Central Park in Fall.
The Only Living Boy in New York
I've been in this hotel for one week.
So this is New York.
I've grown accustomed to the yellow watermarks on the ceiling, the brown liquid dripping from the faucet in the bathroom, and the carpet runners stapled artistically to the walls. I bought a cheap sleeping bag to throw on top of my mattress, though I don't know if two layers of cotton are enough to protect me from the looming brown splotches spattered all over it. I figure it's better than sleeping on the floor and getting trampled to death by cockroaches. Even still, I sleep with the light on to at least keep them at bay under the bed.
The TV works. It turns on, anyway. When you stand two feet away and to the left, with one antenna between your thumb and forefinger and a pop can balanced on your head, Oprah almost looks like Genghis Khan.
I don't have much time to watch TV anyway.
I can see the Times entrance from my window. That's where I work. If the average New Yorker took time to look up from his cup of coffee, the he could see my window office from the street.
The window office I supply with a fresh tray of printer paper every morning.
The appropriate job title would be Office Dust Mite. They sweep me around from room to room, picking up and dispersing all their little jobs that would cost them a good two minutes to stand up and do themselves. It's not bad pay, but I think I deserve at least dental after being called "Tiger" and "Buddy" for ten hours a day. At those moments, I pretend I don't have a degree in English with a focus on 18th century Criticism and imagine I just handed Dad the wrench to tighten the gears on my new two-wheeler.
The regulars come in about an hour after I do. They prop their slick black shoes up on their desks and lean back in their swivel chairs while they make phone calls for about an hour and a half. Next they congregate over by the water cooler for ten minutes to sling nicknames at each other and shake their heads at the increasing amount of work they should be doing. I watch them enviously as I run through a new box of Ticonderogas at the pencil sharpener.
There's Jake-O, the sports guy. His favorite thing to do is toss reports at me and tell me to “hussle those on over to the boss, okay, Slugger?” He's the chief Sports Editor and resident Annoying Yankees Expert. He’s a master of journalism. He can turn a lumbering 27-year-old high school dropout with a drool stain on his chin into a national hero as long as the guy bats over .300 I catch the reports in my gut and chirp something back that is painfully reminiscent of being 12 years old. Something like a voice-cracking, “sure thing, coach!”
Veronica, “Ronnie,” writes the TV reviews. She's a black woman with wild hair and big teeth, but very well-dressed, I must say. She holds her hand in front of her mouth when she talks because a large amount of spit is produced when her tongue tries to interact with those giant white chompers. I’ve often seen her wipe a saliva-coated hand on her carefully-pressed tan suit jackets after speaking. I've also learned to decipher a few hand-in-front-of-mouth phrases like, "grab me a coffee" or "bring this down to the mail boy" or "did you see Laguna Beach yesterday?" The ones I have problems with are "go fetch me a stapler" and "go fetch me some paper." I usually just bring both and hope she's turned around in her swivel chair talking on the phone - too busy with the hair twirling between her fingers to wonder why staplers show up on her desk so often or why she never seems to run out of paper when she's stapling memos.
Just there, in the lounge, are Lenny, Benny, and Jenny. They write the lifestyle columns that come out Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Lenny writes the food column, Benny writes the grammar column, and Jenny writes the gardening column. Cute, huh? The girl is actually named Heather, but for the interest of the memory-challenged public and the need to be grossly adorable, Heather resigned her title and adopted "Jenny." I like Heather. She has a jungle of potted plants in her office and fetches her own staplers. She’s one of those old-fashioned types - and though I don’t support her tirade against the crowding influence of technology or the inherent evil of palm pilots, I like dropping things off at her office just for a good whiff of common courtesy and lilacs.
Lenny and Benny are essentially the same, but both eerily obsessive about two very different things. Cooking and Grammar.
I am convinced that Lenny actually consumes envy for sustenance. He waltzes into the lounge with Rubbermaid lunches of Beef Masala and Three-Pepper Couscous, infusing the air with spices and jealousy by the touch of the “Add 1 Minute” button on the microwave. You can tell Lenny is on his lunch break by the soft chorus of smacking lips and long nasal inhalations that ripples through the entire 4th floor. Lenny thrives on this, and carries his food around with him, running his own errands between the hours of 12 and 1.
Benny is painfully articulate. He wanders the hallways dropping off lines of pure prose and grammatical acuity as if he were throwing fistfuls of season tickets to cab drivers. No one actually understands what he’s saying, but it’s beautiful to eavesdrop on one of his dictations on the evolution of the word “always” in American English. Office doors crack open and necks crane forth to catch tiny pieces of his wonderful wisdom and word choice whenever he stops to chat. He’s always telling me to “procure a coffee” or to “dispose of my lunch receptacle” and “solicit an appointment with Jenny directly.” I wander off with stars in my eyes thinking to myself, “I wonder what ‘solicit’ means.”
They all finish up for the day at around five-thirty. For the last hour or so I am loaded with little errands and bounce around the floor like a pinball. Once all the regulars are gone, “that kid” is supposed to stay around and empty the recycling and re-supply paper.
I’m still looking for an apartment nearby. I can’t build a writer’s studio in a one-bedroom hotel room, and I think the people downstairs are tired of me flushing the toilet. It’s getting dark and my stomach is reminding me that curbside hot dogs are not a food group.
I start to draw the curtains, by now I don’t even notice that one is striped and the other is paisley. I look out into the city and see that same figure in the building across the street. I don’t know why, but I think he’s the one person in New York who feels just like me.
A yellow light bulb is hanging from the center of his room. Brown cracks creep like rotten vines across the shoddy plaster walls. A thread of cigarette smoke snakes its way up to the ceiling and an old Billie Holiday record crackles in the corner. One very old man sits in a faded green armchair with a black receiver tucked into his lap while the dial tone hums to no one.
So this is New York.