"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.