Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

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 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.

He has on a billowy white shirt that looks like it’s from one of those Shakespearean movies — it’s hanging over his wiry shoulders and flared out past his nonexistent hips. On his small feet are a pair of genuine wooden clogs.

We make eye contact and he quickly figures out why I’m here. The actor and the director head back to the set. I search around for a couple of guys who I can recruit to help me. When I turn back, the little guy is standing right next to me.

“Have you seen Tony Soprano?” he whispers in an Italian accent. His eyes are bright, even in the dark, and his breath smells of cheese.

“Quiet on the set!” The alarm bell rings, signaling that the camera’s about to roll. I grab his skinny arm but he twists around and frees himself from my grip.

“Action!” The director cues the actor, who begins his lines.

“I’m a doctor, so people are surprised when I tell them that I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.”

No one is watching me or the imp as he makes his way behind several clients from the pharmaceutical industry who are engrossed in the actor’s performance. Imagine spending a good part of your career having meetings and conference calls about irritable bowels. I squeeze past them and follow my quarry who is creeping closer to the set.

“If you suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, do like I did. Call your doctor. Side effects include stomachache, fever, bloody stool, and on rare occasions, death.”

This time the actor does not laugh, but the imp does, as he dashes right in front of the camera.

“Cut!” What the...?” The director is about to have a nervous breakdown.

I know better than to follow the imp in front of the camera. I figure there will be enough people waiting to kill him for messing up this shot. Someone switches on the overhead lights just in time to see him open the door and scurry out.

The first year The Sopranos shot here were my hardest as a security guard. We had the press, fans, everybody coming by asking to speak to the fictional mob boss, Tony Soprano. We even had real gangsters come around. It wasn’t easy turning these kinds of fans away. We had to hire two extra security guards to handle the crush. But now the show is winding down. The actors are bored. The reporters have moved on. Things were getting back to normal until this clog-footed fruitcake came along.