Queens Noir (12 page)

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 multimilliondollar 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 againnot 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 going
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 expecta tions. 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 its 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 whole
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.