On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (27 page)

You see, a little boy named Joey did a headless-horseman bit where he threw a winter coat all the way down the aisle toward the viewer. It was a terrifying final moment for our patrons. Everyone loved it…until the zipper poked the eye of a first-grader, and she cried to the playground monitor. Ms. Ford marched right over and shut us down. I appealed by telling her I’d screen the kids and do the headless-horseman jacket throw for fourth- and fifth-graders only, but she wouldn’t hear it. She shut the operation down.

“
What are their names?” asks John.

“
Becky, Derek, and Tom,” Lolly says quickly.

“
Why do they hate you?”

“
They were supposed to do the Fringe with us. We were all working on a show together, but then we realized they were crazy, so we told them we weren’t going to do the festival anymore. When they found out we lied, they got pissed, I guess, and decided to exact revenge.”

Our improvisations had perfected this material. We knew it so well, we could complete each other’s sentences, which made for a very believable tale. When they asked us what they looked like, we described ourselves. Our subtle attempt to let them in on the joke proved futile. They didn’t get it. They were running the largest theater festival in the city and didn’t have time to search our answers for subtle nuances.

They held us in their offices for what felt like an eternity. It was mid-August, and we were in the Lower East Side tenements in 90-degree heat with no air circulation. It felt as if it were 100 years earlier, and we were brand-new immigrants smashed into a humid, vent-free boarding house. The interrogation was starting to melt our brains.

Finally, they tell us they’re beefing up security throughout Fringe Central and will make sure they have three people by our doors for our final performance.

“
Don’t forget to put someone one the roof,” I say.

“
How do they come in through the roof?” they ask.

“
Have you seen the roof of our theater? They lift a corner and drop in.”

It isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly improbable. Still, they don’t catch the hint. We thank them a million times and leave the office as fast as we can.

It was quite a show. Not one of us blinked.

And that’s how we ended up standing in the oppressive sun on Stanton Street with Dickey predicting a death.

“
We’re terrorists, you know,” Dickey said. “We’re fucking terrorizing the whole fucking festival.”

“
We’re not terrorists,” I said. “Fag Hog are the terrorists.”

“
WE’RE FAG HOG
!” Dickey shouted.

He got me on a technicality, but I didn’t want to hear it. Nobody wants to be Fag Hog. But Dickey was right. We
were
Fag Hog. With our spectacular performance in the Fringe offices only minutes behind us, I had convinced myself we were innocent.

“
We should go back and tell them,” Dickey said. “We have to put a stop to this.”

“
No way,” Lolly said. “What is that going to do?”

“
Dickey’s right, Lolly,” I said. “We should go back. They’re starting to put some serious resources toward protecting the festival against a fictitious threat. It’s kind of like we’re shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

“
How are we going to go back in there and tell them we just made all that shit up? I’m not going to do that.”

Now, Lolly was right. They did not look as if they were having a very good day, and we just had a million chances to come clean but opted instead to lay thicker hints.

“
Why don’t we get into our Fag Hog costumes and go in there and introduce ourselves as Fag Hog?” Dickey suggested. “That way, we don’t have to ever admit to anything.”

It was a stupid idea. A stupid, stupid, stupid idea. And so, we put on our sombreros and ponchos in the sweltering heat and walked back to the office with our tails between our legs.

When we walk into the oppressive former immigrant hellhole of an office, they barely look at us.

“
Is everything OK, guys?”

Obviously running a fringe theater festival had rendered them immune to wildly dressed people in the office.

“
Everything is fine,” Dickey says.

“
We’re Fag Hog,” Lolly says, trying not to laugh. “We heard you wanted to see us.”

They don’t even take a full second to reply.

“
Get out!” is all we hear. We turn around and head home. They aren’t interested in wasting any more time on our games.

It was so anti-climatic. Somehow, life is more electrically charged when there’s the possibility someone might die. I know it sounds terrible, but isn’t that why we watch football and the Indy 500? Our humanity really isn’t as polished as we’d like to believe.

We perform our last show as usual, but when we reach the “stopping-the-world moment,” we simply stop.

“
Thank you all for coming to see our work in progress,
Stopping The World
. That is all the play we have for you at this time. We’re going to keep working on it over the next few months with the hope of presenting it later this fall. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for moments that stop your world. The next paradigm shift could be right around the corner.”

THE WORLD STOPS

I got off the C train at 50
^th
Street and Eighth Avenue. Running late, I had taken the C train, which arrived first, instead of the B, which dropped me off right below the building where I worked. It was a gorgeous day with not a cloud in the sky, and I wanted to stretch my legs a bit before confining myself to my cubicle.

I stopped at a bodega and ordered a large coffee with milk, no sugar. The man behind the counter, who was listening to the radio, told me an airplane had hit a building downtown. I’d heard once that a plane had flown into the Empire State Building, but that was a long time ago and I found it odd such a thing could happen again. Surely, navigation equipment had improved.

I paid for my coffee, stepped outside, and looked south. I couldn’t see the lower Manhattan skyline, but I could see smoke emanating from that direction.

Hurrying to work, I walked the two long avenue blocks to Sixth Avenue in record time. I was trying to beat the clock, but the truth was, it had already won. I was officially five minutes late even before I got to my building.

Because the anchor tenant in my building was Fox News, the lobby’s many television screens and tickers endlessly spouted right-wing crap. It was the last news source I would trust, so I always ignored the dazzling displays. Today, however, the lobby was packed with people, all standing in silence staring up at the screens. Resisting the temptation to look myself, lest I be turned to stone by catching a glimpse of Bill O’Reilly, I headed to the elevator. Finally safe on the 19
^th
floor, I reported to my cubicle.

“
You know, a plane hit the World Trade Center,” said my boss Bob.

“
Yeah, I heard, some Cessna or something, right?”

“
No, it was an airliner,” he said. “You need to call your parents.”

And he went back into his office.

I understood the gravity of a jetliner crashing into a building, but I wasn’t sure why that warranted a phone call to my parents. Then, a woman I’d never been friendly with ran out of her office and announced that another plane had hit the second tower.

“
It’s like we’re under attack,” I said, almost joking. While that was the impression I was getting, it certainly didn’t strike me as a reality.

“
We are,” Bob hollered from his office. “Call your parents!”

I didn’t know how to process his intensity, so I did as I was told. I picked up the receiver and phoned home.

“
Hello!” said my seven-year-old nephew.

“
Hi, Kevin, what are you doing?” I asked.

“
Nana’s here, and we’re watching New York burn.”

I was struck by his frank observation while at the same time recognizing how truly terrifying his observation actually was. I was
in
New York, and my nephew was 3,000 miles away watching it burn.

“
Can you put Nana on the phone?” I asked.

He handed the phone to my mother, who was at once relieved to hear my voice and terrified by what she was seeing. Having never been to New York, she had no sense of midtown and downtown. All she knew was that planes were hitting buildings in the Financial District, and I worked at a financial institution.

“
Get out of there now!” she instructed.

I spent a few minutes unsuccessfully trying to convince her my office was safe. I assured her I would flee to safety should danger come my way.

“
Yeah, right,” my mom replied. “You can’t outrun a plane, Randy.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I said I’d leave and hung up. Reality had started to settle in, and I got busy on the phone, trying to connect my coworkers with their loved ones, many of whom were navigating the chaos of the lower Manhattan Streets.

Two hours later, after two more planes had gone down, U.S. airspace was neutralized, and the World Trade Center was no more. Those of us who hadn’t already left the office decided we’d done all we could. Scott was walking up from his 20
^th
Street office. Donna, who was unable to get back to Long Island, and I met him in front of our building on the corner of 48
^th
Street and walked uptown to Scott’s apartment on 79
^th
Street and Broadway.

The New York streets were quiet in a way I’d never seen. No horns, no planes, no loud shouting, only crowds of people moving north, away from the destruction. Each time we’d pass an avenue, we looked down at the spire of smoke that, like a volcano, seemed to be endlessly spewing ash.

Chills climbed my spine when I saw the survivors. Unmistakably marked head to toe by a white dusting of ash, their big eyes, glazed over with tears, were wide open, scanning everything in a daze. It was as if they’d been buried for a century and were coming back into the world for a second time, expatriated from the lives they once knew. They were living ghosts.

Scott and I hosted a small group of assorted friends at his apartment until they could all find their way back home. Then, feeling restless, we walked through Central Park. The scene was surreal. The beauty of the day and the silence of the sky created a breathtaking calm. Only the birds spoke, and even they were having a difficult time communicating in the hollow air.

We only had to look south to see the cause of this unusual reality. It was as if, when the buildings fell, they had sucked all the awful, loud, hate out of the air and left peace in its place. To this day, it remains the most serene scene I’ve ever experienced, right in the middle of one of the busiest cities on earth. We would soon learn that the destruction’s gravity was so intense, it pulled several month's worth of awful, loud hate into the ground with it. The fall of 2001 would be the most magical on record. The weather, the people, and the city would be placed in a healing trance.

By the time evening set in, I realized I hadn’t actually seen what happened. I was still relying on my imagination to draw what a jetliner hitting the World Trade Center looked like. So, I left Scott, went home, and pulled out the little TV we kept in the closet to watch this universal stopping-the-world moment. And, as the footage rolled on and the stories began to unfold, I experienced my own stopping-the-world moment in the small, curved reflection. What I understood to be my youth had ended.

As the winds shifted, bringing with them the smells of burning metal, The Beggars Group gathered in my apartment to determine our next move. As we were settling in, we heard a story on NPR about a musician who, when the first plane hit, was having a smoke before heading up to his day job at the World Trade Center. He had written a song about his experience and played it on his saxophone. It was Charles, Lolly’s former infatuation from The Gold Sparkles
.
We hadn’t heard neither hide nor hair of him since
The Expatriates
, but there he was, on National Public Radio, making his art a week after the tragedy.

“
Well, nobody can say we have bad timing,” Dickey said.

“
We can’t do
Stopping the World
now,” I said, leaning out the window with my cigarette.

“
Why not?” Dickey asked.

“
Because it’s too…now. It’s too much. Doing
Stopping the World
now would be like reading the
Diary of Anne Frank
while the Germans still occupied Holland.”

A silent Lolly, who’d had her head in her arms for the last 10 minutes, suddenly looked up.

“
We need to do a piece that is the equivalent of giving blood. You know? It has to have that kind of significance.”

It was a deadly thought, and I could tell she was lost in the rabbit hole.

“
And what would that be, Lolly?” Dickey asked.