-Arab violence of this nature was happening in L.A. "Where's Cate?" asks Kiefer. With literally his last breath, PMAA explains that she's at her house exchanging money for the chip. "I'm not going to make it," he gasps. "Hang on," gasps Kiefer, hoping his velvety voice will revive PMAA. He dies anyway. Everybody drink! "PMAA, I'm sorry!" says Kiefer. Yeah, he's sorry they never got to make out! He gets back into his car and speeds off.
Hancock Park. Cate and the rednecks arrive at Cate's house. I'm confused, because this looks nothing like Chez Crew. It has one of those red laminate doors that you always see in front of ski condos or off-campus student housing. Hey! Kiefer made a movie for HBO last year called Behind The Red Door! I'm sensing another drinking game in the works. At first I thought that Cate had led them to a fake house as part of a brilliant scheme to fuck with them, but then it was pointed out on the forums that Cate -- 29-year-old graduate of Stanford that she is -- probably has her own place and this is it. Even though it is mighty odd, when you think about it, that up until now, everyone just assumed she still lives with her father and never gave it a second thought. "You live here? By yourself?" says one of the rednecks expositorily. Cate affirms this, and after the men threaten her some more, a key is produced from under the mat and everyone files into Cate's foyer. For some reason I'm totally expecting her to ask everyone to remove their shoes and not scuff the floors. An alarm goes off. The rednecks threaten her some more. Cate shuts it off. Her code? "1234." Whatever. "Show us where the money's at," says Redneck #1. Oh, you just know this guy's a murderous redneck. He just ended a sentence with a preposition and everything.
Cate's long ordeal with the sandblasters is starting to remind me of the first, last, and only time I was ever mugged in NYC. Now, before you all start getting too concerned, let me just state at the beginning that I wasn't injured and the police caught the guys. As muggings go, it wasn't so bad. However, it was the longest mugging ever. Seriously. This mugging took so long, my assailants were actually charged with kidnapping. What happened was, I had just graduated from college, and I was still doing crazy things like going out drinking late in the East Village on a Tuesday night even though I had a nine-to-five job waiting for me the next day. So I'm walking home to my apartment, and there are these drunk guys behind me who obviously just came from the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy. They grabbed me, hit me a few times, and told me they had a gun. I believed them. They grabbed my wallet out of my pocket and -- well, I didn't have any cash. I did, however, have my ATM card, so they asked me what my code was. I gave them my actual PIN, and they held onto me just in case I wasn't being honest. Well, this was the early nineties, and at that point, downtown Manhattan had a serious shortage of cash machines. Cash machines that worked were even scarcer. So we're walking down Broadway looking for a cash machine, and there are no working cash machines. We cross Houston. We're totally in SoHo. Yuppies are coming out of the bars, and for all they know we're a bunch of dudes walking around looking for a party. I say I know of a cash machine at Spring and Hudson. We make a right on Spring Street and head for Hudson. At this point, according to the police, we have created a shitload of paperwork for the NYPD because we have traveled through four different precincts and each one of them has to be notified and produce a report. Meanwhile, one of them is holding onto me while the other two are running ahead and trying my card in various cash machines…which don't work. The guy who is my "escort" asks me what I'm doing after "this." Maybe we could go somewhere and "hang out." "You're kinda hot. Are you into boys?" Wow, I feel so validated that one of the guys who is mugging me thinks I'm cute! I'll have to cherish this memory the next time I have an "ugly" day. Oh, and maybe if it works out, we'll have the funniest "how we met" story!
So eventually my adrenaline starts to calm down and it occurs to me that these boys don't actually have a gun. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Because every five seconds, one of them would get into my face and say, "Remember! We have a gun!" But they were probably going to beat the shit out of me once we found a working cash machine, since my checking account was virtually empty. It was time to bail. Now, this is where it gets crazy, because I am not the sort of person who does stuff like this. A cab pulls up to the curb beside us, and I scream, "Help me!" and run for the cab. I grab the door, and just as I do, the cab speeds up just as I am standing on the sidecar like Indiana Jones. The cab goes six blocks with me holding onto the side. He even tries to swerve left and right to throw me off the car. Finally he stops. I hop off, go to a Korean deli, and ask them to call the police. The police arrive and start to arrest me because they assume that I'm holding up the Korean deli. Finally the police figure everything out, and they ask me to get into the car with them and drive around to see if they can find the guys. The guys are standing in front of the very cash machine I told them about. They had forgotten my PIN and were sitting on the curb trying to remember it. The officers got out of the car, whipped out their guns, and told the boys to "spread 'em." They were really feverish about it too. "FACE THE WALL MOTHERFUCKERS!!!" I felt like Eva Peron. Oh, and the coolest part was that I got to file an "attempted rape" charge against the guy who was holding onto me. He was never convicted, but I'm sure he had some explaining to do to his buddies later on. And I'm sure that whatever he wanted from me, he eventually got from his cellmate at Rikers Island.