Scope

Lisa was late so I sat at the bar and ordered a glass of house red. There was only one other person sitting there, a guy wearing a desert camouflage jacket and a Mets cap. Leaning against the bar next to him was a twisted piece of metal about five feet long. It was a rusted girder from a construction site, the ones shaped like I's when you look at them from the side. I stared at it for a while, paid for my wine, and glanced at the guy. He was staring straight ahead, sipping a clear cocktail in a highball glass.
Normally I don't talk to strangers. I never know how to start conversation without sounding contrived. But this time I had something.
"What's that for?" I asked.
He looked at me and then chugged the rest of his drink.
"Work," he said.
"Construction? Demolition?"
He got up from his stool and sat down in the one next to me, leaving his metal piece where it was.
"Sort of," he said. "I'm an actor."
"And that's a prop?"
"Yep."
"What kind of work do you do?" I asked. Some of my friends were actors and they resented being grouped into one category. I figured I had to make distinctions, for their sake.
"Right now I'm an Iraq War re-enactor."
This was new.
"They have those?"
"Damn straight."
"So you're like one of those Civil War guys. Only you're doing Iraq."
"Yeah."
He inhaled a couple of ice cubes.
"Isn't that a little insensitive?" I asked in my politest voice. "I mean, people are still dying."
"That's the beauty of it," he said. "It's not history. People aren't interested in something that happened two hundred years ago, that they've already studied to death in eighth grade. This is journalism. The closest you can get to the real thing."
I stared into my glass.
"Is it live performance?" I asked.
"We tape some stuff but all of it is done for an audience. We have an outdoor set in Washington Heights and do it all live."
Lisa was due any minute. I wondered if I should put my name on the host's list.
"Does it bother you?" he asked.
"I guess I'm a little uncomfortable. How do you know what you're doing really happened?"
He seemed pleased by this question. He leaned in close, like he had a secret.
"We have a correspondent who's in on it at the AP. He takes the reports that come in during the day and at night he works on the scripts. We change up the scenario every week."
"People pay to see this?"
"They used to be free. We had a government grant for a while. But then we had a depressing run one month. Lots of IED's and bodies. Caught some bad press. So then we had to start charging. Not much though. 20 bucks a seat."
I looked up at the TV screen in the far corner of the bar. A pitcher was stretching his shoulder.
"What's the metal bar for?"
"It falls on me and kills me in the scenario we're doing now," he said. "It's just styrofoam." He leaned over and grabbed it by the end with one hand. The massive metal beam suddenly lost its menace.
"How long do these things last?"
"An hour, usually. We try to condense the action as best we can, but some weeks are real boring, you know. One quick explosion and the clean-up. Soldiers playing poker, that kind of thing."
He put his prop down and shook his empty glass at the bartender.
"The way I see it," he continued, "we're giving people the facts. The news only reports so much and lots of stuff gets lost in the transmission. We're giving them eyewitness accounts. As real as it gets without being in Iraq."
"Does the military know about this?"
"Are you kidding? They love us. We're making them heroes."