On Location

Last Night I fall asleep while reading over the script and when I wake up this morning, I am lying on my white-leather couch in my living room (I have a brownstone in the East 30s) and the clock reads ten o'clock. This means I am already late on the set, since the call is for 10:15. By now, all the streets from my house to the Central Park boat pond will be clogged with film crews and it will take about an hour by car. By rights I should walk, but I feel like a ride this morning. I call the agency and there's a limousine waiting outside my brownstone by the time I'm dressed and ready. I'm wearing the suit I wear in the commercial. A fine spring day. I tell the driver Central Park and we set off. As expected, it takes about an hour cross-town, but I use the time to go over the script once more and then just sit back and enjoy the view. On every cross street there are cameras, crowds and cable, falling past like pencils rolling off a table. Arc lamps blaze holes in the sunlight. On Fifth Avenue, we turn (they have made Fifth Avenue one-way uptown again) and the big productions swing into view. In Rockefeller Plaza, they are shooting a whimsical saving-and-loan commercial; people are throwing money into the fountain and every few seconds, a teller surfaces and makes change. The crowd seems to be loving it. Across from St. Patrick's, they are holding man-in-the-street interviews and volunteers are lined up on 50th all the way to Madison Avenue. Zenith is videotaping a spot in its own showroom at 53rd and Fifth: Here the crowd is being asked to watch itself on the TVs in the window. In front of the G.M. building, I notice a group from GS&C, the agency that gave me my first acting job. They are shooting a crowd scene, too, and I see one of the producers handing out delicatessen numbers. A camera car rides our tail for two blocks, getting some limousine footage, then swerves around us, the cameraman saluting. Now we are at Central Park and I notice Revlon has booked the zoo. There is a huge crowd here, as well, and throughout the park. The cops are on hand to ensure order, but the people seem as cooperative and contented as ever, the more so in retrospect, inasmuch as the grumblers-- that envious minority that circulates through all location crowds, complaining about the traffic, the noise, the lights, the humming of the cameras and the expropriation of public property--must at this moment be massing secretly in some location of their own.

I think how it must have looked from the air, the swarms of malcontents marching on the boat pond, like ants converging on a drop of syrup. (Our location is among the first to be attacked.) When I get there, around noon, everything is still proceeding normally. The Groom & Clean reps have just arrived, so my lateness goes unnoticed. Edie is there, already in her mermaid costume and waiting to be transported to her rock. They are going to shoot her alone first, and then, as the script has it, I row over in a rowboat and we have a little conversation about the product. The problem just now is with Edie's rock, which the Groom & Clean reps are worried doesn't give off enough reflection, so the crew is hosing it with glycerin. Edie, squirming around in her mermaid costume, looks about to throw a sulk. When I go over, though, I see she is not so much impatient or sulky as, for some reason, scared.

"Well, let them get the thing right and we can all go home," I say.

"Something weird going on," she says.

"Like what?"

"I just don't want to be here. I don't know what it is."

"Is it the costume? It's a nice costume."

"I just have this weird feeling."

That's all the warning we have. We wait as everything is moved up, the cameras, the lights, the reflectors, and the crowd gathers at the shore line, out of range, eating their lunch out of paper bags. The make-up people come and put the stuff in my hair, with the FTC guy hovering to make sure it's the real thing, right out of the tube. I'm not in the first shot, so I wander off up a nearby slope to watch. Some people in the crowd start to follow me, thinking the next setup will be on the hill, where I'm going, but I assure them no, pointing to the row-boats, and they go back to watch Edie. So I'm alone, looking down on the boat pond, with a view of other locations in the park--Salem and Clairol and Pepsi--and I'm the first to spot the attackers. I don't even know what to call them. The enemy? Long lines strung back toward Fifth. What the crew on the ground sees are a few noisy latecoming spectators, maybe a few grumblers, but from the slope where I am, it's the organized aspect that is obvious, and then I see the weapons. I can't believe it. Guns. Not all of the attackers have guns, but a lot of them do and they are converging on Salem and Clairol and Pepsi and on all of us at the pond. Little by little, it is dawning on the people below. I manage to signal to one of the cops, who starts over with some men. Then in the distance, I hear one of the attackers, one of the enemy leaders, cry out: "Are the cops the only ones preventing you from entering this location?" "No!" the yell comes back, enthusiastic, obedient, followed by a confused pause, and then the voice of the leader trying again: "Aren't they? Listen, now. I say, aren't the cops the only ones keeping you from this location?" "Yes!" comes the answer, the correct one this time, and cries of "Death to the expropriators!" "Death to the image makers!" "Death to the manipulators!" Our people, the crew, the Groom & Clean reps, are running for cover, while the first attackers to reach the location are timidly overturning canvas chairs, still not sure of the procedure and looking around at the leaders for instructions. But nobody is stopping them, the cops, who have never seen such a thing, are slow to respond and the attack is gathering momentum. One of the propmen is blowing a whistle. I try to make an inconspicuous descent from the slope. As I climb down, baboon fashion, something lands with a splash in the pond; they are starting to throw things in, a light stand, a coil of wire: There is a crackle of bad electricity and the pond gives off a puff of smoke. This is real trouble. Our people are milling around in confusion. The invaders have begun to intimidate the bystanders, thrusting guns into their hands and commanding them to join the assault. Another splash, I look behind me and see a camera crane being wheeled to the side of the pond and tipped in, and then comes the unmistakable sound of human bodies being thrown to the waters. I look around for Edie and then I see her. Two of the leaders are trying to carry her off, as though she were a trophy, but she is flailing around in her mermaid costume and the two men are finding her a slippery catch. I run toward her. The costume has come unzipped: One breast is exposed. I lunge at one of the leaders. He drops Edie and wheels around, getting tangled in his gun strap. His eyes light up and I see I am a trophy, too. I grab the other leader around the neck and he lets go of Edie, who is free now, running across the grass to where my limousine is parked; in the next moment, I pull loose from the second attacker, hearing a shot go off above my head, and soon I am in the car, our location a shambles behind us. We are heading back toward Fifth, my whole body tingling. Edie is shaking. When I get hold of myself, I flip on the TV. A news helicopter is swooping low over midtown; it is clear the trouble has spread to nearly every location. But Edie and I can see this for ourselves, out the window. As we turn onto Fifth, a crowd surges out of the zoo, with a Revlon model borne aloft on several pairs of hands. Ahead, on 66th Street, a Chef Boy-ar-dee Pizza car is aflame, with an actor inside. Edie, her nipple flattened against the windowpane, cries out in horror.

"Call somebody," she says, clutching my sleeve. "Are they going to let these people just do this? Where are all the police?"

"Caught napping, I guess." I try the car phone. One line is dead. I hang up and try again. This time I get an open line, but an actress imitating an operator repeats the words directory assistance three times; I hear a voice in the background say, "Cut."

"They're pretty smart," I say. "Some of the locations they're leaving alone. Letting us strangle in our own cable. As it were."

"How can you be so smug about it?"

"Am I?"

"It's all your fault," she says.

"Why my fault?"

"You should have seen it coming," she says, tugging at her mermaid costume.

"So we could have joined the right side?"

"Yes. All right. Why, did you like being an actor so much?"

"You're speaking in the past tense."

"With your hair full of grease. And me in this idiot costume." She shakes her head, biting back an inadvertent smile. We are nearing my house in the East 30s now, the driver steering a course through unruly crowds. "I can't believe it. And we're sitting here arguing--almost joking--about it."

"I guess this is the time we do joke," I reply. The truth is, I am sexually aroused. There is a sound of gunfire in the distance. My head is snapping with it. I suppose I still don't believe it's happening, though as we get out of the car in front of my house, recalling that Edie and I are special targets, I am careful to look both ways before heading up the stairs. At the head of my street, a camera car has been forced to the curb by a group of attackers. Shielding Edie, I open the front door. We go inside. I lock (continued on page 160)On location(continued from page 132) the door. I go down to the basement and check the courtyard door. I pull down all the blinds and return to the living room, where Edie is seated on my leather couch, trying to undo her zipper. My living room looks suddenly so incriminating: the pictures of myself on the walls, stills from various commercials and my two Clios from the American TV and Radio Commercials Festival on the mantelpiece. I recoil in fastidious horror, as though I had wandered by mistake into a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. It is not my house. I never meant to live like this. Should I hide my picture? Or will the cops have things under control in a few hours? The clock on my coffee table reads 1:30. Maybe all we have to do is hold out, by tomorrow everything will be normal again, better than normal, because now the enemy has exposed itself and can be exterminated. I am very excited. I go over to help Edie, who is still cursing at her mermaid zipper, and thrust my hand between the couch and her scaly, sequined leg. As soon as I touch her costume, I feel everything is going to be all right. I peel it down and pry into her popliteal fossa, firm pad defined by photogenic tendons, the supple, moist flesh, while Edie sits there smiling, excited, as bewildered as I am that we can be making love in the midst of possible disaster, yet letting me know with a smile that she, too, has decided this is what people everywhere have always done. Her head goes back, her body slips gently down, her nostrils widen as I bare her hips to the light and kiss her mouth, tasting a thick, molten bubble, like the center of a clay spring, which breaks, spreading its flavor over my lips.

She starts to murmur, then twists her head in alarm. A second light has just gone on in my living room. A footstep hooks us like two fish. Jerking up, we see a figure in the doorway.

It is the man from the boat pond. One of the two leaders who tried to carry Edie off. He has followed us here. He is fiercely calm and is pointing his gun at us. Here. In my living room. But if a man is in your house, how can he be your enemy? And now, with a sweep of the gun barrel, he knocks all the items off my mantelpiece, including my two Clios. My face goes hot. I am going to cry. Edie is clutching my arm. I try to open my mouth to say something, but I can't find the words and my jaw starts to tremble. "You stupid bastard," he says, raising the gun to shoot. I push Edie to one side and duck. The gun goes off. Something enters my shoulder. I dive at the attacker. The gun goes off again, into the ceiling. The man is on his back. I step on his face and wrench the gun from his hands, slamming the butt against the side of his head. I hit him again, again, digging at his skull with a hoelike motion until my arms go weak and I can hardly see through my tears. It feels as though I have been hitting him for hours. I look at his head--he is bleeding freely from the ear--and sickness engulfs me. Edie is shouting my name. A numbness crawls up my arm, burrows inside my shirt like a small animal. I feel my shoulder, wincing at a pain no larger than a tooth, wondering if there is a bullet there beneath the blood and what must be done about that and how soon. My lung has been punctured, I think, and test this hypothesis with the next few breaths. The childish fears are much worse than the pain, worse even than the sight of a murdered man lying on my living-room floor. I must get myself to a hospital. I go to the door. Edie takes a raincoat from my closet to cover herself and follows. In the midst of everything, the sensation is like emerging from a double feature to find the weather has changed. The East Side is now swarming with attackers. We walk toward the river. A captured camera car is going along First Avenue and two men, knee deep in photographic equipment, are tossing cameras and lenses and film stock onto the sidewalk, cheered on by a crowd standing in front of Bellevue. We cross the street. Fires have broken out all along First Avenue. All the locations have been sacked except the vital services. They are treating their own wounded at the hospital. "Our own wounded," I say aloud. Edie winces. My wound is starting to throb. In the Bellevue parking lot, guns are being distributed. We walk toward the entrance. Medics are watching from the doorway. I go over, clutching the gun. A medic peels off my shirt. "Death to the image makers," I say. The medic nods. There are many people tightly packed in the parking lot, camera cars and ambulances coming and going, men with rifles climbing onto trucks, dismounting, new shifts of attackers being dispatched in camera cars to new locations. I look around for Edie, lost somewhere in the crowd. The medic is bandaging my shoulder. "You're needed," he says, acknowledging the gun I hold and pointing to a car about to leave for somewhere.

"The girl I was with--"

"Has been sent to Central Park."

I suppress a shudder. "To mop up?"

"Exactly."

Oh, God, I think, but they have won and I am in the car, pulling away from the hospital onto First Avenue. The streets are filled with broken glass. Across First, at the Kips Bay apartments, gun-fire is coming from the roof. I want to roll down the window, call out, tell everyone to give up. We should have known. To tie up public property is evil. A camera car is going by. They must have salvaged some equipment, because they have a camera pointed at us and running. The barbarians donning Roman finery, I think, feeling the car slow up. It is my house we are stopping at. Oh, God. They don't realize a man has already come here. They will find him on my living-room floor with his skull crushed in. They'll see my picture on the wall. Oh, God.

I wonder if I can make a run for it. I have left my rifle in the car and now they are forcing me up the stairs into my own house. I shake myself free and rush into my living room.

There is no one lying on my floor. I look up and see the dead man giving me a wink. A make-up man is wiping his temple clean of blood. I turn around and see the cameras and lights being moved in and a propman replacing my Clios on the mantelpiece. Another propman is setting back the clock on my coffee table. He leaves it at ten o'clock, then unwinds the bloody bandage from my shoulder and discards it. A third propman places a script face down next to the clock. Turning, I can see the director seated in a canvas chair, the cameraman stepping behind his camera and, behind them, a crowd of onlookers being kept at a distance by several policemen. I am told to lie back on my white-leather couch and pretend to be waking up. I close my eyes and lights come on and a camera hums as the horror of it strikes me: They are going to do this until they get it right.