The guy handed the radio back to her. She put it to her ear and started walking north with the herd.
The voice on the radio was suddenly hysterical. “We’re losing it! We’re losing it! OMIGOD!”
She turned and looked down Broadway. Her building was collapsing. Boom! Boom! Boom! Like one of those structures in a demolition movie. A huge cloud of thick gray dust rushed toward them up the street. She turned again and ran. Past the church with the pealing bells. The sexton had thought to do that. As if he were in some medieval village that had the plague.
She had walked all the way to Riverdale that day. Over the Henry Hudson Bridge. Her knee never recovered, had not stopped hurting since. She never returned to physical therapy. Just the thought of physical therapy brought back that picture in the papers the next day. The guy falling though the air. Head down. The familiar building behind him. She had looked and looked at that picture. Sometimes she was sure it was Harry. Other days, it didn’t look like his hair.
The buzzer on the luggage carousel sounded and the metal belt started to move. Bags moved down the slope onto the belt in front of her. The Hasidic guy peered at a huge black one, frowned, and then let it pass. It came around again. Blood dripped from a small opening where the zippers met at the top. Bright and shining, it pooled onto the metal of the conveyor. She breathed in to scream as it went by. She held her breath. People would call her a hysteric. Seeing blood all the time, knowing that if she had jumped that day her body would have liquefied. That’s what they said. That a body hitting the ground from such a height just liquefies. The bottoms of her feet were sweating. Just like driving over a bridge.
Her bag came tumbling down the slope. She saw the green ribbons on the zipper. Not red. Not blood. She grabbed her bag, turned in her card at Customs, and dragged it to the nearest restroom. She couldn’t drive over the bridge. She just couldn’t.
In the handicapped stall, she sat on the toilet and laid the big bag down. Inside was her toiletries kit, with all that stuff you can’t carry with you on a plane anymore.
She unzipped it and pulled out a pink disposable razor. She wedged it under the toilet paper dispenser and pressed hard. It bent but would not break. She put her foot against it too and finally it popped with a loud metallic crack.
“Are you okay in there?” a voice from another stall called.
“Fine,” she said.
She retrieved the razor blade from the floor and held it carefully between her thumb and forefinger. This is better, she thought. She could stop the pictures in her head of Harry liquefying on the sidewalk. She could finally do what she was supposed to have done. She cut along the blue veins on her wrists. She held out her arms and let the blood drip on the green ribbons, running them red, like the blood in baggage claim.
ARRIVEDERCI, ALDO
BY KIM SYKES
Long Island City
I love my job. How many people can say that?
I could be working security in a department store over in Manhattan, where they make you follow old ladies with large purses and mothers with baby strollers. Or in an office tower doing Homeland Security detail, looking at photo IDs all day and pretending I care whether you belong in a building full of uninteresting lawyers and accountants, most of whom come to work hoping I’d find a reason to stop them from going in. Or guarding a bank where you’re so bored that you consider robbing it yourself or kicking one of those lousy machines that charge two dollars to do what a bank is supposed to do for free.
My friends tell me I got it pretty good because I work security at Silvercup Studios where they shoot television shows, movies, and commercials. Not to mention the fact that it’s not far from my walkup in Long Island City. My neighbors treat me like I’m a celebrity. Which is pretty funny since my mother worked at Silvercup in the ’50s baking bread and nobody ever treated her like she was somebody, except me and my father.
Yeah, okay, I see lots of good-looking men and pretty girls, famous singers and movie stars. No big deal. They’re just like you and me. Especially without the makeup and the fancy clothes. They all come in with uncombed hair, comfortable shoes, and sunglasses. Some of them got egos to match the size of the cars they drive up in. They arrive with their assistants and their entourages carrying everything from little dogs to adopted babies. Some of them pride themselves as just folks and come in on the subway. The one thing they all got in common is that I make them sign in. It’s my job. They might be celebrities, but I treat them all the same.
There are exceptions, like the directors and the producers. They don’t bother to sign in. Every day they walk past my security desk and one of their “people” will whisper to me who they are. You’d think they were royalty or something. I check their names off a special list the office gives me. The boss says that they pay the bills and we should make them happy no matter what. I guess when you’re in charge of making multimillion-dollar movies, it’s the little things that matter, like not having to write down your own name.
Then there’s everybody in between, the ones who are not movie stars—the supporting and background actors, backup singers, and the hoochie girls in the music videos. When they come in, all eager and excited, they usually put their names in the wrong places and walk through the wrong doors. Especially the first-timers. They don’t pay much attention to anything except the hopes and dreams in their heads.
Last, but not least, there’s the crew. Most of these guys I know by sight. They come in when it’s still dark outside and that’s usually when they leave too. They walk past me half asleep. It’s hard work getting up before dawn every day, unloading, setting up and breaking down and loading up again— not to mention looking after all those people. So sometimes I try to make their days a little easier. If I’ve never seen them before, they sign in. If I know them, I let them go through, but you didn’t hear that from me. You see, we got thirteen studios and they’re in a constant state of shooting something. So sometimes I have to bend the rules.
* * *
The phone at my security desk rings and I almost fall backwards in my chair. It’s probably the boss’s office telling me about an unexpected delivery or adding a name to the list. You see, they got it under control up there. The next day’s schedule and sign-in sheets are usually done at midnight and placed on my desk for the following morning. We run a tight ship around here, so when the phone rings it’s pretty important. I answer it on the second ring.
“Yes, sir?” I straighten up in my seat. It’s the boss himself.
“Listen, Josephine, we got an intruder walking around the premises.”
I can hardly believe my ears. The news makes me stand up and grab hold of my nightstick, my only weapon.
“I’m sorry, sir,” comes tumbling out of my mouth. I feel as if I’ve let him down. Being the only woman in security here at Silvercup, I know I have to work harder than everybody else.
“He’s walking in on sets, Jo. He’s ruined a shot in Studio 7, for Christ’s sake. See who the hell this guy is, will you? Probably some damn background actor looking to be discovered.”
It happens occasionally that extra players, bored with waiting around, go exploring the place in hopes of finding the next job. Sooner or later a production assistant spots them and sends the poor thing back to where he or she belongs. The fact is, Silvercup is the last place you’ll be discovered. By the time actors get here, they’re just numbers in a producer’s budget. If you’re not in the budget, you’re not in the shot. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but I can count them on one hand.
“Anybody say what he looks like?” I ask my boss.
“White, around thirty. Wearing clogs.”
“Clogs?”
“That’s what they tell me. Just take care of it, Jo.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
There are thirteen studios here at Silvercup, and at least two sign-in sheets for each one. We’re talking hundreds of people. It’s barely 10 o’clock and the place is packed. This is not goi
ng to be easy. On one of the sheets, a couple of wise-asses signed in as Mick Jagger and Flavor Flav. They came in early. I can tell by the names before and after them. That means these comedians are with the crew. I take a moment to remember who came by my desk just before dawn. There was nobody I didn’t know. And I would have remembered a guy wearing clogs.
The new guard, Kenneth, is checking out the Daily News and eating his second meal of the morning. His plate is piled high. He is reading his horoscope and is oblivious to my panic. I watch him dunk a powdered donut into milky coffee and drip the muddy mess on his blue vest. I hand him a paper napkin and look past him at the tiny security screens mounted on the wall. Like I said, there are thirteen studios here, with at least three times that many bathrooms, not to mention dressing rooms, storage rooms, production offices. These little screens are useless to me. You’d think we’d have better video equipment here, but we don’t.
Still, nobody-but-nobody gets past me. I pride myself on that. I’m famous, if you will, for keeping the place tight and secure. Okay, I’m not going to make it seem like I’m guarding the U.S. Mint, but we get a lot of people trying to come in here, like rag reporters or crazed fans or desperate actors. They don’t have weapons but they have things that are far more lethal to us like pens, cameras, and unrealistic expectations. It’s my job to protect Silvercup and everybody inside from all that. My job and reputation are at stake, and I’m not going to let some clog-wearing twerp or donut-eating knucklehead ruin it.
Just my luck, my other two colleagues are at lunch. That leaves me and the munching machine, who since he got here has been visiting the different sets and mooching free meals. I watch him fold the News and start the Post. He reminds me of myself when I started on the job years ago. After the rush of the morning, it slows down to a crawl. Keeping yourself awake is a chore. Thanks to plenty of coffee, newspapers and magazines, and hopefully some good conversation, you can remain alert most of your shift.
Then there’s the food. Each production has it’s own catered breakfast, lunch, and if they’re here long enough, dinner. My first six months I gained twenty pounds and it’s been with me ever since. One day it’s fresh lobsters from a restaurant chain shooting commercials, then it’s a week of birthday cakes from a television show. Here, at any given time, someone somewhere is eating something. Makes you wonder where the term “starving actor” came from.
I’m not too confident in this boy’s abilities, especially after I see him bite into his breakfast burrito and squirt half of it on his lap. But he’s the only guy I got on the desk right now, since the other two have gone off on a break. So I tell him to keep an eye out for a white guy wearing clogs and to call me on the walkie if he sees anything suspicious. He doesn’t bother to ask me what’s going on or about the clogs even, and I don’t bother to fill him in. I give him two weeks, if that.
I take today’s schedule with me. I have to be careful not to excite or disturb the productions going on. Today we’ve got four commercials, two cop shows, three sitcoms, one movie, and two music videos shooting, not to mention the Home Shopping Network, which has it’s permanent home here. That means hundreds of actors and crew roaming the place. I decide to go up and work my way down. I don’t bother with the top floor where the boss’s office is. I figure a guy in clogs is not interested in that. A guy in clogs wants attention. He wants to be discovered. And that means I got to go where the directors and the actors are. I take the freight elevator to the second floor.
When the doors open, I see a herd of suits, some eating bagels, others reading or having intense conversations. It’s like I just walked in on a business conference at some firm on Wall Street, only the men are wearing makeup and the women have rollers in their hair. I move past them to Frank, a production assistant I know pretty well. He’s worked here at Silvercup almost as long as I have.
“Yo, Frank, all your people accounted for?” I ask him.
Frank silently counts the actors.
“Yeah. Why?”
“We got somebody walking around the place. He screwed up a shot in 7.”
“Moron.”
“Yeah. You see anyone who doesn’t belong, call me.”
“You got it, Jo.
“Oh, and he’s wearing clogs.”
Frank raises an eyebrow.
“Don’t ask,” I tell him.
I walk to the other side of the building. Past storage rooms that have complicated lock systems installed. You have to have a combination or a special key. On some of them you need both. I try the doors anyway. Better to be sure.
My schedule says they’re setting up a music video in the next studio. Whether they want to or not, they usually start shooting later in the day. Pop and rap singers don’t like to get up in the morning. They can afford not to. The crew was there, however, installing stripper poles for a rap video.
“What’s shaking, Jo?” says Dimples, a pot-bellied Irishman carrying heavy cables. I cross the studio floor toward him.
“You won’t believe it,” I say as I approach. “I’ve got some guy walking around the place messing up shots.”
His cheeks flushed, betraying his nickname. “Was he wearing clogs?”
I nearly choke on the chocolate-covered peanuts I just snatched from the Kraft table. “Yeah, you seen him?”
“About ten minutes ago. He walked in here asking for Tony Soprano. I thought he was joking.” Dimples takes off one of his thick gloves and scratches his bulbous nose. “He had an accent. Italian, or maybe Spanish. It’s hard to tell. Tiny guy, though. No bigger than my leg. Kept stuffing bagels into his pants, like he was saving them for later. He creeped me, so I chased him out of here.”
“Which way did he go?” I ask, licking chocolate from my fingers.
“I followed him out to the hall and watched him take the stairs down. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Thanks.”
I run toward the exit and take the steps two at a time. I figure if I move quickly enough, I can catch up with him. Besides, how fast can a guy in clogs go? But when I get to the bottom landing, I have to sit down. They say, if you don’t use it you lose it. And after all these years, I have definitely lost it. When I was younger, if somebody had said to me I would be tired after running down a flight of stairs, I would have kicked his ass. Now the very thought of lifting my foot to carry out my threat exhausts me. Not counting vacations and holidays, I have mostly spent my time sitting behind the security desk watching others come and go. The last time I chased anyone was awhile back when a mother-daughter team tried to get an autographed picture of Sarah Jessica Parker. They would have succeeded if they hadn’t been as out of shape as I was.
I look down at my ankles. They’re swollen. It makes me think of my mother, who would come home from work, worn out, same swollen feet as mine, in the days when this place supplied bread for schools in Queens and the Bronx and parts of Manhattan. Now, instead of filling their stomachs with dough, we fill their heads with it.
The mayor keeps telling us that New York City has grown safer now that violent crimes are at the lowest rates they’ve been in a decade. That’s true everywhere except on television and in the movies. It’s as if Hollywood didn’t get the memo. Production companies spit out cop show after cop show, movies full of mobsters and gang-bangers who kill and rape, rob and shoot one another—in the name of entertainment. It’s not Silvercup’s fault. We don’t write the scripts. We just provide the space to film them in.
I push myself up from the steps and enter the first floor. First thing, down the hall, I see two guys about to come to blows. Any moment the fists are going to fly. I stand quietly off to the side and watch. I know that when the time comes for one of them to throw the first punch, they’ll calm down and probably laugh or pat each other on the back. This time they do both.
“Hey, Jo, what’s up?” Edward, the one with the perfect teeth, calls me over. I shake his manicured hand. He plays a serial killer on one of the cop shows. He’s on for the who
le season. Nice guy, great family man, good kids.
“Same ole, same ole,” I answer. “You seen a guy running around here in clogs?”
The actors laugh, thinking I am about to tell a joke.
“I’m not kidding.” I say this with my best poker face.
Ed drops his grin. “No, just us up here running lines before our scene. Why?”
“Nothing serious. Sorry I interrupted you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the new guy chirps. He has a shaved head, which from a distance made him look thuggish, but now that I’m closer to him, I can see that he’s a kid barely out of school. Must be his first big part. This morning when he signed in he was a little anxious around the eyes; polite though. Probably right out of college and here he is playing a street thug, the kind his mother and father sent him to university so as not to become. If this script is like all the others, his character’s going to be shot or killed and sent off to prison by the afternoon. That’s show business.
I stick my hands in my pockets. It’s cold in here, I want to get back to my desk where I keep a space heater tucked down below. The boss has the thermostat in the low sixties, even in winter. He says it keeps everybody on their toes.
The next studio is dark except for the set, which looks like a doctor’s office. They’re rehearsing a scene for a pharmaceutical commercial. A very nervous actor in a doctor’s coat is having trouble with his lines. When he gets to the part about the side effects, he starts to laugh. But no one else thinks it’s funny. Time is money and everyone is frustrated, including the director, who makes the actor even more uncomfortable by sighing loudly and storming off between takes.
After my eyes have adjusted to the dark, I glance around the room. The crew, producers, and other actors are standing around, quietly waiting for the next take, hoping this day will come to an end so they can all go home. Everyone except what I will later describe to the press as a deranged imp—no more than five feet tall. He’s standing off to the side, eating a bagel that he has just pulled out of his tights.
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