The Humble Nailbanger

Recently the Mrs and I travelled some distance to attend a friend’s wedding.  As if the long drive weren’t enough, she was sick and I was in the process of catching what she had.  Grumpiness abounded.

It bled into the next day as well.  An hour before the ceremony, as we were getting dressed, the button on my pants broke.  I know, I know.  I mean, I was forearm-deep in the waist of the pants in order to tuck in my shirt, but they were tight to begin with. Too many on-set breakfasts and lunches and not enough physical work, surely.

So there I was…my arms out at shoulder height, sort of mid-shrug.  “Great.  Just wonderful.  I broke the button on these pants, and they’re brand new. Naturally I don’t have a belt, and I can’t wear the other pants I brought with the jacket I have.”

The Mrs slumped.  We both stood there, frozen, trying to figure out what to do.  Then I jumped.  “Hey, I have some line in the car.  I’ll just tie them up.  I do it all the time.”

“Once a stagehand, always a stagehand,” she muttered to herself as I quickly put on the other pair of pants I had on hand and gathered room and car keys.

I ran down to the car, cut myself some line off the bundle I always keep in the trunk, and returned to the room, whereupon I shucked the old clothes, donned what I was wearing to the wedding, and tied them up with a big grin.  “Nice.  That’ll work just fine.”  I looked over at the Mrs, who was standing there all ready to go.

“Good thing I always have some rope and a knife, huh?”  I said with a smile, while feeling various pockets for the car keys.  “Hey, where are the damned car keys?”

A moderate wait for the tow truck and man with slim-jim later, we were at the ceremony, and only 15 minutes after it started….

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.