Dog Stories

I graduated from Hampshire College in the Spring of 1981 and moved to New York City. Hampshire is/was this alternative school that had no grades or credits. Sounded good when I first enrolled; I was never much into schoolwork to begin with and the thought of never being judged for my poor performance seemed a Godsend. Well, it was more complicated than that. You actually had to design your own curriculum, do the fundamentals at the sister colleges Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, or the University of Massachusetts, and then complete in-depth work that resulted in a kind of graduate thesis. I initially studied photography, the arty kind, but switched to fiction writing after my camera equipment was stolen out of my station wagon while parked on the streets of mid-town Manhattan. A new typewriter was less expensive, and I’d just taken an interest in literature. My sort-of thesis was a few short stories and an ill-conceived novel. I moved to New York City to start a new novel and, well, see if I could make it.

I lived for a time in a Soho loft someone had subleted for the summer. The place was seemingly open to anyone, and the rent was what you could pay. I slept on the hard floor with a sleeping bag and paid a hundred for the month. The one soft couch was coveted and staked out by a bass player in this rockabilly band called Levi Dexter and the Rip Cords (Levi apparently had better digs). What I remember is that the base player used excessive amounts of pomade to keep his pompadour stiff, but the stuff also left this massive grease stain at one end of the couch, thus marking it like a dog pissing a fire hydrant.

I then moved to Washington Heights to take another sublet for three months, this place all to myself. The high-rise apartment building was in a dubious section of town (the last stop on the subway before the train left Manhattan) where the bodega owners spoke little English and walking the neighborhood could get you knifed and robbed. The person I subleted from was a published writer and the apartment was filled with books. That aside, the place was filthy with thousands of cockroaches that would come out after dark in search of kitchen scraps. I rarely cooked food there, eating mostly street food from the shops that lined Fort Washington Avenue.

Then it was the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood near Times Square. I shared a one-bedroom apartment with a struggling actor. I had the bedroom, he had the living room, and we shared the kitchen. To get into my room without bothering my roomie, I had to crawl through a window off the kitchen. And so that I didn’t bother him with my incessant typing, I took to writing in the bathroom while sitting on the toilet. Overall, this neighborhood was safe with the Italian ladies who owned many of the three-story brick apartments on the block calling the cops anytime someone unknown walked through. But one block in any direction would get you again knifed and robbed. *

All this time, I worked at 860-870 United Nations Plaza, two towers of very exclusive co-op apartments. The place was filled with titans of Wall Street, run-of-the-mill rich people, and celebrities. My position was elevator operator—this in a modern building with automatic elevators. Over the months I worked there, I had celebrities in my elevator including Cliff Robertson, Edwin Newman, Cheryl Tiegs, Tony Curtis, Peter Max, Gordon Parks, and Truman Capote. I wore a monogrammed tuxedo outfit with a peaked cap. It was the most boring job I ever had, and I kept a paperback novel tucked beneath my suit coat (reading on the job was prohibited).

I only fucked up once. I was working the night shift with this old guy from Brooklyn, Eddie, nicknamed Dog because of his bulldog face and blunt-weapon personality. The overnight shift was beyond boring but Eddie and I would sit at the front desk and yammer away for hours. But one night, he got a call on the in-house phone. This tenant, the founder of Toys Are Us, was having a heart attack. The man’s chauffeur needed to get down to the basement and get the guy’s nitroglycerin pills from the glove compartment of the limo. I rushed to the elevator, switched it off HOLD, and then went up to the 18^th floor. I took the chauffeur down, he ran for the pills, and I took him back up. Then I put the elevator back on HOLD and waited. For a while there was silence but then I heard a woman scream and then violently sob. It was all so heartbreaking.

Ten minutes later, Eddie called my elevator, “Kurt, where the fuck are you?”

“On the 18^th.”

“The chauffeur called, pissed. He told you to wait on the 1^st floor for the paramedics. They’re here now. Get the fuck down.”

“Fuck, okay.” Maybe he told me. I don’t know.

I moved the elevator to the ground floor and picked up the paramedics. Funny, they asked, “Truman again?”

Truman Capote was always messed up on booze and pills and just two weeks prior had passed out in the lobby. I wasn’t there at the time, but these guys had been. His hospitalization had made the papers. I just answered, “No, Mr. Whatshisname in 1830.”

Then I waited again on the 18^th floor.

The next time I moved the elevator was when the paramedics went down with the dead body.

Later, the chauffeur left the apartment and entered my elevator. I said to him, “Sorry, I thought I was supposed to wait on the 18^th floor.” I knew that my mistake had resulted in the paramedics being fifteen or so minutes late. Possibly my mistake contributed to the man dying from his heart attack.

The chauffeur was exhausted and obviously pissed off. He didn’t look at me when he said, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t all your fault.” The intimation was that the death was partially my fault. So maybe I killed the founder of Toys R Us. I don’t know.

I tried to write, often sitting on that toilet seat late at night or early in the morning and tapping away on my manual typewriter. I had a novel in mind—kind of. It was the story of a kid living in Manhattan, working as an elevator operator (yes, me), and slowly going insane due to the monotony of his work. Then, one day while walking along 10^th Avenue, the kid comes across a stray dog. He thinks for sure he hears the dog say something to him but brushes it off as nonsense. But then a few days later he runs across the same dog, and now it speaks in complete sentences, telling him to do things. The kid eventually befriends the dog and they live together, homeless on the streets. (Of course, the dog’s name was Eddie.) That’s as far as I got. At the time, I thought it was all brilliant, Kafkaesque, innovative, and nearly ready for the New York Times Best Seller List.

Years later, I found those pages in a box of old stuff. A few of the paragraphs had some flow, but otherwise, garbage. In retrospect, I guess that during my time in New York, I was experiencing life but not ready to write about it. So it goes.

* I did get robbed at knifepoint once while taking a subway late one night. My friend Mark and I were heading back downtown to the Soho loft after a night at a dance club. We were broke by that time and all we had in our wallets were Mark’s Standard Oil credit card and my father’s Brooks Brothers card, which he’d loaned me to buy an interview suit. Rather than being stabbed, we handed over the loot.