SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR, AND SOMETIMES, ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER GETS HIS SHORT FILM SHOWN IN LOS ANGELES.

So I get an e-mail last night from my old roommate at Swampwater U. Attached to his e-mail is a jpeg photo, and Omar’s directions are short and succinct: “First row, second from the right.”

There’s a few dozen people in the aforementioned photo. I zero in on the person he refers to, and I have a feeling I know who he is. Taking a cue from Julio Cortazar, I open the photo up on Photoshop, blow it up several times and take another look. Oh man, it’s HIM! The nemesis has resurfaced!

Some background info for those who didn’t know me from Swampwater U: Back when I was a sophomore, my roommate Omar had a chance encounter with an aspiring filmmaker. This person has since changed his name to something more Hollywood-ish, but I will refer to him by his Christian moniker, ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER. ASSH*LE had made a few short videos for a local Latino band, and he was interested in directing a full-length movie. He had a cinematographer buddy, and video editing equipment at home. All he needed was money to make the film and someone to write the screenplay. He already had story ideas.

Omar, being a finance major, volunteered to do the producing bit. He called me up one night, gave me the proverbial skinny, and asked me to write the screenplay. I was definitely interested; I mean, why do real work when you can write a movie? We had a general meeting on-campus the next weekend, and I hammered out the screenplay in three weeks.

That’s when things started to go bad. Something happened which upset my ego a great deal. Perhaps I should have been more tactful about it, but I certainly feel I had every right to be upset. Originally, ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER got story credit, while screenplay credit was mine. ASSH*LE got the script from me, called me up the next night, and told me there were some rough edges and he might need to tinker a little. I was okay with the tinkering; I spent all-nighters writing it, and while I was confident in the finished product, I knew it probably had an “off-the-cuff” quality. However, when I got the script back a few days later, I saw that ASSH*LE not only had story credit, but he now had top screenplay credit as well. His explanation: He kept re-writing things, and once he was satisfied, realized that more of the words were his than mine.

But a lot of the re-writing was totally unnecessary. The only reason I could see him re-writing it was to get more credit for the screenplay. For example, if I wrote: “That jerk lied to us!” ASSH*LE would rewrite it, “We were lied to by him! What a jerk!” And he would count that entire line as his. Seriously, he was that anal-retentive about it. He put all his words in bold, and left mine in regular font. Sure, there was more bold than regular font after the re-write, but the dialogue was more or less the same, just re-worded.

Amazingly, I stayed on through that debacle. But then ASSH*LE started bitching about what a horrible job Omar was doing producing. He was disorganized, not doing his job, blah-blah-blah. ASSH*LE would make a phone call and then say, “You know, I should get producing credit, too.” He and Omar almost got into a fistfight during a meeting.

Within a few weeks, Omar wanted to jump ship. The screenplay was still plenty mine, but ASSH*LE said he would toss it aside if Omar and I both left. He was fed up with my lazy roommate, but apparently, I was still valuable as a screenwriter. Clearly, I was being offered the role of co-conspirator. Idiot that I was, I stood by my friend and said if he was out, I’m out, too.

Fast-forward a few days, and we were both out. The project was dead. I was very much relieved.

Back to the present: I read the rest of Omar’s cryptic e-mail. There was a link to the site where the photo came from. Clicking on the link, I was transported to the site for a short film (Which will go unnamed.) The writer/director/producer? You got it. ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER. The film in question was the winner of some contest sponsored by Loews. It got shown once on the big screen. The party was from some premiere thing. I remember my reaction being something along the lines of, “Man, I picked the wrong week to quit accidentally drinking cough syrup.” It’s like finding out the high school quarterback went on to become a billionaire, when you were praying he’d end up working the local tire store.

Actually, I never wished any ill will on ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER. I thought he was a motherfucking asshole, but maybe those are the kinds of people who are successful in the world. “What success?” you tell me. “It was just a short film, shown for one night in front of a few hundred people at an L.A. theatre. Those kinds of things happen all the time. It’s not like he made a feature.”

Not yet, anyway. Perhaps the most troublesome thing is, I read the release on the short film, and it actually sounds… well, good. Thought-provoking. Is it possible that there are depths to ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER’s personality, which weren’t previously there? The ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER I knew was a moron who thought Spielberg was the tops, never watched an independent film that wasn’t “Pulp Fiction,” and once told me he believed playwrights were people who didn’t have the talent to make it in movies. God, what a motherfucking asshole. But he’s still more successful than I am.

You know, the old saying’s true: Every time a friend succeeds, a part of me dies. ASSH*LE M*THERF*CKER wasn’t my friend, but then again, a part of me hasn’t died, either. I know that sounds more profound than it really is, but it’s not really me talking, it’s this bottle of cough syrup I just opened.