I’m holding the door open for Mr. 11A and his dog, but when he sees the Medical Examiner’s van and the police car parked in front of the building, he stops, leans in close to me, and asks in a stage whisper, “Do they suspect foul play?”

     I tell him that the police had only been waiting for someone from the medical examiner’s office to pick up the body and they have no suspicions that 3C died of anything other than natural causes. He seems to accept my explanation, but he’s lingering in the doorway like he wants to be reassured by someone with more authority than the summer doorman.  I’d like to spend the last twenty minutes of my shift in peace, but 11A won’t go away. Luckily for me, the dog is more interested in emptying his bladder than in finding out if 3C was killed in the conservatory with the candlestick. The golden retriever whines and pulls on his leash until his master lets himself be led down the street.

     Much to the tenant’s disappointment, there have been no crime scene technicians, and the two detectives who were here stayed for about ten minutes. For most of the last five hours, the only representative of the law enforcement community in the building has been the rookie cop who got stuck with the job of waiting for the guys from the morgue. “I didn’t become a cop so I could babysit stiffs,” he griped. I tried to be sympathetic, but the truth is I would have been happy to trade places with him.

                                                                                 ***

          Earlier today, a very anxious-looking woman approached my desk. She told me that her name was Carol and she was a co-worker of Teri Peters. “Teri didn’t show up for work,” she said. “She didn’t call and she’s not answering her phone. Could someone go up and see if she’s there and all right?”

      “I’ll try her on the intercom,” I said. “Maybe her phone isn’t working.” I buzzed 3C, but got no response. “Are you sure she’s home?”

     “I don’t know where else she could be,” Carol said, drumming her fingers nervously on the desk. “We had a meeting with a new client today. There’s no way she’d miss it.”

     “She might be taking a nap.”

      I pressed the intercom buzzer again, holding it long enough to rouse the deepest sleeper, but still there was no reply. “She could be in the shower,” I suggested, trying to sound optimistic, but by this time I was as worried as Carol. I gave the buzzer one last thirty second-long push. To avoid looking at Carol while we waited for a call that wasn’t coming, I pretended to adjust the settings on my walkie-talkie before finally calling the super. “John, can you come up to the lobby, please?”

     John got the spare keys, and he and Carol went up to 3C where they found Teri Peters dead on the bathroom floor.

     The EMTs were first on the scene. They quickly confirmed the super’s diagnosis. Ms. Peters had been beyond their help for many hours. When the police arrived a few minutes later, I directed them to 3C. “3C,” said the sergeant, sounding disappointed. “So it isn’t Esther?”

     Esther, the old woman in 15C, has been terrorizing the local precinct for years. In her pre-Alzheimer’s days, she was a community activist who was—even by the standards of the Upper West Side—a loudmouthed, pain-in-the-ass busybody. The super told me that in the old days she was always on the phone to her councilwoman or assemblyman or the Manhattan borough president’s office to complain about dog shit on the sidewalk, or a fruit vendor’s umbrella being too big, or a bank’s sign being too bright. But now that her ability to make a nuisance of herself has been constrained by her diminishing mental capacity, she limits herself to calling the police—usually to complain about the opera singer across the street. The baritone in question moved away more than a year ago, but she insists she can still hear him. “How would you like it,” she demanded of me one morning, “if you had to listen to Der Vogelfanger bin ich ja all night?”

     A police car double-parked in front of most buildings would probably cause the residents arriving home from work a little anxiety. They’d likely ask the doorman in a concerned tone: “Is everything all right?”  But thanks to Esther, a police car in front of The Fenwick Arms is such a common sight that nobody imagined something terrible might really have happened. To the contrary, when the tenants started pouring in around six o’clock, some of them came in cracking jokes.

     “Give ‘em Hell, Esther.”

     “So they finally caught up with you.”

     “You didn’t tell them what apartment I live in, did you?”

     I had to ruin the mood by saying in my most somber mortician’s tone, “There’s been a death in the building.” Because I’ve only been working here a month, I never knew if the particular tenant to whom I was breaking the news had been a friend of the deceased. If I’d known what kind of relationship each tenant had had with Ms. Peters, I could have adjusted my delivery accordingly, and I could have braced myself for the more emotional responses.

     In my role as Death’s messenger I experienced the full range of reactions: Mr. 12D, who, like most of the tenants, didn’t know 3C, offered polite expressions of regret; Mrs. 9E got a little choked up once I confirmed that 3C was indeed “the heavyset woman with short, gray hair who did something in advertising;” a hysterical 6A collapsed theatrically onto the couch and howled, “She was a young woman!”

     To describe 3C as young might be an overstatement. She was probably in her mid-fifties. She was also, as 9E politely put it, “heavyset.” I learned from Carol that Ms. Peters had taken medication for some kind of heart ailment and last month her doctor had rebuked her for not losing weight.

     This news was an uncomfortable reminder of a conversation I had had with 3C. One afternoon last week she had come into the building and said in mock-horror, “I have terrible news: The Hot & Crusty is now selling Carvel ice cream.”

     “Sounds like good news to me,” I said.

      “That’s not a temptation I need,” she said, making a gesture that indicated her ample physique.

     “Don’t give up one of life’s great pleasure for the sake of vanity.”

     I don’t know if she took my advice. I’d feel awful if the fat and cholesterol in that one butterscotch chocolate sundae that I might have persuaded her to eat was what caused her heart to give out. On the other hand, if her heart was already damaged beyond repair, I’m glad my suggestion might have brought a little happiness to her last days on Earth.

     As the news spread throughout the building, people—mostly older tenants—started coming down to the lobby for the latest updates. Carol was still here and she’d been joined by some of her co-workers. They were talking to Mrs. 9E about 3C’s sister in Philadelphia. Esther couldn’t remember Ms. Peters, but was otherwise surprisingly lucid as she sat on the couch commiserating with 11B. I was telling 4C, Mr. 3B, Mrs. 14C, and 11C everything I knew when I noticed 16B approaching us from the elevator. When she saw who I was talking to she hesitated for a second, but her curiosity was greater than her hatred of 4C, and so she crept into our little huddle.

     I had witnessed my first battle in this long-running war a few days earlier when one of the passenger elevators was broken.  4C had been waiting for the one working passenger car with her two dachshunds. Dogs are only allowed in the service car, but Carmelo was using it to pick up the garbage and 4C didn’t want to wait. 16B walked into the building still sweating from her jog around the reservoir. “You know you’re supposed to take the service elevator,” she snapped. The elevator door opened and 4C said, “Fine. Go ahead. I’ll wait.” While the elevator carried 16B upward, 4C stood there fuming. After the elevator reached 16, it began its descent to the lobby. But first it stopped on 15. And then 14. And then 13. “Can you believe her,” cried 4C. “She pressed every floor.”

     4C was telling us about the last time she’d seen Ms. Peters when she spied her old nemesis. She turned violently toward 16B and looked like she was about to say something nasty, but she held her tongue, and a cease-fire was silently declared to allow both sides to mourn the dead, or at least catch up on the gossip. “Anyway,” 4C continued, “I was talking to her in the laundry room just the other day and I noticed her color was terrible.”

     When two men pushing a gurney showed up a little after ten o’clock, the few tenants still hanging around the lobby returned to their apartments.  Whether out of respect or superstition, no one wanted to be around when the body was taken away.

     A few minutes after the super took the men from the medical examiner’s office up to 3C, the sergeant returned to pick up his disgruntled rookie. “If Esther should have some kind of accident, maybe fall down the elevator shaft,” he said as he got into the elevator. “I can promise you there’d be no investigation. Think about it.”

                                                                         ***

     11A has returned from walking his dog. “One day last year when my daughter had a broken leg,” he says, “Teri had the driver from her car service drop us off at Amanda’s school.”

     “Everyone seemed to like her a lot.”   

     All evening I’ve been hearing about small acts of kindness performed by 3C for her neighbors. Mrs. 14D mentioned that Teri had hired her son as a summer intern and then wrote a letter of recommendation that helped him get into NYU Business School. 3B told me that Teri had been so helpful when his family sat shiva after his wife died.  

     11A says goodnight and gets in the elevator. As the door slides shut, Paddy, the night doorman, enters the lobby. I’m telling him about 3C when the service car opens and the cops, the super, and the morgue guys, pushing the polyethylene-enshrouded remains of Teri Peters, pile out of the elevator.

     After the M.E.’s van drives away, I ask John and Paddy how many times they’ve been through this before. “Findin’ the body, ya mean?” asks John. “Once every couple of years.” The two Irishmen between them have almost fifty years working in this and other buildings, so “once every couple of years” adds up to a lot of corpses.

      “It happens to everyone if they work in a building long enough,” adds Paddy, who, in addition to this job, is the super of a small building on the East Side. “I remember the worst one I ever seen. It was in my building. The silly cunt hung himself.” Paddy grimaces at the memory. “Around his mouth was all dark, like, from the blood not circulatin’. The tongue hangin’ out of his head.  And the shit.”

     “What about 8C?” John reminds him. “With the diabetes. Christ the smell! She must’ve been dead a week.”

     As John and Paddy reminisce about the dead tenants they’ve found over the years, I notice that the particulars of the deaths are vivid in their memories, but the details of the lives of the deceased tenants are a lot hazier. “The old fella in 10B,” Paddy is saying. “Or was it 11B? You know the one I mean. He always wore a hat.”

     But John can’t remember him.

     And that’s probably for the best. If you have to suffer the posthumous indignity of being found naked and befouled by the porter or super, you can take solace in the fact that, while the image of your humiliating demise might stay with him till his dying day, any memory of you as a person will likely be buried under the memories of the lives and deaths of other tenants. All that will be left is, “He always wore a hat.”

     And it won’t be any different with the neighbors. 3C is the talk of the building tonight, but 4C and 16B will be screaming at each other within a few days because one of them is hogging the washing machines or some other nonsense. And Esther, who has already forgotten 3C, will keep calling the police until she’s put in a nursing home, or until the day the sergeant gets the call he’s been hoping for.

     Those tenants mourning in the lobby earlier may not grieve too deeply or for very long, but they will at least postpone Teri Peter’s relegation to the ash heap of Fenwick Arms history. The majority of the tenants, however, won’t even have the opportunity to forget her.

     A Lincoln Town Car pulls into the space that was vacated by the M.E.’s van. I rush out to open the car door, but 2C is asleep in the backseat. I hold the door open while the driver resuscitates the exhausted young banker. 2C struggles out of the car and drags himself into the building. He nods at John and Paddy on his way to the elevator. With no ambulance or police car out front, and no crowd in the lobby, 2C has no way of knowing about today’s tragedy, and we don’t bother to tell him. He’ll be getting up in a few hours to return to his desk at Deutsche Bank or Morgan Stanley for another sixteen-hour day, oblivious to the death of a woman whose life for the last three years had been separated from his own by a few inches of wood and plaster.

What’s that about?

“I gotta get my pengé fixed,” he tells me. He has prostate cancer.

It is in times of crisis that friendships are truly tested, and I’m proud to say that Vince and Hector have rallied ’round our fallen comrade: They both volunteer to satisfy Mrs. Roberto’s needs while her husband recovers from his surgery. Hector also offers to peel off the “Elevator Men Always Get It Up” bumper sticker on Roberto’s locker. He promises to replace it when Roberto is “back in the saddle.”

Vince suggests that maybe someone else should be Mrs. Roberto’s love surrogate. “Maybe Brian should do it. He do his job at work, he can do his job at home, too.”

“Brian’s coming back?” I ask. Before anyone can give me the details, the freight car rings, so I wish Roberto well and get back to work. There is a Chinese food delivery guy waiting for me in the lobby. I’m so preoccupied by thoughts of Roberto’s illness and Brian’s return that I take him to the wrong floor. Mrs. 12B scolds me for letting the delivery guy disturb her and I blame Brian for my carelessness. He’s not even here yet and he’s already causing me trouble.

Brian worked here for a few weeks last summer. He stayed in the boss’s (his uncle’s) apartment and filled in for Hector and Jimmy when they went on vacation before he returned to college in September. Now he has quit school and will be starting a stock broker training program here in Manhattan next month, just about the time Roberto is due back at work.

In his short time here, Brian developed a cult of adoring tenants, including 2C and 10D, whom I see chatting with Brian as I enter the building Friday morning. “It’s so nice to have you back,” says 10D, as they head toward the door, which, although I am not yet on duty or in uniform, I am considerately holding open for them. “He’s always so friendly,” shouts 2C as they walk out the door without acknowledging my presence. “Not like some of the sourpusses working here.”

Can they really be this rude? Maybe not. Maybe 2C did nod her head at me as she passed. Maybe 10D did say thank you too softly to be heard over her hard-of-hearing and very loud friend. Maybe I exaggerate everything that relates to Brian McClune. Vince, who is also in thrall to Brian’s charms, thinks so. He tells me I’m jealous. “He young and good looking like you was before you get fat. Now you old and ugly like me.”

Brian approaches me with hand extended. “So you’ve come to make your fortune,” I say.

“There’s too much money to be made for me to be wasting my time in a classroom.”

He tells me about his plans and how he hopes to fill in here at the building even after he starts his new career. “The pay’s gonna suck for awhile,” he explains. “And I figure all the connections I can make here, not to mention the occasional stock tip, could really get me started.”

When I relieve him for his break at 6:30 (I don’t like him, but there’s no questioning the lad’s work ethic—first day back and he’s doing a double shift) he’s already laying the groundwork for his networking blitzkrieg. “4A. Know where he works?”

“I don’t know. Wall Street.”

“Obviously. I mean what company. What kind of business?”

“Pork bellies? Frozen orange juice futures?”

“Seriously. Aren’t you even a little curious about what these people do to afford a place like this?”

Before I can annoy him further he storms off into the boss’s apartment, frustrated by my inability to see how “a couple of sharp guys like us” could use our proximity to these Wall Street insiders to our financial advantage.

I’m feeling a bit self-satisfied by this encounter with Brian because it confirms the impression I got of him last summer, but I’m also feeling a bit guilty. For one thing, I do know where 4A works. Also, I’m wondering if there’s anything really wrong with his ambition. I don’t begrudge the tenants their prosperity, so why do I find Brian’s desire to get rich so offensive? Perhaps when I look at Brian I should see a Horatio Alger hero, a decent, hardworking young man eager to live the American Dream, rather than a scheming social climber–Uriah Heep in an elevator-operator’s uniform.

In less than two weeks Brian has learned the occupation and place of business of almost everyone in the building. He’s accomplished this with admirable subtlety. Rather than just blurt out his intention to become a stock broker or ask the tenants straight out what they do for a living, he has come up with a way to get the tenants to initiate the conversation. He leaves his stock broker trainee prep book next to the package list clipboard and when people ask him about it he tells them he studies between calls. This is ridiculous. The boss yells at us for flipping through the newspaper and he would never let Brian study on duty. But it is an effective prop.

Not only has he gotten the specific information he was looking for, but he has also picked up some Wall Street history and folklore. 9B told him that when he was starting out there were plenty of guys like Brian. Outer-borough guys who didn’t go to fancy colleges, or any college at all, but who would start out in the mailroom and if they were smart and hard-working, could rise to the top of their firms and get rich in the process. “Like Dick Grasso, the head of the Exchange? Now at places like Goldman you need an Ivy League MBA just to get your foot in the door.”

He’s not too worried, though. He knows how little he knows about the intricacies of high finance, but he also knows he doesn’t have to understand AOL’s or Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratios to sell their stock. His potential as a salesman is so obvious that last summer 14C, a psychiatrist who gave up her practice to sell Amway products full-time, tried to recruit him for her sales team. The prospect of harassing his friends and family into buying jumbo-sized boxes of laundry detergent was not sufficiently enticing to keep him from returning to school, and he politely turned her down.

It was Brian’s bad luck that he was here in August when most of the tenants were away. Had he been here at any other time, he might have been offered a real job, and he’d be well on his way to his first million.

“You know the one thing I’ve learned since I’ve been here?” he asks one afternoon while I’m cleaning the glass in the lobby. “Most of these rich people aren’t any smarter than me.” While he pauses dramatically I spray some more Windex on the mirror. “And they’re definitely not smarter than you.” This perceptiveness will take him far in the business world. I don’t mean he’s perceptive because he recognizes my intelligence; he’s perceptive because he recognizes my vanity about my intelligence. And he has no qualms about stroking my ego to get what he wants. In this case, it’s just a little good will, but some time soon he’ll be using this kind of flattery to cheat some old lady out of her life’s savings.

Mr. Murphy works as a doorman on the Upper East Side.

Broker and client scurry away and Vince and I retreat to the basement where I give him his coffee and jelly donut and try to calm him down. I’m tempted to defend the women –explain that most buildings don’t have manually operated elevators anymore, and the women were probably unaware that they were infuriating him with their constant ringing — but the time to point this out would have been before he was armed with a hot cup of coffee.

Vince’s fuse is getting shorter by the day. Yesterday he blew up at 3A after she tried to tip him for carrying her luggage into her apartment. Except at Christmas, he refuses all tips. I, too, have never completely gotten over the awkwardness of accepting gratuities, but accepting a tip is less awkward than refusing one, so I’ve never had the nerve to turn one down. Vince, however, not only declines tips, he yells at the tenants if they persist in trying to give him money. “You put that money in my hand, I throw it on the floor. You think I help for the tip? Is my job to help.”

His outbursts don’t usually need an underlying cause, but the phone call he got from his sister a couple of days ago, detailing the latest estimate from his building contractor back home, might explain his recent belligerence.

Vince has never been able to commit himself to staying in the U.S. or returning to Malta. His constant wavering has cost him a lot of money. Ten years ago, his cousin offered him a chance to invest in a small apartment building in Queens, but at the time Vince was certain he would be returning home within a few years. Today, his cousin owns five buildings and a farm in Pennsylvania. Rather than invest with his cousin, Vince put his money into building a grand house in Malta across the street from his mother. The house, which he has never seen, gets bigger and more expensive every year and he’s still working eighty hours a week to pay for it, even though he still hasn’t decided whether or not he’s ever going to live there.

Vince is aware of the impracticality of sinking more money into the house when with each passing year it’s less likely that he’ll find a wife to help him fill it with children. He rationalizes it this way: “Now I can say, ‘I have no time for a woman, I have to work all the time for the house.’ But if I work only one job and have time for a woman and still I can’t get no woman, then I feel very bad.”

The elevator rings and I take the call so Vince can console himself with his coffee and donut. I pick up 8B in the lobby and on our way up he asks, “Do you know that tall guy on 4? With the glasses.”

“Mr. Nelson in 4A.”

“Know where he works?”

Understanding how much we know about their lives, the tenants often come to us with questions about their neighbors. “What floor does she live on?” “Is he married to the lady with the red hair?” And always but always, “What does he do?” Usually they ask out of idle curiosity or a desire to assign the person some kind of status ranking, but 8B’s questions seem to have a more specific purpose. It occurs to me that this is the second time this week that I’ve seen 8B in the afternoon and I wonder if he’s lost his job. I tell him I don’t know where Mr. Nelson works. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I was just wondering.” The forced casualness of this remark makes me almost sure he’s unemployed. We’ve reached the eighth floor and I open the door as quickly as I can, hoping he’ll get out of the elevator before he can work up the courage to ask me to slip his résumé under 4A’s door.

When I report this to Vince, he tells me that 8B has interrogated him about some of the other tenants. “So many questions. How the fuck I know? He’s crazy. Anyway,” says Vince, lowering his voice. “I think he like the mens.”

With a wife, two ex-wives, four children, and countless mistresses and prostitutes to his credit, I consider 8B to be a paragon of male heterosexuality, but I’m reluctant to question Vince’s authority. He has a nose for sexual deviance. He tells me which movie stars are gay and which baseball players have a weakness for underage girls. This is the man I have to chase out of the laundry room with a mop because he’s taking women’s underwear from the washing machines, so he knows a fellow pervert when he sees one.

Although Vince is annoyed with him at the moment and calling his manhood into question, 8B is his favorite tenant. They regularly chat about baseball or hockey and sometimes even a little about the stock market. Last Christmas, 8B tipped Vince more than double what he gave the rest of us and he has frequently defended him at co-op board meetings when there have been complaints about Vince’s rudeness.

The unlikely alliance was further strengthened last summer when Vince saved 8B’s marriage (or at least postponed another expensive divorce). One night in July, Vince saw Mrs. 8B, who was supposed to be in Sag Harbor, getting out of a taxi while her husband was upstairs entertaining an attractive, young summer-intern from his office. Vince quickly alerted Mr. 8B and when he was bringing the wife up in the elevator, he cut the power and pretended that the elevator had stalled, giving Mr. 8B enough time to get the intern down to the seventh floor where Vince picked her up after dropping off the unsuspecting Mrs. 8B.

But I think their camaraderie is based on something more than a common interest in sports or a mutual sense of gratitude. Vince, who hasn’t had sex in over a decade, admires 8B’s success with the ladies, but he also sympathizes with how much it has cost him. To support two families in proper Upper East Side style, not to mention his extramarital expenses, 8B works (worked?) almost as many hours per week as Vince, and, despite the man’s heroic libido, he usually looks as exhausted and miserable. That 8B works to pay for the fruits of his bountiful sex life and Vince works to justify the fact that he doesn’t have one, doesn’t stop the poor, lonely elevator operator from pitying the wealthy Don Juan.

The New York Times columnist has lived most of her life in Washington and what she knows of our profession has been gleaned less from personal experience than from popular culture, a subject to which she devotes far too many inches of her column. The NYC doorman is a much maligned character in film, television, and contemporary literature, and I wonder which specific works have shaped her low opinion of us. With so many possible sources, it is difficult to know for sure (with one big exception), but I would like to suggest a few possibilities.

In the offending column, Ms. Dowd refers to Mr. Fitzgerald as “This Irish priest of the law” and glories in his victory over Mr. Libby, the protestant banker’s son. This embarrassing display of ethnic cheerleading, in tandem with her libelous views on doormen, leads me to believe that she has read Peter Quinn’s historical thriller “The Hour of the Cat.” Mr. Quinn’s Irish Catholic private detective, Fintan Dunne, pursues an evil Nazi doctor and his henchmen in pre-war Manhattan while battling the prejudices of the WASP Establishment. But the real villain, the character whom Quinn seems to detest most passionately, is a doorman who is just doing his job: “The doorman at the building’s main entrance gave him the once-over that every doorknob polisher in the swank districts kept on ice for strangers, a look more of snobbery than suspicion, as if serving the rich made him one of them.”

Ouch.

Maybe Mr. Quinn is right about our inflated sense of self-regard, but I must object to the epithet “doorknob polisher.” I defy him to inspect the doorknob on the front door of my building and tell me it’s been polished in this millennium.

If Ms. Dowd has somehow overlooked “The Hour of the Cat,” perhaps it is “Wake Up, Sir!” by Jonathan Ames that has poisoned her mind against us. In a passage describing how his main character came into his small fortune, Ames demonstrates his contempt for the working man: “How this check came into my possession was that two years before I had slipped on some ice in front of a Park Avenue building and broken both of my elbows…I had been awarded $250,000 by the owner because the doorman should have salted the area where I fell.”

We are accustomed to criticism and ridicule, but inciting the masses to make us the target of phony lawsuits is a new low in the history of doorman-baiting. What is so insidious about Ames’s character assassination of the members of our profession is that it appears in a book that was purportedly written in homage to P.G. Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves, the literary hero and role model for all of us “in service.” I will need an entire essay to properly express my hatred for this book. So, in my next piece, “Bring Me the Elbows of Jonathan Ames,” I will be analyzing the author’s crimes in greater detail and suggesting possible reprisals.

One can only hope that Ms. Dowd—and the rest of the world—has avoided this hateful book. And if we can’t blame Ames, the doorman’s Goebbels, for her condescending attitude towards us, then Colin Harrison, author of the novel “Afterburn,” has to become a prime suspect. There are two building staff members featured in his book who could have been the basis for Ms. Dowd’s image of Fitzgerald the Elder: Lionel, a sullen, illiterate elevator operator; and Kelly, a doorman who is servility incarnate—his every move calculated to increase his Christmas tip. These are the usual offensive stereotypes, and Ms. Dowd could just as easily have picked them up from watching reruns of “The Jeffersons,” but what makes “Afterburn” useful to our discussion is that it so clearly betrays the source of its bias. Mr. Harrison’s hero, a tenant in the building where Lionel and Kelly work named Charlie Ravitch, thinks, “If the police came by and wanted to know if you were in or out, they [the doormen] could give an answer. ‘Mr. Ravitch—he left a few minutes after eleven, sir.’ ”

Mr. Ravitch, along with Mr. Harrison and all these other writers, has been watching too much “Law & Order”. In countless episodes of this otherwise fine show, the detectives go to the doorman to get the dirt on the tenants. Typically, he is reluctant to snitch, but by threatening or cajoling, the cops get the information they want. Oftentimes, the doorman has to endure the cops’ wisecracks, the insinuations that the doorman has been less than vigilant (see: girl-gets-killed-in-laundry-room-during-teenage-lesbian-lovers’-spat episode.)

Being constantly portrayed as stupid, lazy, self-important, and greedy is insulting enough, but what bothers me even more is that the doormen on L & O don’t seem to have lives of their own. My all time favorite fictional doorman is in the movie “The First Deadly Sin.” In it, Frank Sinatra plays a detective who bribes a doorman to let him search the apartment of a tenant whom he suspects of being a serial killer. The doorman is the sleaziest and most realistic doorman ever seen on film or television. He sucks up to the tenants, he bitches about picking up dog shit, he takes a bribe that will get one of his tenants killed. I don’t know the actor’s name—he played Willie Cheech, the mob rat in “Godfather 2”—but he should be made an honorary member of our union, 32BJ. As vile as the character is, he at least has some personality, unlike the nonentities who are routinely interrogated by Detective Green and Detective Fontana.

Just once I would like to see the doorman on “Law & Order” do something besides rat out a tenant. Why can’t the doorman be the killer, or at least an accomplice? Maybe the victim? I know the producers of “L & O” pride themselves on the “ripped from the headlines” topicality of their show. Why not write an episode using the Patrick Fitzgerald story? A doorman is killed as an act of vengeance directed at the doorman’s son, a U.S. attorney, for prosecuting a corrupt politician.

Unfortunately, the American TV-watching public—including Maureen Dowd and Messrs. Quinn, Ames, and Harrison—has been brainwashed by years of the show’s virulent anti-doorman propaganda and would find a story revolving around a complex doorman with loves, hates, family, friends, and enemies of his own simply too far-fetched.

Uh-oh.

12B and I have a regular routine wherein he plays the rich, boorish philistine and I play the angry, young, class warrior, so, delivered differently, this retort might have been within the bounds of our schtick. But the mirthful tone I had intended was completely absent from my delivery and both of us were a little unsettled by the violence of my statement. “Whoa,” he said, recovering from the death threat. “Take it easy there, Trotsky. It’s Christmas.”

I’m grateful to 12B for taking it so well. Truth be told, he’s a decent guy. Before he sold his soul to Merrill Lynch, he was a fifth and sixth grade math and science teacher, living in a studio in Astoria. But after a few years of watching his Wall Street friends acquire bigger apartments in fancier neighborhoods, as well as summer homes and other luxuries that he could never afford on his teacher’s salary, he decided he had fulfilled his commitment to making the world a better place. I myself have never had a worthwhile career, much less the opportunity to forsake it, so it would be unjust of me to condemn 12B, but I wonder what effect this turbo-charged upward mobility, or, at least, the promise of turbo-charged upward mobility is having on our society.

In the building next door there was a handyman named Freddy, who, like 12B, saw how much money everyone else seemed to be making in the stock market, and decided he wasn’t going to let the gravy train pass him by. After several attempts, he finally passed the Series 7 exam in September, and he now spends his days cold-calling potential investors.

This phenomenon reminds me of something I once heard attributed to Eugene McCarthy. The former senator and presidential candidate thought that the Great Depression was one of the most productive and efficient periods in American history. In the Depression, McCarthy reasoned, legions of educated, hardworking people lost their lofty positions and were forced to take jobs that were unequal to their talents: lawyers became stock clerks, bankers became train conductors, and everything ran smoothly because these overqualified people were forced to do jobs that in better times would have gone to lazier or less intelligent workers.

Perverse as this logic may be, I can see his point. And, if McCarthy is right about this, then the converse must also be true. In a time of great prosperity, the mediocre will rise to levels of such affluence that the jobs they once did—important if not glamorous or lucrative jobs—are taken by the stupid, lazy, and surly. If the friendly and competent fifth grade science teacher can increase his salary tenfold by analyzing pharmaceutical stocks, and the capable building handyman quits to hawk Internet stocks over the phone, then we have to question the cost of all this easy money. What gaineth a man if the Dow hits 13,000 but his kid fails science and his toilet overflows? Do the “corrections” the financial experts tell us are inevitable refer not only to the price of stock shares but to the social order as well?

As I let 12B out of the elevator, I am rudely reminded of my own place in the social order. 12A is waiting with her dog. She thrusts the leash at me. “Can you take him for a quick walk, please? My show’s coming on.” I am too busy trying not to trip over the frantic dog to respond before she retreats into her apartment. Opening the door to his own apartment, 12B looks back at me trying to untangle myself from the yapping Trixie’s leash. “Viva la revolución!” he shouts, his fist raised in a show of mock-solidarity.

Oh, how I long for the day when the stock market crashes and he’s back where he belongs–living in Queens and teaching the reproductive methods of amoebas to a classroom full of giggling twelve-year-olds.

***

Jan. 2000

I am slipping a notice from the management company about an upcoming inspection of window guards under the doors of apartments with children. Only tenants with children are obligated to have them, but after what I’ve heard the last couple of hours, I think they should be mandatory in every apartment. If, as legend has it, people were throwing themselves out of windows after the stock market crash of 1929, then we must take precautions immediately.

When Vince arrived at 2:30, he handed out the coffee with an expression that, while not quite happy, was definitely less suicidal than usual. Roberto was the first to notice. “Damn, papí. You just get laid?”

“I never get laid, anyway,” said Vince, the embryonic smile now gone. “But maybe I make some money.” He told us about the just-announced merger of AOL and Time Warner. Vince had recently bought some Time Warner stock and he was sure that with the news of the merger the value of his stock would soar.

At 4:00, I went to the diner for lunch and observed most of the customers watching the CNBC coverage of the proposed merger. In the last year, the twenty-four hour financial news channel had eclipsed ESPN, the twenty-four hour sports channel, as the home network of bars and restaurants throughout Manhattan, their reporters and anchors fast becoming household names.

I listened to the breathless commentary of the reporters and their guest experts praising the deal. “The synergies this would create for both companies; it would be a paradigm of cooperation between old ‘brick and mortar’ companies and the young turks of the Internet; the one creating content and the other providing revolutionary new ways to distribute it.”

This all sounded like great news for Vince, and he could really use it. During this, the biggest, longest economic boom in history, he has lost money on almost every stock he’s bought. His stocks don’t stagnate or lose a point or two; they go into a freefall within days of his purchase. He buys at 26 and sells at 7. So, maybe his luck is changing; maybe a deserving loser is finally going to catch a break. I hope so, but I can’t help thinking that this is the beginning of the end. Although I don’t have the expertise to challenge the talking heads on CNBC, I know someone who does. And, if he were alive today, I’m sure he would advise his friends and family to take the money and run.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (I’ve also heard this story attributed to Bernard Baruch, so who knows?) made a fortune in the crash of 1929 by shorting his holdings. That is, he bet on them to lose money. At a time when stock prices were going through the roof, Kennedy’s strategy seemed like madness to his more bullish colleagues, many of whom would soon lose everything. How did he see the end coming when others did not? Kennedy’s pessimism was not rooted in any arcane knowledge of economics nor was he privy to any specific insider information. To the contrary, it was outsider information that tipped him off to the imminent collapse of world capitalism.

Unlike many of the more established (read: WASP) Wall Street grandees, the Irish-American arriviste did not willingly engage in small talk with the shoeshine boys, paperboys, bartenders, and barbers who plied their trades in the financial district. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help overhearing them when he stopped for a shine or a shave. Where once these working slobs talked only of Babe Ruth’s home runs or Jack Dempsey’s knockouts, now they were speculating about how high GM shares would go before they split. If the stock market mania had spread so far (and so low), then it was time for serious men of business to get out.

In this era of endless blather about the democratizing, empowering potential of the stock market for the little man, Kennedy’s naked elitism is refreshing, and of course, his business acumen was undeniable. Therefore, it seems to me that Vince’s temporary good fortune is a sign that the bubble is about to burst.

It is also a sign that we need to get those window guards installed in a hurry if we are to prevent an epidemic of defenestrating investment bankers. I am not proposing these safety measures out of any concern for the lives of the tenants–if they want to kill themselves, it’s okay with me. But, as the guy who cleans the sidewalk, it is in my best interest to ensure that the suicidal stock speculators find a less messy way to meet their maker, the Great Alan Greenspan in the sky.

The other Board members soon arrive and they start the meeting. At this time, I usually make myself scarce. I pour out the contents of my bucket into the slop sink and rinse out the mop before going up to the package room to get the dry cleaning and whatever packages need to be delivered. I call each of the tenants to let them know I’m on my way, “Hello, this is Mr. Murphy. I have a delivery for you.” But even with advance warning some of these people come to the door half-naked, which is why, after ringing 12B’s doorbell, I immediately turn my head and glue my eyes to 12A’s doormat. When the door opens, I blindly shove an oversized FedEx envelope in the general direction of the habitually underdressed and dangerously underfed Mrs. 12B.

It is only 7:50 when I finish, so I stop the elevator between the fifth and sixth floors and read the newspaper for the final ten minutes of my shift. While changing in the locker room, I overhear the Board meeting next door. They are discussing a possible increase in the tenants’ maintenance fees to pay for lobby renovations. I laugh to myself, knowing how violently opposed many of the tenants will be to this proposal.

Disputes between tenants are a fact of life in apartment buildings, but in the last year, inter-tenant relations have become dangerously strained; and in a building full of lawyers things can get ugly. Back in the spring, there was almost a bloody coup d’etat when the Board decided, without consulting the other tenants, to allow those who wanted to replace their windows to do so. This was seen by many as an act of war.

The building was truly a house divided. The pro-choice insurgents argued that the current windows were ugly and didn’t keep out the cold. The conservationist camp screamed that the main reason they bought into the building was its beautiful Art-Deco design, the integrity of which would be hopelessly compromised if people could just put in any windows they wanted, without regard to the overall aesthetic.

There were accusations of conflicts of interest, lawsuits were threatened, some tenants demanded the whole Board be ousted for making such a momentous decision without putting it to a building-wide vote. When it was finally voted on, the conservationists won in a landslide, and two of the Board members were replaced.

The warring factions are usually divided along generational lines. The younger, more recently arrived tenants have made a great deal of money in a very short time. A few years ago, these people wouldn’t even have considered living anywhere east of Lexington, but everyone was getting so rich in the late 90s that there just weren’t enough available apartments on Park and Fifth. So, forced to settle for a less prestigious address, these people are compensating by turning their new homes into palaces. They are the ones who are leading the charge for the new lobby. They also want to expand the gym and hire a concierge.

The older people in the building, who have made less money over a much longer period of time, are offended by the brashness of their new neighbors and do not see the need for such frills. Another frequent complaint of the old guard is the noise and dust from the constant construction going on in the ever expanding apartments of the inconsiderate newcomers. The Sterns in 14A will soon be the Sterns of 14A and 14B. Mr. Stabile in 17C has bought 18B and 18C and is going to convert the three apartments into a giant duplex. The older tenants were outraged that the Board approved the plan. When bitching to me in the elevator about Mr. Stabile and his ilk, 17A compared them to another group of notorious land grabbers.

Now, comparisons to the Nazis are definitely overblown and in bad taste. And yet, I can’t help thinking that these ultra-rich young tenants share a certain hyper-developed sense of entitlement common to conquerors throughout history. That they peacefully satisfy their lust for Lebensraum by buying out the guy next door and knocking down a few walls rather than by invading Poland is–as far as their bitter, envious neighbors are concerned–a distinction of little significance.

The first snowflake of the season has fallen. For the next month, white (or green or red) envelopes, within which lie our Christmas tips, will descend from the Heavens, or from as high as the penthouse, anyway. In our euphoria, we have momentarily forgotten the untimely demise of 16A. By most definitions, the death of a ninety six year old man can’t be considered untimely, but when the nonagenarian in question is the building’s best tipper, who traditionally dispenses his Christmas bounty the day after Thanksgiving, and he dies the day before Thanksgiving, then you can understand why we feel his life has been cut tragically short.

Also temporarily forgotten, at least by me, is just how hard I’m going to have to work for the next month. The UPS and FedEx deliveries are tripling in size daily. The building is filled to capacity at this time of year, so there’s never a lull in either elevator, and I’ll be sweeping up the needles from the Christmas trees until the 4th of July. But so what? It’s a small price to pay for a little peace on earth and goodwill toward man, not to mention about 3000 tax-free bucks.

No doubt some of our patrons would be amused to see the jubilation caused by what for them would be a month’s parking expenses. It’s true that their year-end bonuses will be several hundred times what ours will be, but there are certain small pleasures to our form of remuneration that they will never know. When your average Wall Streeter gets his annual affirmation of his worth from his corporate masters, money flies electronically from one account into another. No matter how lucrative, the process is sterile, joyless. We, on the other hand, luxuriate in a slow, sensuous cascade of 20, 50 and 100 dollar bills.

When I get to work on Friday afternoon, the boss hands me a small stack of envelopes that have accumulated during my two days off. In the course of my shift, I pick up four more. At home that night, I lie in bed, the opened envelopes strewn about me as I open each card, remove the contents, and add it to the rapidly growing stack of bills on my nightstand. In this age of credit cards and ATMs, most people have forgotten the tactile pleasure of holding a large wad of cash. After reading the cards, I make a note of who each one is from.

Keeping track of who has given and who hasn’t is imperative for a successful Christmas season. Ideally, all of the tenants would give me my envelope directly. That way, I can express my gratitude on the spot, shake hands, and the transaction is complete. It is always awkward thanking them after the fact, but if a tenant gives my envelope to one of my co-workers to give to me, then I must track down that person as soon as possible and thank him. If the tenant has to ask me, “Did you get my card?” I end up looking like an ingrate. An even worse scenario is thanking one of your benefactors for a gift that she has not yet given. This happened to me last year. I got sloppy with my bookkeeping and accidentally thanked 3B for her generous gift. It took several apologies and reassurances that I was not being sarcastic before she forgave me.

As we tiptoe through this etiquette minefield every December, there is another volatile issue upon which we must tread very lightly: religion. A majority of the tenants belong to one faith, and we, the staff, belong to another. So, what do I say when 8C hands me an envelope and says “Merry Christmas?” I know she doesn’t celebrate Christmas, so I can’t respond in kind. It would make my life less complicated if everyone used the generic, secular “Happy Holidays,” but despite the hysterical protestations of the Christian Right to the contrary, most people still say “Merry Christmas.” In years when the two holidays overlap or are near each other this isn’t a problem, but this year Chanukah will be over three weeks before Christmas. This is an especially sticky subject with 8C and I am eager not to offend her in matters Hebraic because I’m not sure she has forgiven me for an unfortunate incident that occurred last Passover.

I was doing my usual evening rounds, oblivious to the fact that it was the first night of Passover and the tenants probably didn’t want their Seders disturbed by the porter delivering oversized mail-order catalogues and other package room detritus. I was feeling a little lazy and did not call 8C as I usually would have before ringing her doorbell. When I rang the bell her youngest grandson yelled, “It’s Elijah!” and ran to the door. His disappointment at finding not the Old Testament prophet in his chariot of fire but me with his grandma’s dry cleaning was so great that he refused to finish reciting the four questions. I was blamed, but I think the kid’s defiance of his elders might have been fueled as much by alcohol as by religious disillusionment. He’d obviously been sneaking sips of the adults’ drinks all evening. I saw the little sot empty his father’s glass of slivovitz, but his family was too busy rebuking me for my cultural insensitivity to notice.

To atone for having caused little Jonathan’s apostasy, I have become 8C’s faithful shabbos goy. Whenever I see her lingering in the lobby on a Friday evening or Saturday afternoon, I rush to press the elevator button to summon Roberto or Vince.

I have often wondered about the logic that allows 8C to ride in the elevator on the Sabbath, but forbids her from pushing the button. But it would be unfair to judge her too harshly for her petty religious hypocrisies when my co-workers and I–all of whom are at least nominal members of the One True Faith–are celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Our Savior by worshipping that holy trinity of Mammon: Jackson, Grant, and Franklin.

That’s it. That was my last cynical thought of the year. From this point forward, I am Mr. Scrooge on Christmas morning—my faith in humanity growing at the same rate as the stack of bills on my nightstand. This willful suspension of cynicism has the lifespan of the average Christmas tree. A month from now, when I’m dragging the spent, desiccated carcasses to the curb, I will again realize that the bonuses are not a sign of the tenants’ generosity and gratitude for a year of conscientious service. I will have to reconsider the possibility that they think of the Christmas tip as a form of extortion and are paying it only for fear of reprisals from the staff or for fear of looking cheap. The magic of the season, which has temporarily cured me of the churlishness that would ordinarily make me question the selfish motives of both the tenants and the staff, will have dried up like old pine needles.

The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here.

**

    I am here less than an hour before I slice my finger with a box cutter while breaking down some boxes 8B left in the hallway—her weekly fix from the Home Shopping Network. I should probably put a bandage on it, but the boss is bellowing for me to polish the brass in the boiler room. He says it looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in months. In fact, I haven’t ever cleaned the brass in the boiler room. It’s news to me that there is anything brass down there. Anyway, I get a rag and the polish and go to work on the two brass door knobs that the boss has suddenly decided must be positively luminous in order for the building to survive another day. I’m rubbing one of the door knobs vigorously when some of the polish gets into my open cut. It feels like I’ve been given an injection of napalm. I cry out in pain, but get no sympathy from the boss. “I know, it hurts for you to do a little honest work once in a while,” he says. I run up the stairs to wash out the cut. The service car is ringing furiously. I ignore the elevator until after I’ve cleaned out the cut. I say a quick prayer that I don’t die of blood poisoning and answer the call.

     Mrs. 18A is shrieking at me before I get the elevator door open. The woman is so frantic I assume there must be an emergency, a flood or a gas leak. But the situation is even worse than I feared—her dog has pulled a glue mousetrap from under the oven. Miraculously, the trap did not get stuck on the dog, but it is now lying, sticky side down, on the linoleum tile. She’s screaming at me to get it up. It’s ruining her beautiful new floor. I try to peel it off, but it might as well be painted on the tile for all I can move it. I pull harder and a small piece of the cardboard trap comes off in my hand. I throw it in the garbage before giving the trap one final yank. “Don’t pull too hard,” commands Mrs. 18A. “I don’t want you to pull off—”

     Rip! Too late. The mousetrap and the tile are now both in my hand. From her agonized expression and banshee’s howl you’d swear I ripped out her pancreas along with the tile. I am cursed for my incompetence. She threatens to have me fired, sued, arrested, and killed.

     Although I am blameless in this case, (then again, maybe I’m not; I suppose if I had held down the tile with my left hand while pulling with my right, the tile wouldn’t have come loose) she is right. I am the worst porter this building has ever had. That’s not to say I don’t work hard or that I’m unreliable. I’m never late for work and I haven’t missed a day of work in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been here. I’m also still young enough, despite my ever expanding girth, to be an effective beast of burden. But any task that requires an iota of intelligence or manual dexterity is beyond me. For example, on Sunday the old lady in 4C asked me to change the battery in her smoke alarm. I tried at least ten times, but could not get the new battery to fit into the slot. She looked at me with disgust. “Get down from there,” she snapped. “Let me try.” I got down off the chair and helped her get her arthritic, osteoporosis-ridden old bones onto it. Within five seconds I heard the battery click into place. She beamed triumphantly atop her pedestal, looking down on me with scorn and pity. I should’ve kicked the chair out from under her. She wouldn’t look so goddamned smug with a broken hip. To add to my humiliation, she wanted to pay me for my trouble. I said I didn’t want the money because I hadn’t done anything. “For trying,” she said, forcing two crumpled singles into my hand.

     Having said all that, I’m the last person who should be throwing stones, but the absolute helplessness of the tenants is pathetic. True, I have to ask my brother or my father to come to my apartment to hang a set of blinds or fix a bookshelf. And despite countless hours of instruction, I still can’t change a tire. My helplessness is born of a singular stupidity, but the tenants: they wear their infant-like dependence as a badge of privilege. They remind me of something I read in the Guinness Book of World Records. In it there was a picture of an Indian guy with the world’s longest fingernails. His nails were so long (I don’t remember the exact length) that they spiraled inwards like the horns of a ram. The book said that long fingernails were a status symbol in the highest caste of Indian society. The incapacitatingly long nails were a way of saying that he could afford to have someone perform even the smallest tasks for him. So it is with the tenants. Unlike me, they could probably learn to program their VCRs or change their own light bulbs, but then the neighbors might get the impression, not that they’re self-sufficient, but that they can’t afford to have someone do it for them.

     I make it to six thirty without destroying any more apartments and relieve Vince for his break. As he goes out, Mr. 3B and Mrs. 10A enter the building followed by one of the dry-cleaning delivery guys who is carrying what looks like the entire men’s department of Bergdorf’s on his back. “I know that can’t all be for me,” I say.

     “Sorry, my friend.” He doesn’t look too sorry, unloading his cargo piece by piece: 12B, 7C, 18A, 5E. The two tenants in the elevator are waiting for me, so I don’t have time to put the clothes in the package room. I take them to their respective floors, operating the elevator with my right hand and carrying about twenty five pounds of dry cleaning in my left. The metal hangers are biting into my hand and it takes all of my willpower not to drop the clothes until after 10A gets out of the elevator. As soon as I close the door behind her, I lay the clothes neatly on the floor. When I get back to the lobby I pick up the dry cleaning before I open the door because I know there are people waiting for me. This goes on for about twenty minutes before I finally get a chance to put the clothes away. I’m hanging the clothes in the package room when the elevator rings again. I hurry back to answer the call. Mrs. 14E and her friend Mindy are waiting in the elevator. 14E is carrying her infant daughter. “Watch this,” she says to Mindy. She holds her left hand in front of the baby’s face. The child is mesmerized by the reflected light shining off two obscenely large diamond rings her mother is wearing. “She could stare at them all day.”

     “Like mother, like daughter,” says Mindy. “Can you even bend your finger with those things on?”

     “Nope,” 14E proudly replies, demonstrating her inability to move her ring finger.

     Like the Indian guy with the long fingernails, this woman is determined to cripple herself with conspicuous consumption.

     A few minutes later, Mr. 14E and 7A arrive home from work. Now, here is an interesting study in contrasts. On the one hand, you’ve got 14E, the husband of the woman with half of South Africa’s Gross National Product on her left hand. He is a securities trader, a paragon of predatory, high-pressure, Darwinian capitalism. The man is buying and selling with tens of millions of other people’s money at stake every day. Not surprisingly, he is a wreck. When I see him returning from work (which isn’t often, since he usually doesn’t get home until after I’ve left) he looks like a shell-shocked veteran home from the front. He stands outside the building trying to get every last bit of nicotine from his cigarette because he knows he has to get all the way through the lobby, up fourteen flights in the elevator, and down the hall to his apartment before he can get another hit of nicotine.

     On the other hand, you’ve got 7A, an accountant for an insurance company. True to the image of his profession, he appears to be a quiet, even timid man. He is not the bundle of nerves that his fellow passenger is, but his discontent is just as obvious. It can be seen in the blankness of his expression, in the slow, mechanical, marching-to-the-grave rhythm of his gait. Despite his resemblance to one of the living dead, 7A is, in fact, quite the wild man. He rides a Harley, has climbed all the major peaks in North America and Europe, and is an avid skydiver. So, which of these two men would be a better role model for me: the man with a job so stressful that he will probably be dead of a heart attack within a year, or the man with a job so soul-suckingly stultifying that he is doing everything possible to get himself killed?

     “It’s nice today,” says 15B as he enters the elevator, taking off his gloves and Dartmouth Alumni Association baseball hat. “Maybe a little chilly.”

     “Yeah, it’s nice,” I agree. I close the elevator door behind him.

     “Forty now, but they say forty five later on.”

     “Great.”

     We’ve reached his floor, but the retired cardiologist won’t get out until he’s given me the complete five-day forecast. Can’t he see me squirming? Doesn’t he recognize the look of agonized boredom on my face? He must. He is intentionally torturing me. Finally, someone rings for the elevator, providing me with an excuse to cut the old guy off. He lets me escape, but promises to keep me abreast of any breaking news from the National Weather Service.

     I am always polite and forbearing with the tenants, especially the old-timers, but today I let 15B ramble on even longer than usual. I’m not proud of it, but there has been an undeniable change in my attitude and behavior lately. I’m not the only one. When I came into work today, Jimmy was sitting on the couch reading the National Enquirer. The elevator rang, but rather than finish the article as is his custom, he jumped off the couch and ran into the elevator to answer the call. Dry cleaning that would languish in the package room for a week in May or June is now promptly delivered to the tenants as they enter the building. The super, who usually grunts at the tenants, is suddenly friendlier than a politician at a fundraiser.

     As any doorman, porter, or elevator-operator in the city can tell you, Christmas is coming. Yes, we are in holiday mode. The payoff for a year’s worth of abject servility is almost within reach, and we are working ourselves into a sycophantic frenzy. We fawn over their children and pets, we laugh at their stale jokes, and we humbly beg forgiveness if we’ve kept them waiting for more than ten seconds.

     I wish I could say I was above this seasonal obsequiousness, but damn it I want a new computer. So last night, I cravenly accepted 1C’s insincere apology as I mopped up after her Pekinese. I wanted to kick the incontinent rodent across the lobby, but Gateway isn’t giving those laptops away.

     Although I am counting on the tenants’ Yuletide sense of noblesse oblige, this in no way changes what I know to be the fundamental truth of tenant-staff relations: THEY HATE US. Sure, things are cordial and even friendly on the surface, but if you doubt their enmity I suggest you take a look at the uniforms—nay, costumes—they parade the doormen around in. The sartorial manifestation of their animus can be seen in the ungodly brown-and-green polyester suits with bright yellow piping, the ridiculous looking hats and bow ties and gloves. And, worst of all, the item that most emphatically expresses their contempt, the epaulets. Epaulets! What reason can they have to dress the help in the accoutrements of warriors, except to mock us? I can hear them snickering, “Hey, Admiral Nelson. Throw my clubs in the Beemer for me. I tee off at Winged Foot in an hour.”

     Oh, they can laugh at us, but it doesn’t hide the fear. And make no mistake, despite the fact that it is we who depend on them for our livelihood, it is they who fear us. For we know their secrets, we see them stripped of their armor. We know who had a hooker in his apartment while his wife was away at the summer house. We know which teenager didn’t spend the summer at a camp in Vermont, as his parents told the neighbors, but at a drug rehab in Minnesota.

     The lies and pretensions they pass off to the rest of the world are to us laughably transparent. You can go to all the Urdu Film Festivals and Jackson Pollack exhibits you like, 8C. I see you in the gym watching TV, going up and down on the Stairmaster, but never taking your eyes off Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight.

     Prior to coming to work here, my only exposure to the denizens of the Upper East Side was in Woody Allen movies, so I expected to hear lots of witty repartee and recondite references to August Strindberg and Bauhaus architecture. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that People Magazine subscribers outnumber New York Review of Books subscribers four to one. And the conversation is as laden with references to their status-obsessed consumerisms as any you’d hear in an inner-city high school. The only difference is the brand names of choice aren’t FUBU, Phat Pharm, or Tommy Hilfiger. They are Mercedes, Bridgehampton, and Yale.

     “Hey, Carlos. Where we going?” I ask the deliveryman from the diner.

     “8D, amigo.”

     I call the tenant from the elevator phone and bring Carlos up. When we get there, 7D doesn’t have the money ready, so we are both kept waiting. When the tenant finally returns, he says he wants thirty five cents back, leaving fifty cents for the tip. Carlos only has quarters, but the Goldman Sachs investment banker isn’t going to let this Ecuadorean con-artist beat him out of ten cents. While 7D goes off in search of the exact change, the elevator rings angrily. I can’t answer the calls because I am forbidden from leaving the delivery man alone, lest he steal someone’s doormat.

     After the transaction is complete, we return to the lobby. When I open the elevator door, I am greeted by five scowling faces. I should tell them to save their nasty looks for 7D, but I’ve been here long enough to know nothing is ever a tenant’s fault. One of the people impatiently awaiting my arrival is the new proprietress of the penthouse. She is in a foul mood, not only because I’ve kept her waiting, but because, as I hear her rant at Johann, her personal trainer, her bastard of an ex-husband has had the gall to send her the bill from the stable that houses Junior’s horses.

     Mercifully, when I get back to the lobby, Vince has returned from his break. I gladly hand the passenger car over to him and return to the solitude of the service car to resume picking up the garbage. This is my favorite time of the day. It’s the final hour of my shift, the boss has gone into hiding until tomorrow morning, and the tenants are now Vince’s problem. As well as being the most relaxing part of the day, it is also the most instructive. It is in the trash where the most interesting revelations about the lives of the tenants are discovered. In a typical day I might learn that 3C thinks she’s pregnant, 2D is trying the latest cure for baldness, and the kid in 8A failed his geometry test. But not all the artifacts I unearth are so easy to interpret. Often, I have to utilize what I know about the tenants in order to make sense of their garbage. For example, almost every day I collect five or six crushed Coors Light cans from the metal recycling bins on the sixth floor. I’ve never seen who puts them there, but I’d be willing to bet all my Christmas money that it’s Mr. 6E taking out his frustrations on something less ferocious than his shrew of a wife.

     I finish the garbage and return to the lobby to give it a final mopping before going home. Vince is sitting on the couch looking more forlorn than usual. “She just went out,” he said. “She not wearing any underpants.” The number of women in the building wearing panties fluctuates daily in inverse proportion to the number of hours Vince stayed up the night before watching pornographic videos. The woman he’s talking about is 9E, the trophy-wife-in-waiting. She’s been fired from three jobs since coming to New York, but her parents back in Texas still support her in the hope that someday soon, her beauty will persuade some middle-aged mutual fund manager to abandon his wife and children, and relieve Mr. and Mrs. 9E of their daughter’s colossal credit card debts.

     “I no have chance,” Vince continues glumly. “Maybe I show her the checkbook.” Whenever a tenant angers Vince, he threatens to show them his bankbook. It should go without saying that he makes the threat to me, not the tenant. He works two full-time jobs and he lives with his brother, so he doesn’t pay rent. Except for an occasional trip to a strip club, he never spends a dime, and has amassed quite an impressive nest egg for an unskilled laborer. “They think they something cause they have money. I have two hundred thousand dollars!” he screams at me. What the fuck! They see this shitty suit and they think we nothing.”

     Vince has just hit on the other reason why they dress us like buffoons: emasculation. Working in such proximity to the wives and daughters of Manhattan’s elite, we must be as sexually unthreatening as possible—the eunuchs that guard the harem. If Vince were the best-looking man in the city, the women would still only see this sad, polyester-clad castrato.

     I go downstairs to the locker room to change. When I get in the elevator with Vince a few minutes later, he is more morose than ever. “I go home, I see in the bars everybody holding hands, kissing. That’s why sometimes I get pissed off. This is not a life. This is not a life.” I know what he means, but I’m not exactly moved to tears by his lament. I’ve heard him say it a thousand times, and what’s worse is I’ve said it at least as many times myself. The day wouldn’t be complete without at least one chorus of: we’re poor, we’re stupid, we’re ugly, women hate us, and we’re stuck in these shitty jobs until the day we die.” Of course, we always conclude that we have no one to blame but ourselves.

     As I leave the building for the night, I look into the lobby of the building across the street. My grandmother was a nanny in that building. It was her first job in America. Sixty-five years and two generations later, I’ve managed to move the family place of business about twenty five yards to the north. The doorman in that building is talking to a boy about ten years old. He seems to be studying a pack of the boy’s baseball cards. It is my habit to spy on the doormen of all the buildings I pass on my way to the subway. By the time I get off work, their evening rush is over. Some read the Post, others step out on the sidewalk for a smoke and to watch the lady pedestrians passing by. They sometimes look bored, but they never look as miserable (Vince’s self-pity is catching) as I feel. Am I a snob? Do I think I’m too good for my job?

     Yes.

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The next episode of the "The Doorman's Double Life" can be read here.

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