"Another Doorman's First Week on the Job"

Sooner or later, every doorman will be confronted with the death of a tenant—sometimes even on his first week on the job—as this next story, which dovetails closely with the author’s own experiences—illustrates. It was told by Billy K, a thirty-year veteran from Milwaukee who originally moved to New York to become an actor in the late-seventies and has worked as a doorman on Central Park West ever since.


If memory serves correctly, it must have been around late July or early August 1977 that I answered a Help Wanted ad in the Daily News that read: “Part-time doorman wanted. No experience necessary. Call super at … or apply in person.” After graduating Magna Cum Laude from the Yale School of Drama, I moved to Manhattan that summer to become an actor. Unable to find work, I impulsively applied for and was immediately hired as a vacation relief doorman at the upper west eighties building near The San Remo where I’d end up spending the next thirty years and counting. I was twenty-four back then, and at the time, being a doorman was only stop-gap, a rung on the ladder to something much better—and since a lot of celebrities lived there—I figured that if I did my job well enough one of them might even help me break into show business.
Little did I know, that wasn’t to be and this would become my career.
For five days straight, beginning on August 16, the day Elvis died, I trained alongside Hector, the daytime doorman who’d worked here since fleeing Cuba in the early 1950s. He showed me the ropes, introduced me to most of the residents and warned
me about whom to avoid. He got me up to speed on how to run the service elevator, how to handle the delivery boys, how to log and relay messages, and how to hand out the dry cleaning and packages.
In other words, anything that anybody with half a functioning brain, much less an Ivy League graduate, should be able to master in less than a day, except—
What to do if a gay, Italian, heroine-addicted, cross-dressing hairstylist to the stars hangs himself, and his father, upon learning of his son’s death, becomes so over aught with grief that he decides to camp out in the hallway for three days straight?
Yep, Hector forgot to check me out on that one and it really did happen.
My very first week on the job.
The tenant’s name was Michael, though he also went by Michelle, and he lived in a duplex on the top two floors and often entered the building dressed in women’s clothing. In his early-fifties back then, he owned a prominent Madison Avenue hair salon that catered to such celebrity clientele as Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O and Liza Minnelli. A millionaire several times over, he owned second homes in Amagansett, Palm Beach and Aspen, and was a regular at places Studio 54 and Elaine’s. I’d been warned that he was a drug addict and I figured he drank a lot also because the previous day I’d signed for ten cases of Stoli. And low and behold, he did not disappoint. On my first shift alone, he staggered out of a cab and into the building around three in the morning looking like a strung out version of Dorothy Michaels, the Dustin Hoffman character in Tootsie.
It was a sweltering summer night. It is also significant to the story that even with my Ivy League education, I was green—which is to say that I didn’t know what to do at first—especially after the guy told me to fuck off, so I called Al, the super, who came out and shoved Michael-Michelle into the elevator.
During the morning shift about four days later, Al apologized and explained that Michael-Michelle was crazy but said, “He’s one of the building’s wealthiest tenants and when he comes in drunk, the best thing is to get him back up to his apartment as quickly as possible and just let him sleep it off.” Then, like at about one-thirty that same afternoon—when I was upstairs on his floor—I couldn’t help but notice that there was a terrible stench coming from his apartment. Several of the other tenants had been complaining as well, and so I immediately called Al on my walkie-talkie and we gained access to the apartment using our passkey. Another thing Hector had neglected to tell me was that breaking-and-entry was sometimes part of the job, and, though none of us knew it yet, Michael-Michelle had already been dead for seventy-two hours.
When we opened the door, it was nothing less than the most repulsive scene I have ever encountered. All of the windows were closed and the odor was so noxious that I nearly fainted as we waited for the police to arrive. As we looked up, we could see part of Michael-Michelle’s vomit-stained bathrobe through the slats of the metal stair case. His head? It was listing at about a ten degree angle from the top of the landing with his arm outstretched and caked with blood, as Al, who’d awarded me this assignment on my very first week, like it was some kind of initiation ritual, simply handed me a blanket to cover the corpse and instructed me to go back downstairs to the door until the police arrived.
I was foolish enough to listen to him and not quit right then and there on the spot as I helped them carry the body out through the service entrance.
When the results of his autopsy came back about a week later, the preliminary cause of death was determined to be a drug overdose from speedballing crack and methamphetamine. The apartment was sealed off and padlocked pending a further investigation into whether there was foul play.
Then at around six-thirty several days later, just as I was about to go on my dinner break, an elderly man in his early 80s showed up at my door carrying an oversized Louis Vuitton suitcase and claiming to be Michael-Michelle’s father. He’d just flown in from Milan and had no idea of his son’s death. Inconsolable, he demanded access to the apartment. I remember him as a strange man—at once mench-like and menacing. I remember, too, how when we told him we couldn’t let him in, he snuck up the back staircase and began drinking wine, lighting candles and holding a séance in the middle of the hall for the next three days—reeking of booze—and clutching a St. Christopher medal in his left hand. On that following Tuesday, Al told me to escort the police back up to the apartment. That’s when we discovered the old man passed out in the hall and they carted him off to Bellevue in handcuffs for psychiatric evaluation.

Postscript: Needless to say, no matter how well-educated I was, nothing could have prepared me for what happened during my first week as a doorman. And yet, here I am, thirty years later, still not an actor and still on the job. In the mid-eighties, circumstances that no longer matter led me to quit my non-existent acting career and pursue playwriting, an endeavor in which I had a couple of minor successes. More recently, I have tried my hand at screenwriting and my agent is currently shopping a couple of scripts around Hollywood.
In the meantime, despite all of the danger and all of the hardship, I have been a doorman for so long that when people ask, it’s what I tell them I do. It’s who I am and over the years I’ve come to love it even as I still wait for my ship to come in. If others don’t approve, that’s their problem and not mine. And in case you’re wondering, at least ten different people have lived in Michael-Michelle’s apartment since that incident long ago—but I’ve never been back inside.

"My First Week on the Job"

Author’s Note: I’ve listened to suggestions from people who think I should drop this chapter altogether or include parts of it in the introduction. Listen, it’s a free country and you’re perfectly free to skim it or skip it. I won’t be hurt either way. I put it here so you’d gain some background as to what a day in the life of a typical New York doorman is really like—and what really happened to me my first day on the job. So, if you actually want to have some context when I mention things later, pay attention.



In an odd sense, my circuitous journey to becoming a doorman goes all the way back to the early ’70s, when my parents and I lived in a Pre-war building on Central Park West that was a lot like the place where I later worked. Until my younger sister was born, we had a six-room, tenth-floor apartment overlooking the park, and to this day, I can honestly say that most of my memories of growing up there remain intact.
In particular, I vividly recall as a young boy being enthralled by Fernando, our weekday doorman who had come to America sometime in the 1950s after losing everything during the Cuban Revolution, and the rest of the staff, with whom I used to spend hours hanging out with and shooting the breeze in our building’s marble lobby. We also had this old manual elevator that José, the elevator man whom I kept in touch with over the years until he retired and moved back to Puerto Rico, used to let me drive. So enamored by their jobs was I that I even turned the toy policeman’s costume I
got one year for Christmas into a makeshift doorman’s uniform. Not only that, but once during a two-day doorman’s strike in 1976, I actually put it on and offered to fill in for them as our real doormen picketed outside for better wages and working conditions.
Of course, back then, this was all innocent child’s play. But it is something I have thought about often, especially when my tenants used to ask me about how and why I became a doorman, knowing that they were expecting to hear some hard-luck story, or that my father and grandfather had both worked as doormen and it was a generational thing in my family, even though nothing could be further from reality.
The real truth is that after moving out of our apartment on Central Park West in 1977, we moved to an even bigger place on Park Avenue and then left the city altogether in 1979. My parents, both native Southerners, moved my sister and me to Memphis for a more normal childhood when I was eight and she was three. My now retired father was a doctor as were both my grandfathers and my uncle, and after four years in Memphis we moved to Nashville in 1983 where my dad became chief of Neuropathology at Vanderbilt University Medical School. My mother did fundraising for a non-profit group for people with hearing disorders and eventually went into the antiques business with her best friends Connie and Sigourney.
At fifteen, I went away to prep school, first in Virginia, then Atlanta, finally winding up in Boston where I majored in journalism at Emerson College. After graduation, I returned to New York to become a writer and supported myself as a business reporter and through a random series of thanklessly humdrum public relations jobs throughout the dot-com era, eventually landing a lucrative gig spinning for a firm on

Wall Street.
When I got laid off one month before 9/11 because of a merger, I collected my unemployment benefits until they ran out, and eventually settled into a commercially successful but financially meager existence as a freelance entertainment writer covering movies, TV and stand-up comedy for the New York Post, the Daily News, The Hollywood Reporter and the L.A. Times.
I also published two books in the process, but hit a dry spell when neither of them earned back their advances and my agent found no takers for two other TV history projects he was trying to peddle because New York publishers weren’t buying them anymore. After that, I decided to switch over to writing about something other than pop culture and when my editor suggested doormen I jumped at the chance. That was a subject that had always fascinated me, but still I never thought about actually becoming one, until serendipitously, it just happened.

It must have been around eleven-thirty on the morning of Good Friday when I got the call on my cell phone. “Yeah … uh… Whetsell … this is Manny, the super over at the Wyckforde where you dropped off your résumé last week,” the raspy, Spanish-sounding voice on the other end barked. “I checked your references and I want you to be here the first thing Monday to train for the weekend four-to-midnight shift.”
Click.
Although I’d already worked briefly at a rental building near Sutton Place, the idea of being a summer relief doorman at the Wyckforde, an Art Deco Pre-war that was

just six doors down from where Jackie O used to live really pulled my chain, even if it
meant completely giving up my weekends. Over the years, I had passed by it a million times and even fantasized about one day becoming a bestselling author and living there. Like where I’d grown up on Central Park West and later Park Avenue, the Wyckforde gave the impression that its doormen were part of an elite fraternity in which only the top echelons of the profession could join. Hell, their uniforms had epaulets and
they even wore white gloves all year-round for Christ Sakes.
The fact that I’d actually been hired to work here seemed like the most important thing that had ever happened to me up until that point. I had arrived; I passed muster.
The first person I told was Sharon, my friend whose address I had listed as my own on the application. Next, I e-mailed my agent Peter, then called my family. Naturally, I assumed Mom, my sister and brother-in-law would get a kick out of my little ruse, which they did. My father’s reaction, however, was less than enthusiastic.
“Are you crazy,” he yelled. “What you’re doing is totally dishonest and if someone finds out you could be sued for libel.”
“No, I won’t because nobody’s ever going to find out,” I argued, rolling my eyes. Plus, it’s one of the great journalistic challenges of all time.”
Even as I tried to explain how I’d be getting paid $18 an hour, my ultra-
conservative, well-meaning dad was having none of it. And yet what could I do? I had already signed on for the job, and remembering what he had always told me about the importance of finishing what you started, I wasn’t about to back down.

That first week started out on a raw, rainy day in late April. Dressed in the same black suit I’d worn for my first book warming party, I showed up for work an hour early and went in through the service entrance since doormen are prohibited from coming in through the lobby. Sam, the daytime doorman where I really live who’s also the union shop steward, had lent me one of his ties and given me some pointers, so I felt prepared. After filling out a time card and inhaling my breakfast of burnt coffee and a stale doughnut from a street cart, I headed upstairs to train alongside Danny, a heavyset Italian guy about my age who’d already logged fifteen years on the job.
So began my fledgling doorman career, where for the next five days straight I worked from 8:00 to 4:00 p.m. as Danny dictated orders and slacked off while I absorbed bits of instruction along the way. Never give a real time for when something will be delivered or fixed. Address all residents by their last names even if they tell you
otherwise. And always tell them to have a nice day even if they don’t respond in kind.
The first couple of hours seemed to pass like days even though it was great people watching and I was busy learning the ropes—the whole enchilada of how to use the intercom, logging in the dry cleaning and packages, who the biggest assholes were, etc., etc.—and catering to the demands of the tenants who spilled out like human waves as my
mentor just stood there.
Paradoxically, of course, there’s was a life I knew like the back of my hand, though right now they all just seemed to blend together as if they had been handpicked by central casting. Old money Wasps and Jewish establishment, new money Wasps and Jews who had wanted to appear old money. Even a subset of non-assimilated outcasts of virtually every stripe (think Henry Kissinger meets David Lee Roth). Brahman versus Bling-bling, in other words, which is why in order to survive here you had to fight a daily collision course of Wall Street power brokers, sundry artist types, the elderly who could barely remember their own names and people still using sippy cups all in one fell swoop. Over time, this ritual became as predictable as a bad sitcom, tempting me, as if on cue, to either (A:) adjust the patent leather brim of my hat, or (B:) throw caution to the wind and yell, “Showtime!” No other event personified the job as perfectly while I was doing it, and it always began and ended in the same place: inside the tiny vestibule of the lobby’s main entrance during the morning rush.

My initial bright-eyed enthusiasm did not last. By ten o’clock on that first day, my medically diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder was already starting to rear its ugly head,
I really had to go to the bathroom and my feet and lower back felt like they were on fire, none of which I could immediately attend to because my “break” was still more than three hours away. I’m exaggerating slightly here because you are allowed to use the bathroom when nature calls, though pervasive kidney problems, especially among older doormen are one of the biggest occupational hazards. But the whole break concept is basically a crock of shit because while you’re on duty you are forbidden to sit, drink, eat or read with the exception of one half-hour union-mandated meal break. Supers get to sit any place, any time they goddamn well please—which they do at every opportunity—but it’s their job to run roughshod over the worker bees, even when there’s absolutely nothing to do, and that’s why, for doormen, these breaks and the end of a shift is like getting paroled.
Even when you’re on a break, I’d be remiss not to point out also that you can’t leave the premises except to run down to the corner deli for food. And still then, at countless buildings like the Wyckforde, the staff is banished downstairs to the locker room. How to describe? This windowless room, which looks and smells like an oversized
gas station lavatory, is where doormen and porters stash their civilian clothes and go to relax. Only there’s almost never anything to relax on unless you count a couple of badly beaten up folding chairs and a long-discarded sofa that has exposed metal rods everywhere because half the stuffing is missing. Plus, depending on the time of year, the temperature in this shit hole in the very bowels of the building runs from either scorching to sub-zero and nearly everyone smokes to alleviate stress. On my first day, in fact, one of the porters was sucking down a Marlboro red dog in between trying to reheat his lunch and thumbing through the sports section of the Post. Atop an ancient microwave, a barely
audible Spanish hip-hop tune strained from the paint-scuffed, antenna-less Magnavox radio above which dangled a badly faded First Aid poster. Next to the bathroom was another handwritten missive that read: IF YOU CAN’T HIT THE BOWL, CLEAN IT UP, even though any visible signs of sanitary provisions—Lysol, soap, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.—were missing.
But even as I stood there looking at my smudged reflection through the cracked mirror over in the corner—as repulsed and wrung out as I already was—I knew I had no one else to blame. Not my dad, not even my editor and agent who had suggested I get a job as a doorman in the first place. None of them were holding a gun to my head. This was what I had volunteered for and where I wanted to be—at least until something interesting happened that I could use in my book.
The morning rush was already over by the time a quarter to eleven rolled around, but the lobby was still buzzing with the last of the tenants leaving for work and maids, nannies, contractors and food deliveries coming in and out. One of them was for Danny who was sitting on one of the couches and asked to borrow a twenty.
Trying to ingratiate myself, I lent it to him and stepped outside to get some air. When I leaned up against the awning pole to stretch my back, that’s when Manny the super sidled up against me and from out of nowhere said, “If I wanted to see a fucking pole dancer I’d go to Scores.” Just then, the president of the co-op board, a balding eighty-something man with a cane shuffled by as my boss reprimanded me to get back inside, then shoved a piece of crumpled paper at me and told me to go down to the
management office on East Forty-Second Street for a background check, and, as he so tactfully put it, to “take a piss test.” But there was never a please or thank you, just a directive. I felt like a kid in high school who had just been caught smoking in the boy’s bathroom as I muttered, “Yes sir,” trying to regain my composure. So much for working for a guy like my real super Joe whose recommendation had gotten me here in the first place, I thought to myself. With that, I limped over to Lexington Avenue, chugged down four Aleve and hopped on the Number 6.

Ah, my background check and drug test. Both are forever etched in my mind for one reason: panic. The very term “background check” still sends chills up my spine to this day—especially given what I was doing and how up until now I had somehow managed to buck the system. The drug test scared the living crap out of me, too, even though I’d never even smoked pot unless you counted the one time back in college when I took a toke at a frat party. Also, judging from the way my own doorman Sam had described it, the screening process, even if you passed the drug part, was still rigorous and I felt like I was signing on to become a member of the CIA. Accordingly, there were a lot of steps and they made you jump through hoops so that no one fell through the cracks.
Also, the term “management office” when it comes to describing the place where you go to be tested is a misnomer. For starters, it was nothing at all like the glitzy corporate behemoth I was expecting. Instead, it was filled with rickety filing
cabinets, stained industrial carpeting, an uninspired layout and surly, overworked
employees. And the truth is that most Manhattan residential management offices—especially the ones that serve as the face for many of the city’s ritziest buildings like the Wyckforde—are meant to look this way. They are intended to be cheap, makeshift hovels that provide one purpose—pushing papers not only for standard clerical work, but for granting permissions, issuing directives, waiving obligations, enforcing probations and so on and so forth.
I felt like I’d walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles on the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.
After an olive-skinned receptionist named Carmen buzzed me in through the double glass doors, she escorted me down the hallway to meet the Wyckforde’s managing agent, Denise, a morbidly obese woman in her late-forties who was simultaneously talking on the phone and eating a Big Mac in her cramped, paper strewn office. Clad in powder blue stretch pants and a floral print polyester blouse, small beads of sweat trickled down her forehead and she spoke in a thick Brooklyn accent.
When she finally got off the phone, she took a swill of her soda and began combing through my application trying to find flaws. The first thing she spotted was my
address, which was really Sharon’s. Then she proceeded to inform me that she was also the managing agent in Sharon’s building. And not only was she Sharon’s managing agent—she knew her. Four years earlier, there had been a lawsuit involving Sharon and one of her neighbors who had tried to have Sharon evicted because he claimed that her dog Max barked when she wasn’t home. The case was eventually thrown out of court when it was discovered that the barking was coming from the dog downstairs and a friend
of mine later wrote an article about it in the City section of the Times.
But when Denise bought the incident up, I nearly had a heart attack. “You must be thinking of someone else,” I said, convinced I’d blown it big time.
Except that somehow I managed to win her over, and so she dropped the subject, took another sip of her drink and then began grilling me with questions about why I was looking for work as a doorman. So I took a deep breath and spoke very slowly, as I tried to remember the speech I’d rehearsed: I was an unemployed actor from Atlanta who’d done a couple of small walk-ons on Law and Order, I’d had a recurring part playing a hospital orderly on All My Children and now I was saving up to go to NYU film school in the fall.
Sill seeming to buy into my story, she asked to see my photo ID, but there was another problem. Not only did it not have my real address, it had been expired since the previous March, so I apologized, quickly handing Denise my social security card and explaining that I had just moved in with Sharon a week earlier.
With that, she shot me a skeptical look and told me to wait while she waddled down the hall to make a copy of my paperwork as I tried to figure out what to do next,
whether it was making up more lies to cover my lies or come clean altogether. But when Denise returned about ten minutes later, all she did was wish me luck and then she said she hoped to see one of my movies someday. Then she handed me an index card and directed me to a dingy lab down on West-Fourth and Broadway that resembled an off-track betting office to take the drug test. And when that was done about an hour later, I
hopped back on the Number 6 and headed back uptown to finish out my shift.
By the time I got back to the Wyckforde, it must have been close to two-fifteen. With slightly less than two hours to go before I got off duty, Manny tapped me on the
shoulder again and informed me that I had passed the drug test and background check. But he didn’t say, “Welcome Aboard,” or “I’m glad you’re going to be here with us,” as I had expected. Instead, he dismissively told me to go find a uniform—an impossible task given that I had no idea where the hell to look, not to mention the fact that the only ones in my size were either riddled with moth holes or covered in mildew. He then ordered me back upstairs.
Then it came, the perfect storm. As I was getting out of the service elevator, I heard a scream from over in the corner. It was coming from Vida, the woman who took care of Dominique Devereux, a 98-year-old tenant in 8C who with six cats who hadn’t left her apartment in nearly five years. Vida was a plump and gangly woman in her mid-30s who wore dreadlocks and had a nose ring. I was immediately weary of her.
About twenty minutes earlier, she had discovered that Dominique who suffered from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease wasn’t breathing, and so she ran downstairs to
summon help. Desperation gave way to an emergency plan as Danny instructed me to escort Vida back up to the apartment while he called an ambulance. Reluctantly, I complied even though the thought of seeing the corpse made me queasy. Meanwhile, Vida was sobbing uncontrollably and my hand shook as I put the passkey into the lock and turned the tumbler. Inside, the apartment smelled of ammonia and cat litter. In the living room was a wheelchair, two oxygen tanks and an unopened case of Ensure.
Aside from that, the apartment where Dominique, a former silent film actress had
lived since 1949, was a shrine to a life long ago lived—faded paint and peeling wallpaper with furniture and appliances from another era, old books and photos of dead relatives. There was a black rotary dial-up phone on top of the coffee table, as well as two signed framed photographs from Louis B. Mayer and Fiorello LaGuardia.
I slowly walked toward the bedroom and Vida followed. It was completely still except for two cats that were lying at opposite ends of the hospital bed. When I switched on the light, one of them lunged on top of the window sill and knocked over a canister of baby powder. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but when I bent down to pick it up I could see Vida running her fingers through Dominique’s white hair. Rigor mortis had already set in and Dominique’s drawn face was a grotesque mask, opaque purple with engorged blood, her tongue lolling around her toothless gums. She wore a stained, red flannel nightgown and clutched a teddy bear underneath her shriveled right arm. “She’s gone,” I said, pulling the top sheet over her head. Vida broke down again. Her bellow reverberated throughout the apartment and I held her hand until the paramedics arrived about a half-hour later.

Much of what happened next during my first week at the Wyckforde is lost in a haze of nerves and exhaustion. I received a softball-sized lump on my right shin helping a woman get out of a cab. I nearly pulled a muscle in my lower back carrying up another tenant’s air conditioner who didn’t tip me. And Manny read me the riot act because Eddie, the regular weekday four-to-midnight doorman was pissed off at Danny and had had purposely lost some important papers that a lawyer in 10D was expecting. Still, I got blamed because the person on duty always takes the rap even when it’s not his fault, and so I did what any good doorman in the know would do under such circumstances. I
pretended to play dumb and passed the buck. But these proved only to be the first tests of my endurance over the next year. I was now officially a New York doorman, indeed, only instead of getting better the job just got progressively worse.

Introduction from the Book

“Doormen are regulated to a ten by ten space and we’re like chameleons that blend in with the furniture. Half the time you don’t even realize we’re there. When we leave, we turn into different people, but we’re always dreading tomorrow because it sucks you into a false sense of security and our lives start to revolve around eight-thirty when we see that son of a bitch going out to walk his dog or that senile old woman who spits when she talks and always asks you the same question about her mail.”

Joe D, Upper East Side

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of narrative nonfiction entertainment. It’s based on actual events and real people, and makes no assertions, apologies or excuses otherwise. While some may find its lack of sentiment disturbing, that’s because this is the first book to explore the forbidden zones of a New York City-centric profession so deeply etched in the mythology and hierarchy of urban life as to be all but invisible.
The residential apartment doorman.
To the average person in Iowa or even in other major cities like L.A., Chicago and Boston where doormen exist, the functions they perform—hailing cabs, receiving packages and, of course, opening doors—may seem superfluous. But for New York’s wealthy and powerful (and those of us who live here on the fringes), their daily symbolic value is far greater. They serve quite simply as a fuck you to the rest of the world that they are rich enough to have a doorman.
The fact that classic New York doormen tend to live long lives like turtles and are paid to keep outsiders at arm’s length agrees with these well-heeled denizens just fine. It’s all part of the mystique of being able to afford to live in this protected, insular community, one most people know very little about. Occasionally, when we do hear about the marriages, divorces and sundry other celebrity exploits inside of one of Manhattan’s myth-shrouded tower residences, it’s often because their disgruntled, loose-lipped doorman tipped off the media. Invariably, however, these public figures always find a way to squash these rumors and retreat. Usually, it’s with a “no comment” issued through their publicist. Exhibit A: Last summer, when US magazine broke the story that Yankees third-baseman Alex Rodriquez had been spotted “sneaking out of Madonna’s spacious Central Park West apartment well past midnight,” it was none other than the Material Girl’s own doorman who spilled the beans—and her doorman-building-living PR flack Liz Rosenberg armed at the ready to clean up the impending shit storm.
I rest my case.
And yet despite the spin, for all its presence everywhere, our ghoulish obsession with the misbehaving famous never wanes, our ears perk up and we eat it up like candy—at least I do. So if you’re like me, even if you’re ashamed to admit it, swallow your pride. Walk, run—quick! Hide this under a copy of the National Geographic if you must and open wide. On the following pages, you’ll learn about the ludicrous, lewd, downright disgusting things that New York’s doormen have seen, done, heard and are never supposed to reveal. Pimps, prostitutes, groupies, gropers, wife swappers and transsexuals … movie stars, models, moguls and politicos behaving badly. At one time or another, doormen have crossed paths with practically all of them—and they drop the dime here—in many cases for the very first time.
There will be horror stories and those that are simply too unreal and surreal to believe. Nothing that appears between these two covers has ever been presented in its current format. While no one was directly harmed, defamed or maimed during the writing of this book, the mature, XXX-rated subject matter isn’t for the skittish or easily offended. If you’re a prude, or you lack a sense of humor, you should put it right back where you found it. This isn’t The Waltons and my name isn’t John Boy. Remember, you’ve been well-forewarned. For the rest of you, however, sit back, fasten your seatbelts and read on. From the lobby up and from the penthouse down, I’ll be stopping on every floor.
First, however, I want to tell you about the oppressive subculture that exists beneath the highly polished veneers of New York’s 28,000 doormen because it’s a world unto itself with a language, episode and incident all its own that the average person cannot imagine. In ways most of us grasp, but routinely ignore, doorman epitomize the vivid human flux that is the heart and soul of the world’s greatest city, all the while struggling to survive at a job that, at its best, is sheer monotony. Every eight-hour shift—usually from eight-to-four, four-to-midnight or midnight-to-eight is an exercise in endurance mired in chaos, most of it in bad weather. Also, doormen are economically powerless and the job is physically and psychologically exhausting.
In Manhattan, which has more doormen per capita than any other city, the average full-time apartment worker with over five-years experience can earn slightly upwards of $40,000 a year, excluding holiday tips that typically run anywhere between $2,000 to $10,000 depending on the location and pedigree of the building. Nonetheless, they barely scrape by and many work second jobs as doormen and porters in other buildings in which the highly paid supers who employ them live in spacious quarters, usually for nothing, and can afford such status symbol luxuries as SUVs, private schools and weekend country homes.
Over time, as a result, a lot of doormen develop stomach ulcers, chronic back problems, heart disease and acrophobia. Many more turn to drugs and alcohol, and become jaded, cynical or worse because they hear too much, see too much and are obliged to put up with too much. The even bigger irony here is that while doormen are routinely exploited, maligned and even abused by tyrannical tenants, totalitarian supers and mercurial managing agents alike, their average tenure in the same building is well over twenty years.
I’m saying all this because I want you to get a realistic sense of how being a doorman in one of these buildings has always been a thankless, dead end job. How it will likely always remain that way—and what it feels like to be yelled at, sneered at and literally ignored like an old piece of furniture in the exclusivity of a luxury apartment building lobby—working most weekends and holidays with virtually no possibility for advancement. Ever! Wall Street’s recently declining fortunes aside, this environment has generated a new class of self-entitled inhabitants with overinflated expectations and a rapidly diminishing set of social graces, thereby making these already-oppressive conditions even more stressful for today’s doormen.
However, I’d also like to tell you about the flipside of the job and how it affords an almost unprecedented level of access to some of the world’s most famous and influential people, the kind of “insider’s knowledge” that nearly every tabloid journalist in America would give their eye’s teeth for—and which for the right price a lot of doorman are willing to pass along (pun intended) at the drop of a hat. I’m pointing this out to demonstrate how, in spite of everything else, being a doorman can be profitable. In addition to A-Rod and Madonna, there are countless other examples and it can be an extremely lucrative sideline for the average union-scale apartment worker who barely scrapes by. And while it’s a strictly stealth practice, you can rest assured that it goes on practically someplace every day and has prompted more than one high-profile celebrity to sell their Park Avenue duplex just so they can conduct their affairs in relative seclusion.
As for me, I’ve always thought of myself as an authority about what goes on inside this community. For the better part of four decades, I’ve lived in doorman apartment buildings, chatting with them whenever about whatever and so I thought I knew everything there was to know about what makes them tick.
And then I began doing research for this book and quickly discovered that I hardly knew anything at all. Not only was I totally clueless about just how tough the job of a doorman really is, I was even more ignorant about just how much they knew about me and the other residents in my building, not to mention the methods they use to get the lowdown on everything from the kinds of food we eat, the movies we watch and who we really spend our time with to where the stains on our clothes came from before the drycleaner picked them up. Partly because of this, I even considered abandoning the project, despite the urging of a number of friends, many of whom are journalists like me and write about a lot of interesting subjects. At the time, I scoffed at the notion that doormen could actually be one of these subjects, much less an entire book, because I was simply too caught up in my own life to realize that my experiences really were unique. I suspect also that I probably resisted early on mostly out of fear and knowing that the shrewdest doormen tend to keep to themselves as mine did when I approached them about participating. Adding to my misgivings was the fact that the super in my own co-op who served as a technical consultant and even recommended me for a job as a doorman (I’ll get to that in a second) forbade the staff in my building to talk to me.
However, as I thought more and more about it and discussed it with others, I realized there was a broader audience outside those of us who live in doorman buildings. But because New York doormen hold such a pivotal place in American cultural lore, I quickly realized I couldn’t write an accurate book unless I approached the subject from both sides. I also didn’t want to succumb to the usual clichés, if for no other reason than I already had somewhat of a tainted point of view. Furthermore, I knew that I had to tell the story from a doorman’s perspective and that meant completely abandoning any preconceived notions I had. In the end, I decided that the only way to overcome this obstacle was by becoming a doorman.
My plan was to find a job, any job in any building, which would give me a rare, firsthand glimpse into their lives. Ultimately, it would be part of my story, but there was first the problem of how to present myself and trying to explain my nonexistent relevant job experience. To prepare, I sought the advice and counsel of my real super Joe, a former stand-up comedian and aspiring writer himself who agreed to let me use him as a reference. Still, there was the other issue of my résumé, which obviously had to be altered and couldn’t reflect that I’m really a writer.
Even so, having already published two books and freelanced for scores of magazines and newspapers, I still ran a serious risk of being recognized if someone had read something I’d written or Googled my name. So, I decided to become creative and besides listing on the job application that I was already a doorman in my own building, I put down that I had previously worked as a waiter, part-time dog walker and retail stockroom clerk. As for my address and background, I said I was living with a friend and that I was also an aspiring actor and filmmaker, which was sort of almost true. Back in high school, I did want to be an actor and twenty years earlier I would have been admitted to NYU’s screenwriting program had it not been for my mediocre grades and crappy SAT scores. Plus, as I saw it, my faked résumé and new identity was the only way I could pull this off. I was also, I reasoned, by no means the first writer who had ever gone undercover—and I was convinced that no one would ever be the wiser if I did it right. Fearing legal repercussions, however, I didn’t change my social security number and I listed my real cell phone as my contact.
Here’s how it all went down. Dressed in a respectable, not-too-prosperous outfit of slightly worn kakis, an oxford shirt and brown Top-Siders, I began making the rounds on a sunny afternoon in mid-April. Since Joe had already warned me to avoid the higher-end buildings on Fifth Avenue, Park and Central Park West, I initially limited my search to within my own neighborhood and systematically worked my way up to East Eighty Third Street between Second and Third Avenue. I ended up at a building that was made famous back in the ’70s because it was the “deluxe apartment in the sky” where The Jeffersons took place. All told, I dropped off about twenty résumés in five hours and not surprisingly practically every one of them turned me down cold—their reasons being either “we’re not hiring yet,” “we just found someone,” “the super’s not in right now,” or some variation of all three.
It helped, however, that I’m white even though no super will ever admit this, and that April is the time of year when a lot of buildings are looking to hire vacation relief help for the summer. And so obviously my skin color and the timing of my search were in my favor, because by the end of the day, I had two offers and I ended up working at both buildings.
From the outset, I knew the job would take a considerable amount of time and energy, but still I vowed to approach it with an open mind. Soon, however, it became apparent that it was going to be a lot less challenging and more physically demanding and time consuming than I would have liked. And then there were the real moments of irony and wonder: occasionally one of the tenants would do something strange or there’d be an altercation, and I’d listen intently, getting a charge of the ideas they had just given me without the slightest inkling of what I was doing. Mostly, though, nothing ever happened and I ended up just staring at the ceiling and looking at my watch. And not withstanding those rare moments—like when one of the female residents suddenly appeared before me half naked or there was a middle-aged couple arguing—after I while I became claustrophobic. The opposite was also true, however, and eventually what started out merely as background research turned into something of a joy ride. Also, most of the other tenants liked me and at nearly a hundred bucks a throw, plus thirty dollars in tips on a good day, the extra pocket money wasn’t half bad either.
Most curious of all was, as much as I hated the day-in-day-out routine of being a doorman, in many ways my position gave me a sense of power that was intoxicating. Over time, the front door and the lobby became my domain where, in essence, I was the master. Like the policeman walking his beat, I became privy to all sorts of things that the average person never sees during which personal problems of life, love and otherwise surfaced during a split second exchange. As a result, my senses are now keener, I am now able to interpret human behavior others can’t and I used to miss, and I can act accordingly.
Of course, there was always the one glaring difference between me and the other doormen that no one else but me knew—that I was really writing a book and when I went home at night it was to a place very much like where I worked in which I spent an hour or so typing up the day’s events on my computer. To a certain extent, what I was doing bothered me, especially in the case of the tenants I really liked. But as I convinced myself very early on, it was all intended as a harmless experiment—albeit with a means to an end—and the year I spent on the other side of the door is an experience I won’t soon forget.
When the idea for this book first began taking shape and long before I joined their ranks, I thought it would be interesting to simply write about the lives and experiences of some of the doormen like the many I’ve known over the years. I thought I would seek them out, as well as those who have worked the longest at many of the city’s A-plus buildings, ply them with a few drinks, listen to their stories and tell them to you verbatim without revealing their true identities. But after much consideration, this approach seemed boring. It was almost as if I was trying to take the easy way out and soon I began to wonder: Why did certain doormen work in the same building for so long and was it about more than just the job security? How did they wind up there in the first place and how did they gain the trust of the people who lived there. And how much were they willing to reveal to complete stranger—and what if their stories could be put into words as if they had happened under the same roof? That was the premise that prompted the fictional setting of the Wyckforde where the book takes place.
John Lennon who lived (and died) at the most famous New York doorman apartment building of all, the Dakota, once said that reality leaves a lot to the imagination. But what if the lines between reality and imagination get crossed as they invariably do? How do you separate them, should you even try and at what cost?
New York Doorman Confidential then is my tale of a journey into this crossed reality and a personal paean to this rarified, incestuous world I have witnessed from both sides. It’s not a memoir in the traditional sense, though certainly it combines elements of my own life with what I saw on the job and the things that other doormen for whom this is their livelihood have said. Especially, I want to bring home a sense of the New York luxury apartment building environment and the highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants who know far more about their charges than residents know about them. At once frantically hailed and frequently abused, it’s a grueling and lackluster life a doorman leads that is constantly repeated and never twice the same. And for the tenants who tend to look through them, the ultimate psychological price can be far greater than the exorbitant maintenance fees. For them, hopefully this will be a lesson in understanding the next time their Chinese takeout doesn’t arrive on time and they take it out on the doorman.
Although many of the themes pertain specifically to New York, they are variants of a universal truth about our collective fears, foibles and vulnerabilities that can be found practically anywhere. That’s why regardless of whether you’ve lived in a doorman building all your life or you’ve never set foot inside, you’ll be able to relate to its common threads of love, loathing, exhilaration, anger and amenity. My preference is not to sugarcoat things and the end result will be absolutely shocking, scary—and even a little bit sordid.
To some what’s on these pages will come as no surprise at all. To others, particularly the doormen who’ve been doing this for most of their adult lives, the book’s politically incorrect candor will be a fork in the eye to a profession that is kept as intentionally obscured as it is visible. Regardless, they’ll both agree with me and I’ll leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. And for that reason, I’m determined to tell it as I’ve seen it and as others have told it to me—with all of the real names, locations, measurements, weights, heights, dimensions and any other quantifiable or qualifiable data changed, torn, obfuscated and/or mutilated to protect those who feel they may need protection—hence the title. Although numerous New York City locations and institutions are mentioned, all are used strictly for background. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Consider this Exhibit B. And C, and D …