Share

The wood shop was quiet, its high ceiling not echoing the buzz of loud table saws, its bare floors not being showered by wood shavings fresh off the planer. In the carpenters’ office, beneath the tall pegboards filled with tools, sat three workers in paint-stained dungarees. They were reading books or nose-deep in crossword puzzles.
The prop shop down the stairs was equally tranquil; the artists in the scenery department just as unoccupied.

“What do you think you’re doing in here,” I said, standing beneath the doorway with my hands on my hips. “Let’s get those saw blades spinning, that sawdust flying. If you have any questions, I’ll be making my rounds keeping this place from going to hell in a hand basket.”

I’d be doing no such thing in fact. All I’d be doing was walking around the many rooms of the theater, joking around and killing time. It’s all I’ve been doing at work for the last week or so, all part of my job working in the production department for a New York theater company. The title by name on the payroll: truck driver.

All of our playhouses are occupied with shows, and as such, most of us on the production staff have much to do. My job, hauling stage equipment in the theater’s twenty-four foot truck, is nearly at a stand still. The stage carpenters and scenery design team aren’t too busy either. We are merely on call, showing up to work for an eight-hour day of waiting. Eventually, things will need to be done again. The current shows will end their runs. New plays and actors will come in. We’ll have new equipment to haul out, new sets to build, new props to design, new stages to set-up.
For now though, and for days on end, we have nothing to do. We pass the time playing games, making jokes, having pillow fights or singing songs. The office has its own running jokes and routines. As most of my co-workers are part-time actors and stage performers, most of our running gags derive from acting exercises. Improv routines are popular and often we’ll spontaneously enter into fictional personas that we maintain for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, sometimes going all day speaking in some affected voice and repeating the made-up catch-phrases of our fictional characters.

Of those who labor for the theater’s production department, the sound and light guys are the rare ones still with work on their hands. While they run sound checks and test the spotlights, we dance on stage or play keep away with a balled up pair of socks.
Mostly though, when we aren’t goofing around or running the occasional errand, we nap. We play tricks on each other, sing songs, goofed around, and snoozed… all the while pulling a pretty nice paycheck.

Since as truck drivers, we have no office at the theater, me and my co-worker usually hang out backstage or in the actors’ dressing rooms. There is some first-class talent working at our theater. Willem Defoe, best known for his portrayal as the villain in the Spiderman movies, is starring in one production. Lemon Andersen, a Tony Award winner, is starring in another and one day last week he spent a few hours hanging out with us. Matt Damon came by the theater one day too. Apparently he’s a friend of someone at the theater.

Working Monday through Friday has affected me positively. For the first time in years I’m working a job with a steady day-to-day, week-to-week schedule, returning to a semi-permanent residence each night. There’s been a sense of relief with it all, a pleasant and relaxing feeling of security. I’m able to plan a little a better too, able to eat three square meals everyday and even, for the first time in years, able to have somewhat of a social life. I wonder now what my next job will be. How long will I keep working as a truck driver? How long will I stay in New York and with what frequency will I bounce from place to place in the world before returning?

I don’t know any of this. But for now I’m able to write everyday, able to work on journaling and on two new fiction projects, and I have time to work on my photography. It’s nice to have steady money coming in too, and for the first time since taking to the road in 2006, I’m not worried daily about running out of money. I’m sleeping well and coming up with so many story ideas I can barely keep track of them all.

Who knows what the next week could bring.