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 and 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.