Rivington Was Ours

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  I stared at the keyboard until it changed alphabets. No help. I couldn’t concentrate. Who had seen our show? When could I see photos?

  THAT’S WHEN I GOT MY second very strange phone call. This time from Leah.

  “I just wanted to let you know that we aren’t going to have you play the DJ in the video.”

  “Are they cutting the DJ part? That makes sense. Well. I still want to be there for her.”

  “We said the same thing,” Leah assured me. “We still want you and your look in there. But we are going to go with someone else as the DJ.”

  “Okay.” I really was okay with this. I am a real DJ—I don’t just play one on a music channel no one watches anymore. “Who?”

  “Space Cowboy is going to do it.”

  “The guy from that Christmas song?” Weird choice. Gaga and he had worked on a holiday jingle. Only they did it in the off-season.

  This video was supposed to be a microcosm of my life. I DJ at the end of a cool party and after it dies this pop star shows up and makes everything incredible. I knew I had a tendency to take pop matters too seriously. On a good day that meant I played “Billie Jean” all the way through ’til the end (the kid is his son!). On a bad day this meant I refused to play a show because the flyer didn’t have the year on the date (what are we doing here if we’re not making music history, people?). And this was one of the bad days. Won’t it seem weird to people that she skipped a party where her own DJ was playing? Didn’t make any sense.

  “Yeah, but we still want you in the video. And if you can have any of your friends send us their info we could use some more people.”

  Ain’t gonna do you wrong while you’re gone

  Suddenly I got overtaken with the idea that the video would suck. What if the casting company just sent over a unit of twenty-two twenty-two-year-olds in drugstore reading glasses and clean American Apparel clothes with the tags still on? Ohmygod. Then what would we do if it worked? What if kids watch this video like we did and try and reenact different scenes? What if they started dressing like this?

  We needed something to make it real and fun. This had to go down like the Beauty Bar party with all the chaos and flare feeding into it like a party furnace. I called around to Beauty Bar LA and asked them to send over some kids. But that wouldn’t help enough.

  I needed a miracle. I texted Justin from Semi Precious Weapons. “Gaga and I just left Miami. We’re in LA shooting the video on Monday. Is there any chance you’re around?”

  After that I took a six-dollar shower with things like papaya seeds, ground kale, and raw pistachios. I put things on my body that I usually put on a salad. Afterwards I felt like I’d made a healthy choice and still felt hungry. Luckily they didn’t charge for towels.

  Justin texted, “You’re filming your video on MONDAY IN LA? You know we fly in Sunday for our show, don’t you?”

  “We need extras. Can you guys be in it? It’s an all-day shoot but it’s a paying gig.”

  “Of course!”

  I emailed Gaga the great news. She wrote back with such a joy. But maybe not enough. “Sorry. I’ve had a rough day.”

  WE HAD SO MANY DISTRACTIONS at home. Not enough here. Home had a buzz, a feed, a constant drip of expectations, drama, and excitement. Something was missing. I checked the clock. It would be almost midnight at home, about the time Leigh usually got out of work.

  When she answered the phone I heard the cheers of people and loud, inexpertly mixed music. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” she said, like she was waiting for the other person to speak.

  “Can you hear me? It’s me.”

  “Yeah. It’s just . . . I’m out with some friends.”

  “That’s good—fine. Normal.” I’m not one of those guys who got jealous at things like this.

  “I can’t really hear you.”

  “Step outside?”

  “Fine.” It got slightly less noisy. Although the honking clutter of street noise made me homesick. “Look, it’s still really cold here.”

  “Okay.” Did my phone have a bad connection? Did we? “Hi.”

  “Look, I was expecting to hear from you when you got done in Miami.”

  “This is it. I just got to LA.” I could feel the distance. “I just wanted to talk.”

  “Do you know when you’re getting home?”

  “Not yet. But the video is tomorrow. Hopefully it’s just one day.”

  “Look. I gotta go. And we’ll talk when you get home. If you ever do.”

  Uh oh.

  We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far

  Shuttered truck bays creaked open in the chill of early morning to deliver lights while curious neighbors peeped through their blinds in tightly clutched bathrobes at the video shoot. The video would take place at a house party, so we rented a house. Across the street from the location house on 4304 Enoro Drive, the production company had rented out another house just to feed us. They filled the driveway with tents and tables and a buffet from a parked food truck. Not two days before, I walked myself to one of our gigs and set up my own equipment, and now we were on a video shoot that had to cost more than the entire record.

  We didn’t have the money to put me up at the Grafton, so that weekend I slept on an air mattress in a friend’s kitchen. He had a rented studio in Echo Park, where I was able to foil the air mattress’s devilish wish to deflate at some point in the night by pumping it up in the tiny kitchen. The now inaccessible stove and refrigerator acted as a headboard and footer. In the dark kitchen, I slept like an inflatable god. He dropped me off early on his way to work.

  As the first one to the shoot that early morning, I had the experience of wandering around a foreign city as it woke up for the day. A support van made deliveries nearby. The crew made every effort to have this area run like a single office building complete with security staff, parking shuttle, staff bathrooms, an employee lounge, and a cafeteria.

  I got there before the other on-camera people and learned how shoots like these went.

  The director runs the show but the assistant director does all the bossing around. The pecking order at mealtimes enforced a bit of law into a land that could have become Diva Central. First the crew eats. The gaffers and lighting hands, the technical producers and the guys running wires. They have a long day ahead, yelling at each other or getting yelled at en masse by a higher up. Their meal status makes up for their pay status, judging by the cheap prepaid phones they kept checking on breaks. Then the managing crew eats, although they do it with an I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit vigor. They stand while eating and bully younger employees into proclaiming that they are both eating the best fucking ham sandwiches on the planet. After them the lowest of all get to eat. A gaffer takes over for a security guard over by a tent where everyone has hidden their backpacks of headshots and alternate costumes so the security staff can have a bite. Only then can the lowest of the low get in line and pick away at the buffet: the actors.

  This production has no actual acting involved in it, so the hired faces become known as “background.” Because of my new position as a character in this ensemble, I have become an extra in my own music video. I am background. I jump when the AD shouts, “Okay, background! Let’s eat and get back in there at five!” He splits us into two groups and learns names—of me and my fellow backgroundlings—and then promptly forgets them just in case he wants to change the groups up.

  The background had all fielded the same phone call I got this week and they all arrived in pitch-perfect LES uniforms. Just up the hill from Crenshaw Boulevard and Martin Luther King Drive a group of tired, messy-haired kids in tight jeans and thrift-store jackets wandered around the sunny, suburban, black middle-class neighborhood.

  THE DANCERS SHOWED UP AS I finished the best fucking huevos rancheros of my life. (I take back everything I’ve ever said in regards to East Coast vs. West Coast.) They had a later call time than the rest and would orbit the crew somewhere as Background First Class, their matching outfits
telling all the other camera-ready actors dressed in their own clothes how much they outranked them.

  “Did you visit your mom?”

  “Yes,” Sheryl said, “and she was so surprised!”

  We discussed what else we had all done since Friday (sleeping, mostly) and looked around the set. We were three coworkers having a coffee on a Monday morning and talking about our weekends.

  I WANDERED AROUND THE SET the way you would explore a music festival while you waited for your favorite bands to start. The back of the makeup trailer had two trailer toilets, which never once got dirty the entire day. On the other side of that trailer, a pair of nonplussed makeup artists dealt with the un-camera-ready makeup needs of the various background divas. Many background actors who could not accept that they would be out of focus throughout the entire shoot grimaced into the makeup mirrors, forcing the makeup artists to believe them that they were getting a zit.

  In an office trailer—also parked at the hilarious hilltop angle of our cafeteria—I heard of a problem. Casting had gone—shall we say—too well. Everyone had a vision of what the, y’know . . . those kids . . . with their . . . haircuts . . . and their outfits. Every person in the office had a different word for them. Some went by neighborhood: Silver Lake, Wicker Park, some place called “William’s Bourge.” But they tackled the subject with that fantastic Left Coast alacrity. “Didn’t you say these were supposed to be Brooklyn kids?” “Can any of Akon’s people make it?” I knew the problem right away. They were filming a video in the ’hood for a hip-hop label and it was supposed to take place in Brooklyn. Where were the damn black people?

  I pulled the AD aside and told him that I had a friend in the neighborhood who Gaga knew and who could be in the video. Here’s how to say that in Californese: “Somebody told me you want to improve the diversity of the cast?”

  Within half an hour I had Sandy, the girl who beat eight thugs off of me with her purse at St. Jerome’s only a few months before, at the shoot in heels and a dress. We had the team together. All we needed was Semi Precious Weapons.

  WHEN I FINALLY SAW GAGA, she looked right at home at the top of the hill. The talent hung around on the other side of the house in a private area. Lots of favors had gotten called in to get some Interscope brass to crowd together on the couches. Gaga had on a normal outfit for her: a disco-ball bra and a torn white undershirt and heels. Because we had to do all the shooting in one day, we spent all day doing the inside shots with all the windows blacked out so that we could get the night shots in all at once at the end. This meant that the intro and the establishing shots outside would get taken when it got dark. The background all hung around in their own clothes and so did the star.

  “You look great,” she said to me. I had worn the same outfit for a week: black jeans, black leather jacket, and white sunglasses. But the AD wanted me to go talk to wardrobe, so I switched into a pair of vintage white Nikes, pink fingerless gloves, and, for no reason, a sparkly cummerbund. I would never wear something like this at home, but when I saw it I said, “This is what we look like to them.”

  When no one was looking she plopped down next to me and let out a deep breath.

  “Everything okay yesterday?”

  “Huh?”

  “Said you had a rough day.”

  She looked down at the driveway as people carried props around and carried the man’s hilarious furniture out. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you—”

  “BACKGROUND!” The AD came in and abducted six of us for our first scene.

  I turned back to Gaga as I got pulled into the video’s orbit. “I’ll stick around this week and we can catch up.”

  Her big eyes looked up at me, lost at first, and her mouth hung open. She reminded me of that little girl I’d met only a year before, hungry for the scene. She’d wanted everything and now she had it. She took a breath and morphed back into the star, nodding her head at me as I went away.

  We walked into an unbelievable relic, a house from the seventies that must have spent the last thirty years under glass, pinned perfectly in place like a butterfly in a museum. Shag carpet like you wouldn’t believe, only you would believe it perfectly once you saw the harvest gold couches, three of them in a row, trimmed in gold rope. Floral polyester masterpieces. A short hallway with one bookshelf separated the sitting room from the living room. Both had unbelievable details. No wonder they had to move so much furniture into the driveway. This man was addicted to couches. I counted eight total, plus the plush armchairs outside.

  Gaga walked into the sitting room and found me helping the people in there with their costumes like we we’re getting ready for a Motherfucker party. She smiled at the production. “You guys look like my friends,” she said wistfully, as if by staging this production in LA she had conjured the people she missed all winter. I smiled over to her. She looked at me. “Well, you’re my friend. But they look like our friends.”

  “ACTION!” THEY PLAYED THE SONG about halfway in so that our totally professional dance motions would sync up. We all looked around, hoping for the first time that the camera would show us out of focus. Some girls tromped on the couch with their heels on. I grabbed a bottle of André champagne. It was warm and still had the sticker on it from Ralph’s.

  Dancing in place during a make-believe party felt unbelievably moronic. We looked like go-go dancers stationed on couches. I wished Starlight were here.

  Instead I stood around with a half dozen American Apparel employees and pretended to have a good time. It’s like a party in Williamsburg.

  A big part of this production involved nothing getting mic’d. This helped because none of us had studied being music-video extras at Julliard. When the music played we all tried to look happy and drunk while we interpreted it together. This wasn’t a hip-hop video, where we could look taut and sexy in slo-mo.

  “BACKGROUND—MOVE AROUND! YOU EVER GO TO A PARTY WHERE EVERYONE JUST STANDS STILL IN PLACE?!” The AD stirred us up from just behind the camera.

  We tromped around the room, trudging over furniture and spilling three-dollar champagne on the ottoman we just kicked over. Gaga stood in front of the sitting room while a production assistant guarded the front door to make sure no one messed up the espionage lighting we had going. The idea was to make a motion-picture version of the photos that came out of downtown parties like Misshapes, Motherfucker, and our own nights at St. Jerome’s. Very washed out, no-time-to-get-it-perfect. The idea worked.

  After that the actual director walked in. She had finesse where the AD had force. She could tell you just with her gaze where you needed to stand to keep up your part of the video’s unified vision. After styling the party room she told us she wanted us to come through the beaded curtain one by one. Gaga would stand on the other side of it singing a verse and we had to walk past her like we would anybody else at the party.

  On Gaga’s side of the curtain you had the lights, camera crew, audio playback, and the director.

  On our side you had the goddamn AD screaming, “BACKGROUND, MOVE AROUND! C’MON! KEEP WALKING AROUND. NOW COME THROUGH ONE AT A TIME.”

  Because of the front lighting, you could see Gaga where she stood and sang a verse while everyone passed. The first girl through walked by as if Gaga were the bitch who wouldn’t get out of the way in the slippery hallway where everyone dropped a splash of vodka cranberry as they negotiated down three steps in heels. Gaga remained unscathed from the interaction as if she were playing in a club where the way to the bathroom is just a few feet from the stage. The next guy just marched straight through like a nervous extra in a music video who just wanted to get his part over with already. Everyone looped back around the living room and past the front door to come back to the sitting room when they finished, as if they were having a good time, and then went to the kitchen to refuel.

  The next guy to go through kind of offended me. Wardrobe put him in a leather jacket and a pair of nerdy glasses. My schtick. He strolled through the gold-beaded curtain and looked Gaga u
p and down. I stopped doing my fake dance when I saw him. He paused and threw Gaga against the bookcase and tried to make out with her. I could just imagine how much Guy would want to kill this guy. After that, the Asian girl in the dress walked by in her heels as if she could not possibly care. We did a couple of takes. Mostly on loop. Because of my incurable need for authenticity, I went for my launch and when I came to Gaga at the bookcase I slapped her on the back of the shoulder like I would if I ran into her downtown. “Gaga? What are you doing here?”

  “CUT! CUT!” Music stopped. Production halted and the front opened like a drawbridge, bringing in propmasters with the relief of a constipated doorway. Some nervous lads had hidden in the garage for the entire take, trying to keep an ice sculpture from melting in the California sun.

  The AD ran in the room. “OK, BACKGROUND! I like what I’m seeing but I want more. More movement, more interaction. If you have a bottle in your hand you should be offering it to everyone around you. This is a party. Move around. Leave the room. There’s no reason that everyone would leave a room at a party individually. Run around. Have some fun. Maybe two of you have to go to the bathroom at the same time. Maybe you took a picture you want to show someone in another room.” He spoke with that lumbered, old-man cadence that tried to respect his inadvertent need to make fun of the young. We get it, pal, say the backgroundlings. We’ll be more obnoxious and self-involved.

  Just then the director parted the curtains and walked out, all smiles. “That was great, you guys! I love the interactions and the way it looks like a party!” She can’t be any older than I am. “I want more. More interactions. Don’t ignore Gaga just because the camera is on her. Move around. Interact. You”—she pointed at me—“I like that moment when you walked up and tried to grab her and press her against the wall. Do it again? Only this time, y’know, like move in for it, okay? Like you’re gonna kiss.”