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 …