Set Pa

Dana's advice for me is to be more assertive. She hugs me tightly, and someone asks if we're related. Dana says, I wish, she's beautiful. I wonder if that's why she hired me. 

Dana asks me if I’m having fun, I say yes, maybe too much fun, to show I feel a little guilty for kicking around a soccer ball with Neil in front of the clients. 

Neil is my best friend on set. One of us could go to the lunch tables but instead we do a joint fire watch. Fire watch is one of those imaginary jobs that they give to PAs. I have done it many times, watching and watching, and there has never once been a fire. 

There’s a plastic skeleton in the yard out front, still left out from October, and I put its arm around my shoulder. Neil and I take selfies with. We name the skeleton Dennis "Intuition" "Post-pone my Student Loans" "the Menace" Malone.

Neil asks me my favorite bands and looks up each of them on Spotify. Neil is a Leo, an actor, a middle child, the favorite of his charismatic mother. He's lived with his parents in Yonkers for the last four years, but he's moving to Bushwick with his sister in June. We're gonna jam when he gets here.

Elena is my second best friend on set. She's intimidating -- 6 feet tall and Russian, but her accent sounds like Julie Delpy to me. She asks me pretty immediately if I'm a witch, and I pretty immediately take to her. I recommend that she get a pendulum, she tells me the next day that she got a holographic one on Amazon. 

Elena tells me about how her father died when she was 7, he just happened to be at the train station, the radiation finally killed him fifteen years after Chernobyl. Watching the mini-series was deeply painful for her. She doesn't remember a lot about him, but she remembers crying the day he went bald. 

Mike the Medic was at one point my third best friend but he thinks I'm going to hell for not worshipping Jesus. I walked over to Mike and Elena on the second day to hear him describing the angry voices in his head, he doesn't believe in mental illness, he's convinced it's the demons speaking.

Mike the Medic tells me and Neil the story of how he found God. In this story he was backpacking in Scotland and he said, God give me a sign, and God cleared the clouds from the sky. He found a little deserted beach so he got naked and started singing and dancing and thanking God. He saw Hebrew letters in the clouds and had a conversation with the sheeps. He asks a few times for consent to quote verses from the Bible and I finally say yes, then immediately regret it.

Mike reminds me to drink water. Mike recommends me a TV show about Jesus. Mike has a dog with an Instagram named Bear McFluff. I tell him about how I was attacked on the subway and he asks me the attacker's race. I tell him black and Mike says that stereotypes are there for a reason.

Neil asks me if I'm Jewish on the second morning. I tell him yes, how did you know? He says "whenever I meet a young woman who's really into music..."

A cherry blossom tree in the front yard spews baby pink tears. The days are full of sun, and we get browner, brighter. We linger in patches of shade, pointing out prisms in the hot blue sky. We wake up in the darkness and go to sleep with the light.

I mentioned "crushes" fleetingly with a few of the PAs and this woman, who seems more like a girl, launched into a story of her "cosmic connection". She met a guy on set, 22, 16 years younger than her, and they flirted all week, sparking rumors. She drove him home last in the passenger van and asked for a kiss. He kissed her firmly with his mouth closed. When they met again for dinner, he asked to go back to her house, because he lives with his parents. There, he made her feel like herself, and fulfilled her secret sexual fantasies and spit in her mouth. She told him he was the best she'd ever had and he left without holding her.

She oscillates between thinking maybe it can just be a one time thing and telling me she wants a healthy and loving relationship with him. She asks me what I would say to a friend who was interested in a woman 16 years older than him. I say: are you equals? Why does she want to be with someone 16 years younger? Why do you want to be with someone 16 years older? Do you want the same things from your lives right now? She says, those are really good questions, and tries to answer.

I tell her about the last time I was with someone 16 years older than me. We got drunk, we went to his apartment, I said I didn’t want to fuck, and left at 5AM while he was sleeping. She asks me why I went. He’s successful, he’s verified on Instagram and he’s always going surfing with his friends in Hawaii.

On the last day, Neil rolls us a joint that we smoke in the passenger van on the way back to the city. Elena plays her favorite house music and sticks a tiny strobe light disco ball in the car charger. I get home when the sun is down and fall asleep instantly.

My hands are scratched up from the manual labor. My pointer finger is dripping with golden infection.

In the days after the sun, a bleak white blanket of vapor covers the city. I read a book about a housewife whose husband has left her for a younger woman, and grieve for my non-existent husband. I try to use other people to orient me, but we're all disoriented.

The weather app says it's storming, but the clouds never break. Violet's sleepless from too much sun, too much serotonin. The air is thick with energy, like the Santa Ana winds. A man in the stairs with a missing tooth thinks we're talking shit about him.

On the roof, Violet calls Edward in the corner. He doesn't answer. Violet worries he's mad at her. Jake says he heard Edward has been taking a break from music. I say Edward has a musical gift, maybe we should be worried. Violet looks down at her phone to find that the last three minutes have been recorded as a voicemail for him.

After talking over each other nonsensically for hours, an act of grace. The tension breaks. Jake's gig gets cancelled when he's about to get on the subway. Violet falls into a deep sleep on Jake's couch. Derek goes to and from the Fake Pollacks show, getting progressively sillier, then to the Good Room. Jake and I brainstorm a comedy soundpiece. We create an alter ego for me - Sober Sarah. Sober Sarah says caffeine is a gateway drug and you’re going to die in a gutter. I play Jake and Derek my song about the double-jointed man dancing on the subway, with the same chord progression as Alex G's Change. Derek contributes a detail, the double-jointed man is now gay.

When we were on set, Neil wrote down the bits we came up with into a notes app list of band names. He might actually use "Mount House". In retrospect, there's more of a ring to "Mount Home."