Spells

Convenience Stories: Chapter 5

I received the first installment of the Magic of Hecate course and jumped right in. As part of my daily spellwork, I asked the goddess to make life interesting. I desperately wanted a new job. A girlfriend would be nice too! But at the very least, until that sorted itself out, I could stand to have a break in the monotony. 

Each day in the lottery game has a predictable rhythm. I’d punch in (might be 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. or 11:30 a.m., depending on my schedule) and look at the janky app on my work phone to see where I would start my shift. Life improved immensely when I found the setting in Google Maps that circumvents highways. After that, I always took the scenic route. Winding dirt roads in the middle of nowhere, Mail Pouch Tobacco signs painted on the sides of barns, Greek Revival buildings with pedimented gables, the occasional Colonial-era cabin, stopping to watch a couple goats tending the grass in front of a pole barn, taking a leak in a utility truck turn-around with an ear out for passing vehicles: these are the highlights of my day. The other major perks to the job is that you have a lot of time to think and listen to audiobooks, and very little contact with management.

While driving through Washington, southwest of Pittsburgh, I played Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco, about the making of Brian De Palma’s 1990 film Bonfire of the Vanities. As the author recounts the director’s decision to uproot the whole New York City-based production to shoot a scene in Washington, Pennsylvania for a million dollars, I’m thinking about how immeasurably my life would improve with only a fraction of that budget. I was getting paid the next day, so for the next 24 hours, I would be juggling three almost-maxed-out, high-interest-rate credit cards to buy lunch and enough coffee to get me through my shift.

The producers are against the new location: “It isn’t going to be easy to find a lot of black and Puerto Rican people in Washington, Pennsylvania,” one of them says. De Palma must realize that he’s being stonewalled: “Pittsburgh’s forty-five minutes away… They must have blacks in Pittsburgh.” At that point, the director goes out to eat and purchases a new Walkman and the soundtrack for Paul Schrader’s Mishima on cassette.

Man, I thought, as I tried to avoid a raccoon carcass in the middle of a dirt road, directors really have the life.