10: IMPACT
 

 Surveying the Wag/Clinton similarities, it is only serendipitous that I should soon find myself in the Oval Office of The White House. Painstakingly recreated at the Warner Bros. adjunct facility in Hollywood (as opposed to the massive studio in Burbank), I am hanging spacelights and making crop-circles outside with four-ought.

The heavy gauge cable is what we use to power the set. Oftentimes, the extraneous lengths make bizarre-looking configurations along the ground, strategically placed in obscure places before terminating precisely at the power destination. Such measures are taken to prevent the buildup of resistance, and the heating-up that occurs if a cable remains coiled while carrying current. It also affords a bored electrician a way to be creative in an abstract way.
 I have already been through The White House security check system. It was back in 1989, before any of us had reached L.A. There was a gubernatorial debate occurring in New Jersey that President George Bush was to attend. Steve-O and I went to rig the lights, and we had to submit our social security numbers for the check. I'm sure they looked at everything from credit report to criminal record.
 Regardless, we dreamed up espionage ways one could infiltrate the protective shield they would cast. They went so far as to have us rig two sets: an interior of a school gym, and an exterior government building. I guessed one was a cover set, in case unpredictable New Jersey weather decided to piss on Congress. Either that, or to foil some late-breaking assassination attempt in case anyone decided to open a black umbrella in a grassy knoll on an otherwise sunny day.
 Rigging two sets with the knowledge one of them wouldn't be used seemed wasteful and exorbitant back then. That was a long time ago, before I had ever really seen Hollywood. In retrospect, the measures taken to protect the president seemed minimal compared to the expenses the studios would write-off for a simple momentary deception.
 Now I daily saw production throwing thousands upon thousands of dollars away, and that is with respect to the electrical department alone. Hiring guys to load a truck full of equipment to go to a location that hadn't been scouted-- then canceling the location, forestalling the production schedule, and re-hiring the guys to unload the truck. All this amounted to major dollars spent weekly with zero footage to show for it.
 These costs were just daily drops in the bucket of an otherwise overinflated and costly project. Last year's tidal wave of epic blockbuster movies ("Volcano," "Independence Day") had set the trend for this coming year's monster movies-- "Godzilla," and "Mighty Joe Young" to name a few.
  Does all of this sound familiar to anyone else? Are we just re-making movies we already saw as kids, because digital effects are better now? Because if we are, it's okay Mr.Studio Head, if you just own up to it. But if you have seen any of these old monster movies lately, you will realize that they don't have very much plot content or good dialogue (or good dubbing, for that matter), but that's okay-- we're not watching it for that stuff. We're just waiting for little Mr. Toro to start jumping around in the rubber suit, putting his footprints all over Nagasaki while people run screaming "peas and carrots! peas and carrots!!" So please, don't go giving us some Demi Moore sappy love-triangle twist where her hubby is trapped under 'Zilla's big toe.
 We-- Steve-O, myself, and some twenty-odd other electricians had our own monster to manage presently.  A "what if" yarn about a meteor headed for collision with the earth. How did I come to be the key rigger on one of the biggest sets in Hollywood? Don't ask me, because if I had known what I was getting into, I would have flatly refused claiming that you couldn't pay me enough.
 The best boy, Thorpe, weaned me into it. He coaxed me along before he finally slid it over onto my lap. Granted, he was busy acting as rigging gaffer while the first unit was away on location in Washington D.C. We were rigging two stages in town, and scouting locations around L.A. for when the company came back. This show had problems built into it from day one-- they had already lost a number of good lighting technicians who quit early on. When I came on board I was just a set of gloves happy to have a job. As guys dropped out, I was handed increasingly more responsibility.
 Deep Impact had an albatross wrapped around it's neck from the start. They (Dreamworks) had rushed into production prematurely, as became increasingly obvious on a daily basis. There was another studio (Fox) that was in pre-production with a picture called Armageddon. It had the same plot premise (comet to crash into and destroy the earth), with many of the exact same locations. This became increasingly apparent as time went on and Armageddon went into production, and we compared notes with other visiting electricians.
 Some of the guys who were working with us went to Armageddon when they had been laid off from Deep Impact. The jokes ran rampant; "I only do comet movies," quipped DaMonde,  after a short visit.
 The real joke was, everyone in Hollywood who had any connection to either of these two pictures or studios knew they were making the same movie. Steve-O and I met Laura for drinks after work one day at the MGM Plaza where her and a group of her studio friends were gathered. We got to talking about the pictures we were working on, and a guy from the story department told us of his run-in with Deep Impact.
 "I read the script and did coverage on it, a while ago," he said, "and heard nothing of it. I was talking with a friend of mine who is a DP recently, and his agent contracted him to shoot 'Impact'. After reading the script, for whatever reasons, he decided doing the picture might not be a good career move so he asked the agent to get him out. Reluctantly, the agent did so, and went off to book him another job. The next week the agent gives him another script to read, and that script is Armageddon. So he reads the script and gives it back to the agent, saying, 'What is this, some kind of joke? I just told you get me off this thing! It's the same fucking movie!'"
 So I figure this must be the laughing stock of all of Hollywood by now, judging by the number of people who have come and gone, it being such a huge production. It was Dante's Peak vs. Volcano all over again, a race to the box-office, thinking whoever got there first would win. Dreamworks was throwing money at Deep Impact like a bunch of drunken gamblers in a poker game.
 On set the script had been held securely, as if it were top-secret; it was available on a need-to-know basis only. In the first few weeks, it had been rumored that there was no ending written; the lack of a complete shooting schedule supported this. Then word got out that they were doing a massive rewrite because some MIT professors had been given the script and informed the producers that a meteor crash wouldn't happen like that. Of course, we were already in production. All we could really do was sit back and laugh about it.
 That was the beginning, the onset of the complications. The entropy just got worse. Had I the foresight, I would have run from it like the plague. It was one of those doomed space-vessels condemned with rampant disease, and the only way to escape it was to get out. But I stayed on board, because I was some kind of field-captain and rose to the occasion.
 Often times, DaMonde and I would find occasion to go bowling or play golf on company time. We got accustomed to being sent on a mission and having hours of down-time because of improper scheduling, planning, and dispatching. It was inevitable that wherever we went, there would be delay; either we couldn't get in to the location, or there was no security, or whatever. We would be forced to find ways to bide the time.
 We saw a lot of guys come and go. It seemed like just about every electrician in Hollywood, if they weren't already glued to their own show, would come by and work a day or two. That is, if you could put up with the BS. Steve-O stayed on, as did DaMonde and myself, and we made the best of it. Find another job, there's some other bullshit to go along with it; we had already established our presence here.
 This was the start of the show, with the first studio rigs and some of the locations. Everything was just getting warmed up. By the time we got to Paramount we were going full throttle.

*****

 Paramount was mayhem. It was an abomination. The anticipation building up to the construction and lighting of The Comet set was enigmatic, to say the least. The fact that we pulled it off, is incredible in retrospect.
 I was there for the first executive safety meeting concerning The Comet, when all the department heads were gathered together. There were producers there, people from Paramount, fire-safety people, toxic-chemical people, special effects coordinators, the key grip Mitchell Par, and Thorpe and myself from the lighting department.
 Thorpe started introducing me around and I immediately felt uncomfortable-- I didn't want to be there, and I didn't want any of those people knowing my name. I was a rigger, my job was to install equipment; not to discuss how and why with producers. You get paid a lot more for that in Hollywood, so I disappeared into the background.
 It was a political meeting. Thorpe took the floor and handled it discreetly, as I watched from the distance, noting his delivery.
 "Here is a giant Styrofoam comet that I am to light from beneath with more than two-hundred, tungsten-filament, heat producing lighting instruments. What kind of precautions are we going to take to prevent any imminent disasters from happening in such small, confined spaces?"
 He presented the problem to the group and implicated them into it. We were the ones who were going to put fire to it, but we weren't responsible for burning it. That was the beauty of the setup.
 Construction and set design had built a wall-to-wall cortex of a comet, in sections, out of giant Styrofoam bricks. The Styrofoam was cut and sculpted to shape, then covered with hardcoat acrylic spray and painted atop the infra-skeleton. If you've never seen a comet as it exists when hurtling through space, which you probably haven't, it looks like this: it's surface is largely ribbed plates, very hot and glowing, but you would never know that because it is so consumed in gas and smoke and atmospheric conditions (plus hurtling through space at phenomenal speeds). In effect, the set was a giant igneous rock.
 We would frequently have to climb out on the rock, and I grew to like the thing. I would daily fantasize about mountain biking down it's deliciously ribbed plates. But we were there to lay cable and rig lights, in and around it. It was my responsibility to see that it got done properly.
 Not an easy task, and my heart wasn't really into it.  Thorpe was the best boy on the show, he got all the recognition and credit, and that was fine with me. At times we were pushing forty or fifty guys, and it was necessary to delegate authority, but I was often angry to have received so much of it. Now all of a sudden guys I had never met knew my name, and were approaching me or calling me asking for work. I didn't want to be like Welder, making all the decisions about who stays and who goes. It was a delicate balance; I would hate to lay someone off who had a family and children to support, in favor of keeping a friend employed-- but it could easily happen.
 We plowed forward, Thorpe and myself, DaMonde coming to my much-needed aid. For a while I didn't think it was possible to bring all the cable and power necessary into the stage. It seemed there was not physically enough openings in the building to do it. We got inventive, and poked a few new holes in the stage ourselves. I even stashed some of our dimmer racks inside the doorway of the high school on Paramount's New York Street backlot set (you've seen it hundreds of times, but wouldn't realize it unless you'd been there). We already had a tractor-trailer full in the alley between the stage and the next building, and were running out of places to put them. The guys from Paramount were very helpful, as much as they could be, but they intoned that we were setting a new standard for what could be facilitated by that studio.
 The toxicity people ran tests to see at what temperature the Styrofoam would start to heat up and burn; they attempted to determine the toxicity of the fumes. All options to try to deflect and diminish the absorbed heat of the lighting units were explored. Eventually, tempered glass plates were ordered to fit the lamps. Huge, multi-ton air conditioning units were brought in and temporary ductworms were spread underneath The Comet to carry the cool air into the underground network of tunnels. Some hundred or more home circulation fans were bought to be dispersed beneath as well, and hourly progress/hazard checks were performed during operation by the Mole crew.
 The Mole crew was the unit that worked beneath The Comet. It was a labyrinthine maze under there, so you had to be small and sharp on your toes. A crew was dedicated to it's needs for familiarity reasons, since it was so easy to get lost in the cavernous nooks and crannies below surface.
 It was amazing that the thing lit up and didn't toast like a marshmallow. It looked great, too, with all the lighting and effects, when it was in full swing. The twinkling "star-curtains" hung around the perimeter giving the impression of the unlimited depth of space in all it's vastness (or so they hoped). Then the wire-guys, with all their rigging of overhead track and cable-harnesses for the spacesuits, would come in and make the talent fly above it all, with spoolers and travelers. Finally, the post-production editors "paint" out the cables to finish the illusion, and bam!-- Flying Monkeys 2000.
 Easier said than done. The whole procedure of Deep Impact took a tremendous toll on all involved. It was not unlike other films shot in Hollywood, except that this one took longer to produce than most, and was more intricate in the suspension of disbelief. The effects they were trying to achieve would determine much of the plausibility of the film. They were willing to cater to any expense.
 Most people's tempers had run thin by the fourth month, myself foremost amongst them. The constant subservience to incompetence was taking it's toll. I was plainly irritable on and off the job. I didn't realize it, but I was taking my work home with me. Working mostly nights, I wouldn't see Laura for days at a time. It was altogether unhealthy.
 This caustic reaction began to take effect in the mid-life of the show, during the filming of The Comet sequences. Technical dilemmas in every department forestalled the completion of the shoot. For a while, it seemed that The Comet would not die. And no one knew it better or more intimately than myself.
 Once it was rigged, The Comet was shot by the first unit crew for more than a month. There was enough maintenance involved in lighting a set this complicated to keep myself and a few others steadily employed throughout the run. A second unit crew was added to shoot The Comet when the principal photography there was completed. DaMonde and I were asked to head-up that operation-- we both flatly refused. We had a formula for survival thus far in the mission-- we knew not to tamper with it. We didn't want to suddenly be playing the best boy fiddle to some knuckle-headed gaffer. It was at this time that our idle hands beset our ways.
 Things were getting slow on Deep Impact now. There were no sets to rig. We would arrive in the evening, wait for the first unit crew to finish shooting, perform our clean-up chores, and go home. There was no challenge. No stimulation. It was too easy-- we couldn't even really complain. Side-bar: in the film industry, complaining is a form of pacification. There are always many things to complain about, and it provides a therapeutic way of alleviating stress for the speaker at the expense and creation of stress to the listener. For this reason it may be thought of as a "stress-trader," whereupon one may imbue and "pass-on" their stress to another. In addition, some trained studio personnel such as grips, can even pass off complaining as a form of conversation or small talk, so you hardly realize what is transpiring.
 We got careless about our work as we lost our regimented structure. We dared them to fire us-- did as we pleased and thought fit, as long as we could justify an answer. This group had truly gone renegade.
 We could be held personally liable for this-- myself, DaMonde, Thorpe, Steve-O; anyone who ever put a foot on that rock. But if you ask me, I blame The Comet itself.
 Yes, construction built it; they put up the frame, held the building blocks in place. The craftspersons gave it shape and texture, the painters gave it finish, while the laborers lent support. Then we came, and gave it a nervous system; an intricate web of electronic impulses connected and controlled by one highly complex brain, with reactions transmitted to every part of the body.
 The Comet had a life force all it's own. So many had invested so much in it, for whatever reasons, it was an object of contention. It was the ground we stood on, the place we lived, ate, slept, and who and what we were for so many weeks.
 It was a civil war on a stage. Space was so short, The Comet being wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. It left no level ground to stand on but a fire lane that the law prohibited blocking. Every time you moved something, you put it in someone else's way, having no place to stage equipment. It put the different departments at each other's throats.
 I likened it to something James T. Kirk might have come across in his stellar travels. A living, breathing, rock in space that is trying to take over your mind and making you fight amongst yourselves.
 "This... Planet, Bones... Is trying to take over!!"
 Only now I was commander of the Enterprise, the vessel being Stage 15 at Paramount, and we were hurtling forward uncontrollably and headed for Deep Impact. Being constantly confronted by Klingons, Romulans, Borgs and their like added to the deception; Stage 15 at Paramount is surrounded by the stages where they shoot the Star Trek Voyager series.
 We even wound up stealing their power. There wasn't enough juice on the stage to satisfy our exorbitant consumption needs. We conducted a twilight raid, arriving at 4A.M. one morning to run a colossal whip of trunk line from the vault which houses the transformer for the Star Trek series. Sure, the authorities at Paramount were aware, but did they tell The Federation? The Borgs knew something was up...
 The Comet was truly a sight to behold. It was a living, breathing, many-celled animal. When it was lit, smoking, pulsing, and chortling in screaming winds with blowing snow, it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Then add actors, marionettes being danced by strings from above as in a giant puppet show.
 The stage would be busy and bustling during rehearsals; there was much movement and coordination to be done in anticipation of The Comet working during a shot. Effects guys would ready the steamer and dry ice, the Ritter fans and the snow; the wire guys would reset the spoolers and travelers; the electricians would check the lights and fix any movement and shifting that may have occurred while the camera resets. Then, all would get still as the company waited for the call: "ROLL CAMERA!!"
 I was underneath The Comet when I first experienced this. Beneath the comet was where the dimmer board was set up, along with some of the effects guys' controllers. They needed to be manned stations, so they naturally evolved (over the course of several months shooting) into a lounge-type atmosphere where electricians and other technicians would gather, seeking refuge from the prying eyes of the production people.
 "Club Comet," the Mole-people called it, and they even erected a lit sign boasting it. Mood lighting is always status quo for the electric lounge, having tools and gear at the ready. There was a card table and seating area where all forms of betting or competition would take place, anything that would help to move time along. If you think time moves slow in a bottle, try sitting underneath a lit stage with nothing to do for fourteen or more hours.
 A similar lifestyle emerged up-high in the permanent catwalks, where the perm-riggers would await any complications in the delicate system of suspended lights. If the Mole-people lived like they were in a submarine, then the sky-guys were in a giant birdcage. An aerial prison, it was stark and dark like Alcatraz up there when they were shooting. Exposed metal everywhere, hidden from camera by big black curtains. Behind them, men sneaking around, up and down ladders, dropping ropes and pulling puppet strings that move the toys in the giant theater below.
 And so, my colleagues would kill time while the minds that were making this movie decided who and what went where. I had the pleasure to witness this one day, as I arrived for my night comet-maintenance detail. There had been some huge and costly production delay today that would keep the company there longer than expected.
 I descended the stairs of the astral monolith, where Club Comet was in full swing. A few Moles were deep in a card game, while Steve-O wrote an epic saga of the Mole-people's struggle to surface on one of the supporting structures. Clark sat at the dimmer board, smoking cigarettes and watching the monitor that showed what was going on on-set.
 It was like an Elks Club, or a meeting of the Rotary. No one immediately looked up, then people gradually would greet me, surprised to see me, and realizing they should be going home about now. Not tonight, though, so it was business as usual. I took a seat, figuring I'd mingle and wait for DaMonde.
 Not a bad gig, I thought to myself, and then the radio squawked and it all quickly changed.
 "Okay, roll camera... and... ACTION!!"
 The call came abruptly, but everyone was ready to work, and had that automatic mode to react quickly. Clark hit a few keys on the keypad, several Moles got up from their card game and scampered off in different directions, then an effects guy popped up from nowhere to turn a few key switches and valves.
 The Comet came alive. It pulsed with lights from around corners, casting grisly shadows of the infraskeleton crossmembers of the giant rock. Liquid frothed and hissed, escaping from pipes and tubing with a wake of scathing steam. The sound was like nothing I had ever heard before; industrial, but not techno or modern. Primitive and organic, like a massive sixth-grade science project. A stationary steamboat, driven by the breath of giant dragon, snorting, chortling, messy, and maddened.
 Day after day The Comet awoke with the crew call, as did those underneath, around, and on top of it. At night, there would be DaMonde and me, to tuck it in and put it to bed. The first unit finally moved on, and now the second unit lingered, shooting tedious close-ups and effects shots.
 Some day this had to end, and now, I felt it was near. The set had been standing for months, but no one knew it better than I.
 It all happened very quickly. 
 "The Comet is wrapped!"
 "What?"
 "Yeah-- just some Messiah re-shoots, then the Wolf-crash location."
 "No way!"
 Word finally drifted down, and Thorpe gave the instructions-- "Pull out the HMI heads and Lightning Strikes and Goya lights-- all the expensive rentals come out first!"
 And so the few of us went at it, and began dismantling what was now probably the biggest mess ever created in Hollywood. It seemed we would need an army to un-do what had been done, but we chipped away at it anyway, taking one piece from here, and two from there, trying to put together the expensive elements of the returns.
 We went home that night exhausted from extensive labor. Though we had begun to pull it out, I could not believe that The Comet was finished. I thought it would take forever to make it go away. Cables intertwined with cables, tons upon tons, hundreds of miles worth-- like a bowl of spaghetti the size of a football field. It looked like the inside of my head.
 Laura was distracted with her own front-office complications of the studio business, and it made communication difficult. All day long she dealt with these studio types fraught with multiple idiosyncrasies, while I dealt with the blockhead production people. She was in the offices, I was on the shows-- it seemed like two different worlds we couldn't make connect, even in our personal lives, what was left of them. By this time our schedules had become so incongruent, we hardly even saw each other during the week-- we were just two people living in the same house.

*****

 I went into work the next day after a short night, having turned back around to daytime calls so quickly. It was another morning on the Paramount lot, like so many I had seen before, since The Comet had first entered my orbit. Walk across from the parking structure, wave "hi" to the guard, jump on your bike, cruise the lot over to Stage 15, maybe swing by New York Street on the way. Some crew was shooting a commercial there today, I realized by all the traffic, so I rode in circles thinking I might run into someone I knew.
 Sure enough, I ran into Sean, a friend I had met in college who was now in set-dressing. A glorified furniture mover was he, but he had a connection with a production designer who got all this commercial work, and it paid good money. We ran into each other on a few sets before in the past few years. It was getting to the point now where it was uncommon to walk on a set and not know someone-- I was feeling what a small town this really was.
 "What are you doing here?" He queried of me.
 "Deep Impact-- a Dreamworks thing, comet crashes, everyone dies. You know the story." I was less than enthusiastic. I had had it up to here with comets.
 "Oh yeah, I heard about that one. I heard it's a disaster. How's it going?"
 "It sucks. But it's almost over, so... What are you up to? Are you just here for today?"
 "Yeah, it's a one day shoot. I'm heading back to Seattle tomorrow for a week or two, 'til our next job. My girlfriend lives up there, it's beautiful. I'm working on my photography, lining up some print contacts..."
 So the conversation went, briefly glancing over the studio business, quickly segueing into more interesting pursuits. This was how the small talk increasingly turned over the years, I now noticed. What was once "Oh, I'm working with this great, Academy Award winning DP", or "I'm gaffing this interesting little film", had become "Oh, another shitty movie, but it pays feature scale."
 I reminisced of more hopeful and prosperous times. When we were production assistants, we would huddle together and share our dreams-- "What do you want to be? Director? DP?" or "I want to make a film about..."
 Our eyes were wide open, we were learning, excited and impressionable. We could see the disdain in the eyes of the technicians; they wanted to wipe away our smiles with their dirt and sweat, but couldn't take the time, no, wouldn't take the time, because they were sure a few years in the studio business would do it for them. I was beginning to understand why.
 Now, I was one of the technicians. I would see the PAs, and have little time for them and the pesky annoyances that they pursued with such determination. There was so much going on and they were so out of the loop, it was easy to ignore and not notice their presence. But so often there was one who would remind me of myself, it kept me in check. What of those dreams? Where were they now?
 There I was, in a circle, talking with the other technicians about life besides the movie business. There they were, the PAs, anxious to make their life the movie business. It felt like role reversal, or peering through a window to the past. The dialogue in our circle went from, "I want to be a great DP", to "I'm thinking of opening a Starbucks in Plano, Texas." Somewhere along the way, the emphasis went from great movies to great mortgages and money-market funds. The golden goose suddenly seemed anywhere but there.
 I collected myself and headed for the elephant doors on New York Street that led in to Stage 15. Before I entered, something caught my eye that made me stop in my tracks. It was a Schwinn Stingray Special Edition, complete with banana seat and high-rise sissy bar, in metallic flake forest green. I recognized it immediately-- it was the bike of my dreams, as a pre-teen boy growing up in suburban Queens.
 It wasn't the cool color, ape-hanger handlebars, or easy-rider styling that made it a Special Edition, though. What made this ride unique was the stick-shift on the crossbar controlling the three-speed hub. That's right, a genuine Hurst-inspired gear-changing stick planted right between your legs on an upright bicycle. When you're eleven, and hormones are beginning to trickle into your system this is a taste of machismo enough to make you salivate. With Starsky and Hutch raging around in that striped Gran Torino, and your thoughts about a driver's license as distant as those of a 401k plan, this was the definitive muscle bike.
 The memory was vague; this was going back some twenty years now. I had seen the unmistakable model somewhere, whether it was in the neighborhood or in an advertisement I could not remember. I wanted it; I bugged my parents endlessly, and the search began. We looked everywhere, what seemed like everywhere to a child, but amounted to a local bike shop or two.
 Eventually, I had to accept my Dad's explanation that the bike could not be had. I succumbed to the new craze that was sweeping the world of bike-riding children, and soon found myself atop a shiny new red BMX, complete with indestructible one-piece "mag" wheels. But the image of the Schwinn Stingray, crafted in the likeness of the muscle cars of the day, remained forever etched in my mind.
 Amazing as it was in every detail, it now didn't surprise me why it so soon disappeared. Taking your hands off the handlebars to shift is never a good idea when cycling, especially for children. I'm sure the legal people at Schwinn soon realized this, furthering the limiting of the edition. Whatever the case, the bike disappeared but was never forgotten.
 I stepped out of my time machine and wiped the saliva from my chin, never taking my eyes off the two-wheeled wonder. Sure it was rusted in spots, and sorely in need of maintenance, but-- after successfully resurrecting the Triumph, revamping this to original condition would be child's play. I wondered if, at long last, could it finally be had?
 "You like that bike?" I heard a voice calling from over my shoulder, approaching from the adjacent stage.
 "It's awesome," I replied. "I wanted that bike as a kid, but couldn't find it. Is it yours?"
 The guy was a big dude, definitely not an electrician or grip, but certainly from one of the crafts departments. He was way too big for the bike, but you're usually going short distances across studio lots and getting on and off a lot, so you often manage with whatever is available. Whether he knew it or not, this guy had a particularly stylin' ride.
 "It belongs to the Property Department here at Paramount," he responded. My face fell upon hearing it. Studio politics would thwart me from acquiring it, I was sure. The guy continued, "It used to be Bobby Brady's-- y'know, The Brady Bunch?"
 "NOOOOOO!" I could hear myself scream, it reverberated through my brain a million miles a second. Bobby Brady, curse you! That was where I saw the bike, for the first time, on The Brady Bunch television show! He had it all, that mop-topped freckled bastard-- cool bike, model childhood, and-- that rad Valley house where it all went down. California-- that's where it was. It resounded in my mind-- California. It all came to me in a rush-- California, The Brady Bunch, the film and television business, and he, Bobby Brady-- he made me come here. I wanted what he had, I wanted to work in television, and-- I wanted his bike.
 Realization is both startling and sobering. I took a deep breath, staring at the rusted heap of a bicycle before me, as the crafts guy gets on it and rides away. The wheels were untrue in every direction, and as he rode away he confided in me that the shifter didn't even work. I let out a demoralized laugh, and felt like I just found out there really wasn't a Santa Claus. If I really wanted it, I probably could have gotten Bobby's bike, but I didn't really want it any more-- and that made me laugh.
  My gaze lifted to the water tower there on the lot, boldly imprinted with the Paramount logo overlooking New York Street. I was a long way from home. A relevant memory surfaced; I had once heard that Mike Lookinland, a.k.a. Bobby Brady, had become a camera assistant after maturing from the Brady character. Yes, that's right-- in fact, I even remembered seeing his name in screen credits to verify this fact! Hah! Imagine that-- Bobby Brady, a camera technician! And here I was a lighting technician! I suddenly felt like maybe I hadn't missed so much if we wound up somewhere so nearly the same.
 I didn't know what to think anymore. My worlds collided, the fantasy world that we carry around with us, with the real world that we exist in. I had nowhere to run to any more. I felt lost, there on the corner in front of the subway, where there was no subway, just a stairway down to a blank wall.
 I was overdue for work now, though it didn't matter and everything seemed so confused. Maybe I wasn't used to working days after so much night detail. I finally made my way to the stage, feeling from that moment on, something was different.
 As I passed through the fire door it slammed shut behind me with an echo. The hollow "thud" made me nervous-- wait a minute-- was I even on the right stage? My eyes squinted from the glare of mildewed tawny yellow stage walls, four of them, ominous and distant. Where were the star curtains? The greenbeds? The spoolers, the travelers, the spacelights, the tons of cable above and below? Where was the comet that so long ago crashed on a small chunk of soil to wreak havoc on the lives of the privileged few who would daily traverse it?
 Gone. Completely vanished, dissipated into thin air, like it never existed. Sure, they saved a few pieces for the inevitable re-shoots, but for the most part it was now landfill. I couldn't believe my eyes. I stood there in the doorway like I had passed through the portal to another world. All that was left of The Comet was a vacuous hole in the stage, with a few Styrofoam sweepings being pushed by a laborer with a broom.
 I took it all in with a deep breath. Gone was the headache of what to become of the wrap. Gone was the monstrosity that seemed to rule my life. Not another quarrel with another department regarding who gets to put what where. Not one more questionable command from Thorpe, with some ill-fated logic behind it. My troubles were over, yanked from beneath me like a tablecloth under a dinner banquet.
 The only other bodies on the stage were a few standing by the side of the empty pool (it could be filled with water on demand, though I doubted it would ever see another comet). I recognized DaMonde and the others Thorpe had given the call to. I walked up to them and no one said anything, awaiting my reaction. I looked at their faces, all wearing shit-eating grins, but no one would let on.
 "What the fuck is going on here?" I finally broke. "Are we on the right stage?"
 "Yeah," DaMonde answered for the group. "We thought you knew."
 I stared at the ground for a moment, ground I had not seen since we set foot there months ago. I looked up, and around, and listened to the tiny sounds that bounced around the giant space. I looked at the faces of my co-workers, still smiling, still patient, as they waited for me to speak.
 I shrugged my shoulders. "Well, I guess that's it for The Comet. Let's blow!"
 Like a football team breaking from a huddle we grabbed our things and set off. As we walked by the Klingons and Borgs in the alleyway, smoking cigarettes through their tedious costumes, they eyed us conspicuously like they always do. Without looking back, I put The Comet behind me, and I thought to myself this is a great day to go home early.

*****