| By Kevin MacDonald,
|
Favoured : 131 |
Published in : , Fiction |
New York was a disappointment.
I moved here following the advice of this musician friend of mine named Bobby who had escaped from the generic suburb we both grew up in. He’d been living in New York since 1998 and told me I needed to get my ass to the city before our hometown killed me from the inside out. I couldn’t disagree. But what I found when I got here wasn’t at all what I was expecting.
"Where’s the filth?" I asked Bobby, sitting on the barstool next to me in his skinny jeans, Dead Boys T-shirt, ratty Chucks, and leather wrist cuffs. It was the wee hours of another tired Saturday night in the East Village and we’d both downed a few too many PBRs. "They make this place look so cool on TV and in the movies, you know? Times Square’s supposed to be filled with crazies. Cabbies are all supposed to be lunatics. Muggings on every corner. Punks and thugs, and graffiti on everything. Alphabet City: Artsy, Brave, Crazy, Dead. Fuck, riding the subway feels about as dangerous as going to the mall."
"Gentrification, man," he said. "The whole city. It’s never going to be like it was. Fucking Disney’s ruined everything. The East Village is turning into another ‘hip’ neighborhood for fucking day traders to meet golddiggers. I mean, they closed down CBGBs for Chrissake!"
"I would kill to have seen the Ramones back in the day. Or the Talking Heads. Patti Smith. Even Blondie—you know, before they sold out."
"Shit was happening back then. Now it’s all sanitized crap."
"I hate the present day. I need a DeLorean, like in that movie, so I can go back in time."
And that was the beginning of it. It’s not like I was the first person to ever talk nostalgic. I don’t know, maybe it was the alcohol. Or maybe Bobby was just that kind of crazy motherfucker. Something went off inside him.
Bobby knew a guy down in D.C. named Xan who promoted small club shows. Xan knew a Ramones cover band. There were plenty of Ramones cover bands around, but Bobby said these guys looked and sounded just like Joey and company.
We’d find a space on the Lower East Side, rent it out for the night, and decorate it as much like the old CBGBs as possible. I had some money left in my trust fund, so we had just enough cash to do up everything right.
Xan didn’t take much to be sold on the idea. The faux-Ramones heard the idea and loved it. Hell, we were all excited. And when we saw the response from the people we gave fliers to, we knew we were on to something.
The night of the show, a thousand little punks were lined up in front of our shabby storefront, posing and snarling like it was August of 1974. A cloud of smoke from all the cigarettes almost blocked the CBGB sign we painted on the awning. The vintage T-shirts on display told a history of 1970s punk rock. A few people showed up wearing Sum-41 shirts, or a patch on their bag that said Good Charlotte. It was a good thing we had security, because these blasphemers could have been ripped to shreds if they hadn’t been quickly removed from the line. Anachronistic Mohawks and safety-pin piercings were allowed because they were considered enough a part of "original" punk. But nobody wanted the logo of one of those poseur modern "punk" bands to distract from the idea that they were about to see real history in the remaking.
As the crowd flooded in, you could hear hardcore punk historians dropping tidbits of their knowledge at each other, testing the cred of the people around them.
"You know, the Ramones weren’t actually the first punk band to play CBs."
"I know. It was Television. They played Sunday nights starting in March of ’74."
"Blondie played for the first time the same month as the Ramones."
"Yeah, but they were still called Angel and the Snake at that point."
"Well, Debbie Harry was doing backing vocals for the Stilettos before she was with Angel and the Snake."
Others just stood around and did their best to stay in punk character. They didn’t want to be talking about history; they wanted to be living history. And those were the people we put the show on for.
The "Ramones" slunk to the stage and started into "Blitzkrieg Bop." Even though it was supposed to be the first time anybody had ever seen the band, nobody could resist singing along. The only way we couldn’t maintain historical accuracy was with the set list. Bobby and I did our best to research what the Ramones played that first night, but we just couldn’t find a reliable source. As a compromise, we decided to limit the cover band to only playing songs off of the band’s first album. Of course, there were so many classics off that record that nobody really cared about authenticity. All it took was one "Hey! Ho! Let’s go!" and everybody was having a blast.
It was the Ramones.
It was CBGBs.
It was the way New York was supposed to be.
The Ramones show scored us enough bank that we decided to do it again. And again. And then we decided to branch out. Xan tracked down a Talking Heads cover band. Then we found a Blondie tribute. After that, a spot-on Patti Smith impersonator asked if we’d give her a shot. Those shows all did well, but it was the Ramones shows that really brought the people in. We ended up doing six of them over the next six months.
Halfway through what would turn out to be our last Ramones show, Xan brought a guy named Douglas Appleby up to Bobby and me. He stood out from the crowd because he was the only person wearing a suit. He shook hands like someone who told you everything you need to know about him with one grip. With a charismatic smile he said, "Are you ready to take this to the next level?"
We called our company Old New York. We specialized in re-creating experiences from New York City’s past. Appleby lined up the clients, Xan put together a crew to scout venues, and Bobby and I recruited the talent.
We started off with what we knew and what could sell a lot of tickets—re-creating club scenes. Our first request was for the Cotton Club during the golden age of jazz. Bobby and I lined up impersonators of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and George Gershwin. We even managed to find someone who looked like boxing champion Jack Johnson to wander the audience. Appleby insisted that we be as authentic as possible, that perfection was the only thing our clients would accept. So that’s what we provided. It was a real bitch, but after seeing the take for the week of Cotton Club shows, it was all worth it.
Next, we did The Palladium at the suggestion of the daughter of a real estate mogul from North Carolina. The girl and her friends had grown up watching Club MTV and wanted to see what it was like to rub elbows with Downtown Julie Brown while Cathy Dennis and Information Society played on stage.
We did Saturday Night Fever, charging a premium for whoever wanted to be John Travolta or part of his gang.
For a specialized gig, a guy wanted to be Lenny Bruce doing stand-up at the Café Au Go Go the night the police arrested the comedian for obscenity. We did our best to reconstruct the 1964 Greenwich Village hipster scene, but the guy couldn’t remember his lines, and the whole night was a long grind of flubs and false starts. That was the first time I realized that not all of these events were going to be fun.
We got a lot of requests for the night the gay bar Stonewall was raided and set off riots in the West Village. The only snag with that one was that we couldn’t call the location Stonewall, because the original bar is still in operation. This was the same problem we had with orders for Studio 54—in the early days it was our most requested re-creation. Because somebody still owns the rights to the name Studio 54, we couldn’t call the place that. And without the name, it was pretty much a generic night club full of hedonism.
Which gave Appleby an idea. That idea led to us mocking up Plato’s Retreat. It was the first event that had to be sold very discretely since there was no way we were going to get a permit to run a sex club. But our customers understood, and even kept quiet when we had to turn people away because we just couldn’t fit everyone into the place.
The things I saw that night . . . I shudder just thinking about it. Some people should never take their clothes off.
Individual requests came in from the kind of people who can afford to elaborately indulge a nostalgia kick.
Two brothers wanted to restage the premiere of Saturday Night Live, with them playing host George Carlin and comedy guest Andy Kaufman (doing the Mighty Mouse record bit). A week later, their older brother approached us wanting to be Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. My first thought was, there’s no way we could do the Marshmallow Man. But he was understanding, and was happy just to do the scene where they try to jump a ghost in the library basement. It was the first time we had to work with special effects, but once Appleby decided something was going to get done, it got done.
We did a lot of movie scenes. They were maybe the most fun out of everything. It was easier to get the re-creation right when there were fewer customers involved. We did selected scenes from Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Warriors. A young couple with money to burn paid us to star in West Side Story. The location production was great. It’s too bad neither of them could sing for shit.
The scale of West Side Story made Appleby more ambitious. Our next client got to drive the car chase from The French Connection. Unfortunately, he got injured when the car crashed into a subway track support. After that incident, Appleby decided to cool things off a bit. He didn’t even consider somebody’s ridiculous request to do the original King Kong. Instead, he put us to work on scenes from Midnight Cowboy. One guy just wanted to do the Dustin Hoffman "I’m walking here!" bit. This other guy—a real twitchy, nervous sort—wanted the full Joe Buck experience. Appleby loved anyone looking to explore their repression because they paid more than any other clients for the opportunity.
Case in point, a married couple with an open relationship who wanted to be Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, and they brought in the husband’s mistress to play Peggy Guggenheim. I was never really sure why they needed us to help them out. Did they really need our company to find locations and provide costumes?
Sometimes it felt like we were just being paid to watch.
Not every client was easy. Several clients came in and told us they wanted to be Andy Warhol. Our only question was, "But what are you going to do, sit around and come up with ‘ideas’ while other people do the work for you?" It wasn’t until the third or fourth request when someone in the office mumbled, "Didn’t that guy get shot?" And so, we staged Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya. What surprised me was that we were able to sell the re-creation to three people who wanted to play each of the three characters. The same thing happened with John Gotti whacking Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano and with Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon. With the Lennon kill, we even found someone who fantasized about being Yoko.
Murders were big for a while. A few orders came in for Son of Sam: some to play investigating officers, some to play victims, and, of course, some to play David Berkowitz.
We also did generic muggings. People wanted the "real New York" experience of walking down a rough street in the Bronx or the Lower East Side or Brooklyn and getting their purses stolen or getting cracked over the head with a bottle. (We used candy glass.)
One really disturbed couple even wanted to reenact the episode of All in the Family where Edith was raped, with the husband playing both Archie and the rapist.
There were sales to be made from every angle.
Out of all of them, my favorite, being from Massachusetts, was a rich Bostonian who just wanted a chance to set right a particularly horrible moment in history. And because he had enough money, we were able to rent out Shea Stadium and set him up as Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets—and this time, Buckner caught the ball.
Some jobs started off really inspiring, and then turned to absolute shit—literally. Almost as many people as requested Studio 54 asked to relive their ancestors’ arrival at Ellis Island. So many, in fact, that Appleby sold it as a two-part, all-inclusive experience. We tracked down an old steamer ship and packed it full of clients in authentic period costumes from whatever country their ancestors came from. The ship left a dock in eastern Long Island, just far enough away that the queasy got to toss a few cookies to the shores of Brighton Beach, and made the trip into New York harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, and to the Ellis Island Immigration Station. There, everybody was shuffled into a crowd and forced to wait in long lines before having their last names Americanized, getting their papers stamped, and being sent on their way. For those really ambitious, the second part of the experience involved a week-long stay in a rebuilt Lower East Side tenement building. People got to relive the deprivation and suffering their ancestors went through after having arrived on the gold-paved streets of America. Of course, many of the customers lasted one night eating the authentic slop food before pulling out their cell phones and ordering take-out.
The misery of the immigrant experience was a hit. It was almost as popular as the murders, and it created a whole new scale for our company to operate on. Orders came in for us to set up a Hooverville in Central Park. I don’t know how Appleby managed to do it, but he got the permits, and within a week’s time we had an entire shanty town hellhole built in a secluded corner of the park, complete with extras paid to randomly mock assault people and steal their belongings.
More than anything, it seemed, pain was what sold. People loved to explore the darker sides of the New York experience. They wanted to be beaten up and robbed and treated like crap. Maybe they thought they could exorcise their guilt over being rich by subjecting themselves to manufactured hardship. Whatever longing drove these people to us, Appleby was more than happy to accommodate their whims.
On the up side, ironically, nobody asked for a rerun of the 1990 garbage strike. We’d barely gotten away with some of our re-creations, and I’m pretty sure the natives wouldn’t let us cover their city with rancid mountains of trash just to service some transplant Manhattanite.
I guess I should have been happy because of the money I was making. Appleby paid well, and to some it must have looked like I was living the New York dream. But all the misery was starting to get me down. I’d been working with Old New York for two years and was feeling like I was past ready to move on. While interviewing prospective actors I often found my mind drifting, trying to remember why I’d moved to this city, and knowing that reconstructing memorable moments from history and movies wasn’t it. I wanted to make my own history.
Our latest client was asking for us to restage Simon and Garfunkel’s reunion concert in Central Park. Appleby tried his best to make it work, but the more time we spent going over it the more impossible it seemed. Even if we could somehow get half a million people to either buy tickets or act as extras, and even if we could somehow coordinate the logistical nightmare of such an event, there was the fact that the Central Park Conservancy was pissed at us over the Hooverville gig. It seems that Appleby had withheld some important details in order to slip through the paperwork for that job, and once the park officials saw that we weren’t exactly Christo with his Gates, they worked as quickly as they could to shut us down. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want a crime-infested makeshift village of shacks and tents right in the middle of the park.
Eventually, Appleby had to give up and tell the clients that there just wasn’t any way they were going to see old Paul and Art duet on "Bridge over Troubled Waters" short of renting a video of the original.
Rather than getting him down, having to admit defeat lit a fire under Appleby. He became determined to make his next project happen: resurrecting Times Square of the Seventies and early Eighties. As burnt out as I was, I decided it was a project worth sticking around for, if for no other reason than to see how he pulled it off.
And, boy, was it ever worth it.
The Times Square order was the hardest job to date. Because we couldn’t use the real Times Square, we first had to find a neighborhood nearby that was close enough in layout that we could superimpose the old Square onto the current surroundings. Bobby, Xan, and I, and even Appleby himself, scouted locations for a month before we found the right place in a far corner of Queens. The shop owners, for the most part, loved the idea . . . and the potential money that would pile into their cash drawers as a result. Our set designers got to work making facades while hundreds of extras were auditioned to play the dregs and skells and low-life lunatics that would be lurking around the porn shops and peep shows and shadowy back alleys.
When we were done, it was like an amusement park. There was no specific event we were reenacting, no specific performances. Hell, the whole thing was a performance. It was like a giant installation piece. It was show on an environmental scale, a living museum that our clients were free to wander around to their hearts’ content.
The first night of the re-creation I was sitting in a booth in a restaurant made up to look like the Howard Johnson’s that used to be on 46th and Broadway. Bobby, Xan, and Appleby were there with me, sharing a plate of disco fries, watching as our customers gleefully scurried about our masterpiece of urban decay. Even without looking at him, you could feel the pride coming off of Appleby like the stench from an overturned Dumpster. This was his crowning achievement.
It felt good.
And that’s when he leaned into the table and had us huddle around him. With that same smile he had on his face the first night I met him, he asked in a giddy hush, "Are you boys ready for our next job?"
I couldn’t help but be excited. Appleby’s enthusiasm could be infectious, but it was Times Square that revitalized something in me. After seeing what we were really capable of, I was ready for whatever Appleby had lined up next.
"What’s the next job?" I asked.
Appleby’s grin got wider. "I got two numbers for you," he said. "Nine. Eleven."
Xan got up from the booth first. "That’s it!" he barked. "I’m done. Are you fucking crazy?"
"She’s willing to pay us ten million in advance," Appleby said, putting extra emphasis on the dollar amount.
"I don’t care if we’re getting offered a hundred million," Xan shouted back. "I’m not going to relive the most fucked up day of my life for some rich bitch who feels guilty that her husband is in the oil business. Tell her to get a ‘Never Forget’ bumper sticker for her SUV like the other soccer moms. I’m going back to D.C."
The bell above the door to the fake Howard Johnson’s jingled, and that was the last I ever saw of Xan.
"I think I might be out too," I said, getting up to follow him out the door.
"You can’t quit," Appleby said. "This one’s going to be our greatest job ever."
"I’m sorry, Mr. Appleby."
Bobby followed me outside. Xan was already a ghost. "Man, you have to stay," Bobby pleaded. "This is the big one."
"No way," I said. "You know I haven’t been into this thing for a while now, and this shit just feels wrong."
His mind was working in that crazy way that got us here to begin with. "You don’t get it," he said. "You arrived late to the show. You didn’t move here until after the shit went down. Being here on that day . . . I can’t even describe it. It was like, before 9/11 I was just some kid from the suburbs who was playing in the big city. But going through that shit, after it was over . . . all I know is, after that I felt like I was really a part of this city. We can cry in our beer over not seeing the Ramones play CBGBs, but those towers falling was the day that really made this town. This is your chance to know what it was like. Man, this is your chance to stop being the small town boy and start being a real New Yorker."
Bobby’s speech wasn’t enough. If I was going to do this, I had to meet the person I was doing this for. A week later, she came into the Old New York offices. The client was a transplant from Colorado who moved to New York a couple years back, well after the events of 9/11. She told us how she didn’t even know about the planes and the Towers as it was happening, that she was in a therapy session the whole time and only found out after she reached the exit room. Since moving to New York, she’d felt like an outsider, like the whole city had been part of some shared experience that she missed out on. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t help but feel like a tourist.
Did I feel sorry for her, or did I identify with her? I had to find out which it was. I decided to ride with Appleby one last time.
I always knew the man had connections, and I thought he had limits. But this woman—she must have a seriously connected husband, because she got us clearance to do shit I never would have thought possible. We got to use authentic NYPD and FDNY uniforms, vehicles, and equipment. We got to study special footage and reports so our reenactment would be as accurate as possible. But most amazingly, we got to stage the whole thing near Ground Zero.
Next to the hole where the towers used to be, we built a scaled-down façade replica with a limited interior that was designed to mimic one floor of the north tower and an emergency stairwell for our client to escape through. The windows on the floor were actually giant flatscreen televisions that would show computer-generated footage of the view of the south tower being hit and then collapsing. The whole structure was rigged with effects to simulate what it was like inside the tower that day. By the time the client made it outside, our north tower would be collapsing behind her, and off to the side she would see a smoldering ruin representing south tower.
Like with the Times Square job, most of the local merchants fell in line. Some of them were still recovering from the financial hit from 9/11 and welcomed the business the spectacle would attract. One man, a Korean deli owner, told a New York 1 reporter that we were "monsters" and "grave robbers" for what we were doing. Appleby loved the controversy.
The morning of the reenactment, our client was sitting at a desk, pretending to be working for the financial firm her husband owned. As it turned out, our client wasn’t just feeling like an outsider, but she was also feeling guilty because her husband’s firm lost most of their New York staff due to poor training on evacuation procedures. The desk the client was sitting at was a customer service rep she’d talked to once when she dialed the wrong extension. It was the only company drone she’d ever talked to. She couldn’t remember her name.
The clock ticked 8:46, one of our technicians threw a switch, and the client felt the building shudder from the simulated impact. Alarms went off, emergency lighting kicked in, some extras "panicked," others began to "improvise" an evacuation. The client had been assigned to a specific actor, one who had also trained as a real-life EMT. She stuck close to him as she watched the TV screens showing the second plane hit the other tower. She saw tiny CGI people jump out the windows and plunged to their replicated deaths.
We witnessed the whole thing on monitors in the control booth at ground level. Our client handler guided the woman toward the stairs. We switched to another camera and watched them begin their intricately choreographed descent.
Something exploded inside the building.
The monitor went dark.
"What happened?" Appleby asked, whacking the screen.
"It’s not the TV," a technician said. "It’s got to be the internal cameras."
"Check it out," Appleby ordered. "I want to know what’s going on in there."
Minutes passed with no word. We sent two men into the building to investigate. More time. And then, over the radio: "—dead!" the voice crackled. "Handler dead! . . Stairs collapsed . . . Neck snapped."
I looked at Appleby, but he didn’t turn away from the tower. Grabbing the walkie-talkie, he asked, "Is the client okay? Repeat. Is the client okay?"
Five long seconds.
"Client okay…"
"…bringing out now."
A few minutes later, the client emerged from the tower, streaks of char streaming down her face from the tears. Once outside, she collapsed to the ground as our site medic ran to treat her.
"I’m sorry!" she cried. "I’m sorry! I just wanted to know. I didn’t mean to— I just wanted to know!"
I turned to Bobby. "Fuck! What are we going to do?"
"We’re going to get sued!" Bobby said.
"Fuck sued," I said. "We’re all going to jail." I turned to Appleby. "What are we going to do?"
But he didn’t look at me. "Do you see that?" he said, watching the client’s emotional breakdown. "That woman is a wreck. A real wreck. Those aren’t fake tears she’s crying. That’s real anguish she’s going through." And then he turned to me with that famous smile on his face. "Make sure we charge her extra for that."
In the seven years Kevin MacDonald has lived in New York, he's worked in varying capacities at several major publishing houses and is completing his masters in creative writing at City College. He lives in Astoria, Queens because Manhattan is like an amusement park and, while it's fun to ride the rides, at some point you need to get away from the people in the funny animal costumes.
|
(0 vote)