Trashed!

Gem and I got trashed on New Year's Eve.  And I am not talking about spending far too much time at the working end of a Champagne bottle.

No, I'm talking about coming home, to the place where you live, love and work, and finding that it has been wrecked.  The kind of trashing conducted by thieves and vandals.

Have a look for yourself.

We'd been out to a showing of three James Bond reels (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger).  Midnight was approaching and we had more than a smooch in mind for ringing in the stroke of twelve (big question: how many strokes past twelve would I last?).  All that carefree thinking went out the window when we opened the door and were greeted by sheer chaos.  It was as though our home had been mistaken for Times Square.

"Kids," I said to Gem.  "Kids did this."

"Now will you call Mikie and Immy?" she asked, reaching for her phone.

Mikie and Immy are friends of ours who are also in the XzillaRation fold (you can see Mikie in the first Pound Cake trailer.  First scene, the bank executive I am shouting at).  They also happen to be top notch security and weapons experts.  For awhile now Gem has been trying to convince me to have them perform a security audit on our place.  "After all," she reasoned, "we keep all of our film work here."

My worry, though, was that if I got in the same room as the three of them, a security audit would have been the last thing on my mind.

I should have realized that Immy and Mikie are far more professional than that.

Minutes after my call they dropped their own celebrations and came over to survey the wreckage.  They quickly determined that it wasn't kids behind the mayhem.  "You're dealing with a professional crew," Mikie said as she paced off the distance between the wall and the toppled bookshelf.  A fierce looking pistol of some kind (I am a lover, not a fighter, and thus never enrolled in Lethal Weapons 101) dangled from her hip.

"Come on," I asked in disbelief.  "Pros?  Aren't you getting a little . . . "

"That shelf didn't just topple," Immy insisted, holstering a gleaming handgun.  "It was carefully put in that spot.  Now what we need to determine is, what did they take."

"The only thing missing is the bed!" was my instant reply.  "Otherwise, they just trashed . . . oh fuck!"

That's when my eye followed Mikie's gaze to the empty space once occupied by the bed.  "I was hiding a working print of Pound Cake underneath the bed!" I cried. 

"Paul!" Mikie said.   "Aren't you a little old to be hiding porn under your bed?"

"In his case, old habits die hard," joked Gem as she took my hand.

"What about a backup?" asked Immy.

"Yeah," I mumbled.  "Well, sort of.  All the raw, and I do mean raw, footage that went into the print.  The version missing was edited and ready to go for distributors to copy.  I'll just have to do that again."

So, not only did we have a major cleanup on our hands.  I was looking at a trip back to the proverbial drawing board in order to get another Pound Cake print ready for distribution.  The holidays were officially over.  2014 comes in with a new security detail, protocols for ensuring our own safety and that of our work.  In short, we're now under the protection of two armed-to-the-tits badass ballistic bitches, who, when they aren't popping their tops, give a whole new meaning to putting a cap in your ass.

And that's a good thing.

Because when I turned on the lights to that mess, the feeling I had . . . let's just say, I felt less violated the first time Gem did me with her strap-on.