NOTES FROMTHE GARAGE

The Ride to St. Marys

The ride north starts in the valleys — small towns south of Interstate 80, gun shops and farms, roads that step up and down through the ridges like the land can't make up its mind about elevation. It's fun riding. Not dramatic, not scenic-overlook-with-a-plaque riding, just good winding Pennsylvania two-lane that makes you lean and shift and pay attention.

Once you cross I-80 and get into the northern tier, everything changes. Twenty miles or so through state forest lands, and the elevation rises and the forest closes in. That's where it happens — the smell. Pine and hemlock and something damp and ancient underneath it all. The shadows get long. The light comes through tall trees in shafts, like a church nobody built. Camps and campsites dot the road. You could be anywhere in the forests of North America — Maine, the Adirondacks, Colorado. It all smells the same when the trees are that tall and that old.

A small gas station, long defunct, with a Gulf sign still standing. Cabins dotting the road, some occupied, some not, all of them looking like 1963. And then just trees. Pine scent and needles on the shoulder and nobody ahead of you and nobody behind you.

It comes to an end when you start the long downhill. A field appears, then another field, then a new road leading toward a factory or a mill or a storage facility of some kind — the architecture of small-town industry that doesn't explain itself. Slow roll into Ridgway, which seems bigger than St. Marys but really isn't. Diagonal parking, main street, old buildings and storefronts with that particular look of places that were built for one economy and are waiting for the next one.

A short ten miles to St. Marys and the Cozy Afghan Inn — a bed and breakfast that is exactly what it sounds like. Warm, small, quilts on the bed, someone who remembers your name at breakfast.

Heading home the next day just means the usual roads, good weather, and a longing for home after one night on the road. I used to be able to do a week. Then three days. Now one night and I miss my bed, my dog, my coffee maker, my routine. Guess I'm getting older. Lenny would understand. He'd also tell me that one night is enough if the riding is good, and it was.

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Off We Go

Tomorrow morning, after I finish teaching tech to old folks — which is its own kind of motorcycle maintenance — I'm pointing the BMW north and not looking back for a couple of days. Up to St. Marys, PA. Winding route, mountain roads, small towns north of Route 80 where nobody's in a hurry and the roads belong to you.

Bed and breakfasts and inns in towns with one traffic light and a diner that closes at two. I'll be looking for Trump signs — are they still out there? — and farm stands with ripe tomatoes and fresh corn. Peaches, too, in parts of PA where the orchards come right up to the road and the air turns sweet before you even see the trees.

But mostly I'm going for the feel of the road and the wind. The way the smell changes as you move through different kinds of forest — pine to hardwood to hemlock — and how the air gets cooler when you drop into a valley and warmer when you climb out. You feel all of it on a motorcycle. Every degree, every scent, every shift in the landscape comes through. A car seals you off from the world. A bike puts you in it.

It's a clear-your-head trip. I've been busy. Working on Lenny, working on an AI education application, working on the house, walking the dog, the band is playing again soon, and some things just need attention that they haven't been getting. Including me.

Am I Lenny? Sure, in many ways. But I never had a brother — just one sister. And I've never wrenched on a bike. Tried that once. Not good. Lenny would be embarrassed.

At rehearsal the other night, someone brought up flat tires, and one of the guys said, "Don't use that Fix-a-Flat stuff — you'll be cleaning it out for hours." And another guy — the astute one — said, "Well, you won't be, but someone will." He nailed it with that. Didn't bother him at all. Great story. Great attitude. And a trip like this tends to acquire a story or two of its own.

People always talk to an old man on a motorcycle at any stop. It seems to be a rule. They want to know where you're going, where you've been, how long you've been riding. And of course they admire the bike. BMW S1000XR — not the fast one, but the nice one. The one that says I'm going somewhere interesting, not somewhere quickly.

Uncrowded roads, ripe tomatoes, the smell of pine, and nobody expecting anything from me for forty-eight hours. That's the plan. Off we go.

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Pittsburgh Is a Character

People ask me where the movie takes place and I say Pittsburgh and they nod like it's a location. It's not a location. It's a character. Pittsburgh doesn't sit in the background. It argues with you. It gets in the shot whether you planned it or not.

The bridges alone tell half the story. You can't get anywhere in this city without crossing water, and every bridge is a decision — which side are you on, which side are you going to, and are you coming back. Lenny crosses the same bridge every morning and he's been doing it so long he doesn't notice it anymore. That's the whole movie right there. The things you stop noticing are the things that define you.

The garages in this city. Not parking garages — real garages. The ones behind row houses in Lawrenceville and Bloomfield with oil stains on the floor that have been there since the Eisenhower administration. Garages where somebody's grandfather rebuilt a transmission and somebody's father stored a motorcycle he swore he'd get back to and never did. Lenny's shop is one of those garages, just bigger. The smell is the same. Mineral spirits and old rubber and something metallic you can't quite name.

The churches. Pittsburgh has more churches per square mile than I've seen anywhere. Not the big cathedrals — the little brick ones wedged between houses on hills so steep you question the structural engineering. The brothers in this story grew up in one of those churches and stopped going and never talked about why. The church is still there. It doesn't care whether you come back or not. It'll outlast all three of them.

The bars. Not the new cocktail places — the ones with wood paneling and a Terrible Towel thumbtacked to the wall and a bartender who knows what you drink and doesn't ask about your day unless you start talking first. Lenny's kind of bar. The kind where you can sit alone and it's not sad, it's just Tuesday.

The hills. You can't shoot a flat scene in Pittsburgh if you tried. Everything tilts. The camera has to adjust. The actors have to walk at angles. The light comes in sideways through valleys at times of day that don't exist in Los Angeles. A DP would lose their mind here — in the best way.

I've driven through this city a thousand times and I still see new things. A staircase going up a hillside to a door that doesn't seem to go anywhere. A mural on the side of a building that's been there so long the building has started to look like the mural instead of the other way around. A guy on a vintage motorcycle crossing the Hot Metal Bridge on a Sunday morning, and you think — that's Lenny. That's the shot.

You could set this movie somewhere else. You could. But you'd lose the argument. Pittsburgh doesn't let you tell a simple story. It makes everything more complicated and more beautiful and more stubborn, just like the people who live here. Just like three brothers who haven't spoken in ten years and now have to share a garage.

This city earns its screen time.

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The Other Kind of Agent

"Agent" has such new meaning today. Agentic is everywhere — AI agents doing this, AI agents doing that. And yet we're forgetting about agents. People. Human beings who represent other human beings. There were some great depictions of them in media — Entourage, Jerry Maguire. We used to hear about Rahm Emanuel's brother Ari, still a big macher in the business. "Show me the money" still resonates, doesn't it?

Now we hear that AI PhDs have agents. Chefs have agents. Sports figures, actors, writers. It all makes sense when you think about it. How can you be a creative, talented person of some kind and also have great negotiating skills? Implausible, right? You need someone in your corner who loves what you do and knows how to make a room say yes.

I've been scanning websites and IMDb Pro, where you can see their pictures and their areas of interest. Quite fascinating, actually — the specificity of it. This one represents character actors over fifty. That one specializes in first-time screenwriters with indie sensibility. You start to imagine the conversations.

The agent of all time, most known, has to be Brian Epstein. Without him — right? The Beatles might have stayed in Liverpool forever. He saw something nobody else in a suit could see and then made the world see it too.

And one I think about a lot: Mike Appel. Even though he and Bruce Springsteen were mired in litigation for years because of his usurious contracts, you still have to wonder — how did he get John Hammond to agree to hear Bruce in his office, with an acoustic guitar? "He's the new Dylan," Appel told him. Insistent. From a guy who wrote songs for the Partridge Family. He was a Bruce evangelist, and that's what was needed.

Albert Grossman — creating the trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. How did he know? How did he look at three separate people and hear a group? That's not business. That's vision.

That person is out there somewhere. Maybe scanning IMDb Pro right now, just like me.

Take My Script. Please.

Most of my agent references are music people, I realize. The movie agents — I've never really followed them. But I'm interested now. I'm scanning, reading, looking at who represents who and why. It's a whole world I never paid attention to, and suddenly it matters.

Did you watch Seth Rogen's show The Studio? Just finished. The tension, the stress, the money, the craziness — everybody fooling themselves, the delusions, the politics of getting anything made. It sounds exhausting. It also sounds fun. That's the world this script would have to survive in, and honestly? I can do none of it. I can't find the actors who are perfect for these roles. I can't find the producer or the director. I can write the thing and believe in it with everything I've got, but the rest of it — the business of turning a PDF into a movie — that's somebody else's genius.

So here's my pitch, and it's not sophisticated: take my script. Please. Read it, love it, do what you will with it. Find the Lenny who makes you believe every word. Find the director who sees Pittsburgh the way I see it — steel bridges and church steeples and a garage with oil stains that have stories in them.

A screenplay sitting on a website is a song nobody's heard yet. It needs someone who reads it and can't stop talking about it. Someone who picks up the phone and says, "You have to read this. Three brothers, a garage full of vintage BMWs, Pittsburgh. Trust me."

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What Happens Next?

I don't know. But I imagine it isn't linear and clear. There's a zig-zag of interest among agents, producers, maybe an older actor — male or female. Calling on you, Susan Sarandon. Jean Smart. Glenn Close. And the men — Michael Keaton. Richard Dreyfuss. Jeff Bridges. Harrison Ford. Sorry, not that old.

Then maybe some rewriting based on who's interested. Maybe the characters need to be a little younger. A little older. Maybe not Pittsburgh, and they want Ducatis instead. Who knows.

What goes on in my imagination? Magic. A director. An art director. A music supervisor. A million PAs and tons of those Haddads trucks — they're based near here. And the BMW club gets involved, and band mates, and bars and churches, and all kinds of fun stuff to begin a long process of making a vision of people seem as real as possible. Real enough so that you want to know them, you want to walk in their shoes, you root for them like they're your best friends. It would be amazing to see.

Am I banking on it? Expecting it? Praying? I don't know. But as they say, you never know.

What a wise man told me a long time ago — and then again recently — was just: finish it. Get it done. A finished screenplay, book, novel, song, or poem is something that doesn't happen every day or for everyone. Any of them can be rewritten, edited, re-imagined, and totally revised. But the first time you are finished, you have completed the act of creating characters, feelings, events, and relationships out of thin air that then seem so real to you that you can't imagine anyone else not loving them in the same way.

That's not nothing. And if nothing else ever happens with this script, you've got to know these characters and they can inhabit your mind for the rest of your life. And that, again — not nothing. A special thing. Really.

Thanks to the spirit of creation, as it has been unstoppable since humans — and maybe pre-humans — walked the dirty dust of earth.

The First Ten Pages Are Free Now

I've spent ten drafts over eleven years getting this screenplay right. Ten drafts is a lot. Eleven years is longer. But Lenny's not a character you rush, and the story he's in — three brothers, a decade of silence, a garage full of bikes that are easier to fix than people — is one of those stories that had to ripen on its own schedule.

Starting today, the first ten pages of Lenny's Vintage are free to read. No email gate, no sign-up, no pitch deck. Just the script.

Why? Because if the first ten pages don't make you want to read the next eighty-one, nothing I write in an email will either. The writing is the pitch. Lenny walks a 1966 R69S up a ramp in one practiced motion, puts a strip of black tape over a check engine light, and by page four he's telling a nervous first-time buyer that a motorcycle asks for the same thing a marriage does and most people won't give it to either.

If that's your kind of movie, the rest of the script is a phone call away.

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Getting Older Started in 2016

I was 56. Teaching. Traveling. Doing a wide range of stuff and being helpful and effective at most of it. Success measured in happy people being themselves — in Rwanda, Liberia, Pittsburgh, New Jersey. My kids generally thriving, having lives of goodness and interest.

And movies. TV. DVDs. Music. A constant of childhood that continues unabated. Married to an astute student of culture — Kate Borger, herself a producing media person: radio, music, adaptable to new things like jazz. She started with rock, moved to American ethnic, New Orleans, piano experts, rhythm — roots and rhythm inventor for WYEP. And we shared ideas for movies, always, always, always.

Finally, an idea better than the pursuit of the spaghetti cone in American food ways. Three brothers, older, forced to live together under circumstances beyond their control. Why this story? I don't know. Never had brothers. Never been forced to do much. But a baby boomer conundrum, I think — what happens when the people you've been avoiding show up and won't leave.

Bring in the BMW motorcycles, a newer obsession since I bought my first one. I was looking at the used ads and saw a BMW K75. A light went off. Yes.

Then it sits for ten years. While I stew. Grew. Changed. Retired. Looked, listened, watched, and imagined.

And finally — dust off those PDF files and screenplay software and get to work. In a few weeks, rounded off, it works. It fits. I got it, get it, and want it to get out there now.

Are you someone who could help make it happen?

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Ten Drafts and What Changed

The first draft of Lenny's Vintage was 124 pages. Lenny talked too much. Marvin was a villain. Danny never showed up until act three. There was a subplot about a zoning board that I thought was hilarious and absolutely nobody else did.

By draft four, I figured out the movie was about three brothers, not one. By draft six, I figured out Marvin wasn't the antagonist — he was the mirror. By draft eight, I cut the zoning board, which physically hurt. By draft ten, the script was 91 pages and every scene earned its place.

The thing they don't tell you about rewriting is that cutting is the easy part. The hard part is knowing which version of a character is the real one. Lenny was funnier in draft two and more sympathetic in draft five, but it took until draft seven before I realized those were the same thing — that his humor was his sympathy, just delivered from behind a workbench.

Eleven years. Not continuously — there were gaps, other projects, a whole teaching career in between. But Lenny kept pulling me back into the garage.

It's Never the Carburetor

There's a line in the script where Lenny picks up the phone and a customer tells him his '73 R75 won't start. "Everybody thinks it's the carburetor," Lenny says. "It's never the carburetor. That's your points."

I rode BMWs for most of my adult life — never rebuilt one, despite telling myself every winter that this was the year. But I broke down on enough back roads to know what a misdiagnosis looks like. The carburetor is the thing people can name, so it's the thing people blame. The actual problem is quieter, less obvious, and has been getting worse while everyone was looking at the wrong part.

That's the whole movie, actually. Lenny thinks the problem is his brother. Marvin thinks the problem is money. Danny thinks the problem is distance. They're all cleaning the carburetor. The actual problem — the corroded ground wire, to stay in the metaphor — is that none of them ever said the thing that needed saying after the cottage got sold.

The bikes are honest about what's broken. The people aren't. That's why Lenny prefers the bikes.