Step Up to the K-Hole

by Daniel Stein

 

Back in the Summer of ’89, Channing Tattum and I invented a diet that would change the diet-world forever.  We sat around Channing’s dining room table up in Laurel Canyon, each man with his own bottle of Glenlivet.  We smoked four packs of Marlboro Reds a piece that night.  When Channing got the munchies, he turns to me and says, “There’s only one thing that’ll get my gut going right now.”  So there we are, bottles of Glenlivet in one hand, five lit cigarettes in the other, and three pounds of sunflower seeds between us.  “Chan,” I said, “Chan, this is all a man needs to live on.”  And he agreed.

By the fall of that Winter, Channing had locked himself up in a Ketamine hole so hard, he was a prisoner of his own mind for six months. Once or twice, I ventured into the K-hole in attempts to retrieve him.  But sometimes, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.  I had to liberate him the only way I knew how, one sunflower seed at a time.  Luckily, my machinations took to the skies when I remembered that Channing suffers from arithmomania like the modern vampire.  After shaving off his jail beard, Channing revealed that he had his passion project–a film idea called “Step Up.”  We took to the Glenlivet, the smokes, and the sunflower seeds, banging out the script in an hour’s time.  As daylight dawned upon that dining room table in Laurel Canyon, the last coherent thought I had before blacking out was, “Goddamn, we’ve done it.  We’ve re-created the New Testament.”

Years later, I found myself sitting with my dog company in Jerusalem’s Old City, flirting with the waitress who served me up the old single malt and sunflower seeds.  I haven’t spoken to Channing since that fateful night.  Some things are just too weird and impossible to recant.  All I can say is that we were both on to something that night.