Thoughts Without Cigarettes (40 page)

Our department went by the name Central Control. My official title: traffic control assistant. We had six employees in our section, each designated a particular function pertaining to the wonderfully literary pursuit of placing print and illuminated advertising copy into thousands upon thousands of locations nationwide. The media we dealt with included billboards; one-, two-, and three-sheet posters; bus and train car-cards; airport and terminal backlit dioramas (Grand Central station, with its spectacular and numerous dioramic displays and high volume and demographics, being the Taj Mahal of that business); as well as assorted other media, from subway clocks to ads alongside bus shelters, which, in fact, TDI pioneered. (I'm not quite sure what Mr. Belsky actually did, but during my first week there, I spent an afternoon by his side, taking various measurements of a shelter just around the corner from the agency: I think he, a former big shot with the MTA, had a lot of pull, for within a year or so, new bus shelters were being put up around the city, with redesigned structures that allowed for the inclusion of a glass-enclosed frame at the side for the insertion of three-sheet ads, mostly for Broadway shows or cigarettes, the ancient ancestors of those computer-generated ads you see now. But that's the only thing he seemed to have accomplished while I was there, his position, I believe, a payback to the company for some favor in his earlier capacity as an MTA exec.)

Though I had just started out, I soon became responsible for most of the ads that went into the interior of LIRR trains, at the rate of about twenty-five each car, as well as the stand-up ads and dioramas on the station platforms; then most national airports, thousands of spots to be filled, all such work orders done by hand, and our records kept in ledger books, for computers had yet to come into use at the company. (And even then, a few years later when the company finally decided to modernize their inventory system, they were these bulky, time-consuming things that took forever to format and input, while producing reams and reams of hole-punched green and white paper records that were hard on the eyes.) In those days, if you saw a Marlboro Country diorama in Grand Central Terminal or in an overhead display at JFK or La Guardia airports, not to mention any number of other facilities around the country, chances are I had issued the work orders.

Some days, I'd spend the morning making copies of work orders on a Xerox machine, which was always breaking down; afterward, I'd send off a few sets of orders with one of the routers from our warehouse in Long Island City, for use in what we called the “field.” Our men, union members all, with ladders, buckets of paste, and brushes in hand, would then spend the next week or so putting those ads up in car after car, and station after station, until they'd have to take any number of them down, the whole cycle beginning again.

It was, I have to say, incredibly tedious and painstaking (to stay awake) work, requiring a good aptitude for numbers (which, being able to cipher in my head, came easily to me), a lot of patience, and an ability to look the other way about some things: The salespeople, having sold X number of spots to an outfit like the Philip Morris corporation, whose Marlboro Country ads were already just about everywhere you looked in the city, always wanted to sweeten the pot with freebie bonuses, which we were continually pressured to fulfill for the big accounts, often at the expense of someone else's space—a fooling with the books process that someone there called “taking from Peter to pay Paul,” with a wink.

But the position I would eventually become most identified with at the company involved the very underworld which, on some level, had always made me queasy: the subways. Or to be more specific, the glowing white-dialed clocks, some fifteen hundred and seventy-six of them, with their illuminated ads adorning the platforms. I allocated those spaces but, as well, often went out into the field with my counterpart over there, a roguish Irish fellow named Charlie, who comported himself much like a cop, especially when we'd ride the trains into some pretty rough parts of the city (he'd keep a hand inside his right breast pocket under his coat, as if to imply that he had a gun—I don't know if he did). Sometimes, I'd pass half the day down there, showing executives their ads—how those MTA guys and transit cops do it full-time I can't imagine.

Along the way I learned a few things: Ever stand on a platform and watch a half-full train pass your station for no good reason? It's to keep the train supposedly on schedule. Ever wonder who ran those chewing gum and candy bar dispensers in the old days? The mob. Those machines, never turning much profit, were maintained by guys who were also running numbers. And if you've ever wondered why the system ran so badly for years, it had to do with the resentments the older MTA workers, mostly Irish, felt toward the newer workers, who tended to include Latinos and blacks: Pissed about their incredible entry-level salaries, a lot of those workers, upon retiring, wouldn't bother to divulge the intricacies of switching systems and such. Such were the subjects, among so many others, that came up between me and Charlie while riding around.

Somehow, all of us got through those days, pacing ourselves and finding small routines for breaking the utter monotony of what, in essence, became fairly mindless (and soul-destroying) work. Thankfully, smoking, though never in the mornings, helped me pass the time—all the desks had a heavy hard plastic ashtray stashed in one of the drawers—and, about once an hour, as a matter of habit rather than out of any urgent need, I'd go off to the men's room in the outer hall just to stretch my legs, often (I swear) recognizing Mr. Belsky's brown cordovan shoes just visible along the floor in one of the stalls, where it seemed he'd spend half the day reading
The New York Times
from first page to last; I'd also often bump into one of my favorite people, a quite tall, silver-haired Irishman whose name, by coincidence, happened to be John O'Connor (he'd laugh wildly when I'd tell him that I had Irish forebears and a Cuban great-grandmother named Concepcíon O'Connor). He had a stately manner about him (paging Buck Mulligan) and, as one of the “go-to” troubleshooters and jack-of-alladvertising-trades, could make his own schedule as he pleased. Like Bannier, another World War II veteran, he had flown nearly a hundred missions as a B17 bomber pilot in the Pacific, and cheerfully aware that he was lucky to have survived at all, never had a bad thing to say about anyone or anybody. (When I once asked him, “How'd you get through the nerves?” he answered: “Booze.”) He'd always check himself out in front of those bathroom mirrors before going off to his meetings, or perhaps to see a lady friend, for he was always dapperly dressed. I envied him, I have to say, and the universe in which he seemed to live, for to his generation, the war had been a kind of life-affirming ritual, which my own seemed to have lacked: Hence, a restrained self-confidence emanated from his every pore, while I continued to move through my days without any certainty about myself at all.

My favorite place to hang out, however, while slipping away from my desk, was the art department, where ads would be knocked off for the smaller mom-and-pop businesses in the city, like Zaro's kosher breads up on Lexington, or Gene Barry's Photo Lab on Forty-second, in-house production a part of the deal. The fiftyish art director, who always seemed to be reading the
New York Times
obituaries page, happened to be a nephew of Max Fleischer, pioneering animator of the 1930s and creator of the Popeye cartoons, and aside from sitting me down in an area cluttered with artist materials to show me how he'd prepare typeset copy, with its different fonts, for the printers, or how he'd adjust color proofs—to get just the right tones—trace drawings off a light box, and any number of innumerable techniques that have long since been forgotten, he'd regale me with stories about the New York he had lived in as a kid, in the 1940s. I'd listen to him as he sat over a light box, tracing images onto a piece of translucent paper. He'd freelanced for some of the legendary comic book studios; worked in animation sweatshops, the sort to provide those Harry and Bud Piels ads for television; and, in general, with a nostalgic look in his eyes that my pop would have instantly recognized, championed—just like so many of the guys from my former neighborhood did—the notion that things were simply better in the good old days.

Now, I'm mature enough to know that he was probably confusing the wonderfulness of being young with the mundane realities he had actually experienced, but back then, I thought he might have had a point. After all, I looked into my own past as often as I did the future, and even I had to admit that there was something—perhaps a lot of things—that had been beautiful about my childhood. Still, there was something about life in New York in the 1940s that spoke especially to me—why, I didn't know. As for Mr. Fleischer, there is not much else to say, though I often listened to his stories about growing up in Brooklyn with the kind of interest and respect that made the younger secretaries, among them our scrumptious Puerto Rican receptionist, Myra Lopez, regard me as a bit of a weirdo. Looking back on that period now, I think I used my fascination with other people's stories as a way of keeping my writing, which I hardly touched in those days, alive. Still, at twenty-five, married all of five months or so, I seemed to have, in some ways, a mind-set more appropriate to a man many years older than what I happened to be.

Which brings me back around, at the expense of mentioning so many of the other wonderful folks I worked with, to that wintry day when I turned up at the office despite the fact that I could barely take a breath without having a coughing fit. Bad as I looked, no one said a word to me about going home. It wasn't unusual for the employees at TDI to keep on working through an illness—as some of the higher-ups, pricks at heart, frowned, to use that corporate euphemism, on excessive absences—in fact, I probably caught that flu in the office, where it had been going around. But because of my flu, I was given light duty (mainly answering phones with my rasping voice) and even allowed to take a long nap in the midafternoon, on a couch kept way in the back for the King Perceval production staff, who often worked late hours. Somehow, dosed on cough medicines and blood-pressure-raising syrups from the Duane Reade down the street, I managed to get through the day. (Thank God, it was a Friday.) Finally, heading home, however, I made the error of allowing myself to be swayed from my course by the company photographer Sid, a black dude, who, catching me in the hall and pleading a conflict, begged me to wait out in front with a package that he wanted me to give to a woman. We had no concierge in the lobby—and he hadn't the time to wait for her himself.

“Swear to God, bro,” he told me, crossing his heart. “She'll come by no later than quarter after five.”

“All right,” I told him, even if I felt like death.

So he called her up: “You'll see the dude—a serious-looking white guy—a little mopey maybe, with glasses. He'll have that thing for you, all right, sweetheart?” And he gave her the details of how I was dressed: a dark blue coat with a hood, and a dark red scarf. Then he reached into his coat pocket and handed me a brown paper bag inside of which there was a box about the size of a package of cigarettes, but wrapped tightly in white paper. He took off, rapping my back.

“See you Monday, man; feel better, huh?”

For more than half an hour, I waited in the lobby for her to show up, and then, feeling worse and worse, as I was about to head back upstairs to stash that bag away in a drawer (I never found out just what it might have contained) this fine-looking black woman in a Red Riding Hood outfit came up to me, asking, “Are you Sid's friend?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, do you have that thing for me?”

“Sure.”

When I handed the bag over, she made happy noises like “Uh, umm” and said, “Yessiree,” feeling it through her gloves. Then, as if she hadn't another moment in the world, she took off. “You have a nice Christmas,” she called out, turning back to look at me, going to wherever she happened to be going.

The weather had gotten even more bleakly cold in the meantime, a frigid sleet falling, the curbs flowing with sludge, and on such a moonless night the “canyon” of that famous neighborhood—the Empire State Building was just a ten-minute walk away—went floating in an ethereal India-ink black and blue darkness that seemed to both stretch into every direction and at the same time cut right into you to the bones; it was the kind of evening when even the Christmas lights that you saw blinking in store and barroom windows began to bleed tears through the gathering frost on the panes, when not even the sidewalk Santas on the corners of Sixth Avenue, ringing their bells merrily, could work their magic on you.

Somehow, in the same way I had dragged myself to the office that morning, I dragged myself uptown. Climbing out the subway station, at Seventy-ninth, into a Manhattan night when most people resembled shadows, the Edward Hopper yellow-lit windows of the Guys and Dolls Pool Hall seeming to float in midair above Broadway, I couldn't wait to change into warm clothes, eat some hot something, and collapse into bed to watch TV, while my wife, as was her habit, sat on the floor in a negligee, playing solitaire. We lived on the fifth floor (apartment 5I), and as soon as the elevator doors opened, I experienced the strangest intuition that something had changed. Coughing, sweating up a storm, I rang the bell, expecting her to answer—in the old days, she'd quickly welcome me inside—but this time I opened the door to complete darkness. Putting the lights on and taking a quick look around, I could see that just about everything had been cleared out of the apartment, save a futon on the floor, a few blankets and pillows, a small black-and-white TV, and two lamps, as well as some of my things, piled carefully in a corner: typewriter, books, guitar. Shreds of paper and pieces of nylon rope lay scattered here and there on the floors, as well as some old issues of
Backstage
and
Variety
newspapers; plastic garbage bags, filled with her random castaways, lay in the corner; in the kitchen, all the wedding-present cutlery and plates were gone, even a wall clock, but at least some food remained in the refrigerator. A note, addressed to me, apologizing for the way things had played out, had been left on a windowsill.