I Live In A Doorman Building In NYC. I Thought It Would Be Easy.
It wasn’t
I decided to move out of the fifth-floor walk-up I shared with two college friends when the cockroaches no longer scattered in my presence. I found a studio in a building on the Upper West Side that my mother called fancy schmancy. It had nine doormen, six handymen, five porters, a live-in resident manager and his assistant as well as a roof-deck overlooking Central Park. Was I worthy?
Truth be told, it wasn’t just the cockroaches that prompted my move, though my girlfriend had taken to tiptoeing across the floor as if it were a minefield. (I found her aversion to this basic survival technique of homo apartmentus as strange as she found my reaction to her aversion.) An equally important reason was that after graduating from NYU with an economics degree, I’d accepted a job at an investment bank which shall remain nameless except to say a journalist once described it as a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.
Though my move did solve my cockroach problem, I now faced a new predicament. Never having lived in a luxury building, I was clueless as to how to deal with the doormen. I tried making small talk, but they barely responded to my feeble efforts. They also wielded a powerful instrument of control: a revolving door which they swiveled for residents…
