I never thought I’d say this, but here it is: I have a doorman. Well, technically I have a part-time doorman. And he is silently judging me.

Let me explain how I ended up with a doorman. I’ve lived in plenty of crappy New York City apartments, and had many crazy roommates. In most of my apartments, I didn’t even have a super, let alone a doorman. I did have a super when I lived in my sixth-floor walkup apartment in Manhattan, but he and I had different ideas about what a super should do. My idea was that the super should fix things upon request, his idea was that he should hit on the tenants and that there should be an exchange of sexual favors for work done.

When I first met my husband, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a roommate and my two cats. My husband was also living in a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate, but shortly after we met, his lease was up and he moved into a studio apartment by himself. Well, it was more like a “junior 1 bedroom,” as the real estate agents would say - it had a front room and a back room but no actual door in between them, just an open doorway. By the time my lease was up (and my roommate had disappeared), my husband and I had decided to move in together, and were trying to decide whether to stay in my apartment or his. Both had their pros and cons - my apartment was bigger, but the rent was more and it was further from the subway. Not to mention that all the windows were stuck shut, the shower went scalding hot/freezing cold about twelve times in five minutes, the ceiling in the bathroom was collapsing, the entire apartment slanted, and in the bedroom the ceilings were about six feet tall. The apartment, being on the top floor, was also about 100 degrees in the summer time. My husband’s apartment was much smaller, but also much cheaper, and had a lovely garden out back. Unlike my absentee landlord, who I’d never even actually met and who never made any repairs to my apartment, my husband’s landlords lived right upstairs in the rest of the brownstone, where they had lived for about 20 years. Of course what I didn’t realize at the time was that this was actually a detriment, and not a bonus. I didn’t know that there was also a collapsing ceiling on the horizon in that apartment.

We reasoned, completely naively, that we’d save so much money living in the smaller-but-much-cheaper apartment that maybe one day we could even save up enough money to buy our own place! Of course, this was completely unrealistic. Two people working regular jobs each earning less than six or seven figures a year in New York City any time after about 1982 would never be able to save up enough money to buy a place without inheriting a substantial sum of money (sometimes people will ask me if I own my apartment or rent it, and I will respond “Do I look like a billionaire or someone who purchased real estate before 1986?”). Neither of us have any wealthy relatives, but we had been brought up to believe the crazy fairy tale that if you work hard and save your money you could live in something that might be described as less than a craphole, also often described as “cozy” or “charming” in real estate listings. Of course, a studio apartment is way too small for two people and two cats. We knew that. But we figured it would be only temporary.

“Temporary” turned out to be about four years.  Even our landlords - who got crazier by the year - said to us at one point, “I don’t know how the two of you don’t kill each other living in there.” When we first lived there, we had the garden variety of things that were wrong with the apartment - loose tiles, running out of hot water in the shower, a refrigerator held together with duct tape, an oven that didn’t work, a “working fireplace” that couldn’t be used - but we managed to live with all of them. The light bulb in the kitchen burnt out, and got stuck in the fixture when we tried to change it. We didn’t need light in the kitchen anyway, since we couldn’t really use the stove. If we told our landlords about something that needed to be fixed, we usually received a non-response. You’d think that, being homeowners for about twenty-odd years, they’d know how to make some basic repairs, but they didn’t, or wouldn’t. Then one day, water started pouring down the walls in the bathroom.  Seeing as this could potentially make their entire brownstone collapse, they had to fix it. They knew a guy who lived in the neighborhood who was a super over at a swanky new condo where a parking spot alone cost $40,000. The bathroom repairs were done sporadically, whenever the neighborhood-super-guy wasn’t busy with his actual job, and for a long time we showered surrounded by plastic sheeting, and got more dirt on us during the shower than we’d had on us before. Although, after the shower was fixed, we no longer had to stagger our shower times due to not having enough hot water for two showers in a row.

Then there was the infamous ceiling collapse. The landlords, who of course wouldn’t spend so much as $2 on a repair for our apartment if they could help it, decided to renovate their kitchen - which was above our bedroom. Their kitchen floor/our bedroom ceiling collapsed one day, with their already-neurotic dog falling right through the ceiling. This necessitated me, my husband, and the cats evacuating for several days. During the time we lived in this apartment, the dog would constantly run back and forth barking. This didn’t bother me all that much, but it sure did bother one of my cats. Poor delicate Thurston was driven to the edge by the running and barking, the presence of another cat upstairs, and the cats who occasionally wandered up to the front or back window. Aside from his hissing fits at the neighbor cats, he developed a constant belly-licking problem. He licked all the fur off his belly, which the vet told me was because he probably didn’t like the sounds, sights, or smells of other animals.

The landlords also did a lot of yelling. So there was running, barking, stomping, and yelling above our heads on most days. Eventually, we decided that we had to move. It was all too much - the lack of space, the noise, no working appliances, one closet for the entire apartment, the temperature being either 95 degrees or 4 degrees inside. I started looking around for new apartments. Of course, I was convinced I could find “a deal.” You know how you always hear stories about someone who has a great apartment but only pays $600 a month in rent because they got it through a friend who moved out, or someone’s grandmother who died? Of course I didn’t have a deal. The closest I had to a “good deal” was when I paid $500 a month over ten years ago to live in Manhattan, in a rent-stabilized sixth-floor walkup. But only because we converted it from two bedrooms to three. So it was a deal, but I had two roommates and half a closet in my bedroom, and a bedroom that could literally only fit a bed and nothing else. So I really lived in a cell that I walked up six flights of stairs to get to. I also didn’t want to pay a broker’s fee. “I can avoid paying broker’s fees,” I told my husband. I’ve actually never managed to accomplish this, though. Once I went so far as to actually get a real estate license to try to avoid paying broker’s fees. This is a bad idea, lest you are now thinking “hey, that’s a great idea, doesn’t it only cost about $200 and 40 hours of classes and two exams to get a real estate license?” Yes, but then you have to have a broker sponsor you, which means working as a real estate agent. I did this part-time for a few months and nearly lost my mind, but I did not, in the process, manage to earn a lot of extra cash and snag myself a great place. Finally, my husband reminded me that I paid $500 in rent more than a decade ago, and was making a lot more money than when I paid that amount of rent.  “It’s ok if we pay more than $500 in rent in New York City in 2007,” he said.

I scoured the internet for apartment listings. I did make my husband go with me to look at one no-fee listing in our neighborhood. It was actually worse than the apartment we already lived in, smaller, and more rent, plus the landlord was extremely creepy. He only spoke to my husband and kept being overly touchy-feely with him. “Please,” my husband begged me. “Give up on the no-fee thing.” Then, I considered apartments that had a lot of space, but were in far-flung locales. “How does a two-hour subway ride to Manhattan sound, if the rent is only $1400 a month?” I’d ask him. “I really, really want to stay in the neighborhood,” my husband said. As did I. I just had to accept the fact that if we wanted more space in the same area, we’d have to pay more money. “I never should have moved out of my two-bedroom apartment,” I lamented. “You mean the one that scalded you every day as plaster fell on your head in the bathroom and where you banged your head on the ceiling when you stood up?” he said.

Finally, we made an appointment with one of the dreaded real estate brokers to see an apartment in the neighborhood. We met her in the lobby and she showed us a couple of units. We couldn’t believe it: the place was nice. It was clean. Things appeared to work. There were lights in the apartments, and they had more than one closet. Then she showed us the roof deck. Roof deck!!!! There are no better words in the English language than “roof deck.” “And there’s a part-time doorman,” the real estate agent informed us.

My husband said to me, “We have to get one of these apartments.”

“I don’t know,” I told him.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“It’s too nice,” I said. “It’s too much money.”

“It’s within our budget,” he countered. 

He told the real estate we’d take an apartment, and we filled out the paperwork to apply. Then there was more paperwork. We had come prepared with letters of employment and they ran a credit check, but they wanted more: bank statements, investments, birth certificates, passports, four references, immunizations…. I balked again. “This is too much,” I told my husband. “For a rental? This is insane.”

“Who cares?! Just give them whatever paperwork they want.”

I told the real estate agent to forget it. She told me if I changed my mind to call back.

“Are you INSANE?” my husband said, “Call them back and tell them we want it!”

Then I panicked. What had I done? We found the perfect apartment and I was rejecting it for being “too nice.” Luckily, I called the real estate agent back and she said “No problem.” And then we got the apartment. When we told our landlords that we were moving out in a month, they were angry - even though my husband had signed a one-year lease four years ago and had not signed a lease since then. On the day we moved out of our old apartment, the boiler broke. I was literally wearing a down parka for the entire morning. The landlord came downstairs and asked if he could get into the basement to look at the boiler. He came back up and told me that he suspected they might have to get a new one and it would be really expensive, and that the boiler probably hadn’t been replaced in the past 50 years. “Good luck with that,” I said.

So now I have a doorman - and most of the time, having a doorman is actually pretty great. In fact, sometimes I don’t know how I ever lived without one. He is, as I often remark to my husband, kind of like Santa Claus: He knows when you are usually sleeping, he knows when you’re typically awake. He knows if you come home late, or leave work early, or take a day off, or order a lot of stuff online. He signs for packages, accepts dry cleaning, and keeps dog cookies under his desk, which makes him very popular with the canine set. He loves children. He makes funny jokes, and he knows everyone’s name. On Halloween he asked me if I was going to go trick-or-treating, and I told him no. “Why not?” he said, and then suggested I take my husband. “You could dress him up in short pants,” he said.

Lately, though, my work schedule has been kind of odd. For a while, I was underemployed - I was getting laid off from my job, but it was not clear exactly when my last day would be. I was looking for a new job and going on job interviews - but in the meantime, I had nothing left to actually do at work. I had a lot of vacation time saved up, too. So I took a lot of days off, or went in late to work and came home early (which reminds me of a line from the Luna song, “Chinatown” - “you’re late to work, and you go home earlies” - except I’m not running around all night doing drugs and “chasing girlies”). I know, this sounds great. But for some reason it still gave me a lot of angst, until I found a new job - and then I took more vacation time and started to enjoy myself. But, on the days when I’m home, if I have an errand to run, I sometimes find myself trying to run out and get back in before 2 PM, when the doorman comes on duty. One time I took the day off and went out to the supermarket to get some groceries. I came home around, say, 3 PM, and he remarked “You have the day off, but you are not taking it easy?”  I do wonder what he thinks of me suddenly being home so much. I know I shouldn’t care what he thinks. But for some reason I don’t want to be perceived as lazy or idle, when in reality I’ve always had a job in some form or another for as long as I have been of legal age to work. I’m also terrified of the doorman saying something to the management company. I can picture it: “I’m not so sure she still has a job” and then our lease not getting renewed, and then it’s back to collapsing-ceiling town. Did I mention my apartment is rent stabilized? Rent stabilized, those are the two best words after “roof deck.”  There is a tax abatement for our building which resulted in a rider on our lease which isn’t up for another eight years or something like that.

My husband, of course, knew before I even said anything that I thought the doorman was silently judging me. Everyone keeps telling me I should just enjoy my extra time off and not worry about everything so much. Even Thurston has stopped licking his belly, surely I can take a few days off and putter around my apartment and my neighborhood without too much guilt. So, I have finally started to relax and enjoy myself. I even started going swimming in a nearby city pool and jogging outside more often. One day I went for a run in the evening with a friend. I came back, and the doorman asked me how far I’d run. “I think about 3, maybe 4 miles,” I told him.

“Each way? Or altogether?” he asked.

“Altogether,” I replied.

He looked at me over his reading glasses. Then he said, “Maybe next time you can do five.”

Tags: Totally random //