“That’s fast.”
“Coney Island seagulls? Fuck it.”
Zippo hired Pepper. The thieving stopped.
Pepper sat and watched. Before the production moved to Carney’s that afternoon, they put in a few hours outside Nicky Tavern on Amsterdam, an episode where Nefertiti beats up a snitch. He had hoodwinked her, Pepper gathered, and now she had to beat the truth out of him. Once they got to the furniture store, Pepper set up a stool on the corner of 125th and Morningside, radiating menace. Would-be robbers considered easier prey. The job reminded Pepper of Newark, of the old days working the door at those Barbary Coast spots. His technique: glaring with his arms loosely crossed; lifting a skeptical eyebrow when civilians got too close to the perimeter; the occasional grunt to warn someone off. He was a six-foot frown molded by black magic into human form. It sufficed.
“You’re getting paid to be yourself,” Carney said. “Not bad.” That sarcastic smile of his appeared for a moment. He handed Pepper a 7UP.
Pepper grunted.
Carney stopped smiling once the crew arrived and started fucking with the joint. After an establishing shot of the showroom—Zippo wanted the store as is, save for mirrors that cast reflections—the invasion began in earnest. The white men of the Secret Agent: Nefertiti production team were long-haired hippies with gnarled beards; ransacking, malnourished Vikings, from Carney’s reaction. They relocated a bank of sofas to the other side of the room, rolled up rugs into dusty tubes, cast a dark network of electrical cable across the floor. Carney recoiled. “Watch the floors!” “The chandelier!” Over the years, Pepper had seen the man patrol the showroom, making imperceptible adjustments, arranging his merch in harmony with his secret order. This was a disaster movie. “The mentality that sets a Sterling ottoman next to an Egon club chair,” Carney muttered. Pepper didn’t know what he was talking about.
Pepper hunched in the front door, clocking the street while taking in the shooting prep. The effort required to get something up on the screen. Nagra, f-stop—it was a different language. This white girl named Lola ran around doing things like “continuity”—making sure the actor’s scar was in the same place scene to scene. In Pepper’s experience your scars stayed put.
Zippo had vamoosed to meet a potential investor. Over by the far wall of the store, the gaffer plugged a gigantic lamp into a socket that had been obscured by a long, low, burnt umber sectional. Carney said he didn’t know the socket existed. Pop—the store lights flared and the juice cut out. When Carney and the gaffer returned from the basement, Rusty told his boss to go for a walk. “I’ll handle it,” Rusty said. “The furniture, it’s too close. Too close to your heart.”
Pepper had first met Rusty twelve years before, when he started using the store as an answering service. He walked in and there was Rusty, slender-armed and potbellied, hair conked in frozen waves, chasing a fat fly with a swatter. Time and the city had elevated the hayseed into an upstanding member of the Harlem community. Fatherhood played its part—no encounter was complete without an inspection of his wallet photos of wife, Beatrice, and their three boys. Plus he was churchy, which conferred an air of legitimacy on all comers. Deacon, serving the congregation and such. One time he invited Pepper to check out their services, Church of the Holy Whatnot over on Convent. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been outside,” Rusty said. “There are no locks on His door, no buzzer, and you’re always welcome.” Pepper’s expression ensured that it was a onetime invitation.
As promised, Rusty took care of the store. The salesman directed the young white men to keep the Sterlings with the Sterlings and the DeMarcos with the DeMarcos and herded the floor lamps into a flock of silver and bronze. It wouldn’t be difficult to restore everything to Carney’s liking. He seized on the boom operator’s accent—they hailed from different parts of Georgia but had tuned in to the same radio preacher every Sunday. Now the two of them were up in New York City working on a movie about a black lady secret agent in the cracker-killing business. Secret agent or kung fu lady—Pepper hadn’t read the script. Did black movies get into theaters down there? The KKK probably kept a roadblock to keep them out of the county.
Rusty’s competence and amiability made him a de facto production assistant; Larry’s easy charisma got him a cameo and a line of dialogue. Most days Larry was too slick for Pepper’s taste, but he was less annoying compared to the rest of his generation, with their eye-melting clothing and tiresome, uplifting slogans. When Pepper showed up that morning, Larry was pacing figure eights on the sidewalk and mumbling to himself. Rehearsing, he said.
He told Pepper how it went down. The day after Carney agreed to let them use his store, Zippo made a special trip to see Larry. He slid his dark sunglasses down his nose. “Do you act?”
“No more than the next guy,” Larry said.
“You have a quality,” Zippo announced.
Larry’s character worked for Charles & Co. Furniture, the name of the store in the movie. He holds the door for Nefertiti and makes a flirtatious remark when she comes to see Mr. Dudley, the owner. “I’ve been working on the line for days,” Larry said. “It’s stressing me.” No matter what he did, it always sounded the same as the first time he said it.
Pepper asked him what it was.
“Look at you, foxy.”
The problem was obvious. There was no way to improve the delivery. Larry said it like that when the cameras rolled hours later: One take.
* * *
***
Frankly the racial-harmony shit put Pepper on edge. The majority of the film crew were hippie freaks, but Zippo and the director of photography and Angela, the lady who did wardrobe and makeup, were black. The white people did what they were told.
This was America, melting pot and powder keg. Surely something was about to pop off. It kept not happening.
Pepper had never worked jobs with white people before. Pulling shit in Newark, then uptown in those days, that was the reality. It was not done. Occasionally he’d get asked to join a crew with a white wheelman or a bankroll and that was a sign to wait for the next gig. His current refusals were simple common sense. Pepper barely trusted Negro crooks—why extend the courtesy to some cracker motherfucker who’d fuck you over first chance? Sometimes black people fell over themselves trying to vouch for a white man who hadn’t wronged them yet. Yet.
His work on Nefertiti didn’t break his rule, he decided—as freelance muscle, he was on the outside. No reason not to take the opportunity to learn a thing or two. His second day with Secret Agent: Nefertiti, they were shooting a dice-game scene behind a bodega. The bodega was real—Tiny’s Extra on 132nd, where Skitter Lou had severed Bull Moreland’s windpipe by the ice-cream freezer back in ’67—but the craps were pure Hollywood, from the too-nice threads on the players to the soft faces of the players. A proper dice game featured at least six kinds of plaid—slacks, shirt, jacket—and one dude with a buck-fifty scar. Pepper had read in one of the militant papers that twenty-five percent of cowboys in the Old West were black, and whenever Secret Agent: Nefertiti strayed too far from True Harlem, he liked to share that fact as commentary. Meaning, Hollywood always got it wrong. The movie guys nodded, changed nothing.