The Arachnophobia Easter Egg That's Now a Memorial

Let me tell you a tale of Brian T. Gaughan

Arachnophobia is a movie that's perhaps most notable for trying to make the neologism “thrill-omedy” happen (it did not). For me, however, there is something much more significant in there, though nothing you might think to notice at first. John Goodman plays an exterminator named Delbert McClintock, which makes me suspect screenwriters Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick were fans of bluesman Delbert McClinton, also a fave of my father's. That's neither here nor there. More significantly, when it came time to come up with a name for his fictional company, the one in the script turned out to be one they couldn't use.

I'm not sure who on the crew was responsible, but I know they were pals with my friend Brian, and told him, “Keep an eye out when you see the movie. You'll know it when you see it.” The name they went with for the extermination company was Bugs-B-Gone. My friend's full name was Brian Gaughan, which, if you know Irish pronunciations, led to him giving himself the nickname/online handle “B-Gone.” Bugs-B-Gone is named after him. Like so many of us, he had movie ambitions; his biggest success professionally was to sell a script for The Pirates of Dark Water animated series, though his biggest personal success in that area was likely befriending William Stout.

Brian died this past Friday, at the age of 64. In terms of lasting monuments, this is the one people will keep seeing for many years, possibly not knowing the story behind it. But now you do, and I'd like to tell you a little more. Brian was one of my best friends, and his life's end tears a hole in my past as it knocks the wind out of me. I can only imagine how his family, for whom he lived the most, must be coping, or not coping. (Yes, I have been in contact, so I can guess, but I'm also trying to give them space and not make them recite the same horrible details over and over again. If you've lost a loved one, you know how that is.)

When I met Brian, I was working my first W-2 job in a movie theater, and he was the presenter/merchandise guy for Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation, which would do seasonal weekend midnight shows. The biggest stretch of downtime in a theater back then would be after the weekend 10pm shows started and before they all let out to prepare for midnight crowds to hit all at once, so there was plenty of time to talk, and Brian loved to talk...about everything. Personality wise, he couldn't have been much more different that THE Spike, whom he worked for – Spike looked and sounded like a live-action version of one of the cartoons he presented, while Brian looked and sounded like a wholesome, normal, people-pleaser. But that made the contrast even more stark when Brian would introduce the shows in mock seriousness, telling the audience that unfortunately there had been some complaints about the show (“BOOOO!”) and so he had to make a disclaimer.”

Paraphrasing, it went something like this. “Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted show contains elements that some audiences may find objectionable. So if you have a problem with DICK JOKES! TIT JOKES! SHIT JOKES! FUCK JOKES! (a few others in here), IT'S CALLED SICK AND TWISTED, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE????” It got a big laugh every time, which likely encouraged Brian's own Sam Kinison-like punchline style in conversation – saying something low key, and then yelling the punchline, like, “oh, that makes perfect sense...IF YOU'RE INSANE!!!”

Perhaps nobody loved the rise of “nerd” culture more than Brian – inspired by Ain't It Cool news, he would proudly call himself a geek, and call me one too, as a compliment, though I was never one like him for embracing former playground insults. I always said if I'm a geek, I'm the sideshow kind that eats chicken heads. I had tried for years to shake the physically weak and nonthreatening stigma that accompanied “geek” and “nerd,” but Brian embraced the new self-definition that it meant learning as much as you possibly can about the things you like. And he liked almost everything. That's easy to mock, and trust me, everyone did – it was not uncommon for him to come back from some thoroughly mediocre studio programmer movie declaring “I was BLOWN AWAY!” -- but in the end, the fact is he loved everything he got into, and we should all seek to do so. Dating a classical musician? He'd immerse himself in the history of violin playing and come up the next week with something even she didn't know about her own area of supreme expertise. His toddler likes Bob the Builder? A week later he'd be emailing me that the Bob the Builder animated video Devin was watching was pretty good, actually.

Before that, though, he helped me with my photocopied zines, contributing articles as himself and various other characters to those self-publications that would ultimately win me a film critic job. We even went together to the Alternative Press Expo to promote and sell them – on the road trip up, he said we could stop anywhere we wanted, even if that meant every Toys R Us along the way, and his car rules included permission to sing loudly along to the radio (in his case, in falsetto, and let's just say Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours, he was not). We didn't sell many zines, but had a blast, and made plans for the future of it...which soon thereafter went away because I got the critic job. No matter...he had recently been on a date that went so well he said I might be attending a wedding in the fall (the aforementioned classical musician). I and some other friends told him he was nuts to move that fast, but...it worked out. In fact, it later turned out that Liana had decided after meeting him once that he was the one.

At his wedding, he said he used to fear that the right person for him had been born on the other side of the world...in fact, she had, in Armenia, but now she was here. I went down with a fellow coworker named Jack, who would later stay with both of us at different times through bouts of homelessness until we had sustained that as long as we could take. Jack was the same age as Brian – nearly 40 in 2000 – but carried himself like a crusty veteran who liked the good ol' days better, while Brian acted like a big kid who loved everything new AND old. (Fun trivia: thanks to approaching Neil LaBute at the popcorn stand, Jack appears in Nurse Betty as the stage manager, with one line: “Lemme get ya into makeup, wardrobe...”)

I briefly even got Brian into WWE wrestling, which he loved for a moment, and we went to the Wrestlemania 2000 Fan Axxess fest and recorded a commentary track together. When I first started going to Comic-Con, Brian was there, where he worked for his friend William Stout, the famous comics artist and movie production designer whom he knew at least as far back as being a PA on the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie. Brian let me stash my stuff under the table at Bill's booth, and back when you could still park in the convention center, I could leave it in his van. Brian would babysit Stout's kids, with whom he shared a love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When he had his own kids, Devin and Brianna, they became his biggest joy, and everything they got into, he would get into. He told me a story about how his dad complained to the rest of his family that he couldn't believe he'd named his son “Tigger” – he hadn't; rather he'd given Devin the middle name of Tigran, an Armenian king, but the joke was that given Brian's personality and avid consumption of all media, it was entirely plausible to his father that he might have.

Brian also helped me with my first website, along with another great friend, Matt. I knew nothing about coding, hosting, etc., but it was fun for them. I even got my first Internet service from a company Brian co-founded, along with a fellow who had the amazing name of Doric T. Jemison-Ball III. (I never met that guy, but what a moniker!) When my appendix went bad and I had to call 911, it was the days before cell phones, at least for me, and so I called Brian first, because I could only call numbers I'd memorized, and they had to be collect calls. I knew he'd take mine, and that I could count on him to find the contact info for my editor in Cleveland (a whole 'nother story) and tell him why I was missing my deadline. He and Matt together rallied some friends to help clean my apartment for when I was finally able to come home from my near-death.

Before Brian, I used to be a cynical cinephile about the Oscars, and refuse to watch them, but that show was his Superbowl, and he would cook up feasts that made his home on awards night an essential destination. For as long as I was single, I also always came to Fourth of July at his place, where we'd cook outside, and then drive to some dark Pasadena street to watch distant fireworks. He'd never have alcohol – being Chicago Irish, he thought genetic odds were against him (his father's “Irish diet” consisted of abstaining from New Year's to St. Patrick's Day) – but he shared my passion for exotic and limited-edition sodas, such that he maintained a cellar of them like some people do with wine. (For a Chicagoan, he sure loved the hell out of his adopted Pasadena, which, in Brian fashion, he proceeded to learn every single detail about). My own mother, who likes almost no Americans, liked Brian, though she kept forgetting his wife's name.

Brian even tried to help with my chronic undateable-ness, making him maybe the only friend who ever did, when he tried to fix me up with his sister-in-law. Though it didn't ultimately pan out, it was fun while it lasted, and both she and I have beautiful families of our own now, so that worked out for the best.

Reading back on this, and taking stock of all he did for me – he even helped me move, more than once – I feel like I didn't do enough in return. I was happy that a couple of Comic-Cons ago, I was finally able to get a plus-one to a VIP Disney party, due to the actor's strike forcing every celebrity to bow out, and even though he left pretty early, it was me finally being able to fill a long-standing request that I get him into one. We reconnected after my marital life kind of pulled me in another direction for a while, and had plans to make more lunch dates at various Pasadena eateries. He last showed up at my 50^th birthday, ducked out to see a movie that another of my friends had just recommended to him, then came back to talk about how great it was.

Losing Brian at the same time I lose much of my old career, most of my LA life, and other friends recently departed or soon to do so, feels like part and parcel of a sea change in my life I did not want, but need to embrace, as he did, in order to enjoy everything to the fullest. He spent his last day doing one of the many things he loved – attending a theme park to people-watch.

Brian was culturally Catholic, but spiritually I think more of a universalist – I never spoke much to him on the topic, but I always figured him imagining a Sandman-like afterworld, or something more cosmic. If he could say something now about his life, I imagine it would be the same thing he always said to me, after I was aggravated by some movie or another and poking holes in its logic...

“I liked it. I thought it was good.”

It was.

B-Gone, B-Not Forgotten.

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