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The Bucket of Heads

For some reason this morning, I flashed back to this strange day I had one time. I was desperate and broke living in SF when a buddy called me up and told me he had a cakewalk gig for me, PA'ing for a promo commercial, $100/day. I agreed and that afternoon I met with the producers, who gave me a shooting schedule and itinerary and told me to go to SFO and pick up the director for this masterpiece, who was flying out from New Orleans. They gave me the keys to the Vanagon, and I was off. After the miasma grind of SFO, the director and I cooly crossed the Bay Bridge, with he asking questions about the veracity of the Port of Oakland's "Loading Dog" cranes being Lucas' inspiration for the At-At Battlewalkers in The Empire Strikes Back and I woolgathering a bit, thinking about how fortune turns around so suddenly, and how I was begin paid by someone else to stay in a hotel. I was going to relax in the hot-tub, under the stars outside Sacramento on a balmy night, while everyone else slept (suckers!) "I am going places," I thought. But where I was going was to hell.

Hell, of course, can be pretty funny if you go into it with the right attitude. We all got up, had a mass breakfast at a self-serve buffet of the kind that flourish in the South but are dying in California. What I mean is there was meat in those six-pans - you know the kind I'm talking about - sausages, bacon, Canadian bacon, ham, sausage patties, chicken fried steak, etc. - just so much fucking MEAT it made me dizzy - right before I speared a plateful and devoured it. We were definitely just outside Stockton, home of the Oscar Meyer plants and carnivore capital of central California. The crew, eight of us, got out of there and did the drive to the Oscar Meyer factory. I was chatting with Eric from SF, who got hooked into the gig by our mutual pal Chris, too. Neither one of us knew what to expect. We agreed on our mutual disdain of hot-dogs, advertising, the San Francisco Giants, all of it!- but the pay, man - the money made us do it.

When we made the warehouse, Eric, Eve (PA #3) and I were handed walkie-talkies, and Eric was told to head inside with the crew to film the talking head shots with the factory bosses while Eve and I were fortunate enough to draw the "watch the vans" lot, which means be on call. So we drank coffee and chatted idly, and began to notice that we had an interesting percussive accompaniment to the usual ambient sounds of the day. Sounds like SHWUMP! SCCCHHRUP! SHWUMP!. So we looked over our shoulders and noticed for the first time that we were standing next to a large white dumpster that was smeared with blood and entrails. And then everything happened at once.

We saw that the dumpster was being fed by an enormous conveyer belt which fed from the killing floor to the loading docks, about 25 yards away to our left, where men were throwing offal and unused carcass parts onto the belt. The sound of cattle insides dropping into a metal box is somewhat fluid......Shhuuup! Then a guy appeared at the slaughterhouse door about 50 yards from us and beckoned towards us.

"What do you think he wants?" I ventured.
"I'd rather not know, but here I go anyway." Eve walked towards him. She was a trooper.
Then Eric walked up to me. "Where's Eve?"
I pointed towards the door.
"Ah. It's her turn inside now," he said.
"Well, I think she just went in the alternate way."
"Nice," he said, looking towards the Dumpster of Life.
"You said it. I can't get enough of it," I replied.

Then another sound started up. Eric was trying to contact Eve via radio, but there was too much sound. From around the corner of the plant came an enormous CAT Bulldozer, driven by my dentist. Eve was pacing alongside as they approached, radio in hand, shaking her head. The man-who-is-my-dentist's twin brother (the spitting image of this guy - same spectacles, same thinning blond hair, same white coat - without the bloodstains) gave Eric and I a cheery wave as he passed by us. The bucket of the Bulldozer - about 6 feet deep and 12 feet across - was filled to the brim with cattle heads. It went by us at about eye level, and the air above it was a frieze of flies.

Eve shouted above the din, "The guy wanted to know if I wanted to murder a cow. He offered to take me out on the killing floor."
"You're supposed to go inside," Eric told her.
"What?"
"I SAID THEY WANT YOU INSIDE." Eric screamed.
"Oh. OK" Eve walked away. Then Eric turned to me and said, "I think I'm going to go and see if that guy will let me do it."
"Go ahead. I'm going to follow that guy," I said, pointing after the maniac in the Bulldozer.
"All right," he said, so we split up.

As I walked up behind the tremendous machine, the doppelganger hopped down out of the drivers seat to the ground. We were behind the factory in a wide open dirt plain. To our right, hundreds of cattle were herded in together, a little unquiet - as could be imagined from the sounds of their brethren going to the grinders that they got to listen to all day and night. Quite a few of them pushed towards the gate facing us, and checked us out with big, placid cow's eyes. Sacred beasts, I thought, in some parts of the world. Certainly not here.

"Hi!", said the Man.
"Hi!"
"You with the film crew?"
"Yep."
"Alright! Thought I noticed some new faces around here today."
"That's us, for sure. Say, what's happening back here?"
He looked around with mock innocence. "Oh, THIS?" he queried, spreading his left arm out and sweeping it across the horizon. I was staring at his face and saw he had some irregularities my dentist didn't. He had enormous buck-teeth, for one - but they were bright white. Crystalline. I posed a quick, irrational question to myself: How can he have such white teeth if he works in a slaughterhouse?
"Yes, this. What happens here?" I replied.
"Notice anything strange?" he asked as he came up toward me.
I looked around and, yes, there were large areas of freshly turned earth - many of them, in fact. They matched the width of the Bulldozer bucket. Eric had come up from behind me, and said "Hey."
"Hey, man." I replied. To the Man, I said, "Are these graves?"
He actually gave a little giggle and nodded. "They sure are. They're for the heads."
"Why just the heads?"
"Well, you saw where the rest goes to, back into that dumpster," he said. "We bury the heads here so the maggots can do their thing." So that's what the cattle get to watch every now and then - a bunch of heads pouring like basketballs into a ditch not 50 feet from them. Oh Lord.
"Ah-hah." Eric said.
"Takes a few weeks, but then we dig 'em up, from time to time."
"Why would you dig 'em up?" I wondered aloud, but I knew what was coming.
"Well, the horns make good hood ornaments, for one."
"Have you got a pair?"

"I don't, but HE does," the Man replied, and pointed over our shoulders.
And, following his arm and pointed finger, I found at the end of it a guy, standing propped against the pristine grille of his long cherry Cadillac. He had the dark shades, the cowboy boots, the thumb hooked in his jeans waist, and a broad set of bull's horns all laquered and complementary on the hood of his Prizemobile. It was surreal. Where did he come from?
"That's Mr. Jessup, one of our regular customers. Hi, Sal!" he called out.
"Ho, there, Cal." the Cadillac Man called back.
"Came by for a fresh one?"
"Well, you know, the wife has her dear heart set on it...." he said, coming towards us.
"Sure! Sure!"
"Well, we should be going back to the lot. Thanks!" I said, and Eric and I began to head back the way we came. Another day, another dollar at the Oscar Meyer factory in jolly old Stockton, CA. We broke soon after this, and spent the afternoon shooting at Candlestick Park. It was much quieter there. Colder, too. You know how Candlestick can be.

If you're ever in the mood for high weirdness, I recommend the Winchester Mystery House - which is about 100 miles away. Stockton is Hell, just ask a local.

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