CHAPTER THREE -- TU CHE LE VANITÀ
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
Last night I dreamt I went to Mandate again. It seemed to me I stood outside 155 Sixth Avenue, staring up toward my office on the eleventh floor, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. The building rose up dark and empty, the windows of my office were covered over, and the people I once saw every day had all vanished. There was no moon, and the lights of Manhattan had gone out. As I struggled to wake up, I thought I heard George Mavety, my publisher, calling from far away down the passage of years...
The reality, remembered in the glare of morning, seemed hardly the stuff that dreams are made of.
It was not an auspicious beginning, that wet November day in 1981 when I went for an interview with George Mavety, the grand fromage of Modernismo Publications. The nondescript building that housed his dream factory in those days was far downtown on Sixth Avenue at Spring Street, the western rim of SoHo, almost literally under the shadow of the World Trade Center, which was a twenty-minute walk away.
A week earlier, Beau Moore had phoned me. He and I were friends from university days in the South, and after twelve years in New York he needed a change. He would soon move to Memphis and a new job. "Look," he said at dinner in his apartment, "you're out of work. I'd like you to take over where I leave off. I'll arrange an interview with George." After dessert, he lit a cigarette and flashed a characteristic smirk. "George will hire the one I recommend."
Beau added a couple of statements to the effect that I always landed on my feet. He also wanted to hand pick his successor, for he merged his life with whatever job he held in a way I never did. "I don't think I'm right for general manager of an office," I protested. "Don't you remember when I couldn't balance a checkbook? And before I knew you, I flunked algebra. And tenth-grade geometry. And..."
His peremptory rejoinder: "You're smarter now. Well, aren't you?" I remained skeptical. I could barely add two figures without counting fingers. Nevertheless, the bright days of summer had lapsed into shadow, night crept in by late afternoon, and dead leaves blew across the park. It was time to stop having fun.
An added inducement: Beau offered me his apartment in Chelsea, on Eighth Avenue at Fifteenth Street. He was leaving soon; from there I could walk to work. "You'll also be close to your wrestler and his big muscly arms," he said with a suggestive wink, for he knew I was dating a man who lived ten minutes away, in the Village. "You'll...see him every night."
At the interview, there was no hint of a glamour job, defined as work in publishing, film, television, fashion, and the like. General managers are not glamorous, though they often earn more and wield greater power than those with showy job titles. As I catalogued my qualifications for George Mavety during the interview, I saw no indication of his thoughts. Later I realized that he had none, or if so they were elsewhere. He himself possessed only a vague idea of how a busy office should be run. He ruled his empire by mood and whim and fiat. Against all odds, it succeeded and made him rich.
What did I have to offer? I could type, I could organize file folders, I was good on the telephone, I wore a clean shirt, and since word processors and PCs belonged to the future I wasn't challenged by intimidating technology. The position of general manager being the only slot open, with a better salary than I'd been offered since leaving the Rhodes School, I couldn't turn it down. True, I preferred something more exotic, perhaps in the travel industry. I had even gone for an interview with Biman Bangladesh Airlines, much to the amusement of friends. They pictured me wearing a turban to work. "You refused to drive poor Helen Frankenthaler up the road to Connecticut," said one. "How do you feel about serving lassi on a flight to Chittagong?"
The interview with George Mavety continued after several interruptions for him to take phone calls. When I mentioned my academic background, George looked interested. Much later I realized that he, like many who feel undereducated, set undue store by schooling and degrees. He paid closer attention when I told him I could speak French, German, and a bit of Italian. "My wife is German," he remarked, regarding the ceiling. "This company does business with France, so you could translate when I'm on the phone to Paris." The word "Paris" rolled off his tongue like rich mousse au chocolat.
George, a Canadian from Ontario, burned incense to his British Commonwealth heritage. When out to impress, he elocuted like a Tory prime minister in a Monty Python skit. In such moments of mellifluous grandeur, he rolled his R’s like Orson Welles playing Falstaff. He looked a bit like Welles, certainly the hefty Welles of later years, with an added, though less happy, resemblance to Rush Limbaugh: the round, full face; high forehead; hooded eyes; a shifty smile imitating good nature.
George hired me five minutes later because of my "veddy splendid, veddy excellent qualifications," though any high-school graduate could have carried out the job of general manager better than I -- any, that is, who knew long division and grasped the role played by bills of lading in the transport of merchandise.
George, who according to legend started his career selling dirty books from the back end of a second-hand Cadillac and made his millions without benefit of college, looked upon book learning as the one commodity unprocurable by cash. (Another version of his bio pictured him as a sometime school teacher. I take this one as the more accurate.)
Beau Moore, present at the interview, had his wish. I wasn't sure I had mine. "Mr. Moore," George decreed with plummy panache, "take the gentleman to lunch." Expense accounts, in George's empire, were reserved for George. Mr. Moore took the gentleman to Amelia's, a nearby Greek coffee shop where the costliest item on the menu was tuna on rye with fries at $2.79, fifty cents for coffee and no refills.
How unqualified can one be? Endless pages of figures landed on my desk, along with Kafkaesque stacks of invoices, frightening order forms in triplicate, conversions of Canadian dollars to the stronger ones of the U.S., distribution credits, baffling account problems, documents in strange legalese -- well, at least I knew they were important, so I filed them in a bottom drawer to think about tomorrow.
I could only stare, but never quite sort things out. I was shown a host of business machinery -- adding machines, copiers, devices that clicked and spat out paper and chinged. Oh yes, I said politely, pretending to understand but being maladroit at gadgetry as well as numbers. During his final two weeks at the company, Beau trained me. A seal or a collie might have been a sharper pupil. Like those animals, I looked interested, or tried to. I wonder whether he realized the looming disaster. "I don't mean to condescend," he sighed one day, "but this is not nuclear physics. Can't you reconcile the number of copies shipped with the number returned?" His fondness for cocktails grew more noticeable. I suspected that he drank his lunch. I, on the other hand, like a stoic of old or a Christian martyr facing famished lions, accepted my fate with eyes on the future. Only...there wasn't one. I calculated that if I could hang on for six weeks, two months, I would once again be eligible to draw unemployment. After Beau's departure, I ate lunch alone each day. If only Amelia's offered a dish called Tea and Sympathy, with refills.
I hated living in Beau's former apartment at 85 Eighth Avenue, apartment 2-K. "If you forget the number, just remember Tu che le vanità," a waggish operaphile friend supplied a mnemonic pun. (His witty reference to the aria from Verdi's Don Carlos means, "You who have known the vanities of the world." The first two words are pronounced 2-K.)
His remark sounds clever now, but I didn't laugh at the time. I felt that I was sinking deeper each day into the vanities of this Mavety world. I had been forced out of West Ninety-first Street because the new landlords, a pair of greedy yuppies who might have been imagined by Balzac, wanted my apartment for their own use. New York rental law permits it, more or less. They paid me a tidy sum, however, to avoid litigation.
I should have taken them to court and refused to budge. I left that pleasant, third-floor walk-up in a quiet, leafy, uncrowded neighborhood just two blocks from the Hudson River for a bleak concrete box in Chelsea, a treeless, charmless, desolate district that looked like the anteroom to the Gulag Archipelago.
Had there been a cinematic genre called film gris, Chelsea in those days would have been the ideal location. Gray buildings, streets, and sidewalks loitered in gray winter. Leaden skies dropped soiled snow -- was it white even as it fell? -- and the vast chunk of city from West Fourteenth Street to West Thirty-fourth matched any okrug in Soviet Russia for Stalinist architecture, façades of despair, and graffiti of the doomed. That cell-block building at 85 Eighth Avenue, after I had spent a few weeks there, came to resemble a suicide pad. The landlord should have confiscated neckties, shoelaces, razor blades, pills and pistols of all residents. Looking out my north windows, I gaped at a subway entrance. Did such a sign hang there, or was it only in my mind: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
No wonder Beau drank.
A few months later I hightailed it back to the Upper West Side and stayed there until my farewell to New York.
And my Michaelangelesque wrestler, who suffered from asthma in New York winters, decamped for Los Angeles until April. He invited me to visit him there in February, over Presidents' Day weekend. I expected to be free by then -- for much longer than a three-day stretch.
A nostalgic note about my lost apartment on West Ninety-first Street. In 1978, shortly after moving in, I asked a musician acquaintance whether he could recommend an electrician to add a much needed outlet in my bedroom. The phone number he gave me belonged to a master electrician who did lighting for the New York City Opera. My bloated boast to friends: "And did I mention that the lighting in my boudoir matches Carmen and Don José's ?"
A Pause for Lagniappe** No. 1: Imagine that I had taken a job with Biman Bangladesh Airlines rather than becoming editor-in-chief of three gay magazines. I'm a flight attendant en route from Vientiane, Laos, to Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, when the plane encounters severe turbulence. My turban flies off, crashes into the cockpit, and disables the pilot. I must land the plane, a task made doubly difficult because my knowledge of Bengali is limited to stock phrases such as "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night" and "Madame, you must keep the bengal tiger on a leash."
In 30 or 40 words, what happens next?
** lagniappe is a Creole word used especially in New Orleans to mean a little something extra that you neither paid for nor expected, such as a thirteenth doughnut when you purchase a dozen.
What happens after your turban flies off, crashes into the cockpit, and disables the pilot? Karen Black steps out of the first class toilet and pushes you aside as she hisses "Move it, bitch -- I've gotta land this plane!"
Enjoying your book Sam. Tim and I spent quite a bit of time staying with friends about a block from your Chelsea apt.