Rafael Cruz, the owner and one of Mayfair’s six barbers, doesn’t mind sacrificing his shirt-sleeve as he buffs the barber’s pole between customers. “Look around! There’s no end to it. Everywhere there’s dirt,” Cruz says with a sweeping gesture of his arms. He dodges two garment racks, barely escaping with his life. “I’m not even safe on my own doorstep,” he says.

For Cruz, dirt is a living, breathing entity whose aim is to make his life hell. Out of the corner of his eye he notices that the shop’s name, painted in gold, is starting to flake. He winces and, speaking rapidly to himself in Spanish, moves in for closer inspection.

Cruz’s fastidiousness may once have been a common sight in New York, but these days it’s so rare it’s been known to prompt spontaneous applause from passersby.

When the boss is away visiting family in Puerto Rico or even when he’s outside cleaning fly specks off the window, he counts on his fellow barber, Rocco Battista, to look out after the shop.

Rocco’s body is a testament to 45 years of his wife’s home cooking–he’s all soft edges. His facial features are smooth, sagging a bit, but it’s a kind visage. Hard-earned dark circles hang beneath his eyes. Thick glasses ride low on his nose, making his eyes look bigger and friendlier. He’s bald except for a small patch on the side of his head–barely enough to cut.

He began his career at 15 in his native Naples, Italy, always hoping to come to America, but never expecting it to happen. Now he is part of the bricks and mortar of New York City. His boss, as well as the tonsorial cognoscenti, call him “the best barber in Midtown.”

Fifty years ago, when Mayfair first opened, the difference between success and failure seemed to be the personal touch people invested in their work. The local barber who could boast, “I cut your father’s hair,” is no longer part of our lives. But this is Mayfair’s credo.

Haircuts cost ten bucks at Mayfair–unlike everything else in the world, there’s no catch here. Don’t confuse the bargain price with some inferior, low-budget franchise; no one will ask you if you got a free bowl of soup with a Mayfair haircut.

The shop’s interior is square. The street side has two large windows, with a front entrance dividing them. Two walls are covered by mirrors and fronted by three barber’s chairs; a seventh chair resides in the center of the shop.

Most of the wall-space is taken up with prints of New York as it looked 50 years ago, small posters showing outdated hairstyles, and a couple of expired calendars that haven’t been removed. You won’t find any designer products, just the old-school Clubman brand gel. When asked if he’s heard of Paul Mitchell, Rocco responds, “Didn’t he play for the Mets?”

They still use Pinaud Haircare goodies in their Spartan green canisters–check in your grandpa’s medicine cabinet to see what they look like. Combs are placed in sterile blue liquid, and talcum powder is stored in tin canisters that resemble big salt shakers. On a countertop, an Oster shaving cream dispenser foams out hot lather.

Tiny scissors, designed for ear and nose hair removal, are arranged in antiseptic-looking trays. Old nylon aprons with snaps at the neck are still used, as well as soft-bristled brushes that whisk your neck clean of hair when the job is done.

The finest pleasures you’ll find at Mayfair are the professional shaves. Wielding meticulously sharpened straight-razors, the barbers’ hands are as steady as a surgeons’.

Mayfair is a cultural melting pot where customers feel at home–unlike the subways and buses where a cross-section of society is thrown together, yet straphangers still tend to insulate themselves from their neighbors. On an average day, a street guy can find himself seated next to an Asian UPS worker, a Wall Street guy in $700 loafers, or a newly arrived immigrant hustling garments on racks. The clientele clearly appreciates the opportunity to ease back and soak up the scene. Even if the People magazine is from last January, it’s fun to wait your turn at Mayfair.

Mayfair is a barbershop, not a beauty salon. Women customers are rare. When the occasional woman does come in, it’s for a masculine haircut or one that demands clippers or a straight-razor.

If you arrive at the right time, you’ll catch the regulars. Next to the door, beneath a faded poster of a Fonzi-lookalike advertising Vitalis, sits a lean black man with a sleek, shaved skull and white chin whiskers. A porkpie hat rests on his knee.

“If you’re looking to meet ladies, don’t come here,” he says. “The boss don’t keep no blue hair dye in stock, dig? Ain’t that right, Rocco?”

Rocco, bending over a customer whose neck he’s shaving, responds in almost a whisper. “I will cut anyone’s hair if they come in on time and pay. They can be ladies, too, or anything in between.”

A young Russian barber, the greenest member of the staff, watches Rocco’s hands, fully absorbed in his wizardry. “Look how smooth he is–like silk,” he says. “When he uses the scissors, it looks like a hummingbird’s wings.”

The black man, half-listening, shrugs, and immediately changes the subject to his “old lady.”

“She gets suspicious about what really goes on in this place,” he tells an Asian man with doughy hands, holding a horse racing form. “She suspects it’s a front for a cat house.”

This elicits raucous laugh from all the guys: “A cat house?”

The barbershop could be the last bastion of the figurative “boys’ club” in New York, one which a woman would not wish to join, even if invited.

An old garmento with a gravelly Brooklyn accent, faintly smelling of cigars and Old Spice, has been going to the barbershop since the Nixon administration. He has an answer for everything. Over the course of an hour, his polemic’s range from “Why we blew it in Vietnam” to “Why we’re blowin’ today.” He blows in like clockwork at 3 p.m. on Thursdays.

“It’s a veritable fountain of youth, ” he says of Mayfair. “Twenty years ago, I thought the Big Guy in the sky had Bernie Gootblatt’s number, I tell you. With two bleeding ulcers and a bad ticker, I wasn’t even gonna see Nixon run outta office! Now I kibitz and laugh. It makes the time pass easier. I don’t look a day over 60, do I? It’s the age I was when I started comin’, so I ain’t gonna stop now.”

“Me too! I been regular eight years now,” the Asian man pipes up. He habitually tries to join conversations with the words “me too”–so much so that it’s become his nickname. He works as a stockboy at his uncle’s grocery store up the street. “Everybody know my face here, everybody say, ‘Hi!’ Everybody listen, right, Rocco?”

Without looking up, Rocco, who is concentrating on his client’s sideburns, confirms Me-Too’s statement with a slow nod.

“The city can be a lonely place,” the old black man says, looking down at his shoes. “Most of the good joints closed down.”

Downtown billiard halls and late-night diners were where many of Mayfair’s customers used to hang out.

“It is the Yuppster wiped out all the class in the city, isn’t it, Rocco?” says the young Russian. “They call it sanitation, huh?”

“Sanitization,” Rocco corrects him, his eyes on his client. “People don’t change, only the words.” “Yuppsters! I don’t know from Yuppsters,” the garmento interrupts. “All’s I know is I’m a pastrami on rye with a malt. I think Cagney was the best damn actor ever was, I like a bourbon at night. See my point? That’s what gets me through the day.” He cranes his neck to see if his pals agree.

The regulars nod their heads, as if no finer truth has ever been spoken.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion outside. Three large bodies collide at full-speed into the storefront window, like NBA players chasing a loose ball into the stands. WHACK! The barbershop window quakes but doesn’t shatter; everyone in the barbershop recoils from the shock.

The guy on the bottom, a black man in standard-issue baggy clothes, takes the wallop of a forearm to the jaw. It sends him scurrying for shelter. He tries Mayfair’s front door. The other two men, white with bristly goatees and buzz cuts, charge him. They’re inside now.

Rafael Cruz drops his scissors and heads for the doorway. The two attackers drag their victim outside and bang the man’s forehead on the cement as if it was a sandbag. They pull him to his knees. He struggles back, gets loose. A blur of legs and arms fly. Everything is motion. They’re pushing him against the storefront window, trying to subdue him.

No bigger than a bantamweight but fighting like a heavyweight, Cruz jumps into the fray, easing them off his window, over to the adjacent concrete wall. The black man has nothing left. The two men lock his hands with plastic tie cuffs. It all happens in a matter of seconds. It’s clear to everyone in Mayfair these guys are two undercover cops and a suspect. The black man’s blood has streaked the window.

“Fuck! He’s bleeding!” says one cop to the other. “Did he bite you?”

The same cop sees the suspect is choking. He had the “rock” in his mouth the whole time, trying to get it down. The cop grabs his throat, to stop him from swallowing the drugs and destroying his bust.

Everyone at the barbershop has an opinion to voice about the scene they’ve just witnessed–about the insanity and unpredictability of everyday life. As usual, Rocco has the last word.

“Outside, you never know what to expect. But nothing ever changes at the Mayfair.”

Walpow purchases his seltzer at Gomberg Seltzer Works in Canarsie. Established in 1953 by Mo Gomberg and now run by his grandson Kenny, the company creates its bubbly offering with a Barnett and Foster Siphon Machine, built in London in 1910.

“Good seltzer should hurt,” says Kenny of the mixture of tap water and carbon-dioxide gas (no salts or minerals added). “The term we use is ‘bite.’ When you swallow it, you feel the bubbles in your throat and it’s, like, painful.”

At Gomberg Seltzer Works, New York tap water is first triple-filtered, making it conceivably the purest water anywhere, and then cooled, which facilitates carbonation. Once in the carbonator, the water is beaten with a series of rotating paddles so vigorously that its molecules bind together. The bottles are filled in an upside-down position at 70 pound per square inch; a machine depresses the lever on the siphon, forcing seltzer to rush upward through the nozzle.

Gomberg does not claim his product is superior to the numerous store-bought seltzers that have taken over the market, nor does he deny it. Instead he grabs a newly filled seltzer bottle from the sputtering machine. It’s a special one: old, dark-green, hand-blown in Czechoslovakia, seamless, with half inch sides and a bottom almost an inch thick–antique dealers have been known to pay as much as $40 for a classic bottle. He raises the bottle high above his head and sprays a stream directly into his mouth, as if to ask, “How can a 22-ounce plastic bottle possibly compare?”

Walter Backerman of Queens, a third generation seltzer man and a factotum for all things seltzer-related, puts it more explicitly: “Look, when you open store-bought, there’s pressure leaking out–it’s flat by the time you hit the bottom. With seltzer squirted out of a siphon, the valve is only open long enough to let it out–no excess gas escapes.” He pauses. “Besides, you think the flimsy bottles they use can handle serious pressure?” (Pressure is a very important word when you’re talking to a seltzer man.)

Backerman goes on to expound on the finer points of his trade, but he keeps returning to the main theme: “Don’t ever underestimate the power of nostalgia.” For seltzer men and for others who relish drinking seltzer the old-fashioned way, it’s about connecting with your roots.

In the 1920s in New York, soda water gradually became known as seltzer–two different names for the same product. The word seltzer originates from the German word Selterser Wasser, meaning mineral water from Nieder Selters, Prussia. Immigrants from Eastern Europe brought the word from their homeland, and it stuck.

There has always been a strong association between seltzer and Jews, who were often the purveyors of seltzer. Once explanation for its popularity among Jews is that it complements the rich foods found in kosher diets. This may be a polite way of saying that it makes you belch. In the old days, seltzer was called “Belchwasser” or “Jewish Champagne.” But the ethnic makeup of customers ran across the board: Polish, Irish and especially Italian.

Back when everybody drank the stuff, Barry Walpow’s father, Sam, delivered seltzer with a horse-drawn wagon before graduating to a truck with a hand-cranked engine. Sam, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was like any other young man in Brooklyn at that time, hungry to get ahead and willing to work as hard as it took.

“My father was a workaholic,” Walpow says, taking in the old, peeling walls of the Seaview Diner. “He never took a day off, even on the holiest holidays.” Then, one Yom Kippur morning, when Sam went to spin the hand-crank on his truck, it kicked back and broke his arm. He saw it as an Act of God. From then on, he rested on Jewish holidays.

“In summer, as a kid, I used to ride shotgun while my father drove his route,” Walpow remembers. “I learned all there was to know about seltzer from him. We covered every corner of Brooklyn–everybody was buying then.” The elder Walpow even provided seltzer to a family in Flatbush with a little girl named Barbra Streisand.

The demise of the local seltzer industry occurred in the 1970s, when soft drink companies began to produce and market seltzer and club soda (carbonated water with sulfates), and designer mineral water became popular. Walpow doesn’t quite buy it. “You wanna know what killed seltzer?” he says, poking at his rice pudding. “When the wives started working. No one was home to receive the order. The seltzer men couldn’t leave their valuable product out in the open. Not that I got anything against women’s lib,” he adds carefully, “but it spelled the end for us.”

The waitress places a glass of water in front of Walpow. He holds it up, examining it in the afternoon light, as if looking for bubbles that aren’t there. “Now, I think everything’s like fast food.” He frowns, putting the glass down and pushing it aside. “Things have become less personalized.”

Walpow has a loyal network of customers who rely on his product and appreciate what he’s doing. Ke Wilde, a painter living in Williamsburg, says he’s been getting his seltzer from Walpow for 10 years. “Barry’s such a nice guy and a classic character, you want to support him,” says Wilde. “I got a daughter who is a little less than two, and now she calls for seltzer at every meal. She wants you to squirt it into her cup. She likes the whole experience.”

Walpow rises up from the booth slowly. As he walks over to the cashier, his right shoulder slopes down, from several decades of schlepping seltzer crates. He heads outside toward his van, a decaying brown Econoline with the company name, Lots of Seltzer, Inc., printed on its flank. He climbs inside for his Canarsie-to-Williamsburg run.

Walpow parks at the corner of 79 Berry Street, in front of Oznot’s Dish, a restaurant with a bohemian feel to it. The seltzer man and Oznot’s seem an odd pairing at first, but inside the restaurant Walpow’s bottles line a mosaic-tiled wall, exuding a retro-cool. He looks around at some of the young, fashionable patrons who are drinking his product like old-timers.

“One thing I know for sure,” Walpow says with a smile, “you can’t beat a little spritz of seltzer on a hot summer day.”

The subway station at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue is among the most heavily trafficked and congested places in New York. Watching people elbow each other for position on the platform during rush hour is like watching two NBA centers do battle in the paint. It’s hot, the air is thick, and you can tell by scanning the crowd that most people waiting for the subway here would rather be just about anywhere else. So when one hears the rich booming baritone making pronouncements like, "WHITE WOMEN GET IN YELLOW CARS DRIVEN BY BLACK MEN," it’s almost dream-like, a voice from the collective unconscious of the rush hour crowd.

In fact, the speaker is Carl Robinson, an enigmatic homeless man who for the past twelve years has spent his days at this station — usually on the downtown platform — making statements that one MTA track worker, Frank O’Conner, described as "Zenlike. Some people think he’s a crackpot, and other people think he’s funny as hell."

Robinson, a black man with maybe a trace of Asian Indian mixed in, has a round, inviting face, and a devilish grin that suggests he’s in on a joke the rest of us are not privy to.

When asked about his ethnic background, he said, "When in Eurocentric areas, you always say white. ‘Cause if you’re not white, you’re not right."

He was equally evasive about revealing his age, his past, or why he comes to this spot everyday and says the things he does. Another homeless man, Mark Davis, said Robinson used to sell costume jewelry on the street by the Lexington Avenue station, until the cops busted him and took away his merchandise for operating without a license.

"He wasn’t the same after that," said Davis.

Late last summer, during a pre-9/11 news drought, a captive audience listened to Robinson on the platform. Some people shook their heads in disbelief, some nodded sympathetically, some tried to ignore him. But mainly they laughed. A family of Japanese tourists, whose grasp of English didn’t appear to be strong, looked understandably puzzled by what he said, but videotaped him nonetheless. One passerby handed him a dollar bill, which he hadn’t solicited but accepted.

"You can’t refuse money," he said, "because when people offer you something, they’re really offering themselves. Reject them, and you’ve made an enemy where there was a friend."

He sat against a wall facing the tracks, adjacent to a long flight of stairs and a set of escalators. He scanned some headlines on copies of the Post, the Daily News, and the Times lent to him by a nearby newsstand vendor. He scans newspapers rather than read them because he claims that reading them can infect your brain with "bogus propaganda." An article about Abner Louima’s financial settlement with the Police Department interested him.

"POLICE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!" he bellowed. "FRIENDS FIGHT AND KILL EACH OTHER ALL THE TIME." Then: "JOIN US AND KILL PEOPLE! RECRUITMENT DAY. SPONSORED BY POLICE HEADQUARTERS. FRIENDLY FIRE IN THE COMMUNITY."

"Brother-man, telling it like it is!" a man said as he walked by.

It might have been the power of Robinson’s oratory, more than the substance of his message, that inspired the passerby. Some commuters were clearly annoyed by him. One imagines, however, that many are angered by the same issues that obsess Robinson, and would enjoy sounding off as freely as he does. Yet they don’t say a word, and and ride home without the friction the having to articulate their feelings.

An E train entered the station and the crowd dispersed. A pay phone rang; Robinson uses it as his home number. It was a friend of his, a Columbia student seeking relationship advice. "Women," he counseled, "I gave ‘em up a long time ago." He concentrated on an ad in the paper about domestic violence, and milled around for a while, forming his next rant.

"I HAVE TO GET ON THAT TRAIN," he exclaimed as an F pulled into the station and the crowd pushed its way inside. "I NEED TO GET HOME. FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE." He repeated this a second time, and punctuated it with a diabolical laugh.

A few minutes later, another train arrived. Just before its doors closed, he thrust his head inside and announced: "CROWDED TRAIN . . . SEX ABUSE . . . STRANGE PEOPLE . . . TOUCHING MY BODY." A well-tailored woman who he had been speaking to earlier, waved goodbye and mouthed, "See you tomorrow, Carl."

Asked what his last remark meant, he explained, "This is a classic state of denial. If you were to touch any of these people’s bodies on the platform, they would accuse you of sexual attack. But on the train they press their bodies into yours and say it’s non-sexual. It shows you the duplicity in human psychology, and how they will deny a situation simply because they perceive there is a greater value. See, it’s so important for people to reach home at a quick pace that they’ll allow themselves to get sexually harassed. They simply deny that pressing into somebody’s body is sexual. I love it!"

He shook his head and chuckled as he walked down the platform and disappeared into a sea of people.

"GIULIANI IS A BENIGN, GENTLE, KIND-HEARTED TYRANT," he called out, his voice echoing off the subterranean walls. This was greeted by an eruption of laughter. Then another train arrived and people got in. It pulled away and Robinson’s audience was gone. For the moment he was silent, standing alone on the platform.

When I go looking for her I carry binoculars, because she’s usually off in the distance and there are many who resemble her. Diana is a Moran tugboat: snub-nosed, roughly a hundred feet long, with a flaking red paint job, and a black smokestack emblazoned with a prominent white “M.” When I was one of her deckhands, in the spring of 2000, she dealt exclusively with garbage. Twenty-four hours a day she picked up barges — each one a 600-ton mosaic of soiled diapers, burnt mattresses, dismembered dolls, shattered TV’s, pianos with missing keys and protruding wire strings — at marine terminals located throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and ferried them to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. The job required a crew of eight — captain, mate, engineer, cook, and four deckhands — to live on board for seven days, then swap with another crew.

Privacy was nonexistent. When one guy sneezed, everyone got a cold. At first it was worth it because I was learning seamanship, a long-held dream of mine. (I also learned that living harmoniously with seven other people on a tugboat was far more challenging than enduring the stench of the surrounding garbage, which invited excretory seagulls and swarms of flies.) But I learned something else on Diana: how one unthinking comment can eventually come to haunt you.

On my first few hitches, the crew was less than charitable. The seasoned veterans seemed to resent my not knowing the routine, or, more likely, they enjoyed it, as they lorded their knowledge over me. The only one who never gave me flak was Maddy, the Puerto Rican cook. She was a stubby woman in her early-thirties, and the crew was savage to her.

When I was off shift I would read a paperback on the stern. The senior deckhand, Dave, who refused to break me in, would snicker. “The answer ain’t in there,” he said once. “Better you grow eyes in the back a’ your head.”

He was rumored to have put Visine in a former deckhand’s food, and had body odor and oral hygiene befitting medieval times. The rest of the crew followed his lead, or at least never intervened. Whenever a new deckhand arrived, he became the object of Dave’s hate. One large, doughy Irishman from Bay Ridge broke down under the hazing. After each shift he’d retire to his rack, press a pillow against his face, and cry until it was time to work again. He was one of five deckhands Diana chewed up during the time I was there.

None of the dropouts were as tough as Maddy, who toiled onward like the tug herself. When she burned our steak, which was often, the crew beaned her with the charred beef. Once, she was allowed to prepare her native arroz con pollo, and it was delicious. But the all-white crew claimed it was inedible “wet-back food,” spat it out, and chanted, “Steak! Steak! Steak!”

She cooked with a frightened expression on her face, as if her next blunder might mean walking the plank. She couldn’t afford to get fired; her family depended on her $80-a-day salary.

After she finished the dishes and cleaned the galley, she’d place a foot on the starboard gunwale and smoke a Newport. Her short legs and arms were thick, and her usual outfit, a purple sweatsuit, was unflattering.

One day I found myself next to her on deck while she took a post-dinner cigarette break. She offered me a butt. I declined but began a conversation.

“Purple’s your color,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

“Yeah? I been into Prince since forever.”

A few minutes passed, but the silence wasn’t awkward. She smiled at the sunset over Bayonne. We agreed that New Jersey had the best sunsets, due to all the pollutants. She pointed out that I was squinting, just as she was, and asked me if it was due to the sun, the diesel fumes, or the garbage.

“No,” I said, grinning. “It’s Dave.”

“Same here.” She giggled. We resolved to anonymously buy Dave a toiletry kit filled with all the essentials and an instant friendship was formed.

“Yo, Zach,” she said before we parted. “You the first dude on this boat I ever said could get a cigarette.”

Over the next few hitches, I was gradually accepted as one of the crew. I started spending more time in the wheelhouse than alone on the stern or talking with Maddy. Although I was appalled by the captain’s treatment of her, his vast knowledge of the harbor drew me to him — not only did he know its lore, but seemingly every bump and eddy of the surrounding waters. In time, he spoke freely with me, about everything from his days as a deckhand to his current woman troubles and I grew comfortable with him, maybe too comfortable.

Maddy and I stayed friends, though. Occasionally she put on lipstick and earrings. No one took notice, but I’d flatter her. “Whoa, if Prince saw you, you know he’d bust a move.”

“You corny, man,” she’d respond, her spirits clearly buoyed.

But Maddy had some nasty habits that had begun to bother me. Sometimes she’d swat a fly with her hands, wipe the remains on her apron, and continue to cook. I wondered if this was a mistake, or if she really didn’t know the difference. I started observing her more closely and noticed her doing things like spitting down the sink drain when she thought no one was looking. Eventually, I broached my concern about her uncleanliness with the captain. We were a garbage tug, after all.

He bore down on me. “You see something I should know about?” he said.

I dodged, I hedged (was I completely sure she didn’t wash her hands after killing a fly? And what if she preferred to wash in the head, or five minutes before I entered the galley?), but it was too late. The damage had been done. I would’ve given a week’s salary to retrieve my words.

I pleaded with the captain to let me handle it, but he told me to take the wheel, and clambered down the ladder to the galley. He ripped into Maddy, told her she was fired and, worst of all, said that it was me — “her pal” — who reported her.

After that, I couldn’t face her and began avoiding meals. Finally, she addressed me.

“They treat me like a animal,” she said, “but I know where I stand with them. You got me.”

It was the last time we ever spoke.

Fortunately, she wasn’t fired. But life on Diana got worse. My conscience plagued me to the extent that I started dreaming of Maddy spitting in my food, thinking that it was my penance to eat it anyway. A few weeks later I gave my notice.

Now I sometimes walk along the shoreline, searching the Hudson, looking for my old tug and the figure in purple with a foot on the starboard gunwhale, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset.

The brass-plated elevator door opens, revealing it’s operator, a man named Kenny Coleman. A horde of cops, assistant district attorneys, and clerical workers bustle inside as if they’re heading to a sale at Macy’s rather than for work at the state court building at 80 Centre St.

In his mid-40s, thin-faced and short, and wearing a fedora, a Western string tie and a jean jacket, Kenny perches on the end of his stool next to a panel of buttons. He pulls a lever.

The door closes. It’s a strange sight to see on this thermometer-busting day at the height of summer: all those people cramming into one particular elevator car while five other cars stand empty, their operators waiting anxiously in front of them.

“Okay, folks, welcome to Camp D.A.!” Kenny calls as the elevator rises.

“Today’s activity: Water sports!”

Not one rider raises an eyebrow. They’ve gotten used to this over the three years he’s been running the elevator. Kenny’s worked for the D.A. for a quarter of a century, formerly as a messenger and clerical worker.

But it’s in his present position that he’s flourished. “Are we ready for today’s trivia question?” Kenny asks, in his best game-show-host voice. “I was born ready, Kenny. You know that,” says a burly cop, rolling his neck as if steeling himself for a confrontation. “Okay, sir. Would you like TV or movies, history or science, art or sports?”

“TV,” the cop shoots back. “I been boning up.”

A small fan on the ceiling struggles against the steamy air. Kenny takes his time. A tall man working on a half-moon armpit stain is standing in the middle of the 6-by-8-foot space. Behind him, a fat man is breathing so hard you’d think he was taking the stairs. Mounted on the wall, at eye-level, is a corkboard displaying photographs of several attractive women whom Kenny considers friends. Next to them are pictures of his loved ones: several a Siberian Husky named Lobo and a good-looking man in a black leather jacket–his older brother Dave, who died of colon cancer a few years ago. This is not like being transported in an institutional elevator; it’s like riding in a gypsy cab dressed up to feel like someone’s home.

“On the TV show All in the Family,” Kenny says, “what was Michael’s last name?”

The cop bunches up his features, says, “I love that show,” but offers no answer.

Other passengers murmur to themselves, but volunteer nothing. Meanwhile, the elevator man whistles the Jeopardy! theme song. The elevator arrives at the fourth floor–Parole, the cop’s destination.

“Okay, what is it?” the cop demands.

“Stivic,” answers Kenny, “Michael Stivic. Better luck next time.”

“Quick, gimme one more,” the cop begs as he squeezes out of the elevator.

“What was Edith’s maiden name?” Kenny asks.

The cop stands silent, slackjawed, as the door closes on him and the elevator moves on.

Now, heading toward Special Narcotics on the sixth floor, the tall man with the armpit stains blurts out, “Baines! She was Edith Baines before she became Edith Bunker.”

“This is correct, sir,” says Kenny, searching his pockets for a lollipop.

Lollipops are his gift to those who answer correctly, but he’s out of them. He promises to restock at lunch.

“Make sure it’s the kind with the gum in the center,” the tall man says. “You bet!” Kenny says.

Before getting off, the tall man receives a high five from a fellow passenger–to the chagrin of most of the people on board, whose heads are level with his wet underarms.

“I don’t quiz the people to make them feel bad, or to see them get it wrong,” Kenny confides. “It’s not about ‘Look how much I know and you don’t.’ My goal is to put a smile on somebody’s face, make the day pass a little easier for us all.”

In turn, Kenny’s supervisors allow him to make his own weather. He has become the building’s mascot, its intermission zany, its half-time show between tedious dockets. Kenny admits that his strength is TV and movie trivia, especially Hollywood films from the 30s through the 70s. But he’s strong in world history, too, and dabbles in art, science and sports. His love of movies was in part inspired by his bother Dave who, while attending NYU, had to write a paper on Red River, the Howard Hawks classic starring John Wayne. Kenny researched the paper for his brother. Dave received an A. Soon thereafter, Kenny began to devour the classics. To this day, John Wayne is one of Kenny’s favorite actors–Kenny can quote from El Dorado, The Quiet Man and The Alamo verbatim.

He can even tell you the running time of every Wayne picture, and probably who catered lunch. It makes sense that the diminutive elevator man, made smaller sitting on his stool, spending his days in a claustrophobic box, daydreams of the imposing Wayne, high in the saddle out on the prairie as he surveys the land.

Having finished his one-hour lunch break, the elevator man reenters his small office and sits on his stool. He crosses his legs, affecting a nonchalant air he didn’t exhibit earlier in the day and hums the theme song from The Magnificent Seven. Moments later, two plainclothes cops walk into the elevator, one short with a beard, the other tall and clean-shaven. A rare draft kicks up the short one’s unbuttoned overshirt, revealing his holster and the butt of his gun.

“Six, Kenny,” says the tall cop. Kenny’s finger is already on the button.

“What’s the good word?” the short cop asks.

“How do you fellas feel about John Wayne today?” Kenny responds.

“Naw,” says the tall cop.

“Die Hard?” asks Kenny.

“I’m no good at Die Hard,” the short cop says, giving a wink to his snickering partner. “What else you got?”

“How about Clint Eastwood?” Kenny asks.

“Go,” says the short cop.

“Name the actress who played Eastwood’s partner in The Enforcer?”

The two cops stare quizzically into each other’s eyes as the elevator creaks to a stop. Then, simultaneously–nearly screaming like schoolgirls at a Ricky Martin concert–they exclaim, “Tyne Daly!”

“This is correct!” says Kenny, adding, “it was made in 1976 and has a running time of 96 minutes. But for my money I’d recommend The Enforcer , 1951, Humphrey Bogart and Zero Mostel. Mostel made a great crook.”

As they get off the elevator, lollipops in hand, the partners chant, “Who’s the boss? Who’s the boss?”

The elevator man, now heading down to the ground floor, looks pleased with himself. He shakes his head and smiles. “That was a lob directly over the plate–my gift to the NYPD. They’ll feel smart all week.”