Why Doormen Hate
Volkswagens
PLEASE DO NOT GET THE
IDEA FROM WHAT OUR HUSTLING boy, Roy, is going to say that he is
one of those doormen who seize upon you with their low-floating
eyeballs and make you listen to some sort of prole Weltanschauung about what a big operator you have to be
to get by in New York. Actually, I approached him, and he admits that as East Side doormen go, he is
nothing but a pocketful of change. He controls only one-third of
his street in the Sixties. There are only 18 cars in his stable. He
grosses barely $450 a month parking them on this little “tree-lined
block,” as the classified ads say. And that is before the payoffs,
the fee-splitting with Rudy, the chap in the garage, and the
investments in good will, like the superintendent’s.
“It is a small operation, but more
relaxed,” Roy said, “I don’t miss Park Avenue any more. I really
don’t. Oh, you might clear $600 a month, but that thing wrung me
out. You know what I mean?”
So Roy is standing out front of the
apartment house with its facing of nice diet-size white lavatory
brick, Early Sixties Post-Mondrian Chic, with which fine new
apartment houses are built. Mrs. Jansen, a matron who is just
beginning to get that hummocky, rusty-jointed look about the hips,
comes out walking three Welsh Corgies. Roy swings around like a
grenadier and beams his 80-watt smile.
“Good evening, Mrs. Jansen,” Roy says.
“Was the—uh—operation a success?”
“Good Lord, no,” says Mrs. Jansen.
“Well, look at them; they’re so little. That man was mad;
they can’t stand enemas. But they
look so much better, don’t you think so,
Roy?”
Yes, yes, yes, says Roy, and Mrs.
Jansen fades up the street with her rusting gams and her three
Welsh Corgies, toward the trees on his tree-lined
block.
Roy, on the other hand, from seven
years as a doorman in the East Side car-parking dodge, remains
youthful in appearance, lively, alert, springy. He relaxes, like a
middleweight boxer in training, on the balls of his feet, looking
both ways, bobbing up and down in his frogging, his white dickey
and his visored cap.
“As I said,” says Roy, “this is quiet.
On Park Avenue I had 50 cars, both sides of the block. Figuring an
average of $6 a week for each car, and that’s conservative,
conservative, you could gross $1,200 a
month. That’s with the transients, too, though.
“A lot of that you have to pay out.
Most of the guys don’t mind the cops, or even the cops’
friends—other cops, you know; I mean, well, hell, O.K. But in my
case the super wanted 50 per cent—50 per
cent. He just walked up one day and said he wanted 50 per
cent.
“‘Look,’ I told him, ‘be reasonable. Enough is enough. Without me you would get
nothing from this. You couldn’t run this
operation. You’ve got to be fast. Even with the 12 M.D.’s you
couldn’t do it … .’”
A doctor, with his M.D. license plate,
is the most sought-after client in the whole East Side
doorman-parking operation. The doorman can stash the M.D. cars in
no-parking spaces while he shifts other cars around. A doorman will
give an M.D. a rate as low as $3 a week, just to get him. Suppose
all his spaces are filled—some with transients at 50 cents per—and
one of his regulars pulls up. He must find
room for him. So he takes his floater—the M.D. car—out of the line
and moves it over to the other side of the street where there is no
parking that day. Or he double-parks it. The police will not tag
the M.D. car. Of course, one does not want to abuse that fact. The
first time someone else pulls out, he brings the floater back into
a legal spot.
“ … and you have to know by the way
they’re walking and looking that they’re going to get into that car
and pull out. So I told the super, ‘Look, you can’t even wait for
them to reach for the keys or you’re going to lose the spot. You’ve
got to know people, ’ I told him. But this
super, he doesn’t budge—‘50 per cent.’
“This thing isn’t easy. You’ve got to
look after your door, take packages, open this door for them, open
the cab door for them, get them a cab—and, boy, some rainy night
about 8 P.M. when you’re standing out in the middle of the avenue
trying to get a cab for somebody and you see one of your cars
pulling out from the curb, well, you get pulled apart right
here”—he put his hand on his midsection—“you can actually feel it
inside. Of course, you’re going to lose some spots, but …
.”
But not this time. Without saying a
word, Roy bolts from my side and sprints 40 yards up his tree-lined
block, past Mrs. Jansen and the Corgies, who appear quite startled,
jumps in a car and revs it up.
Roy has seen what I had not; a man in
one of those $42 East Side Bohemian bulky-knit sweaters is leading
his two children toward his Pontiac; now he is opening the front
door for them. There is a motion picture theater nearby; cars are
coursing through the block, Roy roars up in his M.D. floater, a
black Ford Galaxie, and stops right alongside the
Pontiac.
The man in the sweater looks out,
nonplussed, but Roy motions him to go ahead and start pulling out.
Roy backs up slowly to give him room. A man in a Rambler sees the
Pontiac is getting ready to pull out and pulls up ahead so he can
back in. So Roy takes off his visor hat and moves up right behind
him, blowing his horn. The Rambler takes off. Roy backs up again,
just behind the Pontiac once more. A Ford from New Jersey with four
kids in it, double-dating, pulls up ahead to back in. Roy puts his
visor hat back on, roars up behind it, blows the horn, chases it
off, then backs up again as the Pontiac leaves the curb. Roy whips
in there and the space is saved. Two spaces, actually.
Roy bounds back in front of the
door.
“See how I parked it?” he says. “It
takes up two spaces. That’s what you’ve got to do when you have too
many vacant spaces. You stretch ‘em. You have to move all these
cars back and forth like an accordion. You can always spot a set-up
like this. On an ordinary street the cars are all crammed up. Here
they’re stretched out. See these keys”—he pulled a vast ring out
from under the frogging of his uniform—“a duplicate for every
regular. You couldn’t run this thing without ’em. For the
alternate-side parking—you know—I have to shift the whole bunch of
them around 11 at night.
“I’ll tell you something else. You have
to know people. When a guy brings his kid
out to the car, he’s not just going to reach inside and get
something out of the glove compartment. He’s leaving . That’s the time you have to run for the
floater.
“Also you notice how I blocked off that
spot. You can’t pull up ahead of somebody
pulling out, because one of these Volkswagens or something—boy, you
ask any doorman, they hate these
Volkswagens—they’ll pull right in there while you’re up ahead with
your chin hanging.
“And did you notice this business I do
with the hats? This, if you don’t mind me saying it, is finesse. If
you want to chase off an older guy—you know, an adult—you take the
hat off, because an older guy, he’ll see this doorman trying to
bluff him out of the spot, and he’ll say to himself, ‘Well, that
clown isn’t shoving me around. I’m not ninety-seven years old for
nothing.’ But for the kids, you put the hat on. A kid in a car, he
feels guilty a little, you know, even if he hasn’t done anything.
Don’t ask me why, but it’s true. So he sees this hat, and even if
he knows it isn’t a cop, he’s not sure what it is, you know? So he
scrams off. You saw how that kid scrammed off? That’s what I mean,
you have to know people.”
A little while later Roy says, “Wait a
minute, I got to go over to the garage.”
I had wondered about the garage. It is
barely three-fourths of a block away. It rents space to apartment
dwellers at $70 a month, and to transients at $2.50 a day, and
Roy’s business must be costing them about $10,000 a year. They
should be screaming murder. I follow Roy up the block, and I hear
him hollering at the entrance, “Hey, Rudy, I got three out
here.”
“Sure, the owner would ruin me if he
knew about it,” Roy says, “but the guys in the garage, we work
together. Suppose they’re filled up, like tonight with everybody
coming to the movie. I tell Rudy, ‘Rudy, I got three out here.’
That means I can take three cars where I got my cars stretched out.
Okay. Some guy pulls up to the garage. Without me, Rudy would have
to tell the guy, ‘We’re filled up.’ Instead, he takes the guy’s
car, and after the guy walks off, he turns it over to me. I park
it, and we split the $1.50. Everybody’s happy.
“Hell, you got
to play the angles. I have a wife and two kids in Queens, and you
know what my take-home pay as a doorman is? $62.50 a week. I kid
you not—sixty-two dollars and fifty cents. So what can you
do?
“Practically every doorman on the East
Side has this operation going for him. It runs from about 60th
Street to 86th and anywhere from Fifth Avenue all the way over to
the river in some parts. In this town, my friend, you play the
angles. That’s New York.”
An old guy in a great chalk-stripe blue
suit, English cut, four buttons at the cuff, growing old gracefully
the fine worsted way, comes out of the apartment building with
three aging belles dames, all linked,
lacquered, sprayed, and collared in foxheaded fur.
“Roy,” he says, “can you get us a
cab?”
And there goes Roy, giving a sweep of
his 20-20 eyes over his curbline domain, then streaking out onto
the Avenue, blowing his whistle, summoning the hacks. He snares one
and here he comes back, cantering down the middle of the street
beside the cab and opening the door for the four old
parties.
“There were eight people out there waiting for cabs, Mr. Thornton,”
says Roy, the most likely sounding but thoroughly preposterous
figure he could think of bubbling up into his brain. He is panting
like a Method actor finishing a 3:56 mile. “It’s a lucky thing I
know this cab driver. Take good care of them, Raymond. See you
around, boy,” he says earnestly and quite familiarly and pockets
the dollar bill Mr. Thornton gives him. “Thank you, sir,” he says
to that.
The cabbie stares at Roy and then he
looks at me with that quizzical, sempiternal New York cab driver
look that asks the impartial judge, “Who the hell is this
nut?”