The Humble Nailbanger

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.

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?

I was poking around doing something the other day and found this great Stagehand Primer by Mick Alderson from Local 470.

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.

I find myself needing to apologize once again for the lack of posts…there were a couple loadins and loadouts, which have provided me with a wealth of future material, but robbed me of my ability to write much. So sorry.Anyway, I’ve had a few cues for haze or fog lately, and it got me to remembering…

There are a few different methods for creating fog in the studio or on stage, but they basically break into two main camps, both of which are fundamentally different: the chemical, and the natural.

The chemical involves “hazers” or “smoke machines,” where the operator plugs in a bottle or some sort of concoction that creates smoke when you add heat or somehow manipulate it. There’s a lot of downsides to the chemical method….they smell. Actually, they stink. And, well, they’re chemical. Not to mention that night after night, hour after hour of living with that smell…being hit with it when you strip off your clothes right before collapsing into bed, you can learn to hate it really quickly, and come to question the possible hazards and downsides even faster than that.

Living as we do, in a filthy, dusty environment constantly made moreso by chemical snow, whatever potions are utilized for a variety of effects, rat poison and whatever other pest control shit and – worst of all – whatever craft services has left standing out for 7 hours….and the whole mess in a big room that’s never opened to the outside, filled regularly with recycled air and then “refreshed” and filtered through the lungs of a few hundred audience members, the crew can really get behind something that doesn’t leave a residue on both the inside and outside of your body.

Not that we have a choice…it all has its own uses, and sometimes one is called for over the other for specific reasons. But that day they called for “fog,” which means one thing: dry ice and hot water.

Of the options, fog is the most fun to play with, mostly because the capacity for mischief and craziness is much greater. With simply a soda bottle and the cap, a mouthful or two of warmish water and a few lumps of dry ice, for example, the capacity for scaring the crap out of…say, the entire crew…is endless.

This was done in a place that will not be named a few years back with a two liter soda bottle….it was capped, placed on table in the prop room and the door was closed on the way out.

After the reverberations from the explosion faded, the door to the room was opened. It looked as if there had been some sort of catastrophic earthquake…all the ceiling tiles became floor tiles, dust hung thick and choking in the air, and everything was covered with…well, shit. In fact, there was shit everywhere. Everyone in the place stood gaping in direction of the…well, the “boom,” and the crew from the first floor came racing up, sure that a propane tank had exploded.

Don’t try it at home. And don’t do it at work (again).

I’ve seen this a hundred times….it gets passed around constantly in studios and theaters everywhere…you know the kinda thing…it’s been photocopied 10,000 times, the text is all blurry and runny. But it’s a good illustration of where we’re at. Occasionally I’ll say something to someone and realize that I’m “talking theater,” which most people I know don’t speak (yet). So:

In is down, down is front;
Out is up, up is back;
Off is out, on is in;
and of course -
Right is left, and left is right.

A drop shouldn’t;
A block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn’t;
A cove has no water.

Tripping is OK;
A running crew rarely gets anywhere;
A purchase line will buy you nothing;
A trap will not catch anything;
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.

Strike is work (in fact, a lot of work);
A green room, thankfully, usually isn’t.

Now the question is, do I want to explain it? Is it like giving away the tricks after a magic show? Nah:

In is down, down is front;
Out is up, up is back;
Off is out, on is in;
and of course -
Right is left, and left is right.

This makes much more sense if you think of a stage as the center of a world. And it is, it’s the world we’re working in. So everything refers to the stage:

“In” means down, “out” means up. Think of a piece of scenery during a show…you want it to fly into (down, towards the stage) or out of (up, away from the stage) the performance.

In terms of the stage floor, you have “up” and “down.” “Upstage” means to walk towards the back of the stage, while “downstage” means towards the front. When I was first learning, I used to think of the stage as tilted, which sort of forced it to make sense.

“On” and “off” also make more sense if you think of it in terms of the stage as a world…you’re either on it, or off it. And they work in degrees…if you’re standing in a spot and someone tells you to “go a bump off,” you move towards whatever side you’re closer to, because they want you to move more offstage. Either of these is modified by whatever side of the stage you happen to be on…”offstage” is always to the side you’re closest to.

As far as left and right goes, it’s whatever direction exists when you’re looking towards the audience. When you’re onstage looking at the seats, stage left is towards your left. It never changes, no matter where you are….left is always left, not necessarily your left. You with me? In the studios, there’s also “camera left” which is the opposite of “stage left.”

A drop shouldn’t;
A block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn’t;
A cove has no water.

A “drop” is a backdrop, and it shouldn’t fall. Ever. Things are bad if it does.

A “block and fall” or “block and tackle” is simply just pulleys working together to lessen a load and make it easier to hoist.

A prop, as I’ve said before, could be thought of as a “possession” in a show…the walls are scenery for carps, the light electrics, everything else props.

A “cove” is a spot in a wall where lights are hidden. Like a real cove, only brighter.

Tripping is OK;
A running crew rarely gets anywhere;
A purchase line will buy you nothing;
A trap will not catch anything;
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.

To “trip” something is to pull it up, generally with line.

A “purchase line” is part of a rigging system, usually how you control something you’re flying in and out.

A “trap” is…well, think trap door. Same deal, basically.

A “gridiron” is used in an Austrian curtain.

Strike is work (in fact, a lot of work);
A green room, thankfully, usually isn’t.

A “strike” is the best and worst part of the day….the best because you’re going to be getting out soon. The worst part? First you have to – usually after having worked 12, 16 hours, however long – knock down everything you’ve put up…lights, scenery, props, whatever, and put it all away where it goes, all while exhausted. Easy to remember…you set it before, and you strike it after.

And the green room? It’s just where the talent hangs out before the performance. It’s generally not in any way green.

So there you go. Fascinating, isn’t it? Yeah, no, I know.

An observant person who was familiar with both can pretty easily see that there are a lot of things which the sailboat and the stage have in common. A big one is in rigging and knots. The rest? Well, I recently read something comparing stagehands to pirates that wasn’t too much of a stretch, so I think there’s probably a future post in there somewhere.

“Do you know your knots?” many of the old heads will ask you on your first call. I would hesitantly say that “most” stagehands do know them, which is why it’s generally only the older heads that will ask you. I’d confidently say that the guys that don’t know their knots usually don’t carry knives, either.

Basically, there’s two knots that stagehands will generally find themselves using just about every day: the bowline and the clove hitch.

I think it’s because the story of how I learned my knots is funny that I’ve always wanted to start asking the people I work with how they learned theirs. Was it on the job? Or were they clued in beforehand, and able to confidently answer in the affirmative when asked the all-important question I’ve already mentioned above?

Personally, I wasn’t clued in. Actually, I was clued in…it was attempted and I was just too scatter-brained to retain the info. I tend to not be so hot about learning things unless I’m really interested in what I’m being shown. And the chances of that were slim when I was in my teens, unless it involved Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, Led Zeppelin or girls. The long and the short of it is that I didn’t know my knots when I showed up to my first call for carpenters.

I was a half-hour early. It was a cacophonic riot of moving dollies and shouting and gear. I was greeted by the owner of the gruff voice I had heard on the phone the day before. He sported a pompadour, a face older than his voice, a limp and a cigarette in his mouth while one sat ready behind his ear. He was arguing with two guys, both of whose bellies hung far beyond and below their toolbelts and who looked like they could bench press three of me. Each. I asked to speak with the man whose name I had been given.

“You the new guy? The college boy?”

I didn’t really know how to respond to that….I’d never been anywhere where having gone to college might be a bad thing. “I guess so, unless there are two of us starting tonight.”

“Did we speak yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re the new guy, college boy. Thought you’d be smarter than that.” He laughed to the other guys, and jerked his thumb back in my direction. “He paid all that money just to not know that he’s the college boy who’s a new guy.” They both laughed as they ambled off.

“So. College boy. Tell me, do you know your knots?” The speed and manner of which he so thoroughly chewed his gum was especially intimidating, even above and beyond his rangy strength.

I vaguely remembered my father mentioning this, and showing me the two knots “I absolutely, positively needed to know.” His hands moved in flashes under the light and after he showed me three times how to tie each, he had me do what he did. I fumbled around until I got them right, and promptly forgot everything about them. What was good for me was that I quickly and correctly saw that I was doomed here, that nothing I could say or do would prevent me from getting kicked around for a while. Somehow, I internalized it, accepted it and decided to roll with it in one quick, shining and rare moment of adulthood. Rare for me, anyway.

“No sir, I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

He leaned in close to me. Though all around us was chaos and noise, he spoke very quietly. I didn’t miss a word as he growled them at me, delivering them aloft a quiet breeze on which I smelled the odor of every cigarette he had smoked that day, along with the slightest hint of mint. Judging by the pack he smoked over the course of that first four-hour call, there were a lot of sticks on that breath.

“Don’t call me sir, college boy. I work for a living. Do me a favor and save that shit for your professors, alrighty?”

“Ooooooookay. Yup, no problem.”

He turned to a bin full of bundles of white rope, grabbed one, spun and unraveled it all in one fluid motion that showed he had done it tens of thousands of times, all while keeping his eye on me. “OK Plato, there’s just two knots you need to know for now, alright? The first is the bowline. I’m gonna tie it for you once or twice, and then you’ll do what I do.” He reached back, grabbed another coil of rope and tossed it to me.

“See, you just make this little loop, then bring this thing here around it, back to the front, and then through it. Pull this end here to make it tight. There you have it, a bowline.”

The temptation I always have to break into a smile in situations as ridiculous as this had, very luckily I think, deserted me completely. It left in its place a creeping feeling that I was in completely over my head.

“Want to see that again?”

“Please, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“One more time, and then you do it. Hold it like this to start. Then there’s your loop, there’s it going around, back in here, through, and pull. OK?” He seemed to be enjoying himself. And now, in retrospect, I know for a fact he was, because we’ve since joked about it.

“Your turn.”

I looked down at my hands, which compared to his were awfully soft. And clean. The ability to control what they were doing seemed to have left me. “Yup. So I start out by…”

“Switch hands. You a lefty?”

I was. Sometimes. But it was complicated. It took me going for tests with the gym teacher as a kid to figure out which hand my parents should buy a baseball glove for. I never really knew which way to hold a bat, which hand to throw with, nothing. Now, I’m older and wiser and comfortable with the fact that there’s nothing wrong, I am just totally incompetent when it comes to anything related to sports. “It depends.”

“It depends? Is that something I need a diploma to decode? What the hell could it possibly depend on?” Standing under a No Smoking sign as well as the hand lettered, all caps “ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING IN THE STUDIO” one below it, he sighed out an impossible lungful of smoke, and looked first left, then right over his shoulders. He leaned in a little closer, but didn’t talk as quietly as last time. “Tell you what…do you know what hand you tie your shoes with?”

“Lefty.”

“Alright. Then do the opposite of what I do. Take the short end in your left hand. That’s called the working end. You know why they call it that?”

“No.”

“No? Boy, you’re really getting your money’s worth at that college. Alright. Take the working end in your left hand, and the standing end in your right. I don’t supposed you know why they call it that, either, yes?”

‘Christ,’ I thought to myself. The call hadn’t even started yet, and already I wanted to crawl under a rock. “Yes. Well, no. I don’t know why.”

“Didn’t think so. Now follow me. Make this loop. Take this thing, go around the loop. Then go through it. No, the loop. No. Through. The. Loop. That’s it. Now pull it tight. No, the other thing. Yeah. And there you have it.”

I’m sorry, what was it I have again, apart from a fistful of fear and regret and a simmering desire to go disembowel the old man for getting me into this?

“Do it again.” The second time was a little better, though not much. He only had to show me where I messed up once. Two more times, and I was pretty sure I had it.

“Now do it behind your back.” I did, with some effort. Then he grabbed my right hand. “Do it one handed.” I fumbled around for a minute. Two minutes. He let my hand go. “Alright. Another day. Come with me.”
He walked over to a Genie – a sort of open elevator device. It’s kind of like a cherry picker that can only go up and down…a platform that’s about two and a half feet square, surrounded by bars at foot and a half intervals, keeping you inside. He lifted the chain that was stretched across the entrance. “Hop in. Now move over. More.” He hopped in next to me. “Press the green button.”

I turned slightly and pressed the green button. The box started to rise, slowly, with a whine that indicated that it was laboring under the strain of perhaps more weight than it was designed to lift.

We went up, up through the grid, at about 19 feet, the height to which I had become accustomed on lighting calls. On past that, I was looking at the network of pipes and then the thick, dusty cables that powered the whole thing. Up further, and we were going past the air-conditioning ducts, with holes punched here and there by some of the studio equipment that hung from the grid. Past that, the genie whining ominously and the whole thing swaying back and forth like a ship caught in a hurricane, we stopped. We were higher than I’d ever been in my life. And I’d never been very high because I was terrified of heights.

He put his palm on the ceiling. “So this is the whole studio.” I looked around. “You might be spending a lot of time here eventually, but you won’t see if from up here very often.”

Being terrified of heights and up that high in what is essentially a phone booth without the safety of enclosure, I really wasn’t seeing too much anyway. I was really only good for a nod and a smile.

Then he pulled a short section of the same rope out of his pocket. “This is a clove hitch.” He whipped through the knot, going under, over, under then over, through, something, I couldn’t keep track. He pulled it tight and turned to me.

“Got it?” he asked, with a sly grin.

Um, yeah. It was easier than the last one…what was it called again? But at this height, it could be that old shoe knot and I would have trouble. “Once more, if you could.”

He heaved a sigh, untied and retied the knot. “Your turn,” he said, untying it and holding it limply between two fingers at eye level.

I took the short length and started to do what I thought he did. Then the bucket began to sway. I turned and looked at him, he had a wickedly leering grin on his face. It was swaying because he was rocking from side to side! What a crazy fuck!

“C’mon, Aristotle. Tie the damn knot so we can get down. Don’t you know I’m afraid of heights?”

With some pointers from him, I worked through it as we passed through states varying widely from perfectly vertical. Thankfully, he started us on our long descent with a touch of his thumb. “Now tie the bowline again. Behind your back. You should be tying that fuckin’ knot twenty-four seven until you can tie it without looking, upside down and with one hand. Got it? I’m going to check you every night when you leave the studio to make sure you have a few feet of line to practice.”

We hit the ground with a slight thud and he climbed out to go have another smoke. Props was done with most of their strike in the first set.

All we had to do was wait for the clock.