Don't Get Too Comfortable (10 page)

It is sunbaked and sad, a redundancy in my photophobic universe. Two blocks farther on I come upon the near future of this dilapidation: the low-lying luxury of Ocean Drive. The sidewalk is crowded with tables and umbrellas as vacationers tuck into $15 plates of eggs in one hundred percent humidity. In front of the Gianni Versace mansion a man takes a picture of a woman. While he is focusing, she jokingly puts her index finger to her forehead and shoots.
Kapow.
“Hold that!” he instructs her, laughing.

FROM MY NOTES,
written in the margins of the guest list: “Day 2: I have had five brief interactions, put up two umbrellas, ordered two drinks (which I did not deliver). A bright, moss green salamander on the trunk of a palm tree. I point it out to some of the kids. I'm going to help with towels today, I think. Might get to do some food and beverage stuff, too. Hope so.”

I have written the above paragraph, or something like it, countless times before; some version of this minutely dissected narrative of self-consciousness whenever I begin a job. Even this three-day imposture—where they cannot fire me because they never really hired me—has me nervously listing my accrual of small tasks. I am desperate to look busy and efficient, and trying to establish a beachhead of comfort.

The heat and the back and forth of a small plane pulling its banner up and down the beach, C
ENTRO
E
SPANOL 100
G
O
G
O
G
IRLS
D
ESNUDAS,
are hypnotic. A confrontation at the beach gate of the hotel directly next door jolts me from my torpor. An older couple is being ejected. He has gray-blond hair in tight curls and looks not unlike Lamb Chop, the ventriloquist's puppet. A medallion glints on his bronzed chest. She is outfitted in the height of Saint-Tropez fashion, circa 1978—white bikini, a gold chain around her waist, a bright gold clip in her tousled blond hair, gold high-heeled cork wedgies. They are both cancerously tan and surprisingly buff, given that neither of them has seen seventy in a number of years. They could be escapees from a Jews of the Diaspora exhibit crafted out of beef jerky.

“You're a nasty motherfucker, you know that?” the man says, presumably to next door's Pool Ambassador. He continues to hurl invective until they totter off. I am so bored I think wistfully,
I wish someone was ripping
me
a new asshole.

At 1:30, an enormous black cloud the size of the entire neighborhood passes overhead, and about twenty-seven drops fall from the sky. I pray that it will storm and cool things down. Actually, my prayers go deeper and more apocalyptic than that. I pray that refrigerator-sized hailstones will rain down and obliterate all of us. Too bad for me, by 1:42 the cloud has blown over.

THERE WILL BE
a sunset wedding on Sunday evening on the roof (no helipad). A number of our guys are there setting up, leaving the pool serviced by a skeleton crew. An elderly Chinese woman is sitting in the sun, her hands folded over the railing of her steadily heating metal walker. She looks stoic but dehydrated so I walk over and take her order. This
infuriates
Sammy, who feels that if we are short-staffed it is due to bad management. I should let the guests sit and wait to prove this point. I respond that, bad management or not, it's hardly the guests' fault. This pisses him off even more.

“Do you even
have
any food-and-beverage service experience?” he asks me angrily.

Sammy's day is a welter of dark rumination. Old injustices and ancient slights bubble up unbidden. Apropos of nothing, he tells me how in 1974 his grandfather chose not to help his son-in-law, Sammy's father, buy five New York taxi medallions at $5,000 per. Now they go for a quarter of a million bucks each.
A quarter of a million!
I return from lunch that day to find that Sammy has tried to tell Veronica, a preternaturally sweet towel girl who smiles all day long, how to do her job and she in turn has told him to go fuck himself. Later that afternoon, with the wedding now under way, he elbows a hotel guest to point out that the groom is “dressed like shit. He looks like a security guard.”

Sammy works three jobs just to make his rent: here at the hotel from 10:00 to 6:00, at a restaurant from 7:00 to midnight, and the graveyard shift at a bar a few nights a week. At thirty-five, he is a good few years older than the rest of the regular pool staff. He has every right to be angry. But after a few hours with him it becomes clear that Sammy is as much the victim of cruel circumstance as he is of his own unerring capacity to misread situations and alienate others. During our orientation, we are plainly instructed to not overstep our duties. If, for example, we are asked for a restaurant recommendation, we are not, repeat not, to make one ourselves but to instead alert one of the concierges. Less than a second after this sentence has been spoken—the air around us still holding the gunpowder traces of the words—Sammy volunteers as how he'd “just send guests to Lincoln Road.”

It's not like I can blame him. Lincoln Road does turn out to have a multitude of good restaurants. Where's the harm, really, in his suggesting one? I remember what it was like to feel powerless and invisible in a job I hated. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth all day. My mouth tasted as sour and acidic as if I'd crunched on a bottle of aspirin without water. Vivienne smiles patiently and suggests once more what she has just told us, and
again
Sammy says softly, not in defiance so much as in a kind of consoling lullaby to himself, “I'll send them to Lincoln Road.” In honor of my old socialist summer-camp roots, I try never to side with management, but I have to concede that Sammy is incredibly exasperating to deal with. When I ask the general manager if a training session with the hotel's top brass is customary or if it was done for me as a writer, he responds with a pointed, “It wasn't for
your
benefit.” Sammy has already worked room service at the hotel but got into many fights with his co-workers and was laid off. Pool Ambassador is his last chance.

He is one hundred percent right about one thing, though. Luiz really is a jerk. He dicks around making a frozen mojito, wasting time while saying twice during the process, “Damn, there's no one better than me.” Even without extensive restaurant experience, and even though the guests don't seem to mind that the food takes as long as it does, all I want to do is grab Luiz by the front of his T-shirt and tell him to get on the fucking ball. It has been years since I spent my workday with other people. I had forgotten how quickly and deeply allegiances are formed, scapegoats are identified, and internecine backbiting becomes the governing drama of one's life. It is narcotically easy to fall back into those patterns. If I were to stay here even one day longer, I know I would be having whispered powwows in the housekeeping closet.

But I am not staying here one day longer. Too bad, just when it's getting nice out. South Beach has become chilly and overcast. I could work in weather like this. Only one lone couple sticks it out by the pool, huddled together on a chaise. They are possibly even doing it under the wrappings of several towels. Eventually, they give up and decamp to their room.

We pass the last two hours of our shift shivering by the bar. “There are days like this when there's no one here all day and still you have to stay 'til six,” says towel girl Mavis. Pregnant and in her late teens, her mouth a glinting fretwork of braces. With little to do, she has spent the afternoon steadily nibbling her way through the cocktail garnishes. Her teeth are furred with pineapple fibers.

I finally tell my co-workers that this is my last day, that I only came down here to write about the experience. They don't much seem to care one way or the other. Their lack of reaction makes me wonder what exactly I came here to expose. There are more interesting jobs in the world, but heaven knows there are worse things than being bored in beautiful surroundings while servicing a surprisingly low-maintenance bunch of guests. One couple from Minnesota was downright delightful and even invited me out for supper. Over the course of three days, I don't witness a single moment's unpleasantness. No one forgets to say thank you or please, there is no “I'll have your job!” outrage in response to some imagined slight (and remember, I am the eyes and ears of the pool). After all, they're in a good mood—on holiday in a lovely hotel. It's not like I'm trying to mop under their feet in the OTB while they're on a losing streak. Then again, I have stood in beautiful restaurants in the greatest city in the richest country in the world and seen an obviously well-fed clientele behave as if it was being denied its last chance on earth for a meal. I have witnessed (only once and never again) the life-and-death feeding frenzy that is the Barneys warehouse sale. Maybe people are ruder at some of the more famous South Beach hotels, where the bars are crowded four deep and the guests have to yell to be heard while trying to look casual sitting on witty, uncomfortable poured-resin stools in the shape of blenders. If you have to constantly prove that you're cool enough to stay at a place, it increases the chances for toxic interactions. Nothing like being shown your low station in the pecking order to make you want to peck someone even lower. The fact that I am by no means the least attractive staff member here speaks volumes about the comparative egalitarianism of the Hiawatha.

I change for the last time, putting my uniform into the housekeeping bin for dry-cleaning (disgruntled employee habits die hard; I pocket the cute grosgrain belt). I head down the block to the drugstore to buy a razor and a post-work snack. Just ahead of me in the store is a young man: heavyset, acne, long black metal-rocker hair, oversized skate-punk T-shirt, shorts. He shuffles along, his flip-flops never breaking contact with the linoleum. I am caught in his patchouli vapor trail. He has a bag of Doritos in one hand, and in the other a stuffed alligator head. He carries it like a baseball mitt, with his fingers interlaced through the teeth of the open jaws. Approaching the register, he holds up the dusty reptile and asks, “How much is this?”

God knows you can buy some stupid, touristy shit along this commercial strip: shell-shaped ashtrays, leaping dolphins in porcelain and Plexiglas, towels printed with near-naked women whose round asses seem to be eating their own thongs, idiotic T-shirts printed with two arrows, one pointing up to your face that says “The Man” and another pointing down to your crotch that says “The Myth.” And even though this fellow clearly found his treasure on the shelves of this Walgreens, I cannot imagine it's actually part of the store's inventory. More likely someone left it there. I'll go even further and posit that the kind of guy who would part with his hard-earned money for a poorly stuffed alligator head with cloudy amber glass eyes and cracking skin peeling up in places is also precisely the kind of guy who might absentmindedly leave it on the shelves of the place he went to buy his munchies.

The cashier attempts to find a bar code anywhere on the object, turning it this way and that in the red beam of his scanner. Eventually giving up, he raises it above his head and calls out over his shoulder into the refrigerated air of the store, “Price check on the alligator head.” There is no surprise or amusement in his voice. It has been a long day.

MORNING IN AMERICA

I
t's a lucky thing the metal content of glitter glue does not set security wands to beeping. Otherwise the line stretching halfway down Forty-eighth Street would move even more slowly. At least two hundred of us are waiting at six o'clock on a Monday morning to get past the two men checking purses, knapsacks, and the many homemade posters adorned with balloon script, Day-Glo marker, and the careful application of downloaded photographs of Matt Lauer. Once through security, we are corralled behind barricades outside the studio windows of the
Today
show.

Before Ground Zero achieved that quantum state of simultaneously being both part of the city and a talismanic outpost of the rest of the country, the blocked-off street outside the
Today
show was a little piece of New York that all America could love, a destination for throngs who willingly line up to spend their early morning replicating an experience they have every day—watching television in their own homes—albeit in considerably less comfort.

It is springtime and the fake saplings on the
Today
show plaza are just coming into fabric blossom. The prime viewing spots are at the north end. There one can see into the studio itself. It is not the clearest view, it should be noted. There is a refractive amber Mylar-like sheeting on the windows. Still, it is a view. And it enables a mass-communications trifecta: one can see the show for real, watch it in real time on the monitor ten feet away, and—in a perfect world—be on a cell phone to friends and family back home to see if they can see you watching television on TV. But at not yet 7:00 a.m., the only people in the studio are the show's non-famous technicians. The monitors are off, showing an unchanging test pattern of the program's trademark rainbow logo, and the oddly insulting text, “Today Show / Generic Tease / Katie Couric.” On the news zipper above the studio windows the words “Alan Greenspan” and “Enlarged Prostate” scudder by cheerfully in bright red pixels.

I take my place in what seems like
Today
Siberia, somewhere in the south middle. I probably won't get on television but it's still a very good location, placed as it is directly in line with the door where any of the show's hosts will come out.

And now we wait. A tall woman says into a cell phone, “All I want is a date. A date that when he stands up I can see his eyes.” Madonna's “Vogue” plays over the sound system, and more than one of the dozen late-adolescent boys in this largely female crowd start dancing and posing.

The telltale three notes of the NBC melody play. The show is about to begin and the crowd goes wild. A woman from Florham Park, New Jersey, holds up her poster with its (hopefully) inadvertently filthy math equation:

They canceled their trip to Europe because of terrorism fears, so they are spending spring break in New York instead. I ask her which of the hosts she'd most like to meet. It is Al Roker, without question. Part of Roker's job by definition puts him into the most contact with the crowd. Factor into that that he was until recently all-too-humanly obese, offering the greatest surface contact possibilities just in pure metric terms, and I can sort of see why he is the live audience's hands-down favorite. Just then, Roker emerges like the godhead, walking up and down, vibing the crowd, who react like iron filings under a magnet. “Hiya!” he yells. People laugh as if he's made a joke.

“He's just so approachable,” New Jersey Mom says.

Except that, inasmuch as we are behind police barriers and would be hauled off if we so much as attempted to breach them, Roker is exactly as approachable as Matt and Katie, which is not at all. Roker Time is good time, make no mistake, but it is brief time. He doesn't come out all that much, and the stretches in between his glorious manifestations are spent chatting and hanging out. It's a convivial party atmosphere as the loudspeakers announce upcoming stories about murdered Laci Peterson, the North Korea nuclear threat, and a CDC warning about SARS in Canada.

One group of girls tells me that, after this, they will be lining up for tickets to see
Montel,
and then
Conan O'Brien.
With any luck, they will not have to see anything of the city at all, their only glimpse of the skyline will be a plaster replica behind a desk.

Obviously not everyone is unmindful of where we are. A woman from Jessup, Iowa, two and a half hours by car from Des Moines, is visiting the show on her last morning of a five-day stay. She had come to New York to see her twenty-year-old son perform in a choir at Lincoln Center. She also saw
Thoroughly Modern Millie
and
Cabaret
(“A study in contrasts,” she says). I ask if being here is the coolest part of her trip and she looks at me like I'm an idiot and says, slowly, enunciating, in case I had missed it the first time, “No, my son
singing at Lincoln Center
was the coolest part of my trip.”

A foursome of young white guys from the Los Angeles area are standing around, blowing into cold hands, with no apparent or professed interest in the proceedings. Slim Shadys all of them: hooded sweatshirts, baseball caps, low-slung jeans, and foreheads spangled with constellations of acne. They drove all night from Ohio where one of their number is at college. They've just arrived and will not be staying the night. “I want to know where the hookers are,” says one. “I want to see Yankee Stadium,” says another. A basketful of excited puppies, they are. Like a traffic cop, or Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, I point my left hand westward (“Hookers . . .”) and my right hand straight uptown (“. . . and Yankee Stadium”). I resist the temptation to point out to them that we are standing not one hundred yards away from where Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, playing sailors on leave in
On the Town,
faced a similar dilemma of how much ground to cover in a mere twenty-four hours.
Got to see the whole town / From Yonkers on down to the bay / In just one day!

Although the studio is part of the frozen-in-amber deco perfection of Rockefeller Center, the
Today
show plaza is a completely generic space, evoking nothing. It's like one of those waterfront developments in every major North American city, where old warehouses are renovated and the big-shoulders brawn of their bygone days of industry is aped with Olde Worlde calliope wagons selling flavored popcorn, gourmet fudge, and stained-glass-window charms. We could be anywhere, except arguably the very city we are actually in.

Which is odd, because the goings on inside the studio itself can feel decidedly Gotham at times. Standing outside, we can hear the show, but not all that well as it turns out, and a lot of the throwaway stuff is lost in the buzz of the crowd. It might just be the segment I watch from home one morning, an appearance by a man named Steven Cojocaru, the fantastically flamboyant
Today
show style guy who looks like the love child of seventies rock god Steven Tyler and seventies Robert Altman goddess Shelley Duvall. When first we see him, they are freshly back from a commercial. The audio of American Idol Kelly Clarkson singing her treacly power ballad “A Moment Like This” plays. Cojocaru and Roker are cracking each other up on the sofa by lip-synching with outsize gestures; big, derisive, queeny fun. Cojocaru then launches into an anecdote about his flight east from LA where two fellow passengers were furtively going at it under some blankets, admitting no small personal bitterness over not being a member of the Mile High Club himself, tossing off the term like it was an organization as wholesome and widely known as 4-H.

Cojocaru has brought in a selection of accessories spawned by an upcoming movie, set in the Rock Hudson–Doris Day heyday. Proffering a feathered Audrey Hepburn hat, he tells news anchor Ann Curry to try it on. It's a large, raggedly elegant black zinnia of a thing. She dons it, and cracks up, saying, “I look like Angela Davis!” She does. More like an Angela Davis Muppet, actually. The cast and crew laughs a lot in the background. It's all witty and bitchy and knowing. We are catching them in a rare moment where they just don't care whether there is a general conversance out there with black sixties revolutionaries.

It's not a huge surprise that extremely highly paid New York media professionals might occasionally lapse into talking amongst themselves like extremely highly paid New York media professionals, but what makes it so funny is precisely the different frequency on which it seems to be playing, as inaudible as a dog whistle. It must be an eye-glazing comedown when Roker has to leave this blue-state cocktail party and go back outside through the magic portal to this little patch of America, to oversee a lawn-care demo.

THE DAYS OF
the week I go to the show begin running together. On Friday I bump into Randy, a New York friend who is posing as an American. An American so very excited about the theatrical release that very day of MTV's spring break reality movie, that he is compelled to don shorts and a T-shirt and hold up a poster for said film. He is making $200. It seems like a waste of promotional-budget dollars, not simply because whatever might stick in the minds of viewers at home would at best be subliminal in the extreme but also because apparently the camera people tend to shy away from visibly commercially produced posters in favor of the personal variety. We chat and when the camera passes by, he hoists his foam-core sign and yells, with frat-boy zest, “Rock 'n' roll!”

At the beginning of the week, the impulse to be here had seemed like a failure of cognition; an inability to remember that just as we don't register the faces of the people sitting behind the Qualcomm advertisement—or behind Jack Nicholson, for that matter—at televised sporting events, why then should anyone in the crowd expect themselves to be noticed? But what initially looks to be a desire to be seen by millions turns out to be a wish to be seen by very few. A sign that reads
HELLO MEDICINE HAT CANADA!
is by definition aimed at a very narrow constituency. The contact sought with
HI GRANDMA AND PAPA. I MISS YOU. LOVE PRINCESS GABBY
is intimate. Watching
Today,
even in public, is a very personal pursuit. The members of the crowd are not doing this for what could be characterized as the typical reality-television kind of attention: that disinhibited, oversexualized, bereft-of-pride behavior that makes people—whose parents are presumably still alive—allow themselves to be filmed having catfights while wearing thongs, or tucking into heaping plates of beef rectums (while wearing thongs). The simple act of standing, clothed, in the street with naught but a homemade sign seems almost Louisa May Alcott–sweet by comparison.

Almost. It is still television. A woman apparently bared her breasts one morning as the camera swept past her. And Roker, in one of the most juvenile and hilarious segments ever filmed anywhere, was the unwitting mark in a guerrilla prank staged by the Upright Citizens Brigade, the improvisational comedy troupe of cult renown. Founding member Matt Walsh, playing an Everyman named Alan, held up a sign that read
MARRY ME KAREN.
Roker picked him out of the crowd on what looked to be a perfect day in summer.

“I came to New York to raise awareness for Little Donny Disease, Magnimus-obliviophallocytus [a running gag in the Upright Citizens Brigade canon: a pseudo disorder essentially meaning being a kid with a huge schlong], and to propose marriage to a very beautiful woman.”

The producers have gotten “Karen” (in reality Walsh's sister) on the line and Roker serves as interlocutor to the proposal, looking into the camera and asking her questions about herself and Alan. Walsh, the overanxious prospective groom, keeps interjecting.

“Settle down, or we're not going to do this,” Roker warns, not idly.

The proposal is made and Karen consents. Alan goes ape-shit with happiness, screaming “I love you Karen!” over and over. Fellow Upright Citizen Matt Besser has been standing in the background until this moment. He is here as Little Donny himself, he of the eponymous disorder. Sharing in Alan's happiness, he manages to move to the front of the crowd and begins to leap for joy. Roker has a look of mildest distaste on his face, and seems a little nonplussed by their excitement, but only a little. He understands the power the medium can have over people. When he finally registers the enormous pink prosthetic wang flopping out of the bottom of Little Donny's shorts, he realizes he's been had. Grace under pressure, he moves away from them, getting the penis out of camera range, saying only, “Okey-doke let's go . . . Oh my, no more coffee for that guy.”

Little Donny aside, no one here seems to be confusing this with a means to their Big Break. During a brief foray outside, Katie Couric says, “Look at all these cute girls,” just before they cut to commercial. Their mother beams, but doesn't hand over a mess of head shots. Her pleasure is as much about their
Today
stint being satisfyingly concluded. “That was perfect timing. Let's go get something to eat,” she says, and they are out of there. It's 9:00 and Roker and Company have fulfilled their function as the city's highest-paid babysitters.
Today
is just about the only place in New York City to take kids before 9:00 a.m., when the Pokémon store opens next door.