1) Comic book collectors at Newbury Comics.
I worked there in the early 90's. You could always spot the comic book (excuse me, GRAPHIC NOVEL) collectors in the store at Harvard Sq. They wore glasses and pocket protectors and would screech like banshees if you touched their precious comics when you rang them in.
2) Barry F. at my kung fu school
He was really tall and wore a tank top so you could see his muscles. When he did the movements he had an intensity that was kind of scary/funny. Scary, because if one of his flailing limbs actually made contact, it would hurt (he gave me a good sized bruise during conditioning one day), and funny because if he missed a target, he would probably fall over because he was actually really un-coordinated. He went with us to a tournament and made everyone hours late because we were supposed to meet up with him to drive down to the hotel, and he was running really late but kept calling to tell us he was "a few minutes away". He had one guy's cell phone number and he kept calling it every 15 minutes when the guy was trying to watch a DVD to give him another update on his progress. The best part was when the guy answered his phone and the entire van heard: "Wait, what? You hit who? A cop?".
He had rearended an off-duty state trooper on the Jersey Turnpike. In a traffic jam.
We were all greatly relieved to hear that Barry had developed a hernia that required surgery and would most likely not be returning to the school. He had been there long enough to qualify for sparring classes and all the women dreaded being placed in an over-eager elbow lock.
3) Paul the Psycho PA
I worked on a film that shot at the abandoned state mental hospital in Waltham. It was the most fun I've had on a film set in my life. The crew was all people I had worked with on low budgets and we were all starting to make some decent dough. There was one fly in the ointment though, Paul the Psycho Production Assistant.
He was the only PA I have ever known who did not comprehend the sanctity of the grip truck. It is supposed to be the GE crew's sanctuary from the rest of the crew, chiefly over-eager PA's. Nonetheless, Paul would bound onto the lift gate, and then if that wasn't an invasion enough, stand within inches of me and start looking through my CD collection. He was so uncool that there was no way I could nicely hint that he was being a little TOO friendly, so I comforted myself with the fantasy that he was merely an hallucination due to over-consumption of Red Bull.
We had a scene that necessitated the Waltham Fire Department being on set to supervise a what they call a controlled burn. Paul ran around trying to impress the female members of the crew with his Boy Scout experience and then when the firemen set the fire he got REALLY excited. Later on, we all got baked and watched the video footage of the shoot. You could see him dancing from foot to foot as the fire burned and at the end, when the WFD stepped in and extinguished the flames, Paul jumped in the air, hooting and pumping his fist.
Soon, though, his puppy-like on set bumblings began to take on a darker tone. He asked out the new PA chick and she (wisely) turned him down, only to accept a date from the 2nd AD. Paul spent that night's wrap beers session hunched over and muttering things like: "What does HE have that I don't?" and "I could make her like me."
Paul had written a script, and he constantly tried to pimp it to the director when he was trying to work with the actors.
He claimed to have misunderstood a night shoot call time of 6pm for 6am and turned up on the set at dawn in his beaten up hatchback. When he realized, finally, that no one else was coming for the next 12 hours, he got lost on his way off the grounds and ended up stalling out his car's transmission when he tried to back up on a gravel road. He had to get his father to drop him off and pick him up from set. We would be hanging out after wrap, passing a joint and drinking beers and this station wagon would pull up and this guy who looked like Tom Bosley would get out and yell for Paul. Paul brought him over to introduce him to us. He actually looked more uncomfortable than we were.
John Doe was the big star of the film (it was a low budget) and every day Paul would hang around the AD asking if John was coming by the set, would John sign his X cd, what's John really like, on and on. Production started to send Paul on bogus missions that involved long distances and many hours, just to keep him out of everyone's hair. They actually sent him to a town on the South Shore to buy a case of beer from a brewpub. What I really loved about that was the kid managed to get lost on the way back and arrived at wrap time with a story about stopping by a farm to ask for directions back to the highway and getting a tour of the farm instead. We imagined some farmer's wife, her legs sticking out of a haystack somewhere, bloody pitchfork on the barn floor.
As the day drew near for John Doe to arrive on set, we began to dread Paul's presence. Finally, one morning I came to set and the 2nd 2nd AD took me aside and informed me that Paul had been fired. Apparently he was being sent on another bogus mission (this time to buy a dildo in Chinatown for a sex scene) and since he had no car, the Production Coordinator was trying to tell him how hers worked and he completely flipped out on her, accusing her of trying to make him look stupid. The producer, realizing his opportunity, swooped in and almost physically threw him off set. We all spent the rest of that day expecting to see Paul strolling up the road with a shotgun.
4) Dan, my ex-brother-in-law
Dan not only closely resembles Dwight K. Schrute in appearance, but I swear someone has been observing his movements for years and Dwight is actually based on him. This is a man who can spend 45 minutes quizzing you at the dinner table about your car insurance. He reads Consumer Reports cover to cover. My favorite joke that my sister told about him was that when he emptied his pockets at night, she could hear the pennies whine from being pinched all day.
He tried teaching me how to drive and almost ended up getting me arrested. We were driving down a stretch of road that was notorious for drunken late night spin outs. It was raining and cold and I was freshly traumatized by the car crash movies in Drivers Ed. I was going the speed limit and this huge SUV behind us started riding my bumper and flashing its brights into the car. I tried to speed up but Dan wanted to "teach this jerk a lesson" and insisted that I keep to the posted speed limit. Then he rolled his window down for a second.
When we finally pulled over to practice parking, I turned to my window and there was a man shoving a police badge in my face and looking extremely pissed off. I rolled the window down and he started screaming "What did you throw at my truck!!!" and threatening to have 10 points added to Dan's DMV record. Dan turned pale and started pleading with the enraged cop and I was caught in the middle. It turned out Dan had thrown an old cigarette stub out the window and it had hit the cop's brand new SUV.
As I got to know their family more, it seemed like he was the latest in a long line of i dotters and t crossers. His mother would corner my poor sister and spend what felt like hours sharing her recipes for turnip puree and how to get stains out of the toilet bowl. The more time my family spent with his family, the more we came to dread it and when my mother called to tell me my sister was finally throwing him out I said something like "That's great!"
I'm sure there have been more Dwights than that, but I think I have repressed the memories of them. Perhaps the more frightening the real life ones are, the more fun it is to watch the TV version.
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