Extra

My parents had a couple of movie star friends. I had been in some high school plays, and one of these friends offered me a summer job as a “featured extra” on his latest film. The previous summer, at fifteen, I had worked at an independent bookstore. I had liked being around books, touching them and talking about them with customers, but the register gave me trouble. It always took me forever to cash out, and there would be either too much or too little money in my drawer at the end of my shifts, which frustrated my manager. Every day, I’d wondered how I could be such a fuckup.

This new job sent a driver in a black sedan to take me to a regal old theater uptown where I would shoot my scenes. The film was about a theater company in the 1930s. Although I played a stagehand and had no lines, every day I had my makeup done and my hair set with hot curlers by a sweet old lady with a hairlip. I wore old-fashioned dungarees and a pale blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. It was always very hot on set, because air-conditioning would mess with the sound. Between takes, I spritzed my neck liberally with Evian mist from an aerosol canister. I ate craft services foods—pastries and roasted chicken and fresh fruit—and they were delicious and free. On the street, near a celebrity’s trailer, a child who didn’t know any better asked for my autograph.

When the cameras were rolling, I stood near movie stars and did the things that a stagehand in the 1930s might have done. I pulled a rope that drew the stage curtain. I cast a spotlight on an actress just as she burst into song. I ordered and reordered the pages of a script. I walked purposefully through the frame of the shot and disappeared into darkness. Once, I laughed and ruined a take, and was horrified to learn that the scene would have to be reshot. “Oh my God,” I said to the director, my parents’ friend. “I’m so sorry.”

Three men at work took notice of me. I wanted to believe it was because I was pretty with my hair and makeup done, the overalls giving the whole look a quality of effortlessness, but I knew it was really because I was so young. The first man was an actor in his late thirties whom I caught staring at me, again and again. Soon I realized that he wanted me to catch him staring back so that he could smile and shrug: What’s a guy gonna do? The second man was about forty, another actor, a booze-bloated former heartthrob who licked his lips at me conspicuously.

We chatted, and I laughed at his jokes until his girlfriend—yellow-blond and boob-jobbed—started coming to the set each day and sitting on his lap between takes.

The third man, Marcel, was precisely the same height and build as one of the film’s stars and worked as his stand-in, meaning that while the cinematography was being plotted out, he would stand in the place where the star would be standing when the scene was filmed. Marcel was lanky, had angular features, and smelled strongly of BO. He seemed surprised when I told him I was sixteen. He said I was mature for my age, but then again, where he was from, Switzerland, sixteen, thirty-six, it was all the same. When I asked his age, he told me he was more than twenty-five but less than thirty-five—“and who wants to know?”

Two weeks into filming, Marcel and I began eating lunch together and sharing unfiltered Lucky Strikes. At first, I worried that the director would reprimand me and Marcel or tell my parents that I was spending too much time with an older man, but the director was too busy to notice. Marcel told me about the auditions he went on after work or on days off, the roles...