THE STUNTMAN [153]

Pag. 153

THE STUNTMAN

Once I’d proven myself, I started getting real jobs and making real money, and I was accepted as a full stuntman by my stunt brothers. Not that there was anything official about my new high-class status. Even though we acted like a team, there was no real organization, not the way there was at school. We weren’t permanently hired at any studio. As long as work was available somewhere, that’s where we’d plant our feet. There was no system of ranking—except that if you were good, everyone knew it, and treated you with the respect you deserved, whatever your age or background. 

We were brothers, but we were brothers of convenience—close as blood so long as we were all working on a shoot, ready to fight until we dropped for one another’s honor when the occasional bar brawl happened. If you were a stuntman, only another stuntman could really understand you, and so we were companions on the set and off. 

But the names and faces changed from week to week and month to month. As production slowed at Shaw’s, the stuntmen who weren’t getting work drifted off to try their luck at Cathay. When nothing was happening at Cathay, we’d see a tide of fresh faces in the crowd that squatted and leaned in the shade of the set at Movie Town, hoping to be picked up for a day’s work at a day’s pay. But stranger or friend, if you were a stuntman, you were family…so long as shooting ran. 

It was an exciting, ever-changing life, our stuntman’s world. It made us old, or maybe even dead, before our time…but it also kept us from growing up, because if you weren’t a kid at heart, you couldn’t deal with that kind of pace and  pressure. And so if we were kind of wild, it was understandable. 

After all, we had to bite off as much of the world as possible, as long as we were still in it.