Forum / Citation Needed Please

• 
  Chris Okum

  Jul 17, 07:37pm

  Back in the late eighties Tom Cruise used to get his hair straightened at a hair salon in a San Fernando Valley mini mall located next to Off The Record Video. Every two weeks he would sit in a chair underneath a heat lamp while gobs of lye relaxed his locks. His stylist was a redhead named Melanie. On more than one occasion she offered to go with him into the changing room and tickle his pickle. Cruise would laugh when Melanie said this, and then give a polite demurral. In this mini mall there was also a Baskin-Robbins. Cruise's favorite flavors were Gold Medal Ribbon and Quarterback Crunch. Sometimes he would take his cone into Off The Record and eat it while craning his neck to look at the newest titles. He rented five movies during his membership at Off The Record: Bolero, Treasure of the Four Crowns, The Hidden, In Praise of Older Women, and Luna. Pulling out of the mini mall in his gun-metal gray Porsche Carrera Cruise would often listen to Peter Murphy's Indigo Eyes or Boom Crash Opera's Her Charity. Cruise first saw Cocktail with a paying crowd at Universal City's Cineplex Odeon. He sat in the back and cringed during the first ten minutes of the movie. During the Jamaica sequence he began to relax, which he attributed to the pure joy he felt watching Elizabeth Shue. He cursed silently to himself as he watched his scenes with Laurence Luckinbill. Cruise hated Luckinbill, or rather, he hated acting opposite Luckinbill, because the man gave him nothing to act opposite of, and Cruise felt it reflected in his performance, which, towards the end of the film seemed, to him at least, desperate, shrill and vague. He left before the credits rolled. Not wanting to hand his new car over to valet, Cruise had parked it himself, but now could not find it because of the byzantine layout of the parking complex. He had to ask Security for help, which they did, obligingly, tooling him around in a gold golf cart until he located his car. On his way home Cruise decided to drive past his off ramp and get on the 405 North. He drove to Valencia. He exited at Magic Mountain Parkway. He pulled over and got out of his car. He stared at the rollercoasters. Nothing was more beautiful to Cruise than a brightly lit rollercoaster against the night sky. He sat on the hood of his car and listened to the distant screams. The Church's Reptile came on the radio. There was something about this song that made Cruise feel funny. He turned it up. He smelled sagebrush. He knew he had come to the end of something, but he didn't know what. He was twenty-six years old and still did not feel comfortable tying his own shoes.

• 
  Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III

  Aug 19, 05:12am

  This is a great one. I like this better than I like Tom Cruise: His Movies[*], His Iconographic Status, and His Performances.

  *

  (Oh, wait: this is the Forum, isn't it?)

  Still, it's good.

  "Reptile" is a great song. It's one of the very, very few "Alternative" songs those "Guitar" magazines bothered to transcribe, note-for-note w/tablature, in the '80s, back when the poor teenage youth had to scrape by with the music "on loan from a previous generation" (as Sloane Crosley once put it).

  Don't know if that's the "citation" you were looking for, but, gosh darnit, I gave you one!
  ------------------------------
  [*] 'cept "The Color of Money" and "Eyes Wide Shut"

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