So I told her I was coming and I quickly gave my notice and packed my things. The next day I took the train back to my parents’ house in Virginia to drop off my work clothes and get clothes proper for unpaid grunt work. Dee and I didn’t have a place to live yet, but we did have a few weeks until the movie started. I borrowed my parents’ car, a crappy Chevy Celebrity, and drove by myself into New York City. This time I was convinced that my life was finally going to begin. No more false starts; even if this didn’t work out, at least it would be something worth remembering.
Dee and I got every paper and made call after call, searching for a suitable place to live. We walked for miles, up and down the city, checking out each and every room, of which there were few. We talked up bartenders and waitresses, college students and professors; we woke up at 5 a.m. to be on the street when the Village Voice was dropped off, we tried begging and bribery, and we finally got a few leads on possible places for rent. We saw an efficiency apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that had the bathtub in the kitchen. It wasn’t even big enough for us to be in the same room at the same time. To get any privacy one of us would have to stay in the bathroom, a tiny room with just a toilet; to wash your hands you also had to use the kitchen. But even in the bathroom you weren’t actually alone, cockroaches scattered each time the single yellow light bulb was turned on and something scurried across the floor each time it was shut off.
We saw a five-floor walk-up railroad apartment in the Lower East Side. Our lungs and sides stabbing with pain by the time we reached the top-floor apartment but we still considered taking it. At least until we went out that night; walking out of the building we were caught in a fluid stream of junkies. It was like a zombie film, but instead of brains they were searching for dope. Winding lines formed at burned-out buildings. A burly man in a worn leather jacket stood guard at every corner, crossing guards directing the dope fiends to the proper spot, to their own personal place of safety. You got into line, then when you made it to the front you handed one guy your money and he passed it off to another kid, then he would jerk a hanging rope, the number of yanks telling the boy above what you were supposed to receive. The rope was attached to a can which was hoisted up to the second or third floor, they put the glassine baggies of dope, marked with stamps or skulls or names like Redrum, into the can and lowered it back down. Even the drug dealers understood branding. They were marketers as savvy as Pepsi or Coca-Cola, an old drug for a new generation.
We watched as the drug addicts pushed up their sleeves to show their track marks, proof that they weren’t cops, desperate badges of tainted honour. We also watched them scatter like rats in the light whenever the cops did appear. Rumour was that once in a while the police would load up all of the junkies into a wagon and drive them around until they were sick or drop them far uptown in Harlem or the Bronx. It was probably true; there wouldn’t have been enough room in the Tombs to hold them all.
We watched them slink into abandoned, boarded-up buildings after they scored – dirty shooting galleries where diseases spread like rumours in a high school. It was a bit scary and depressing but it was also strangely thrilling. Simply walking through those night-time streets was a rush of crazy adrenaline, a drug in itself. I remembered books like Burroughs’ Junkie and I wondered if he too had walked these streets, scored in these same buildings, and in a sad, twisted way, it was almost glamorous to me. Of course I didn’t know the truth, couldn’t know the truth. That would come years later.
But when we went to look at our apartment we saw rats, large and fierce, crawling out of a gigantic hole in the foundation of the building. We saw a woman, skinny as a rail, her jutting hipbones and pointed elbows poking out of her, squatting on the sidewalk and taking a shit right in front of our front door. We hesitated, but after speaking to a weathered man who perched like a gargoyle on the front steps and learning that the apartments were robbed almost weekly, we finally decided against renting it.
We were staying at Dee’s grandmother’s apartment, all the way up the East Side at Ninetieth and York. It was a typical older woman’s apartment. The plastic-covered couch folded out and we shared it; by morning we both had rolled into the crack, stuck together in the heat. She had a window air-conditioner unit that she refused to use; instead she preferred shaking her head and complaining about those crooks at Con Ed. We stayed there for a few weeks until a friend of mine from back home called and said she heard I needed a place to stay. She lived in a studio apartment in the East Village, right on St Mark’s Place between Second and Third Avenues. We walked all the way downtown and met her that evening. An hour later we had signed her sublet lease and made plans to move in. For almost two weeks we shared a studio apartment on St Mark’s. It was a very close fit. Lou Reed used to live in our building and every Saturday morning tour buses would pull up out front and the entire bus would empty, necks tilting, cameras clicking and the entire crowd collectively oohing and aahing, between asking each other who this Lou Reed had been, and if he was famous.
We would sit on the balcony and throw extra eggrolls at the punk rock bouncer of Coney Island High. I loved that apartment. New York in the early 1990s was a much different place than it is now. It was dirty, gritty, real. Today you will see well-dressed people eating at chic cafés, but back then it was homeless kids and heroin addicts, artists and beautiful androgynous boys and girls. It was alive; the very streets pulsed with danger. Every night was like dipping your toe in quicksand, a little too far and you could feel how easy it would be to be sucked in, warm and smooth, enveloping you like a fleece blanket, seducing you deeper and deeper. We weren’t there long. During that second week her other roommate came back from her European vacation months early and we were, once again, homeless.
Finally, we lucked into a two-bedroom apartment on Seventh and D when two junkies overdosed and died, their bodies undiscovered and decomposing around the stained vinyl kitchen table. At one point it had been a bright and cheery yellow, the top was now nicked and scarred, gouges had been violently spooned out of it. We got the apartment for a great price, an amazing price actually, and all we had to do was clean out all the shit they left behind – including a drawer full of used hypodermic needles and a closet floor of clothes that stuck together and smelled as if they had never been washed.
My friend, Dee, and I moved in before the place was completely clean. We found old letters, photographs, and a large, brown spatter of old blood behind the bed. Underneath the bed frame was a collection of dried boogers. Rotting food made opening the refrigerator more a dare than a domestic event. It was depressing and disgusting, I had done heroin but not like this. I had snorted a bit here and there but I had never shot up and didn’t understand what really being a junkie actually meant. This apartment was my first taste of the reality of that lifestyle, and even with the evidence surrounding me I still neglected to accept it.
Dee and I had already started working on our first film set. Not Hollywood film sets but independent guerrilla-style film sets, the kind with no money. These are the people you see running from transit cops and using stolen shopping carts as dollies. It was guerrilla filmmaking at its finest. To a girl fresh out of college, not yet skilled in the ways of the world or the ways of men or love, it was incredibly romantic.
Just as Dee had promised, the first job we got was as production assistants or PAs. We worked our asses off for no money, just paper plates groaning under the weight of all the carb-heavy food from the craft services table. But we had an idea, we would specialize, learn a skill. So Dee attached herself to the grips, putting together scaffolding, and building things, and I began training as an electrician. I loved it. There was a beautiful, tall, thin, mulatto boy named John, who wore T-shirts boasting little-known punk bands, and shorts with combat boots. It took me just a week to convince him that I was worth keeping around, that I could do the job. Finally, he took me under his wing.
He taught me how to put up scaffolding, how to adjust lights, how to create shadows. He t
aught me how to tie in to live power lines and steal electricity. This was the biggest rush. You attached metal alligator clips onto live electric wires. You were supposed to stand on a rubber mat while someone stood behind you with a thick, heavy wooden board. If you were sucked into the power current they would have to hit you really hard and knock you out of it. I got shocked a few times, but I never had to be whacked across the back with that impending piece of plywood.
My hands were small and I was unafraid. Back then I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would walk into the heart of Alphabet City at any time by myself and buy whatever illegal substance I wanted or thought that I needed. I did things that now make me cringe with fear and self-awareness. I climbed down an elevator shaft to lay cables, mice and rats crawling over my feet. I hung off a broken statue with one hand, twenty feet in the air, to hide the thick, black cable. I didn’t care. Every day was an adventure, and every new experience a dare to be accomplished.
Strangers pointed at the tiny girl buckling under the weight of the bulky, heavy lights. I squeezed through chained doors and cracked windows to get into locked rooms with beckoning electrical boxes. Often I was the only one who could fit. People were impressed by my fearlessness, my ability to take everything in my stride. I used to have dreams, night after night, about winding cable, feet and feet of black cable, rolling it around my arm until it was a huge, thick roll of dead power.
There was something thrilling about working with electricity. It was alive, dangerous. Electricity always has to be balanced. You have to measure, to make sure that one part of the set isn’t using more than the other. That meant you had to lay cable evenly, plug the right paddle cords into the right boxes. If the balance was off you could end up with a power overload, and either no power at all or a fire – the type of fire that wasn’t even afraid of water.
Making a movie is all about light. It’s about capturing light, manipulating light. You use light to suggest what time of day it is, to set ambience and feeling. Lights on a film set are huge and bulky. They’re heavy, you put them on stands and point them at anything that needs to be illuminated, uncovered. Once they are set you can place barn doors on them, a metal box with “doors” so you can close them to cut the light, or keep it from shining on a certain part of the set. Scrims are also used to cut the light; different size scrims allow you to control how much light you cut. Gels are used to change the colours, blues and oranges to create day and night. I’d put on my heavy, insulated work gloves and eagerly climb up the metal scaffolding. I’d be sitting on top, queen of the city, waiting to make the adjustments to my big light as soon as the director of photography, or John, was ready to instruct me.
I also drove the film truck, packed with expensive equipment, because no one else wanted to. It was hard driving a big rig through a crowded city, making wide right turns and avoiding pedestrians. Road construction was an especially irritating and terrifying event.
I was the only girl electrician most of the other grips, gaffers, and crew hands had seen. They laughed at me, running around making sure everything was in place, but they stopped laughing when I lifted forty-pound lights and placed them expertly on top of a stand the size of my finger or moved around a hundred-degree light with my bare hands because the director couldn’t wait. I impressed them all, but the only one I really cared about was John.
On a typical film we’d work three weeks of days and one week of nights. Each day was twelve to sixteen hours of work. We worked all summer, sweating under the hot sun and even hotter lamps. I’d get home and wash off a thick, black layer of dirt and grime, the city itself having transferred to my skin. I hated getting stuck sitting on a set when the cameras started rolling because you’d have to be perfectly quiet. It sounds glamorous but it was horrible. If you were stuck in a squat, then in a squat you’d stay, whether your legs began to ache before falling asleep or not. We’d stumble home, backs bent and shoulders burning, shuffling our feet all the way to our beds. Then we’d wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. and do it all over again. Leaving our apartment in the thin darkness of the morning and returning in the thicker, blacker darkness of night. Our lives were nothing but the film. Films we would never see, films almost no one would ever see. The crew members became family, the actors distant cousins who made you slightly uncomfortable every time they walked into the room.
On the weeks that we worked nights it was a mad hurry of doing laundry, going to the bank, and it was the one week that we actually had to buy groceries. The rest of the time we’d simply fill our backpacks and Tupperware containers with lasagna, baked ziti, and everything else in the pasta family that the creative craft services could think of to feed us. We’d say to ourselves that we would have time to spend with ourselves, that we would go to museums, get some culture, read a book, but usually, starting around two in the afternoon, we’d find our way to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.
The Holiday was the diviest of dive bars. It was always dark in the Holiday, no matter what time it was. Sad, dingy Christmas lights hung year-round over the big mirror behind the bar, plastic palm trees from a celebration that was long since forgotten were still pasted on that mirror, their corners lazily peeling off over the years. The big oak bar took up the entire right side of the establishment, a few cocktail tables littered the left, and in the back were two tattered red vinyl booths, and a jukebox. The same people sat at the bar day after day, lonely men and women who were older than they looked, hands shaking as they lifted that first blessed drink of the day, extras from a Bukowski book, perfectly cast for their own never-ending dramas. The bartender was nice enough; he looked the part with his shocking white hair, passing his days polishing glasses.
John and I would duck in, a dark respite from the brutal heat of a summer in the city. It was always cool in the Holiday; in here, time crawled. We’d stop at the bar to order $2 watered-down vodka cranberries in tall, thin glasses with even thinner straws. We’d stand side by side at the bar, our shoulders touching, and even that faintest touch bringing back the electricity. Then we’d head to the back, again side by side, and each time our legs touched it was a surprise. John would play the jukebox, the same songs over and over. “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed and “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell were my favourites and to this day they both take me back there.
We’d talk and laugh and make plans for the next movie we’d work on. John always promised to take me with him. It was in the Holiday that we first kissed. John took my hand, running his thumb back and forth over my palm, his touch inspiring me. He pulled my hand close to him and leaned in and kissed me. His lips were strong and his breath tasted faintly acidic like cranberries. We held that kiss for as long as we could and when it was over he pulled back and we looked at each other. We had wanted this for so long, skirted around it for so many days until the tension itself had become palpable, sexy. I bit my lip and lowered my eyes and he lifted my chin with his hand. He smiled at me and we kissed again before we were interrupted by Dee and two brothers, Jorge and Mikey, who worked with her as grips. They slid into the booth with us, unaware of what had just happened.
We were all excited, that night we were shooting on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. I had never been up there and couldn’t wait to see a new view of the city. John and I had to pick up the generators so we took off early. Once we had them we met everyone at the staging location at the base of the bridge. It was a strange day, the air was quivering with tension; in California they would have called it earthquake weather but in New York it is a rare feeling for summer. It was more like Halloween – that spooky impending feeling you can’t explain yet you can’t shake.
The entire crew and all of the actors started walking up the ramp to the bridge two by two, like the animals ascending into Noah’s ark or little children attached by that invisible bond of the buddy system. Low conversations drifted back to John and me as we pushed the generators ahead of us. Dee and Mikey each took a corner and, laughing, we made it up the ramp, calves aching as we pushed one
leg in front of the other. Finally we made it to the top. New York, alive and buzzing, a million lights each promising a million stories, shone back at us; on the other side was Brooklyn, darker, it appeared almost naked – the strong silent type compared with its dazzling show-offy sister.
Like the starter pistol at a race or the quick snap of a finger, the director clapped and off we went, struggling to get light stands and lights set up, an impromptu make-up station, and the director began preparing the actors. John and I were working as one, passing tools back and forth without asking, exchanging meaningful glances and laughing at nothing. When you work together in a situation like this, where every second counts, and often where one of you can’t move, it’s important that your partner feels confident that if he asks you to do something it will get done. We had that relationship. We depended on each other implicitly.
We had got off the first shot when the rain started. It was a light drizzle at first, nothing more than a fine mist. By the time we had set up the second shot, the sky opened and the world began to cry. It sobbed, bawled and with the first huge crack of thunder, it was as if Zeus himself was shaking a gigantic rattle in the holiest of temper tantrums. We were out in the open; there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. People were screaming, panicking, worried about getting a little wet but John and I were the ones dealing with live electricity. There is nothing like the heaven-splitting strike of that first lightning when you are high above a dark body of water, hundreds of cars racing right beneath you, and live wires at your feet. The director, producer and PAs began ushering people off the bridge. John and I started taking down the lights. The thunder and lightning were getting closer together, and we were moving as fast as we could. Other people were taking our disassembled lights and stacking them on dollies, like lines of dismembered heads on gurneys. I ran over to unplug that last cable and the largest bolt of lightning I had ever witnessed crashed across the sky. The hairs all over my body stood up and I could feel the shock passing through me. It wasn’t bad, I was lucky, but I still felt it. I pulled my hand back and John was right behind me, holding my arms. I turned to him, shaking and he kissed me, hard.
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