New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  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.

  I go out into the hall but there is no sign of him. I call Kenneth on the walkie but he doesn’t answer. He’s probably in the john, making room for another meal. Did I say he’d last two weeks? Make that one.

  As I struggle to put my walkie back in its cradle, the imp exits a john and sprints into the stairwell. By this time I’m joined by the actor/doctor, the director, and several guys from the crew.

  We follow him up one flight. My heart is thumping. He better hope I catch him before the director does. I can see the tabloid headline: IMP MAIMED AT SILVERCUP. We chase him down the narrow hall toward the Wall Street herd waiting to go on set. Because he’s limber and small, the imp cuts through the crowd barely touching anybody.

  “Stop him!” I yell out.

  A few of the actors look at me like I’m a 300-pound woman who just walked into a gym. Let’s face it. In a place where there are actors and little guys in clogs, I’m the odd one. Thankfully, a banker type catches on and grabs the imp from behind, lifting him off the ground. An actress who looks like an H&R Block agent screams. Everyone panics.

  Coffee and bagels splatter and fly into the air. This is the imp’s second big mistake. You don’t mess up a director’s shot and you don’t spill coffee on an actor’s wardrobe before he goes on. I start to feel sorry for the little guy, until he reaches back and grabs his captor by his private parts and gives them a yank.

  “Aaaah, Christ!” groans the actor, who lets go. The imp lands on his feet and darts toward the east end of the building.

  Now this is where it gets interesting. I couldn’t make this up if I wanted to. It’s the kind of stuff that Hollywood pays big bucks for. I got to remember to put that in the screenplay I’m writing. Did I mention that I’m writing a screenplay?

  The light outside of the Home Shopping Network set is flashing red. This means only one thing: No one can enter. They’re shooting. I’ve seen movie stars stop in their tracks when they see it. Directors, producers, even the boss. But the imp ignores it and, once again, goes in without hesitation.

  I move to stop the others from following him, but then I realize I don’t have to. The consequences of entering a set when the red light is flashing differs from set to set. It can be anything from a stern talking-to, to getting punched out by a Teamster, to having the cops called in to haul you away. Home Shopping has a full-time bodyguard and ex-cop named Zack, who carries a .38. Whatever happens, it’s going to be the last set the imp crashes.

  I wonder how long it will take for Zack to spot him. As soon as I finish the thought, the doors burst open and Zack emerges with the imp tightly pinned under his arm and a meaty hand clamped over his mouth. None of us say anything.

  Ready for revenge, we all silently followed Zack down the hall to the bathroom. It’s like watching David and Goliath. Man, the little guy is strong. His arms bulge like small cantaloupes and his legs are like iron rods. Every time Zack tries to go through the door, the imp’s arms and legs stop him. This goes on for a while until the imp bites down on Zack’s hand. The ex-cop screams like a eunuch and drops him to the ground.

  We don’t waste time. We all dive on top of him, arms and legs grabbing and pulling at other arms and legs. I swear I have him until I find myself pinned to the ground by a sweaty stockbroker. A Teamster has to be stopped from strangling the director. By the time we realize what’s going on, the imp has wiggled out from under us.

  “Ciao!” he calls over to us before entering the stairwell a couple of feet away.

  I watch Zack and the others follow him up. The next floor is administrative and is rigged with an alarm. His only option is the rooftop, and from there he’ll be trapped. So I save myself the climb and take the freight elevator to the roof.

  A couple of years ago, the boss had a series of solar panels and plants installed to help generate electricity for the building. I thought it was a crock myself, but apparently it works. At least it’s gotten the boss off our backs about portable heaters and keeping the doors open for too long, and in August I can take home all the tomatoes I can eat.

  On three sides of the building, Silvercup Studios is encircled by two exit ramps to the Queensboro Bridge and the elevated subway tracks of the 7 train. Four flights down is the street. Unless the imp can do like Spiderman and climb brick, he’s mine.

  Row after row of raised square planting beds lie next to solar panels angled to the east. Large generators, the size of trucks, stand off to the west side harvesting the energy. Above me is the towering S of the famous SILVERCUP sign that lights up the entrance to Queens from the bridge at night. The sign stretches from one end of the building to the other, above the elevated tracks of the subway.

  I walk to the west to get a better view of the roof and spot the imp standing under the P, waving at me like I’m his long-lost sister.

  I don’t like coming up here when it’s not warm, especially on days like today when there’s nothing but gray clouds and a damp wind that cuts through my thin uniform right to my bones. I can’t wait to get my frozen hands on this little creep. But before I start after him, Zack and the others come bursting out of the rooftop door like the Canadian Mounties, only without the horses.

  We spread out and begin walking slowly toward him, just like in the movies, but the closer we get, the further he backs away, until finally he reaches the far edge of the building. Listen, I don’t want the imp to jump. His death is the last thing I need on my conscience, so I motion for everyone else to hold back while I try and talk to him, even though the traffic from the bridge and the trucks unloading below make that impossible.

  I wish I could tell you that I get him to move from the edge or that he drops that stupid grin a
nd runs sobbing into my arms, but things like that only happen on television. Real life is much more complicated. Instead, he rubs his hands along his thighs and then, with an operatic flourish, he calls out to us, “Arrivederci!” Then he turns around and jumps.

  I must’ve looked like the wide-mouth bass in the window of the fish store on Queens Plaza South. At least that’s what I felt like: a cold dead fish. I ran with the others to the edge, expecting to see Italian sauce splattered all over the pavement below. Just one story down, however, there’s the imp, rubbing his hands on his thighs again and grabbing hold of a rope hanging from the 25A exit ramp of the Queensboro Bridge.

  I forgot that this end of the building has an extension to it: a freight garage that’s only three stories high, connected to the main Silvercup building. It looks like he got into the building by lowering himself from the exit ramp to the garage and then climbed up the emergency fire ladder to the main building. When I tell the boss about this, he’s going to lose it.

  I decide not to follow him, especially since he’s scurrying up that rope faster than an Olympic gymnast. Besides, now that this jerk’s off the premises, he’s no longer my problem. If this were a television show, it would be a good time to cut to commercial. I could use a donut and a hot cup of coffee, only my curiosity is getting the better of me.

  We all stand there and watch as he scurries up the rope jammed between the crack of the concrete barrier and onto the exit ramp to 25A. He loses one of his clogs but it doesn’t faze him. Like a tight-rope walker, he steps along the ledge, against traffic, to exit 25, which runs parallel to 25A, but then veers off and under the elevated subway tracks of the 7 train. Once he’s on exit 25, he crosses the lane and hops up on the ledge again and reaches for another rope. This one is tied to the iron gridwork that holds up the track, and instead of going up, he goes down. We lose sight of him behind the Silvercup parking lot, so we all rush to the west end of the roof just in time to see him running, with one clog, up Queens Plaza South toward the subway entrance a block away.

  The End.

  Or so I think.

  * * *

  A week later, I’m sitting with Kenneth at the desk (yes, he’s still here and he’s five pounds heavier) and we’re reading the News. A headline screams, ALIEN ACTOR NABBED BY HOMELAND SECURITY, and there’s a picture of the imp, smiling for his close-up.

  His name is Aldo Phillippe and he’s a street performer from Naples who overstayed his visa. He came to the United States to do three things: meet Tony Soprano, get discovered for the movies, find a wife.

  According to the paper, Aldo decided that a good way to get publicity was to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, crawl through the window of her crown, and sit on her head. You probably think they caught him because they have better security over at the Liberty, but it wasn’t that. According to the article, they had to close the visitors’ center and chase him around for over an hour. The only way they caught him was by cornering him at the tip of the island, and evidently Aldo can’t swim. If he’s lucky, they won’t send him to Guantánamo Bay.

  I keep Aldo’s clog on my desk filled with pens for people to use when they sign in. No one notices it except when the director and actors who were with me that day come back to work. Everybody else is too busy making entertainment.

  PART II

  OLD QUEENS

  HOLLYWOOD LANES

  BY MEGAN ABBOTT

  Forest Hills

  The way their banner-blue uniforms pressed up against each other—the wilting collar corners, her twitchy cocktail apron and his regulation pinman trousers—I was only a kid, but I knew it was something and it made my head go hot, my stomach pinch. Eddie worked the alley, made the lanes shine with that burring rotary machine. Carol slung beer at the cocktail lounge, heels digging in the heavy carpet, studded each night with peanut skins, cigarette ashes, cherry stems.

  They were there every day, at 3:30, in the dark, narrow alley behind the pinsetting machines. And I saw them, saw them plain as day while I sat just outside the machine room on a metal stool, picking summer scabs off my knee. First time by accident, just hiding out back there, where it was quiet and no one came around.

  Eddie’d been there a month, he and his wife Sherry, who ran concessions with my mother over by the shoe station. He had blue-black hair, slick like those olives in the jar at the Italian grocery store. When he walked through the joint, coming on his shift, everyone—the waitresses, even old Jimmy, the sweaty-faced manager—lit up like a row of sparklers because he was a friendly guy with a lot of smiles and his uniform always finely pressed and the strong smell of limey cologne coming off him like a movie star or something.

  No one could figure him and Sherry. Sherry with the damp, faded-blond features, eyes empty as the rubber dish tub she was always resting her dusty elbows on. Cracking gum, staring open-mouthed at the crowds, the families, the amateur baseball team, the VFW fellas, the beery young marrieds swinging their arms around, skidding down the lanes, collapsing into each other’s laps after each crash of the pins, Sherry never moved, except to shift her weight from one spindly leg to the other.

  Just shy of thirteen, I was at Hollywood Lanes every day that summer. Husband three months gone, my mother was working double shifts to keep me in shoes, to hear her tell it. I helped the dishwashers, loading racks of cloudy glasses into the steaming machine, the only girl they ever let do it. Some days, I helped Georgie spray out the shoes or use Clean Strike on the balls.

  But I always beat tracks at 3:30 so I could be behind the pin racks. Eddie and Carol, his hands spread across her waist, leaning into her, saying things to her. What was he saying? What was he telling her?

  * * *

  Sherry’s face looked tired in the yellow haze of the fluorescent pretzel carousel. “Kid,” she said, “you’re here all the time.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mother was stacking cups in the corner, squirming in her uniform, too tight across her chest.

  “You know Eddie? You know him?” Sherry gestured over to the lanes.

  I nodded. My mother spun one of the waxy cups on her finger, watching.

  “I know what’s what,” Sherry said, looking over at my mother. I felt something ring in my chest, like a buzzer or school bell.

  “You don’t know,” my mother responded, looking at the rotating hot dogs, thick and glossy.

  “I got eyes,” Sherry said, gaze fixed on the lanes, on Eddie running the floor waxer over them jauntily. He liked using the machine. He kind of danced with it, not in a showy way, but there was a rhythm to the way he moved it, twirled around on it like he was ice-skating. Billy, the last guy, twice Eddie’s age, looked like he would fall asleep as he did it, weaving down each lane, hung over from a long night at Marshall’s Tavern. His hands always shook when he handed out shoes. Then he threw up all over the men’s room during Family Night and Jimmy fired him.

  “Don’t tell me I don’t got eyes,” Sherry was saying.

  “We all got eyes,” my mother said. “But there’s nothing to see.” Her brow wet with grease from the grill, her eye shadow smeared. “There’s not a goddamned thing to see.”

  I didn’t say anything. I rarely said anything. But something was funny in the way Sherry was looking at Eddie. She always had that blank look, but it used to seem like a little girl, a doll, limbs soft and loose, black buttons for eyes. Now, though, it was different. It was different, but I wasn’t sure how.

  * * *

  Back there in that space behind the pins, it was like backstage and no one could see even though all eyes were facing it. As soon as you walked in a bowling alley, that was where your eyes went. You couldn’t help it. But you never imagined what could be going on behind the pins, so tidy and white.

  And each day I’d watch. It was a hundred degrees or more back there. It was filled with noise, all the sharp cracks echoing through the place. But I was watching the way Carol trembled. Because she always seemed so cool and easy, with her long pane of d
ark hair, her thick fringe of dark lashes pasted on in the ladies’ room one by one. (“They get her tips, batting those babies like a raccoon in heat,” Myrna, the old lady who worked dayshift concessions, said. “Those and the pushup brassiere.”)

  * * *

  Carol was talking to Diane, the other cocktail waitress. Diane used to work at the Stratton, but to hear her tell it, the minute her tits dropped a half-inch, they put her out on her can. She hated the Lanes. “How much tips can I get from these Knights of Columbus types?” she always groaned. She worked at Whitestone Lanes too and had plenty to say about the customers there.

  I was sitting at a table in the cocktail lounge, looking at pictures of Princess Grace in someone’s leftover Life magazine. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one ever bothered me until happy hour.

  “She can jaw all she wants,” Carol said, eating green cherries from the dish on the bar. “It’s all noise to me.” She was talking about Sherry.

  “She should take it up with her man, she has something to say about things,” Diane said.

  “I don’t care what she does.”

  “What I hear, she can’t show her face in Ozone Park. They all remember her family. Trash from trash.”

  “I’m going to haul bills tonight, I can tell. Look at ’em,” Carol said, surveying the softball team swarming in like bright bumblebees.

  “Yeah, good luck,” Diane added, then nodded at Carol’s neckline. “Bend, bend, bend.”

  * * *

  In the bathroom once, right after, I pretended to be fixing my hair, snapping and resnapping a rubber band around my slack ponytail. I knew Carol would be in there, she always went in there after. When she came out of the stall, I looked at her in the mirror. Her face steaming pink, she brushed her shiny hair in long strokes, swooping her arm up and down and swiveling a little like she was dancing or something. She was watching her own face in the mirror. I wondered what she was watching for.