The Downward Slope

" What the fuck is his deal?"  He didn't pinpoint who exactly said it, but it was real, out there, in the open.  Tate: black hooded-sweatshirt, ill-fitting derby har, was bending over, at the waist to reveal: faded carpenter pants, in tandem with belt, hugging the downward slope of his buttocks.  Like a large-breasted woman tying a belt over her dress, directly under her, and accentuating, her pendulous twosome, only reversed.  He had flashed paisley boxer-briefs -- whose claim was staked by GAP -- to the entirety of the coffee shop, all for a copy of the Red Eye.  None of the patrons would ever be the same again -- for at least the next ten minutes or so.

Take crinkled his chapped lips into something of a smile and ambulated out the front entrance, the pre-pubescent spring air greeting him with a hue of passivity.  He didn't dress like this normally, or have any similar proclivities to such sartorial horror.  Tate was an actor.  If you'd lend him your ears he may tell you he was the 7th to maybe like the 11th best actor in the Greater Chicago Area -- maybe.  A few weeks back he'd earned the role of Hitman Hank in Take The Alleyway To My Heart: an indie-film being shot in Printers Row over the month of May.  Per steadfast ritual of living the role before Principal Photography, Tate had been walkin' in Hank's Shoes for nearly ten days, filming to commence in the coming weekend.  There was, it would soon be discovered, a little snafu: Tate had been called by mistake.  He hadn't won the role.  Thanks to the shoddy paperwork of a possibly too-stoned film student intern, his information was jumbled with the real (and despite an unctuous explanation/groveling from the Director, never to be) Hitman Hank, up-and-coming actor Maximus Tellery Johansson: a Scandinavian alpha-male type still well under 30.

Tragically -- at least in a bridge-burning-in-the-neighborhoods-you-hang-out-in social-sense -- Tate had bemused or outright offended a handful of people while purportedly in-character, as was Hank's true nature, an incorrigibly callous fellow.  Hitman Hank was a caucasian hip-hop phenom, propelled by a string of now-legendary, mix-tapes that circulated the NYC underground until he was , serendipitously, discovered by prolific producer Thunderhawk "bizzy ben" Benson.  He had been rapping, for one one in particular, but in very dramatic fashion, on the basketball court of a city park in Chicago's South Side.  Rumor has it there was a pretty heated game of 2-on-2 going taking place simultaneously, but that theory has been challenged before....But, long story short: Hank was an inveterate eBay addict and, in a pronounced and perhaps too formulaic fall from grace, found himself in trouble with the Wrong People following an auction for an $11,000 bundle of authentic Samurai Swords he had hoped to sell, but hadn't the cash for in the first place.  He refers to it as his Rapper fail-safe Insurance Plan to love interest Black Cherry Starling in one of the more poignant scenes in the script. 

The story takes kind of a science fiction-esque turn halfway through, some scenes told entirely in subtitles of binary code; at its crest, Hank has to mine a great deal of Chromium so he can travel back in time to thwart himself betting on the auction.  But it was never to be, at least for Tate.