by
Get in the car, Helen

1. The Plot: 1980′s Tom Cruise plays an ambitious young douchebag who moves to New York City, determined to get rich, conquer the world, and deep throat the American Dream. His plan is quickly derailed when he realizes that he’s a talentless muttonhead lacking even the most basic marketable skills necessary to pilot a mentally disabled child’s bathtub submarine, ergo: He very quickly gets laughed off of Wall Street. So how’s a handsome self-help book reading go-getter with the imagination of Mitt Romney’s pet turtle supposed to topple the big city and achieve his dreams of playing Reach-Around-The-Pony at all the rich and famous parties? Enter Doug Coughlin, a middle-aged mixologist who helps Tom Cruise unleash his inner pint glass twirling skills he didn’t even know that he possessed. Together, they become the most famous bartending duo to ever walk the Earth. Women want to sleep with them. Men want to be the booze that the women who are sleeping with them are drinking. On the surface, it looks like heaven. The world is theirs to own. But then Gina Gershon shows up. And ego’s collide like two Titanics against the fatal iceberg of her vagina. And we learn that in the world of Cocktail, nothing is sober or permanent. This! Is! Not! Sparta! Ergo: even the gods of serving alcohol must fall. . . .

2. In the 80′s they loved to make films in which pretty boy movie stars were cast as super-ordinary characters working ordinary everyday jobs in which they’re goof-ily treated like Rock Stars. Cocktail gives us the Rockstar Bartender, a mythological deity that, like Newt Gingrich’s modesty, does not exist in nature. Patrick Swayze and Roadhouse gave us the Rockstar Bouncer. Footloose gave us the Rockstar Kid-Who-Dances-In-Barns. Etc, etc. The list goes on.

3. Instead of remaking these 80′s classics, Hollywood should just start re-using the ordinary-occupation-as-
rockstar formula. Robert Patterson as a high energy Phlebotomist. He doesn’t just draw your blood, he juggles the vials and makes witty chit-chat while he’s doing it. Trashily dressed women with minor medical ailments form a tight circle around his blood-taking chair whenever he’s on duty. And when his shifts over, they all take turns wanting to fuck him, having no idea that behind the flashy blood work lives a tortured soul, all fucked up because the Uncle who raised him bled to death in front of him when Pattinson was a small child or something like that.

4. And you’ve got to throw a disgruntled mentor in there too. Kevin Costner as the suicidally hysterical fuck up who taught Pattinson everything he knows about flamboyantly drawing blood. Make ‘em both fall for the same girl and stuff like that. Box office gold. Or whatever. You get the point.

5. Coughlin’s Law – Shoot first, and get the bullet hole drunk and ask questions post-fucking it later.

6. You really have to watch Cocktail as if it were a strangely mangled crayon drawing that a small child with irritable bowel syndrome has just handed you before having their Ritalin addicted mother drag them away. Take into consideration that it’s a miracle they managed to scribble anything on paper at all resembling a blue sky floating behind a gray sun before shitting themselves dizzy. Sure the cows look like green hippos with bloated utters and the lake has been crayoned the color of pure urine, but the kid was distracted during the artistic process. He’s got irritable bowel syndrome for christ’s sake. Give him a break. If you start dissecting the plots to these movies with pretentiously critical intention and attempt to take them seriously, your face will explode. So don’t do that. Ok? Good. Now let’s move on to something else. . . .

7. Coughlin’s Law – The sound of one hand clapping is called masturbation. So bring me another drink, my young Flanagan, and go beat yourself off.

8. You wanna know what pisses me off the most about Cocktail? The fucking scenes where Tom Cruise stands up in a crowded bar and recites poetry. Being a poet myself, I’m personally offended. Poetry has a bad enough name as it is these days, and deservedly so. There’s a lot of shitty poetry out there. Every time I’m introduced to someone as being a writer and the person I’m being introduced to asks me what I write, and I say “Poetry”, I cringe. Because they inevitably look at me like I’ve just told them my childhood pet has just died from complications caused by some sort of animalized form of diabetes.

9. Because they assume, as most people do, that all poetry must eventually suck. And the poetry reading scenes in Cocktail only succeed in perpetuating this myth. The poetry in Cocktail is hokey and rhymes and Cruise delivers it with this Pepsodent toothy swagger that makes me want to push myself through the crowd and take his head off with a rusty baseball bat. But in the movie, the crowd eats his shit up. They love it. Which, you know, is infuriating. Applauding bad poetry is just as bad as Rick Perry saying it was OK for U.S. soldiers to piss all over the dead bodies of our foreign enemies. It’s OK because the soldiers are just kids = it’s OK for the crowd to cheer Tom Cruise’s shitty poems because, generally speaking, poetry sucks.

10. Don’t get me wrong. There’s some amazing poets doing great things out there right now. They just tend to get buried beneath the massive amounts of shitty poetry that’s being thrown out there and clogging up the toilets these days. If you look hard enough, you’ll find the good ones. And trust me, it’s worth searching. For example, if you haven’t read Jonathan Montgomery’s book Taxis and Shit, you should be lined up against a wall made out of bean bag chairs and metaphorically shot.

11. Coughlin’s Law–You know you’re having a nervous breakdown if it’s 3 in the morning and you’re all alone and stoned and sad and looking at retro Tron action figures online….whispering to yourself…..softly….’Someday”……

12. Coughlin’s Law – Power comes in tight pants, Mr. Flanagan. As we speak, Mitt Romney’s camp is in talks with a 1989 version of Kip Winger. The VP slot’s his if he wants to fuck it. . . .

13. Goddamnit, Elisabeth Shue, you’re so fucking perfect and beautiful. Why the hell did you have to go and get yourself knocked up by Tom Cruise? It’s always sad when the nice pretty girls go to bed with charmingly handsome douchebags. It breaks my heart. Every time.

14. When I was a kid, I had the BIGGEST crush on Elisabeth Shue. I may not have technically learned how to masturbate while watching her in Cocktail and Adventures In Babysitting, but she sure as hell played a huge part in helping to jump my game into the big leagues and improve my technique.

15. Things That I Would Do For 1980′s Elisabeth Shue That Rhyme With Lines From That One Bruno Mars Song: I would fuck a grenade for you/I would get myself spade for you/I would bitch slap today for you/I’d learn to spell ‘mayonnaise’ for you/I’d make a cucumber glaze for you/I’d jerk off a parade for you. . . .

16. That’s right, Elisabeth Shue. An ENTIRE PARADE!

17. Coughlin’s Law – Don’t be such a pathetic GITCH. Elizabeth Shue has no idea that you exist and Helen never loved you.

18. GITCH‘s Law #1 – Go fuck yourself, Coughlin.

19. Not believing in Love anymore because the woman you loved was born to desert you is not like finding out Santa Clause doesn’t exist. It’s a million times worse, young Flanagan. For one thing, Santa Clause never used to blow you. . . .

20. I’m gonna own my own bar someday.

21. Cock, Tails, and Dreams.

Get in the car, Helen

Since being ubiquitously dumped by Helen, GITCH has been watching a lot of movies. While watching these movies, he writes many things down, in a mad tentacled world attempt to make sense of the heart breaking events that take place both on and outside the screen. His second book, The Aftermath, etc., is now available from Monkey Puzzle Press.