The Humble Nailbanger

…well, things happen.  In the world of the stagehand, there is very little security.  When one manages to find some, one sometimes tends to live it up, to sit back, take a look around with thumbs hooked under imaginary suspenders, and reflect on all the time one spent hustling to get right where they’re sitting, at that moment.

It’s a powerful feeling, friends, and one that your humble narrator has been enjoying for quite some time.  The lack of wandering throughout the various theaters and studios of the city has made me soft, and shut me up, for the most part.  Sure, there was plenty of everyday grousing and talking about how perhaps we might do this or that better, but nothing that really hit me so hard that I could overcome the inertia that was my not posting here.

All that has changed, tho, as I am once again “back on the bounce.”  The free time between gigs has me feeling the itch once again, so hopefully they’ll be more stuff hereabouts for the time being.

There’s a great tradition in the world of the stagehand, where everyone mercilessly mocks the hell out of everyone else in the crew, understanding that it will all come back to them in spades.

Sure, there are serious moments.  But mostly, we all love to laugh.  It’s rarely mean, mostly just affectionate in the vein of Oscar Wilde, who said “the only thing that’s worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”  In some ways, it’s when they stop making fun of you that you have to worry.

So when I found myself a while back struggling during a turnaround in front of a decent-sized audience, working with a focusing pole to try to dress back a tieline and finding that the pole was just a little bit too short, it was no big deal.  We all work under pressure in front of crowds who have little to do but watch the changeover. I’ve been in this position a hundred times…suddenly you find yourself rushing and making do in the blink of an eye.  So far, every crew I’ve worked on has been successful.  I’ve never been in a quick turnaround that didn’t make time.

I really was fine, working away, until one of the heads leaned over and said “C’mon, hurry up!  Everybody’s watching!” I didn’t have to look over to tell he was smiling.

“Aw, give me a break, shut the hell up,” I said, still trying.

He leaned in closer, right in my ear.  “They’re all looking at you, and here you are fucking it up in front of them all….”  I started to turn red.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I said, supressing a laugh.

“C’mon, hurry!  Hurry!”

Then I turned REALLY red.  I started to feel like if I blushed any harder, I would burst into flame.  I was laughing, he was laughing, the crew was laughing, the audience was vocally reacting to each move I made, “awwwww”-ing when I missed, and finally bursting into applause when I got it.  It was hilarious, and I was as embarassed as I’ve ever been at work.

Just another day on the job.

I’ve been walking around with this post sort of slowly coming together in my head, formed from a few different elements I’ve picked up from here and there.  Basically it’s about the ups and downs of stagehand life as a whole, how we’re viewed by the rest of the crew and the world, and how we see ourselves.

First, I noticed that I had been linked (once again) by Backstage at backstagejobs.com.  Thanks very much for that.  So I was poking around that site, and I came across this little piece of annoyance, where English-Test.net explains what a stagehand is:

A stage hand is someone who does small jobs in the theater – helping with the scenery, making tea for the cast and cleaning the place. Hand in this sense represents the person – an employee doing manual work.

OK?  That’s completely understates the scope of the job, except for making tea for the cast (?!) and (in some cases) cleaning the place, which stagehands rarely (really rarely, as in “if ever”) do.

Then, OneNYCStagehand returned after a bit of a hiatus (and I’ll cop to being one of the “folks with too much time on their hands” who was wondering where he went) and clued his readers in one where he has/had been:

I think many of us like to think that we primarily make our living in the arts or at least on the periphery of it. But even in New York City it sometimes difficult to survive on just a diet of culture. As we get further and further from the hot sun of the fine arts, away from the nourishing atmosphere of Broadway we’ll work in the cold outer planets of “television” and “industrial.” Even these can be satisfying when the technological gee-whiz factor is high enough. A lot of product rollouts and events have a lot of bright, new shiny toys.

So where am I? Out in the cold outer reaches of our universe, there is a distant planet called “Cable.” It can support life but it’s a hardscrabble existence. Orbiting that planet is a lifeless, gray moon called the “Business News Channel“.

Yikes.  Well, we’ve all been there in some way or another.  Not there there, necessarily, but in that same “universe.”  He sums it up pretty well at the end:

There’s more, so much more and yet so very little. There will come a time when I’ll get off this little moon. As the saying goes, “when the money runs out, so do we”. The Client can hire my body for a couple of hours or days but the money always runs out and that’s my ticket back to sunshine.

Where have I been? I prefer to think about where I’m going, thank you very much.

What does it all mean?  Well, there’s a great saying that I’ve often heard within the business:

Theater is life.
Film is art.
Television is furniture.

As little as some of us who work in the business want to think about it, for the most part it’s very true.  Television is furniture.  What we are doing is basically building and executing content that is just barely attractive enough to justify all the commercials shown during the broadcast.  And more and more often, the content is the commercial.

But it’s not only what happens in our business but how it happens as well that can be frustrating.  I’ve said here in this space that things are generally feast or famine, stop and go.  And that pertains to work and it’s availability as well as the level of satisfaction that that work might provide.

Many of us bounce around.  What happens in that circumstance is that you might catch a loadin, which is generally exciting and challenging and, if you are in the right mindset, pretty fun as well.  The work is hard and satisfying.  You’re able to watch something take shape, often pretty quickly, from the line of trucks you walk past on your way in and an empty theater through to a fully staged show.  The motors, the lights, the rigging.  There’s so much going on, so many people working, and most of them stagehands.

I always feel an immense source of pride that I get to work among all these men and women who are so capable of doing things that leave crowds of people agog, leaving the theater every night saying “how the hell did they do that?”

The Mrs always reminds me that the hours don’t matter because I love what I do.  And she’s right, in the overarching sense.  Why “overarching?”  Because after the loadin, after all the problem-solving and making quick decisions on the fly, after filling the space with everything in the show and shoehorning it in so it all works together smoothly – and if you’re lucky – there’s the execution of the show.

This can be fun as well.  But in many cases, it’s very routine…pushing and pulling heavy dollies, flying scenery in and out, scene changes both complex and simple.

If you wind up on a show that’s pretty cut and dry (as it often is in television), it can get boring and repetitive fast.  The thrill of the initial weeks fades into the daily grind of everyday tasks.  I’ve done shows that really are mostly just emptying the garbages and sweeping.  We do it without complaint, because it’s great to have steady work and sometimes it’s nice to have some mindless downtime, whether because we’re exhausted, sore, hurt, or studying for a certification and we can put the time to good use.

But while we’re doing it, many of us are conflicted…aching to get back into the action and the culture, looking to do something besides work a pickup and make sure the trashcans don’t overflow, no longer hearing from camera ops and stage managers about how easy we have it when we can look around and know that we built and lit everything that the entire crew is working amongst.

“It’s really dark up here dark and cold at night,” his postcard said.  “This farm is creepy at night.  Danny”

The farm was a rehab facility somewhere upstate. The patients – “inmates,” he called them – spent their days essentially doing the grunt work in running the farm: cleaning stalls, feeding animals, working in the fields.   The walk back to civilization, should they decide to walk away, was prohibitively far.  Work was all there was, and it was good, old fashioned work that anyone could easily romanticize in cliched phrase…early to bed, early to rise, getting your hands dirty and some color on your face.

But reading that postcard gave me a totally different (and unexpected) point of view.  I pictured him wandering around in the inky black, sleepless and quivering, startled by the random noises of regular country life…leaves crackled by unseen feet, chickens and ducks muttering to themselves.  Running water’s quiet whisper and the worst thing…the floating eyes in the headlights of passing cars.  Night in the country is full of moving, watching eyes.  And they track you everywhere you go, keeping tabs, evaluating you for threats.

Just the thing for a paranoid old-ish boozer insomniac trying to dry out.

Something had to give, and in this case it was the crew with a bus pass to get there.  For years – decades? – we’d seen him first thing in the morning, walking in the studio and then right to the craft services table.  He’d pour himself a coffee, slop in some milk and knock it back in two gulps.  Then he’d do it again.  The third cup he took black, which is how he preferred it.  The milk in the first two was just to cool it down enough so he could drink it faster.

He used to tell me “Thank god last call is 3:30, otherwise I’d never make the 4am call.”  He’d come in and pound down those coffees, hoping that they’d dissipate the smell of the alcohol.  It sort of worked, because the coffee in the studio was strong almost to the point of being poisonous.

He’d rush through the pre-hang to start his morning nap, which most days was his first sleep of the night.  Then he’d stand tapping his foot all through the focus, looking to get to his second nap.  He’s disappear throughout the morning after taping started, turning up when there was work to do and vanishing as soon as it was done.  After lunch was better, usually.  On lunch he’d have a couple doubles and beers and come back a little more awake and in a jokey mood.

It was a shame, too, because he was so great at what he did.  He taught me a lot of what I now know.  More importantly, he taught me how to do things, and how to think about the whole studio, how all the pieces work together.  He was endlessly kidding around with all the members of the crew, busting balls from the director straight on down.  He never had his hackles up about the usual stagehand stuff, getting less pay for doing more work, being talked down to by the camera guys who were his friends nonetheless….none of the usual gripes seemed to touch him.  Outside of the drinking, anyway.

The next postcard came a couple days later.  “I don’t know about this the farming life ain’t for me  Still so fucking dark like nam but darker. D”

To a large extent, we all live in the dark, especially in the winter.  We get up far before the crack of dawn and many days finish up after sunset, all while spending our days in a windowless box full of dust and old scenery.  Recycled air and artificial light.  Even in summer, it’s not unusual to see the sun only on a lunch break.  It wasn’t unusual for a biggish percentage of the crew to just skip eating entirely, to just walk to the park and lay on the grass to get some daylight.

And Danny lived in the dark too…the same studio hours, and then up all night in a bar lit by two or three single bulb lamps, hanging forlornly in the dark with their filthy dented shades.  City dark is different though.  There’s streetlights, the blue glow in most of the windows of the apartment buildings, the endless headlights, lights in the pizza parlors and under the awnings in front of clubs.

The “dark like nam” thing was worrying, too.  Like so many others with similar problems, he had served in Viet Nam.  He only spoke about it once, but I knew that he had done several tours, at first living in the jungle until ending his time there in a helicopter as a gunner.  The one time he had ever brought it up, he talked about shooting out the door of his aircraft day after day after day, watching his tracers carve into lines of running people.  He never knew who they were, whether they were guerrillas or farmers.  He just held down the trigger.  He didn’t seem bothered by it, just amazed that he had re-upped on the condition that he be allowed to spend his next tour carving into lines of running people from a couple hundred feet up.

So who knows what it was, but things suddenly went from the everyday rough morning to much, much worse.  He was a private guy, so we never really knew what might have set him off.  He missed a week’s work and didn’t call.  When he showed up, he looked rough.  He had managed to shave, but a percentage of his face that was well below the whole thing, and in random spots, like most of his left cheek.

He had “got into some pills.  Been having bad dreams.”  He just looked so rough, had visibly aged in a week.  Things went from bad but sustainable to worse and really not sustainable for long very quickly, and the whole thing turned on that one lost week.  All those of us on the crew who cared went out to lunch together, made plans, collected money, made calls.  Someone had a connection, and he moved from the bottom to the top of the list.  Then there was a bed, that bus ticket.

But the dark.  A third postcard, “Can’t sleep but at least no dreams.”  Unsigned.

Then he showed up.  We didn’t ask if he’d snuck out or was released, but it was early…it seemed like he should have been gone longer.  But he looked better.  His formerly paper-thin, almost translucent skin looked better.  He had color in his cheeks, and the circles under his eyes were lesser and lighter.  He was early to work.

And then he wasn’t.  And then he never showed up again.

We only saw the note because his next of kin was listed as a member of the crew, and it was returned with his effects.  It was a shotgun, in the bathroom.

The note said “Fellas – Sorry about the mess.  There’s a six pack in the fridge for your trouble.”

The Mrs and I were working on a home project this weekend.  Because of the nature of what we each do for a living, we generally fall into the same roles with building type projects…me taking charge and her being told what to do.  This works most of the time, if I can be patient and not condescend, and if she can tolerate…well, being told what to do.

One quality that I can count on is that she’s always a great student…she’s really interested and she wants to learn.  I think that I take some things for granted, having in many ways pretty much grew up in a carpenter shop.

What’s tough, though, is knowing what to tell her or point out, and what to just let fly by.  Yesterday, as I was screwing some lumber onto a piece of sheathing, it occurred to me to teach her the whole “flush/shy/proud” thing.  I don’t know about anyone else, but time and time again I find myself trying to do something with someone who isn’t a stagehand, and my mind is completely blank but for theater terms…instead of saying “go right” or even “move towards the couch,” my brain cells are screaming “stage left!  Stage left!”

I didn’t make it a big deal though, it wasn’t like I pulled out the chalk board to illustrate.  I simply asked “do you know the whole flush/shy thing?”

“No,” she said.  “What is it?”

“Well,” I started, “flush means it’s even.  Shy means it’s short.  Shy, like hiding.  Then there’s proud, which means it’s sticking out.”

“You theater people!” she said, “you’re all such drama queens.  Why can’t you just say ‘short’ or ‘even’ or whatever?  Jesus.”

I responded “I think what you’re doing is overthinking a plate of beans.  And you just wrote the next Nailbanger post….”

Stagehands see a ton of celebrities.  I’ve been an arms length away from the biggest names in show business, politics, you name it.  It’s just like any other part of my job.  Sure, it was thrilling the first few times, but after a couple days, it’s just like anything else.

And to prove it, I’ll offer you an anecdote:  5 healthy, average working men.  One beautiful starlet in the very prime of her career and the height of her beauty.  She’s outside the proproom where the 5 healthy, average working men are waiting for their next cue.  She’s primping, adjusting herself in her dress, making those mirror faces that all people make when they’re performing that last check to ensure they don’t have last night’s parsley in their teeth.

What are the 5 healthy, average working men doing?  They’re paying absolutely no attention to her.  Instead, they are cheering on one of the guys, who is busily trying to see how much dijon mustard he can eat in one minute.

Being a stagehand working on daytime television results in some really improbable situations.  I lived out one sparkling example a while back.

Now, the location of the studio where the show is taped is no secret, and just about every day finds a few people sitting outside trying to get an autograph or a photo with someone on the show.  And even if you happen to see no one directly outside the studio, you might find yourself behind someone at the local supermarket buying a sandwich to eat while they’re waiting for their favorite actor or actress to leave the building.

Anyway, a bunch of us went out to lunch at a local restaurant in the middle of a long day. There were six stagehands in all, mostly big, burly guys, all wearing black, mostly covered in tattoos.  Basically, we look like bikers.  We’re all friendly and quick to laugh and joke around, but just seeing us on the street?  People tend to curve around us as we’re walking down the block.

We go into the restaurant, a local place that we all go to pretty often.  We seated ourselves, moving together two tables in the back and squeaking our chairs across the wood floors.  Three older women were seated to one side of us, talking somewhat loudly as they waited for their lunch.

Sitting there for a moment, it quickly became obvious that they had been sitting outside the studio and were now taking a break for lunch.  My friend, an older guy who is always looking to start a little trouble, was sitting directly across the table from me.  We were sitting closest to the ladies, and could clearly hear what they were saying.  I kicked him under the table and, catching his eye, motioned with my head for him to shut up and listen to what they were talking about, which was the show.

I should say at this point that we spend 15 hours a day sitting watching soaps.  And I don’t mean that we park ourselves in front of soapnet.  I’m saying that stagehands know the soap(s) they work on inside and out….who uses what phone, what their sheets look like, what order the contents of their closets should be in, and who sleeps on what side of the bed.  They know the plot, too, much to all of our eternal chagrin.  We’re not necessarily interested, but it’s our business to know.

So when we overheard the women at the next table talking and getting one woman’s name wrong, my mischevious, tattooed, bearded friend couldn’t resist.  He leaned over, waiting until one of them noticed him and literally jumped in her chair.

“Ma’am?”

“Um…..yes?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying, and I just wanted to remind you that it’s not Rebecca who’s with Jason, it’s Racquel.  It was Rebecca who was cheating on Racquel with Roberto.”

She looked utterly shocked.  What the hell was this Hell’s Angel lookin character talking about?

“Wa-wa-what?”

“I just wanted to make sure that you were waiting for the right actor,” he said.  “You had the plot mixed up a little, and if you were waiting for the actress who plays Rebecca, she’s not taping today.”

Clearly she wasn’t prepared for this.  Is anyone?  When you go to see the Little Mermaid on Broadway, do you expect the main lavender seashell to be moved around by a 250 lb badass?

Of course not.  But more often than not, that’s who we are.

Perhaps it would be best to start this post with a few examples:A head of department, well into his 70s, still in possession of relatively good health (he is, after all, still able to make all those 4, 5 and 6 am calls), who has worked full-on “stagehand hours” (12, 14, 16 hours in the studio a day) for decades. And who, when asked why he doesn’t just pack it in, says “I don’t have anything else to do.”

A board op who came back from major surgery and who still has a pretty busted up body part (and will continue to have said busted up body part for many, many months to come, rehabilitation or no), who was eligible for long-term disability (and if I wrote about which body part, you’d say (with a wince) “whoa, he came back 1.5 weeks after that??!!”) yet was trying to come back to work one week later. What stopped him? Migraines from the pain medication.

I’m acquainted with another head of department, in a different local from the one I work in, who had a double knee replacement and labored to get back to work as soon as possible, despite his 70+ years, the commute, and the advice of his doctors.

There was a kindly old gent I last worked with 10 years ago. A lovely man, really, with a disposition that was unmatched in its sunniness. But even though he was working daily 3 or 4 am calls for electrics in his late 70s and early 80s (I worked with and around him for about 3 years), he was never really 100% cognizant of the entirety of what was going on around him…he often called me by my grandfather’s name, having worked with him 3 or 4 decades previous; or he might ask, during the morning focus for a soap, when “the contestants are showing up.” He loved manning the bottom of a genie, but he couldn’t hear even the simplest of directions, like “forward,” “back a bit,” or “please stop, you’re pushing me right into a red-hot 5k.”

What’s the connection here? Well, first and most obvious they’re all stagehands. They’re also people I’ve come to think of as “lifers,” and a life-form I’m struggling to fully understand.

What’s a lifer? To me, it’s someone who has become so fully immersed in the world of the stagehand – multiple calls during the day, often at different studios/theaters/a combination of both; the looooooong hours; never really seeing the family you’re killing yourself to provide for; the constant “busy-ness” that keeps you from developing a life outside of the business. I can’t really even quantify how many people I’ve worked with who sacrificed their lives (in terms of time, not actual mortality) for the finer things….big houses, cars, pools, boats.

Hell, the first week I was working in corporate, I was talking about how one can actually be comfortable working as a stagehand, with sniggers from all the suits around me. The next day or so? The cover of one of the New York rags talking about stagehands who made more than some of the highest ranking front-office guys at some theaters around the city.

Yeah, they can. But no one mentions the catch, which is that you never see your family, your home, or any of the other things you’re working all those hours to have.

And there are a lot of these guys in my universe now. I can never figure it out…one would think that you work these hours to make a ton of cash, then get out while you’re still healthy enough to enjoy it. But that’s not the case, a lot of the time.

So what is it? Is it some strange combination of the many somewhat unique aspects of life as a stagehand? Is it because we spend so much time together, that to some folks we become a family as real as our actual one? Or is it that there’s some element of what we do that’s excitement that’s tough to replace? Or is it that you can exist, as a head of department, as someone who can live in our world, normally filled with labor and effort, and just show up, give some direction, and that’s it?

I don’t know. It all seems totally crazy to me. I guess one thing I’m searching for is “why?” Were they predisposessed to it, just not having any interests in general, and work was something that helped them pass the time? Do these guys just need to have some books handed to them?

Well, the Mrs and I have bought a house, which is why I haven’t had much time for posting. I’m hoping that now that we don’t have the stress of looking and haggling I’ll have some time to write a bit more. So….

Although I work in the industry, I’m not a huge tv watcher. That being said, I was recently watching Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations,” and this particular show was set in New Orleans, and dealt with how Hurricane Katrina affected the restaurant industry.

He was in one particularly historic restaurant and was being served by a waiter who had been working at that place for over 20 years. Another member of his family had been there for over 40 years. During the conversation, he said “it’s in my blood.”

This got me to thinking. Sure, I’m a third generation stagehand. But is it in my blood? When I first started, I didn’t think it was. But the more I do it, the more stagehands I meet, the more I realize that this is what I’m ideally suited to.

Having gotten a college education, and being told that my father worked the hours he worked so I wouldn’t have to, I came in thinking a variety of things, many of them negative. First and foremost, I looked at the hours. I looked at some of the things I’ve griped about here in the past. The fact that I was interested in books, writing and politics yet was surrounded by guys who knew nothing but sports and derided me for reading anything besides the NY Post really soured me.

My earliest memories in the business are of being continually mocked and being called “college boy.” (I’ve mentioned this before…it generally went something like this – “What, you don’t know how to do that? Didn’t they teach you that while you were off spending all your money on college?”) I just kept my head down…these guys were too fast, too quick on the draw with really snide and cutting remarks that still managed to be funny. I didn’t know that they weren’t bitter or mean about it. Making fun of people is a serious pastime in this business. I had never encountered that before; in my house growing up, you couldn’t really joke around like that.

Then the learning began. Over the years I’ve developed that really hardcore snark, and can do it with the best of them. I’ve learned that stagehands are among the most diverse group of people you’ll ever meet…I work with guys with half their teeth who can barely write and are mostly good for doing cues involving pushing and pulling. Stagehands who are writing books on the sly and who are addicted to reading. Guys who speak English with some trouble (and they were born here) who can finish the NY Times crossword on a Friday. In ink. Looking only at the “down” clues.

The fact that it took me so long to learn it was/is a bit shaming, but it’s taught me some good lessons…that I needed to branch out more, and that there’s a lot of strange and interesting and fun opportunities in this world…hell, it’s showbiz! And also that I needed to open my fucking eyes. It taught me to look past all the normal things one looks at and find value in a wide range of other things….that guy who’s really annoying and talks too much? Maybe he does the work of three men and always has time to teach you something. Never devalue someone until you get as full a measure as you can. You know, fun little life lessons like that.

Yet another reason why so many of us who live this life would never do anything different.

A friend and I had been joking around about “supporting your local ne’er do well” by hiring him/her on for a call or two.  Or for life, you know.  Because stagehands tend to have reputations, no matter what we do, as ne’er do wells.

And honestly, I kind of enjoyed the whole back-and-forth until I looked it up.  I had been operating under the assumption that a “ne’er do well” was a sort of shiftless soul, happily and with a good-natured grin trucking his way through life, one day at a time.  Maybe, as the Urban Dictionary slants it, with a hooligan streak (I disavow the “shitty fucker” quality in that definition, however).  Going where the wind blows, and all that.  Turns out it’s decidedly different….dictionary definitions are peppered with words like “useless,” “lazy,” “irresponsible,” and my personal favorite: “slugabed.”

So, perhaps it’s not too appropo.  I mean, sure…we do some good, hard sitting around at times.  Lazy?  Some stagehands, sure, just like in every other industry.  But mostly?  Try this experiment: take you and a gang of your non-theatrical buddies.  Meet up with 10-15 trailersful of stage equipment, band gear, video equipment, etc.  Turn it into a working stage full of gear and throw a concert 16 hours later.

Oh, and then take it right back down and pack it aaaaall back up again and send it on to the next band of brigands.

Sound hard?  Yes?  Well then who’s the ne’er do well now?

That’s my everlasting gripe about my choice of profession and my brothers and sisters in the biz.  We can bloody and exhaust ourselves, working 60 hours in three days and consistently pull off seemingly impossible tasks flawlessly.  Yet we’re pretty much universally viewed as worthless, mostly because we are really good at relaxing our tired bones when we’re not needed at that moment.  People see that, shake their heads and say that we have “a license to steal,” or whatever shit they can come up with.