Month: April 2021

i say “tryna make a dollar out of 15 cents” so often i don’t even think about digital underground anymore when i do. it’s part of the language i grew up with, at the same time that i was learning how to carry the remainder and style my mushroom cut. i activate the phrase out of reflex, like hella and waddup, cuz and melting into thizzface whenever i’m really feeling something. it perches at the corner of my lips like a toothpick. bay shit.

i started tuning into chuy gomez on KMEL when i began middle school. that beat from I Get Around slaps so hard, i could loop it endlessly. i spent entire saturdays waiting with a blank tape and my thumb on the red button for rick lee the dragon to throw it into the mix. on hindsight, it’s an inappropriate song for a 10 year old. i had no idea what it meant to put satin on someone’s panties. still, i loved that shock g verse, even more than pac’s.

i only had lunch money to my name, but i understood “tryna make a dollar out of 15 cents” immediately. it’s not even a punchline but it’s one of the earliest bars to raise my eyebrows. a vivid, clever, concise, very functional eight words that i repeated time and time again while digging for ecko shirts in the ross clearance section, while turning my flaming hots into a meal by pouring nacho cheese into the bag, while trying to make world-class projects with broke-ass budgets. i don’t think there’s a line in the entire rap universe that i’ve uttered more times. it’s a mantra.

shock g died this week. we lost dmx earlier this month, and black rob, too. it’s like everyone in the CD wallet i used to carry in my backpack is disappearing. not like i’ve had much of their music on rotation lately, but i cherish them for soundtracking my coming of age. moments from my youth now buried with the ages:

in middle school, bumping Freaks of the Industry on my discman while rolling the garbage bin to the curb. in high school, doing donuts in the logan parking lot with Whoa Remix pouring from my speakers. in harlem, sticking my head out the window to watch the ruff ryders descend down lexington with the RR Anthem on blast. all those songs were about living fast and dying young, nobody mentioned getting frail and passing alone. the rap life never prepared us for death like this.

The writing prompt Lovely gave me today is “something that takes your breath away,” and being a child of the 80’s, my mind immediately went to “Take My Breath Away,” the song by Berlin from the sex scene in the 1986 film Top Gun starring Tom Cruise. I was born in ’83, so it doesn’t really make sense for me to associate with this pop culture reference, especially since I’m not even sure if I’ve ever watched Top Gun in its entirety (I know, get over it).

Part of not knowing if I’ve ever watched Top Gun is not remembering anything about the sex scene, other than the fact that the song “Take My Breath Away” was playing during it, which either means that the song is really incredible or the sex scene is really not. Or that I was three. So even though I know that “Take My Breath Away” is associated with the sex scene in Top Gun, when the song or phrase “Take My Breath Away” comes up, for whatever reason what appears in my mind’s eye are the visuals from the sex scene in the 1988 film Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.

In the sex scene from Twins, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character is already in only his underwear when he hears a knock on the door. Thinking that it’s his twin brother, Danny DeVito (I know, get over it) he opens it, to find not his twin brother Danny DeVito, but instead the Hot Blonde of the film, played by Kelly Preston. The Hot Blonde asks Danny DeVito’s twin brother if she can stay in his room tonight, and he obliges by offering to sleep on the motel room floor. They happen to kiss while passing each other – an act that manages to come across as both bashful and very forward – and then they sleep separately for all of twenty seconds before the Hot Blonde ends up fucking Danny DeVito’s twin brother on the motel room floor.

I watched this scene on Youtube (for writing research purposes), and can report back that the song that plays in the background is not Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” but instead some generic strings in the film’s score composed by Georges Delerue and Randy Edelman. Neither of their Wikipedia pages’ top paragraphs mention Twins starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, as is the case with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. Needless to say, Twins was not anybody’s best work – including Kelly Preston, who is best known for punching Tom Cruise in the face as his ex in Jerry McGuire, a movie that I had also never seen, at least not until quarantine (I know, get over it).

By now I’ve probably spent more time than most on the Wikipedia page for Twins starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, and can appreciate the fact that a film that is so memorable for being so forgettable has enough dedicated fans to keep its Wikipedia article updated.

In fact, as of the time of this writing, it was last updated only two months ago, which not only means that it is more up to date than my own website, but that somebody (in this case, Monkbot), cared so deeply about the 1986 film Twins starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito that they found the capacity – amidst a global pandemic, epic climate crisis, surge in racial violence, American insurrection, coup in Myanmar, and plenty of great films starring Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kelly Preston, and Tom Cruise – to ensure that the Wikipedia article for this movie with an odd sex scene which imprinted itself into my brain when I was five is as pristine as can be, should anyone on a Saturday afternoon decide to read it in its entirety.

Whew, that really takes my breath away.