In 1983, my father hired me to work as a production assistant on an indie horror film called Mutant. I was nervous and excited, eager to embrace the prestige of professional filmmaking. I quickly learned that indie film production had little to do with glamour.
I arrived in Atlanta on a July day a few days before the start of shooting. The temperature and humidity topped 90 percent and everyone had nasty sweat stains. My first morning of work, I was driven in a van with a local P.A. named Roscoe to a creek near the Chattahoochee River. The driver dropped us off beside a small bridge and gave us shovels. He pointed to a steep slope covered in weeds leading to a boggy creek. Our job was to clear the hill of vegetation for a scene involving a car crash. The driver gave us a case of bottled water and said he’d return in a few hours. I watched as he drove away, the sun creating a double-image mirage of the van on the heated asphalt.
Growing up in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb, I wasn’t used to grunt work. Roscoe was right in his element. He grabbed his shovel and commenced with the digging. I resolved not to let him outwork me. I stepped onto the hill and plunged my shovel blade into a patch of weeds. I immediately lost my balance and nearly tumbled into the stream.
“Don’t go into that crick,” Roscoe said. “There’s leeches in there.”
I got up, wiped myself off and dug into a spiky burr. My sweaty hand slipped on the handle and my fingers struck a clump of spiny thorns. A surge of pain shot up my right arm. Tiny slivers of needles emanated from my skin. I yelled out in pain.
“What you doing, man,” Roscoe said. “Didn’t y’all bring no gloves?”
“No.”
“That’s dumb as all get out.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tweezer-like tool. He began plucking tiny spines from my skin. He spat on the area and rubbed it in with his sweaty t-shirt.
“That’ll clean them germs,” he said. He gave me a second pair of gloves.
“Thanks,” I said. “Why did you bring two pair of gloves?”
“In case a snake bites through the first, everyone knows that.”
I started digging, keeping a wary eye for the presence of serpents. The hill was covered in crabgrass and geranium. I dug up shrubs and tossed them into the creek. Roscoe moved much faster.
By 10 a.m., the sun was blazing. I guzzled bottles of water until the case was nearly gone. This worried me since I was prone to migraines and knew if I didn’t stay hydrated, my head would start pounding. I asked Roscoe if I could drink the last bottle.
“I reckon.”
I downed the water and wiped my face with my t-shirt. My arms were aching and I was finding it hard to breathe.
“What y’all do in Los Angeleez,” Roscoe asked.
“I’m still in college,” I said. “This is my summer vacation.”
“I’m fixin’ to get properly educated too. Thinking about going to GTI. Get me an engineering degree.”
“Like a train engineer?”
“No man, I’m talking aeronautics. Maybe I can be the first redneck in space.”
That made him laugh. He took off his shirt, wiped the sweat from his forehead and sang a chorus of “Rocket Man” in a Southern twang.
“Mind if I take a break,” I asked.
“Y’all plum tuckered.”
“Yeah. How do you deal with this heat?”
“This ain’t nuthin’. Summertime in Atlanta’s like a goat’s butt in a pepper patch.”
I was too tired to laugh. I sat at the base of the bridge beneath the branches of a thick bush.
“Y’all don’t want to sit there, man. That’s poison sumac.”
I jumped away from the bush and moved beneath a maple tree. That’s when I started to itch. At first, it was a tickle on my right elbow. It migrated to my shoulder and soon my entire right arm was a raging, burning, scratching nightmare. I looked down and saw a few red spots.
“Hey Roscoe. Any idea what this is on my arm?”
He ambled over and perused my skin.
“Oh man, that ain’t good.”
“What,” I asked. I felt a sense of panic coarse through me.
“I figger it’s a chigger.”
“A what?”
“A chigger, man. It’s a little bug that digs into your skin. They’se ornery little varmints. Hard to kill.”
A wave of nausea filled my gut. I’d never heard of a chigger before but it seemed like something from a horror film. It also seemed like a word a white person shouldn’t say out loud.
“What do I do?”
“Taint nothin’ you can do ‘cept not scratch. That only make it worse.”
“How do I get rid of ‘em?”
“Well you might could find a doctor but we’s out in Bumfuck if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Should I hitchhike to town for help?”
“No man. Just keep working. It’ll all come out in the wash.”
The itching grew worse. I walked to the edge of the creek, dipped my t-shirt in the water and wrapped it around my arm. This was soothing for a few minutes but then started burning.
I traversed the hill and scanned the road for cars. Nothing. I checked my watch. It was 11:30. I paced back and forth, unsure what to do. I peered over the railing. Roscoe cleared the last of the weeds near the creek. He was imperturbable, undaunted by the blistering sun and presence of bugs.
By noon, the driver returned. I showed him my arm that now boasted a heinous rash. I felt like a leper. He didn’t seem to care. We jumped in the van and headed back to town. The driver gave each of us a Dairy Queen bag. Inside was a burger, fries and chocolate shake. Roscoe devoured his lunch. I didn’t touch mine since it was slathered in thousand-island dressing, my personal Kryptonite.
Back at the production office, I sought out the set medic. She was a middle-aged woman from Marietta named Janet. I showed her my arm and she winced.
“Looks like chiggers to me,” she said.
She led me to the bathroom and washed off my arm and shoulder with soap. She donned rubber gloves and poured rubbing alcohol into a glass. She then lit a votive candle.
“What are you doing,” I asked.
“They’re attracted to heat,” she said. “We’re going to flush ’em out.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might want to look the other way,” she said. She offered a pity smile and lifted the candle a few inches from my mangy shoulder. I watched in horror as a tiny black-like speck burrowed out of my skin. It was smaller than a poppy seed but moving. She dipped a cotton ball into the alcohol and swabbed the bug off my arm. I nearly vomited.
For the next 20 minutes, an extended family of nasty critters crawled out of my skin into Janet’s alcohol death trap. When she was convinced the buggers were gone, she reached into her medicine bag for a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“To Southern parasites,” she said.
She offered me the bottle and I took a swig. She followed suit.
Several days later, the crew returned to the bridge site to film the car crash stunt. In the scene, the two lead actors Wings Hauser and Lee Montgomery are driving in a Mustang on a back road. They’re confronted by rednecks in an old pickup. After a short chase, the rednecks slam their truck into the Mustang causing the car to plummet down the hill into the creek.
As the camera crew and grips set up equipment, I felt a sense of pride knowing I’d cleared the hill that would be featured in the film. I told my fellow crew members about what I’d been through showing them the scars on my right shoulder. The art director Tony Kupersmith sarcastically replied, “What do you want, a fucking award?” Yes, I thought, that would be nice. Best Brush Clearing should definitely be an Oscar category.
The scene came off perfectly and we broke for lunch. I stood in line at the catering truck behind Wings Hauser, the film’s star. Knowing I was the producer’s son, he engaged me in conversation.
“What do you think of the South so far?”
“It’s not bad except for the chiggers.”
His eyes grew wide.
“What’d you just say?”
He’d obviously misheard me.
“No wait…”
“…No you wait mister. I don’t know who you think you are but you can’t talk like that. This is the birthplace of Martin Luther King. Because of attitudes like yours people were lynched around here.”
He proceeded to lecture me on the history of civil rights, slavery and the culpability of people like me who thought they were better than others because of my skin color. I tried interjecting to tell him I was merely talking about bugs, but he wouldn’t let me speak. He grabbed his food, marched to his trailer and slammed the door in anger. For the rest of the shoot, he was convinced I was a racist.