Rivington Was Ours

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  My face nodded and smiled. My soul cried out, One time. They’re going to torture me for kissing someone one time.

  “Brendan,” the director said, “you’ll be fourth through the curtain.”

  Great. Now when the video comes out Guy can go find Nikki and say, “See? We weren’t crazy. They couldn’t even keep their hands off of each other at the shoot!” And then add, “You wanna go back to my place?”

  The director had more advice for the other background kids but I couldn’t pay attention. The director of the music video—my music video?—has just asked me to put the moves on my friend’s girlfriend.

  I found myself taking a big swig of the warm bottle of André in my hand. It fizzled on top of the huevos rancheros in my nervous stomach.

  The director turned around and caught me taking a swig and smiled. “Good!” she said, after giving everyone else their notes. “It’s a party in here! Let’s have some fun!”

  ASIAN GIRL TROMPED THROUGH. NERDY boy in leather did my schtick this time for some reason—Gaga? What are you doing here? A real-life drink spill made the next girl in heels clutch both walls and step over her as Gaga wriggled on the floor. Then someone pushed a hand into my back and sent me in. It’s just theater, right? Everyone back home will barely see it.

  I hopped off the couch and rushed through the curtain like a drunk scenester looking for the bathroom. The curtains parted and I walked through like someone coming into the live room at Pianos between songs: Sorry, is this where the party’s at? I grabbed Gaga on my way through and she turned to me like a girl who thought she’d spotted her boyfriend by the touch. Her eyes followed the black leather jacket up to me and when she found my eyes we locked gaze.

  Only we were not two Hollywood actors.

  We were not two kids in a high school play who had to pretend to be lovers.

  Every single thing about this moment felt wrong.

  Gaga looked up at me.

  Our eyes met.

  I felt like the drunk guy at the party should feel when everyone looks at him in pity. Only it’s 9:45 in the morning on principle photography of a music video. And I’ve just grabbed my friend’s girlfriend for a love scene. Instead of leaning in for the kiss I ran off and found myself wishing wardrobe could have stitched a tail between my legs.

  “CUT!”

  I sat back on the arm of the couch as the other backgroundlings discussed whether they might have time for a smoke. Everyone went back to the conversation they abandoned only minutes before. (“My cousin is a PA on that show but he said they already hired a full cast through a separate agency.” “I only go there on Mondays . . .”) I felt terrible. I felt like Guy had threatened me the month before because he didn’t want this exact moment to happen. If the damn guy had shown up to the video we wouldn’t have this problem. And where were the boys from Semi Precious Weapons?

  An older man walked over to me with a stern face. I wondered for a moment if I was getting fired. Can anyone flunk out of the world of music video extras? “Hey, uhm . . . ”

  “Yeah?” I said, facing the music. “What?”

  He turned out to be the owner of Alexander Residence. The proprietor of couches. He elected to stay on location and watch a bunch of Hollywood extras jump on his furniture and pour dirt-cheap champagne on the shag carpet. Now that the cameras had stopped rolling he had something to say. “Don’t sit on the arm of the sofa. It’s not good for it.”

  This guy and his fucking couches. I guess he would know best how to keep a couch from the seventies going.

  Soon we got a flood of cameos. Colby O’Donis did his verse. The one I was singing three days ago. We had exactly as much interaction as I ever expected and I never once met him again. Akon and I had a scene on the couch where we rocked out and spilled champagne among our tacky plastic party cups. He passed the bottle around like a playboy in Saint-Tropez. I told him that where we came from, rock stars knew how to pour a drink.

  BUT THE MOMENT I WILL keep with me for the rest of my life happened just a minute after. Over by the edge of the living room—the anti-thesis of action—I found Gaga standing by the wrapped cord and lighting rigs. It occured to me that if Guy and the Weapons had made it to the shoot, she might have had to entertain them for the day. It was the scenester’s curse that you might invite all of your friends to see you play and then ignore them the entire time you have on stage. But instead I found her over by the VTR, where they watched the playback of the video they’d just shot.

  She stood there with her arms folded in front of her chest, her right hand gripping an elbow and her left hand by her mouth with a manicured fingernail pressed to her teeth. By all laws of diva-ism and music videodom, she could have sat in her trailer. The girl had a boyfriend to Skype and a business to run. She really shouldn’t have to worry about what the local kids looked like when they pretended to look like out-of-focus Lower East Side scenesters. But to Gaga right then, there was nothing more important than every single frame that came through that camera. Editing didn’t matter. Fine adjustments didn’t matter. Gaga didn’t even have a record out yet, but I could see the way she wanted to fine-tune the details right from the start. But she knew the rules:

  A record is only as good as the tracks.

  The tracks are only as good as the mix.

  The secret to a good mix is good recording.

  In my mind I’ve started to see things clearer

  At the next break outside I looked up and realized that I was standing in front of Space Cowboy, the guy who would play the DJ in the video. He sat next to my nerdy stunt double in the leather jacket. He stood out from the thrift-store crowd in a smartly tailored Savile Road suit from London. He held a black-and-red Blackjack phone, checking with it occasionally as if it were his secretary on a slow day at work: Any calls? For no apparent reason he has taken my small, anonymous part in a music video for the day.

  There is a reason for every single thing in the world, Brendan. However, that reason is rarely evident.

  He looked a bit like he’d only got invited to the party so he could DJ and never made any attempt to talk to anyone. Neither on screen or off. Even here he stood tribeless among the music video world. The Pro Tools don’t consider him one of theirs and the AD wouldn’t even know what to tell him he’s doing all wrong. He didn’t eat with the crew or mix in with the other people from Interscope. It felt for a second as if I were watching them dress someone to play me on camera, especially the way he was in the thick of the video and still removed from the party, alone.

  Then I remembered the last time someone who looked like me took over my role.

  This is probably unhealthy to entertain, but I will go ahead and say it: The guy who replaced me in this music video looked like the guys who girlfriends replace me with right after we break up. He’s just another James. We looked identical in every way the camera would see. Shaggy brown hair, weekly shaven stubble, and the lazy-eyed look in our pronounced lower eyelids that came from working hours like these. If you put a pair of sunglasses on him we might look far too identical. When Nikki left me for that waiter, our mutual friends all referred to him as the “less handsome version” of me. That’s supposed to make me feel better. But it begs the question: What is so goddamn wrong with me that you would run to the shorter, dumber, or “less handsome version” of me the second we break up? Especially since no one has ever listed “wish you were just a little bit less handsome” when breaking up with me. What do these other guys have going on that they can afford to lose a couple of inches or have a crooked nose and still beat me out? Obviously he must snuggle better, pick her up from work five minutes before I would, and remember all of her sisters’ names and birthdays or something. It’s probably all written down in that phone he clutched.

  He looked up at me and that’s when I realized I was staring.

  “Space Cowboy?” He followed my voice hopefully, wondering if he might be needed on set. “The gangster of love himself.” I apparently don’t know
any jokes—I just say things out loud like a joke. I suck at life.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Have you ever had a good strong magnet that you can barely peel of the fridge? Like the kind that feels heavier than regular magnets and will stick to anything—except another magnet? If you placed one on top of the other on a flat surface the one at rest would politely shove the uninvited magnet away.

  We introduced ourselves.

  “How’s LA treating you?”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Hey, I like that Christmas song you and Gaga did.”

  “Oh,” he said, as embarrassed as he could possibly be about a song that he probably recorded in a day and never thought about again.

  Earlier he seemed preoccupied for want of distraction. He was busy looking for something to keep him busy and—although he had almost certainly ruled it out as a possibility—he checked his phone once again.

  Out in the driveway of the location house, a few of the PAs put the finishing touches on a pair of turntables, which they had custom inlaid to an old sewing desk. They did a real great job of it too, carving out a hole just wide enough to bury the heavy turntables into the desk and to make them flush with the surface. If I lived in LA I probably would have asked them if I could keep it at the end of the shoot. They even painted the desk when they finished.

  “Sweet setup.” I motioned toward the turntables.

  “I usually don’t do vinyl. Just CDs.”

  “Oh.”

  Two PAs came out at a brisk pace, their janitor rings of keys clanging from the clips on their jeans. They each took one side and repo’d the turntable desk, hauling it inside.

  “You think you’re going to stay in LA long?” (I think he asked that, not me.) Not sure, actually. I can’t tell us apart.

  “Uhm, not sure. I don’t have a return ticket. Hopefully we can get a few shows and I’ll just stay.”

  He paused at this, then looked up. “That’s right. You’re a DJ.”

  “You think you’re going to stay in LA long? Are you going to move here?”

  “Looks like it. It’s really a matter of getting a studio space all set up, ” I—no, okay, that definitely must have been him. I must’ve been the one asking about the moving.

  The AD barged through the door briskly—film production workers, I’d discovered, were the only people on the West Coast who moved at this pace. The afternoon sunlight temporarily blinded him. He squinted with one hand, making a visor over his face. “Where’s Gaga’s DJ?!”

  “Right here,” we said, in such perfect unison that it may have gotten misheard as production-perfect reverb. The emptiness between us made it possible. Space Cowboy and I then took mirrored steps forward and looked at each other. I laughed. He laughed too. Stupid East Coast boy doesn’t know what’s real and what’s pretend on a location shoot in LA.

  Gaga stepped out into the bright light of the doorway. She froze when she saw us both together. Her sunglasses fell from her forehead and onto her snout, covering her eyes.

  I stepped aside, embarrassed. “Right. For the video.”

  “Right . . .” He tried to echo me on this one but he couldn’t force it out. He repeated my words, but they didn’t sounds like they meant the same thing when he said them. “For the video.”

  “JUST IMAGINE YOU’RE ALL AT a party at a friend’s house.” This is the director herself talking to us. Melina Matsoukas had worked for Black Dog for a couple years, making simple videos with stark visuals like Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” and “Upgrade U” for Beyoncé. She had a good-cop tone in her voice in comparison to the iron-fisted AD. “It’s late and far away from home. Maybe you guys all came back from a show and somebody’s parents are out of town. You’ve been out. You’re tired. You can’t party anymore and you pass out. Right there on the shag carpet.” She let out a little laugh as if to acknowledge that, yeah, we had found the most heinous location to shoot in for the day. “You sleep in your clothes because you didn’t bring anything else here. And it’s like a dream you would have when you were a little kid and you woke up to find Michael Jackson at your birthday party.”

  I’d made friends with an extra named Keith, who chuckled, “I’d be pissed if Michael Jackson woke me up.”

  The director was unscathed. “Good,” she smiled. “Use that. If the camera’s on you and we shine the light in your face, act like you just got woken up by a cop with a flashlight. Turn away. Be natural.”

  The AD butted in, yelling as always, “But that’s your thing. Everybody has a thing. But you can’t all do the same thing.”

  We fanned out all over the house to pass out. It actually evened out just like it would at a sleepover. The diva girl headed straight for the longest couch and lay down. Stoner dude just took a slouch in a chair. Sandy went and sat in the Archie Bunker and put her feet up on the ottoman. I found the prettiest girl in the room and lay down next to her on the floor. That’s my thing.

  The AD searched the room. He did that thumbs-and-forefingers movie frame. He looked down at me and the girl. “You. Over here.” He liked that we were lying on the floor. But he would like us to lie on the floor over there. Then he styled our arms and legs because we had not passed out on the floor to his exacting standards. When he finished, my character had a new girlfriend. They were getting pretty serious about each other.

  “Hi, I’m Brendan,” I said to my party girlfriend.

  “Hi,” she giggled from the excitement. “Did you get this gig through your agency? Mine sent me over. I don’t know why. But I guess it’s good exposure. Do I know you from somewhere? I feel like we’ve been background together before.”

  Gaga walked into the room in a flamingo-pink coat with embellished shoulder pads. She took off her sunglasses for a moment and looked around.

  For the next five seconds we were just Stef and Brendan, hanging out and getting ready before a show.

  “You look great,” I told her. “I love those sunglasses.”

  “Thanks. Don’t you love them? They’re from a collector. We had to sign a paper saying we wouldn’t steal them. But I really want to. I’d buy them anyway.”

  “They’re great. You look great.” I leaned up on my elbows. “Hey, if we get done in time, let’s try and see Semi Precious Weapons later.”

  “Yesyesyes!” She didn’t seem to notice that the boys couldn’t make it to the shoot. The girl had plenty on her mind.

  “I already talked to one of the extras about it. He said he’d drive.”

  “Cool. Yay!”

  “He’s super cool. He wants me to DJ at his party on Wednesday.”

  “Awesome. We should go anyway just to get out. Look, uhm—”

  “Stop,” I said. “What did I tell you at rehearsal that made Laurie-ann so happy? I’m a real DJ. I didn’t come here to be seen. I came her to be there for you.”

  She smiled.

  The director entered and Gaga turned back into her character on set. We both put our sunglasses on. She is the star of her music video and I’m the guy passed out on the floor of the dining room.

  One of the extras looked up. “What’s the name of the band?”

  “Lady Gaga.”

  “Oh.” He took in the name. His face registered what a lot of people had said either sotto voce or aloud that year. That’s a clunky name for a pop star.

  A girl turned to Gaga, seeking some kind of clarification or backstory. “Is Gaga your real name?”

  “Yes,” Gaga replied. And she meant it.

  The AD walked in. “MUSIC.”

  ON THE WAY TO CRAFT services I heard a booming voice from behind me. “There he is!” Joe, Gaga’s father, marched over to me and greeted me like we were in one of those Olive Garden commercials. He wore his trademark “Bada Bing!” hat. Gaga’s mom looked around. She’d been told to expect a big production, but not this big. “Is all this for Stefani? There must be one hundred people on this street. Are they filming another pr
oject here too?”

  “How you getting along out West, huh?” He slapped me on the shoulder. “You an actor too now? Wanna give me your headshot?”

  I smiled. “I heard you’re a big-time producer now.”

  “You’re gonna be a star, kid.”

  We joked around until the director came over for me.

  “Mr. Bigshot!” Joe called out after me. “Hey! Which one is your trailer? I’ll answer your fan mail until you get back.” I chuckled all the way to my big scene.

  The set dressers had planted a flock of lawn flamingos out behind the kiddie pool. They wanted me to ride a flamingo (what?) and then fall to the ground. It’s hard to say what’s worse: that I agreed to do it or that it took me like three takes to get it right.

  “BACKGROUND! BOTH TEAMS, I WANT EVERYBODY IN THE LIVING ROOM.” The AD rounded everyone up, jogging the team into the living room. “THIS IS THE BIG PARTY SCENE. I WANT EVERYBODY IN HERE—EVERYBODY.” The finale came together in the living room with the whole cast together. Lipstick-on-the-mirror girl touched up her color. Tattoo boy put on his shades. American Apparel clerk straightened his unbuttoned shirt. Pocahontas came in with her headdress. The dancers waited offstage, Akon and Colby O’Donis had left, and Space Cowboy went home for a spot of tea or something.

  This scene was just us kids in the twelfth hour of this shoot. The sun went down on the mysterious western coast just outside while we all hid in the blacked-out location house. Now the fun began.

  We had the living room to ourselves—no props or lip-syncing to do. Just dance. They cranked up the music and we had our fun, passing Gaga around like the hostess of a party. Everything we did the director loved. “Yes. Interact with her,” she said when one girl pulled Gaga’s shirt off. “Let’s have some fun here.”

  One scene—with Gaga behind a keyboard and us all dancing to the beat—channeled the sort of parties we’d thrown before. I stood behind her for that scene and had my own lost moment. There comes a time when you’re out and find whatever it is you’re searching for in nightlife—in crowds of strangers, in the dark. You find that you’ve gotten lost. And then you feel like for once you are right where you need to be. It’s a wonderful feeling.