Anna* was Black, she was a Buddhist, she was a lesbian, and she was the first person I ever knew to have breast cancer.
We worked together in the early 90s at a theatrical lighting shop that took up three floors of an industrial building in the neighborhood formerly known as Hell’s Kitchen. The shop was the largest nonunion lighting shop in the city, renting gear to off-Broadway theaters as well as fashion shows, film shoots, fancy parties – you name it, we had the package. We dealt in everything from thick black lengths of backbreaking cable to then-cutting-edge projection systems. We had a woodshop, and an iron shop run by a metalhead nicknamed “Beast.” And of course we had lights: lekos, fresnels, par cans, birdies, striplights, scoops, beam projectors, followspots. All of this technology is for the most part now obsolete, replaced by programmable LED fixtures, but at the time we were the best in town, and the care and handling of all this mass of inventory was managed by a sprawling staff of more than a hundred grown-up theater kids, tech savants, artists and musicians in need of day jobs, and a crew of guys from the South Bronx who were all related to each other in one way or another.
When I started at the shop they put me on the loading dock, a common rite of passage before you moved up to the 11th floor, where the actual lights lived, or down to the basement, home of the cable department, run by the South Bronx dudes, and the film and video gear, which Anna handled. All day long I loaded up trucks, step vans, station wagons, and cabs with carefully trimmed instruments and tightly bundled coils of oily-smelling cable, and unloading those same vehicles when the gear was returned, usually helter-skelter and missing a few pieces and parts.
We had our own small fleet of trucks as well, headed by a man known to all as Mr. Harold. Imposing and in his 50s, he was at least 6’ 6”, with a molasses-thick Mississippi accent that became impenetrable when he was angry. It was rumored he had killed a man down South, but here up North his anger only simmered, piqued by run of the mill annoyances: incompetent Teamsters, poor directions, and the sight of an obstinate white girl struggling to load a truck. At the latter, he would swoop in and seize a road box from my hands, telling me “No, no – you don’t do that,” while also shoving me out of the way. Having something to prove, I hated this, of course, but there was also no arguing with him. He had his ways, and they were strict.
Having a shop that spread across three floors was a logistical challenge, and elevator strategy was no small part of the job. The dock elevators were manned by a temperamental guy named Eddie, who was prone to peacocking flights of fashion and who we’re pretty sure was dealing coke, and by a grumpy old man whose name I forget, and who may or may not have spoken anything but Polish. When we needed to send something up we’d ring the bell, go find Eddie when he disappeared (frequently), or rouse the old man from the war-torn office chair that was his resting spot. When a loaded elevator materialized from above or below, one or the other of them would holler through the shop door “ELEVATOR!” – and we’d trundle out from whatever we were doing inside to heave road cases and hampers out and into play.
I took this job because I figured it was a good way to get my foot in the door of the industry and, also, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I thought maybe I would learn some technical skills, but I never made it off of the dock. After I’d been there a year or so, realizing the three-floors-and-unreliable-elevators situation was suboptimal, the company announced that we were moving to an industrial park in New Jersey – a place with wide open truck bays and everything on the same level. Manhattan rents probably had something to do with it as well. But since the Hell’s Kitchen shop was a quick scoot down 46th Street from the theater district, and because some off-Broadway electrician needing a few piece of gear or a couple sheets of gel wouldn’t want to wait for it to be trucked in from Jersey, they decided to keep a small first-floor shop active and leave a skeleton crew in the city, and for some reason they put me in charge.
And so we stayed: me, quiet boy Len, musicians Mike and Dale, bodybuilder Kaya, driver Adam, and Anna. She was in the thick of chemo at Bellevue, I believe for the second time. She’d already had a bilateral mastectomy, and I remember asking tentative questions about it, only for her to grin and say “Wanna see?” and lift her sweatshirt to reveal the scar etched across her now-flat chest. She was out a lot – an accommodation that probably was rare in such a blue-collar job – but when she was present, ball cap perched on her bald head, she was preternaturally good-humored, her dark, dry wit seasoning our daily grind.
But while she may have developed a well-cultivated Buddhist detachment, she, too, had something to prove. When a client pulled up to pick up some gear, she was the first out the door, her 5’4’’ frame grinding into a hamper loaded with heavy-gauge cable and throwing it into the truck. This drove me as crazy as my own feats of strength did Mr. Harold. I had no management skills and no understanding of cancer – no clue to how urgently you may push and scrape and claw to retain some semblance of your normal life in the thick of debilitating treatment. I worried she would hurt herself and, insecure and immature, I took it personally, as though she were sending me a message: I can work this hard, why don’t YOU?
At the time, I was not-so-secretly seeing one of the musicians. We would wake up at his place on the Upper West Side and take the train down, grab coffee, and then as in a clumsy sex farce, one of us would linger behind for five minutes while the other took the last few blocks to work. Our mulish refusal to acknowledge what was obvious to all irked her to the point that she finally called me on the carpet. I had yelled at her for pushing too hard, as she heaved a followspot into a van, and she was having none of it. Out from New Jersey came the HR guy. As we sat in his office, Anna furious, me defensive, she let me have it – about the yelling, about the affair, about my inability to “supervise” anything. I pushed back, admitting only my worries about the cancer. I never saw her so mad. When it was over I went into the bathroom and cried.
Our relationship never quite healed from this rupture, but I did chill out on her performance of vigor. I learned to let it go, to let her be. I was, in truth, in awe of her – she was just cool – but too tangled up in self-doubt to let her know. Othered from each other by not just race, religion, and sexual identity but also our labor, I retreated to my little foreman’s cage and doodled around on the computer, pretending to balance inventory, rather than join the rest of them at their workbench. I longed to be part of the group, hated that I had been marked as different at a moment of my life in which I, all of 25, felt powerless, always wanting what I could not get. Anna, in her dignity and her openhearted frankness, displayed an agency I struggled to wholly articulate as lacking.
I quit not long after, deciding to take the plunge and try to make it as a full-time freelance technician – and I did, jobbing around on the crew at the Joyce, running lights for student opera at Julliard, loading in fashion week at Bryant Park. The musician and I broke up but stayed friends, until I thoughtlessly botched it, an enduring regret. Years later I tried to friend him on MySpace but he never replied.
Some time after I moved to Chicago, Mr. Harold died of a heart attack, in his truck, and the other musician came to town with his band and told me that Anna had died as well. He and Dale and Kaya had visited her in her last days and said she was at once utterly pissed that her life was ending and yet also at peace. I have thought of her so many days this past long year – and these past long decades. I wish I had been better, that I was able to rise to her level of self-knowledge and to fully embrace her vivid life, with all its contradictions. I try to give grace to my own youth and inexperience, to forgive myself my own mess. But this failure haunts me still.
While in New York last month, I went by to visit the building. It was a Saturday and it was covered in scaffolding and locked up tight, the windows too obscured to offer a clue to the activity they now contained. Peering through the front door, I guessed it had all been converted to office space. The lobby had been gutted to shiny, modernist angularity, with broad steps and a long black oblong of a guard’s desk. A security turnstile separated the gleaming lobby from the elevators. But there, just to the right of the desk, was the door to the shop, as unassuming as ever. Outside, a plaque affixed to the polished granite facade tells the story of the 1911 building’s construction as home to manufacturer of candy and chocolate. There’s no external monument to the sweet lives it once supported and sustained, so I’m trying to provide a small one here.
*Not her real name. None of the names used here are true – except for Beast. That actually was his nickname, and I can’t do better than that. I’m inconsistent about this, I know! Just, hang with me while I figure it out.
Summer’s over; life is getting hectic — and it’s all good, for the most part. There are new projects bubbling under that I’m looking forward to sharing with you when the time is right. But in the meantime, did you see this article in the New York Times about older adults flocking to ballet? I feel so trendy! I’m grateful to be in a multigenerational class, and not one restricted to “Silver Swans,” but I endorse the message of this piece — though I wish the photos truly reflected a range of body sizes and abilities. My weekly ballet class continues to be a profound part of healing from the trauma of cancer, both physically and psychologically. I wish I could go every day.
Martha, I was going to write-mumble something about how you got me really "seeing" the characters in action, but Dave got there sooner and with more clarity.
Oh well, how long before you get sick of me telling you how well you write? [As if I didn't know the answer that.] Anyway, you reminded me of a point I made in an essay about writing once--that unlike what we're taught [avoid jargon!] jargon [i.e. the names of things used by the insiders who use them] is remarkably effective in establishing one's bone fides as someone who needs to be listened to [so long as your point isn't simply to show the reader how smart you are] . . . besides which the words themselves have a tang of otherness and are often a breath of fresh air in a roomful of ordinary words. In another place--maybe a different essay?--I made the point that it's OK to take a solo once in a while, a dazzling little riff that, if you did it all the time, would sink the writing, but when done spur of the moment, in a spirit of play or writerly excess is fun. So I was thinking of those two points (not that your piece demonstrates the latter, but the example I'm about to copy in does and the "using jargon" note reminded me of it)--it's from Annie Proulx's, Accordion Crimes [one of those novels that follows an object through time]:
He had cut the grille with a jeweler’s saw from a sheet of brass, worked a design of peacocks and olive leaves. The hasps and escutcheons that fastened the bellows frames to the case ends, the brass screws, the zinc reed plate, the delicate axle, the reeds themselves of steel, and the aged Circassian walnut for the case, he had purchased all of these. But he had construct-ed and fashioned the rest: the V-shaped wire springs with their curled eyes that lay under the keys and returned them to position in the wake of stamping fingers, the buttons, the palette rods. The trenched bellows, the leather valves and gaskets, the skived kidskin gussets . . .
In the essay, I think I followed this with: "skived kidskin gussets"!!!