Snakes on the Brain

On the set of the Snakes on a Plane music video.
by Dan Gillis III

In the way that some people wait with fingers crossed and eyes closed for the next My Bloody Valentine album, I kneel next to my bed every night, press my hands hard together and pray: “Dear Mr. Jesus, I thank thee for thine blessings of this day, and thou hast blessed us with iPods, handiwipes, and most of all… Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane, boiiiiii!”

This exalted reverence for Snakes on a Plane’s upcoming birth from the celestial cinematic uterus has festered in my skull ever since the rumors of this campy, Samuel L. Jackson film lumbered into every crevice of the Internet nearly a year ago. I couldn’t help but dive face first into an obsession with Snakes on a Plane, not just as an iconic summer flick, but as an impossibly long conversation (mostly with my stuffed animals on my bed) delineating every possible snakie permutation that could possibly insert itself into the plot line. Are they going to descend from the overhead bins like oxygen masks? Is Sammy J. going to use some black mambas as nunchuks against some oversized irritable python? What kind of ass-biting, legless beastie will emerge from the stainless steel toilet?

Is that motherfucking Cobra Commander behind all this shit?

Fucking awesome, I do say. So awesome, in fact, that I decided I needed a slice of this slithering action, and volunteered to be a sexy dancer for the “Snakes on the Brain” music video shoot for local Nintendo-epic rock legends, Captain Ahab. Blowing up like a Magnum condom on a hairdryer, Captain Ahab’s track “Snakes on the Brain” won a contest fronted by Tagworld.com (the poor man’s MySpace) to write a song that would play over the credits of the film. Upon winning this enviable spot on the best ‘animals attack’ cult classic since Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Ahab’s Johnathan Snipes and Jim Merson recruited director Larry Klein to put a video together that should air alongside the names of the grips and gaffers at the end of the film.

So I suited up in my best ’90s apparel and headed north to the nondescript industrial wasteland where I was going to etch my face into the Background Dancer Hall of Fame.

I arrived at the shoot in Sun Valley (which should have been called Surface of the Sun Valley) early in the morning and followed the crowd of flannels and cut-offs to the garage-like space where the end dance sequence was to be shot in front of a 1988 red Corvette. The theme of the video was Salt ‘N’ Pepa meets Biohazard, which explains that tattooed guy with the cut-off sweat pants and that girl in the glass heels and the weggimus maximus cleaving her caboose.

I looked more like I should have been in a Fall Out Boy video, but that didn’t stop me from resurrecting the moves I learned from practicing in front of MTV’s The Grind when I was 12. As the tape—or pixels or whatever—rolled, I began to do a little rolling of my own.

I believe it’s what they call the “Tootsie Roll.”

With my hands on the hood, doing what JJ Fad once called “shaking it like a donkey,” I began to gyrate my cut-off Dickies in ways that would be illegal in 49 states (including Puerto Rico). As our dance party turned up the crunk, our enviable moves shifted from Dave Chapelle to David LaChapelle as we waved our hands in the air in a manner in which we appeared not to care. And I didn’t care that I wasn’t as sexy as the other ladies (or that I was a sunburned white dude)—I gave it my all as I tossed non-existent gang signs at the lens, trying my hardest to shake my pants dry.

It’s true, I wet my pants. But this time, it wasn’t like that incident where I pissed my friend’s couch in New York City. No, this happened under much more normal circumstances.

I was jerking off a champagne bottle that I sprayed from crotch level onto a slithering dancer.

“Sorry about that, I’m actually an amateur feminist,” I tried to explain to the nearly naked, tattoo-sleeved lady while the cameraman was shooting what appeared to be an up-skirt shot. “I just thought after you balanced that tall can of MGD on your ass, I should get some Crissy up in Hizzy!”

Wait, I just thought up that last part…but regardless, she seemed to be cool with it. As she pulled up her red mesh booty shorts over her cranberry colored thong, saying, “It’s OK, sometimes you just gotta do that.”

And she was right, sometimes you just gotta pour one out for Captain Ahab, Sammy J. and those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking plane.

Don’t work, read Dan’s Blog at www.underbellyLA.blogspot.com