Time To Feed The Alien

RICO SLADE WILL FUCKING KILL YOU

Rico Slade deserves caps lock.

No one knows what goes through an actor’s mind while they’re having a meltdown. No one, that is, except Rico Slade. Rico Slade knows all about it because Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You.

This book by Bradley Sands is about a B actor running to his ex-boyfriend’s apartment while having a delusional fantasy that he is Rico Slade, the character he plays in shitty movies. Chip Johnson is the actor’s real name, and his modest life is revved up into screaming action hero levels when he is told he cannot pay for a phone with an IOU note and he goes on a hulked out rampage. He fights Midwestern tourists, office cops, and a teenager he mistakes for a terrorist on his way to defeat Baron Mayhem at the evil fortress reunite with his gay lover at a run down apartment.

This is basically the hidden life of every closeted action star from that one guy to that other guy and also all the other ones, the interchangeable bunch that they are.

Also in the picture is Chip’s psychiatrist Harold Schwartzman, who Rico Slade mistakes for Joe Pesci. Things turn bizarro as Schwartzman realizes that he needs to convince Rico Slade to whore himself out to women so that Schwartzman will have more money to buy his wife bling. There’s a scene with a sandwich eating orgy and still divorce doesn’t occur to him.

This is a really messed up version of Hollywood life but considering how mad everyone in Hollywood is this book could easily be passed off as a documentary on the subject and no one would be the wiser. And that’s the real beauty of it: that you know actors are doing this stuff every day, but you just don’t live anywhere near them to prove it.