Then there’s the food. Each production has it’s own catered breakfast, lunch, and if they’re here long enough, dinner. My first six months I gained twenty pounds and it’s been with me ever since. One day it’s fresh lobsters from a restaurant chain shooting commercials, then it’s a week of birthday cakes from a television show. Here, at any given time, someone somewhere is eating something. Makes you wonder where the term “starving actor” came from.

I’m not too confident in this boy’s abilities, especially after I see him bite into his breakfast burrito and squirt half of it on his lap. But he’s the only guy I got on the desk right now, since the other two have gone off on a break. So I tell him to keep an eye out for a white guy wearing clogs and to call me on the walkie if he sees anything suspicious. He doesn’t bother to ask me what’s going on or about the clogs even, and I don’t bother to fill him in. I give him two weeks, if that.

I take today’s schedule with me. I have to be careful not to excite or disturb the productions going on. Today we’ve got four commercials, two cop shows, three sitcoms, one movie, and two music videos shooting, not to mention the Home Shopping Network, which has it’s permanent home here. That means hundreds of actors and crew roaming the place. I decide to go up and work my way down. I don’t bother with the top floor where the boss’s office is. I figure a guy in clogs is not interested in that. A guy in clogs wants attention. He wants to be discovered. And that means I got to go where the directors and the actors are. I take the freight elevator to the second floor.

When the doors open, I see a herd of suits, some eating bagels, others reading or having intense conversations. It’s like I just walked in on a business conference at some firm on Wall Street, only the men are wearing makeup and the women have rollers in their hair. I move past them to Frank, a production assistant I know pretty well. He’s worked here at Silvercup almost as long as I have.

“Yo, Frank, all your people accounted for?” I ask him.

Frank silently counts the actors.

“Yeah. Why?”

“We got somebody walking around the place. He screwed up a shot in 7.”

“Moron.”

“Yeah. You see anyone who doesn’t belong, call me.”

“You got it, Jo.

“Oh, and he’s wearing clogs.”

Frank raises an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask,” I tell him.

I walk to the other side of the building. Past storage rooms that have complicated lock systems installed. You have to have a combination or a special key. On some of them you need both. I try the doors anyway. Better to be sure.

My schedule says they’re setting up a music video in the next studio. Whether they want to or not, they usually start shooting later in the day. Pop and rap singers don’t like to get up in the morning. They can afford not to. The crew was there, however, installing stripper poles for a rap video.

“What’s shaking, Jo?” says Dimples, a pot-bellied Irishman carrying heavy cables. I cross the studio floor toward him.

“You won’t believe it,” I say as I approach. “I’ve got some guy walking around the place messing up shots.”

His cheeks flushed, betraying his nickname. “Was he wearing clogs?”

I nearly choke on the chocolate-covered peanuts I just snatched from the Kraft table. “Yeah, you seen him?”

“About ten minutes ago. He walked in here asking for Tony Soprano. I thought he was joking.” Dimples takes off one of his thick gloves and scratches his bulbous nose. “He had an accent. Italian, or maybe Spanish. It’s hard to tell. Tiny guy, though. No bigger than my leg. Kept stuffing bagels into his pants, like he was saving them for later. He creeped me, so I chased him out of here.”

“Which way did he go?” I ask, licking chocolate from my fingers.

“I followed him out to the hall and watched him take the stairs down. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Thanks.”

I run toward the exit and take the steps two at a time. I figure if I move quickly enough, I can catch up with him. Besides, how fast can a guy in clogs go? But when I get to the bottom landing, I have to sit down. They say, if you don’t use it you lose it. And after all these years, I have definitely lost it. When I was younger, if somebody had said to me I would be tired after running down a flight of stairs, I would have kicked his ass. Now the very thought of lifting my foot to carry out my threat exhausts me. Not counting vacations and holidays, I have mostly spent my time sitting behind the security desk watching others come and go. The last time I chased anyone was awhile back when a mother-daughter team tried to get an autographed picture of Sarah Jessica Parker. They would have succeeded if they hadn’t been as out of shape as I was.

I look down at my ankles. They’re swollen. It makes me think of my mother, who would come home from work, worn out, same swollen feet as mine, in the days when this place supplied bread for schools in Queens and the Bronx and parts of Manhattan. Now, instead of filling their stomachs with dough, we fill their heads with it.

The mayor keeps telling us that New York City has grown safer now that violent crimes are at the lowest rates they’ve been in a decade. That’s true everywhere except on television and in the movies. It’s as if Hollywood didn’t get the memo. Production companies spit out cop show after cop show, movies full of mobsters and gang-bangers who kill and rape, rob and shoot one another — in the name of entertainment. It’s not Silvercup’s fault. We don’t write the scripts. We just provide the space to film them in.

I push myself up from the steps and enter the first floor. First thing, down the hall, I see two guys about to come to blows. Any moment the fists are going to fly. I stand quietly off to the side and watch. I know that when the time comes for one of them to throw the first punch, they’ll calm down and probably laugh or pat each other on the back. This time they do both.

“Hey, Jo, what’s up?” Edward, the one with the perfect teeth, calls me over. I shake his manicured hand. He plays a serial killer on one of the cop shows. He’s on for the whole season. Nice guy, great family man, good kids.

“Same ole, same ole,” I answer. “You seen a guy running around here in clogs?”

The actors laugh, thinking I am about to tell a joke.

“I’m not kidding.” I say this with my best poker face.

Ed drops his grin. “No, just us up here running lines before our scene. Why?”

“Nothing serious. Sorry I interrupted you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the new guy chirps. He has a shaved head, which from a distance made him look thuggish, but now that I’m closer to him, I can see that he’s a kid barely out of school. Must be his first big part. This morning when he signed in he was a little anxious around the eyes; polite though. Probably right out of college and here he is playing a street thug, the kind his mother and father sent him to university so as not to become. If this script is like all the others, his character’s going to be shot or killed and sent off to prison by the afternoon. That’s show business.

I stick my hands in my pockets. It’s cold in here, I want to get back to my desk where I keep a space heater tucked down below. The boss has the thermostat in the low sixties, even in winter. He says it keeps everybody on their toes.

The next studio is dark except for the set, which looks like a doctor’s office. They’re rehearsing a scene for a pharmaceutical commercial. A very nervous actor in a doctor’s coat is having trouble with his lines. When he gets to the part about the side effects, he starts to laugh. But no one else thinks it’s funny. Time is money and everyone is frustrated, including the director, who makes the actor even more uncomfortable by sighing loudly and storming off between takes.