Elephant
Christina said it was a bad idea, using
The Twenty % Tippers' mailing list to score a job, almost like begging.
But the other Tippers didn't mind, and you couldn't deny it was a killer
list. Over 500 names of people who'd called for a free cassette including
VIPs like Gordon Lish, the flamboyant senior editor at Alfred Knopf, Carolyn
Warmus, the Westchester schoolteacher who was doing time for shooting her
lover's wife, Troy Canty, one of the victims of subway vigilante Bernhard
Goetz, and Cindy Adams, the gossip columnist from the New York Post,
who even Fed-Exed us shrimp dumplings at Christmas. Absolutely killer.
On Saturday we took the mail to the post office
and by Monday I got my first call.
"Is this Mr. Ken Sorkin?"
"Yes, this is Ken."
"My name is Walter Reckziegel. I'm a mechanical
engineer. I've been getting your mailings for eight months. I'm very impressed
with your organizational skills."
"Why thank you. Do you enjoy reading the stories?"
"I never read the stories, but I can extrapolate
from the mailings that you have real organizational skills. You're looking
for a job. I might be able to use a man like you."
He mentioned a job working with him inside
Grand Central Station that paid $10 an hour. I agreed to meet him at seven
the next morning in his office.
His office was down in the sub-basement, below
the Oyster Bar. It was a dark little place that held a desk, a blackboard,
several stacks of Water Supply Bureau Annual Reports and a slew of Detail
Distribution Maps of Manhattan's water system. A very serious man, Walter
had the slightest German accent and interesting weather-beaten hands, the
fingernails coated with grime that probably never came out. He was an independent
mechanical engineering consultant hired by the Grand Central Partnership.
Apparently the job I was about to do was quite important.
We started at the beginning. Walter said it
could be extrapolated that the first water main laid was back in 1455 and
was used to carry water to the Dillenberg Castle in Siegerland, Germany.
He even wrote this on the blackboard, scrunching his face up with concentration.
He went through the entire history of the New York City water system, era
by era, in the dullest engineer's monotone as I struggled to look interested.
He talked in detail about flow problems, about cases where old city mains
are too small to supply the peak demands of large buildings. Apparently
gravity will cause pressure differences in vertical lines of .43 pounds
per square inch per foot of height. Any remaining differences in readings
taken will indicate the effect of frictional resistance to flow in pipes
or the presence of closed valves or the action of pressure regulations.
The work we were about to do sounded complicated and it seemed he was putting
a great deal of trust in me.
Then he winked and asked if I was ready to
get to work, assisting him in taking pressure tests. We locked up the office
and went up to the main concourse at 7:45 as the rush hour crowd was starting
to materialize. The next thing I knew he was taking me into the huge men's
room and sitting me at a little desk in the middle of the floor, one of
those desks from back in elementary school where the seat is attached. He
gave me a red fireman's style hat to put on which prominently read URINAL
TESTER and said my job was to count how many times the long row of urinals
against the wall were used throughout high and low demand periods. I was
supplied with a mechanical counter and a notebook, and my job was to click
the counter every time someone stepped up to a urinal and each half hour
to record the number into a column of the notebook. Walter said he would
be on the floors above and below taking pressure gauge readings and would
be back at lunchtime, when we would review our results over hoffenpfeffer
sandwiches he had prepared earlier.
Then he left me alone at that little desk
wearing that loud URINAL TESTER hat. As guys started coming in they would
shoot me dirty looks over their shoulders as they unzipped their flies.
Meanwhile I tried my best to look professional. Now and then I'd get cruised
and have to explain that I was really on the job, working for the Grand
Central Partnership, though somehow it didn't sound convincing. There was
a homeless guy near the door begging for change and I must've heard his
pitch about 500 times. Then a well-dressed tourist from Europe, thinking
I was a concierge or something, came up and asked in broken English what
restaurant I'd recommend for business, Il Nido or Griffone. I pondered this
for a moment and then told him that Il Nido on 53rd Street had better ambience
but that the food was better at Griffone because it was on 46th Street and
most people could flush hard enough to reach Griffone but not hard enough
to reach Il Nido.
At noon Walter came back and glanced at my
notes. Looking at the results, his face quickly flushed and he said he could
extrapolate from my numbers that I was sleeping on the job. He said there
was no way my figures could correspond to the pressure gauge readings he
had been taking on other floors. The guy was upset! Though I was prone to
keeping things in, at this point I just lost it.
"Listen man, do you know how humiliating it
is to sit here for four hours staring at guys in front of urinals? The only
thing that's missing is the Handi-Wipes and the toothpicks. And then you've
got the nerve to come in here and criticize my numbers. What kind of job
is this?"
"Oh, your generation," said Walter, frowning
with disgust. "You're all ungrateful. Do you know how many people got their
start in this position? Do you know Billy Crystal did this same job way
before he became a big star. His father used to own a record shop nearby
on Lexington Avenue and he worked here with me."
"Yeah, what about David Caruso of NYPD
Blue?"
"No, not him. But Billy Crystal worked here
and also DJ Premiere from that rap group GangStar, he worked here for a
couple of days."
I stood up, handed Walter his hat back and
told him I was quitting. I should've waited til after the hoffenpfeffer
sandwich but I couldn't be sure Walter had washed his hands before preparing
it.
Walking out of the men's room after four hours,
I quickly blended into the onrushing crowd of Grand Central Station, unemployed
again after such a short spell. I decided to check my incoming messages
on one of the pay phones and sure enough there was one call about a job.
A guy from the mailing list named Eddie Smalls left a message about an assistant
gamekeeper position up in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. I remembered seeing
horses up there so I figured it involved that. Getting on the shuttle to
Times Square, I transferred to the number 1 train and took it up to the
last stop at 242nd Street. By one-thirty I was at the horse stables at Van
Cortland Park.
There was a group of school kids taking rides
on horseback around a fenced-in area with two instructors and back near
the stable area I saw a wiry guy with long gray hair pulled back into a
pony-tail.
"Are you Eddie Smalls?" I asked, walking up
to him.
"Yeah. You Ken?" I nodded my head and he broke
into a delighted smile.
"Alright! The Twenty % Tippers! I love you
guys. Those stories crack me up, man. Like the one where you meet a talent
scout from a big record company and it turns out to be your old rabbi. Did
that really happen?"
"Well, sometimes we bend the truth a bit."
"Yeah man, I can dig that. Listen, there's
a job open here with the Parks Department. I know they're making cuts down
at City Hall and everything, but we're sort of like in our own little world
up here. Like we have our own little zoo, just of couple of animals, but
I don't think anybody even knows about it. Do you have a biology degree?"
"Um . . . ," I said stammering for a moment.
". . . I was an oral hygiene major."
A quick hint of disappointment flashed across
Eddie's face. "Well, maybe we can stretch that. Listen, let me ask you something."
He suddenly leaned into me. "Do you get high?"
I looked at him, not knowing what to say.
"Tell me how mind-numbing the job is and I'll tell you if I get high."
He laughed at that. "Well after seventeen
years it gets pretty mind-numbing. No man, you gotta take care of the elephant."
He motioned me back to this lone decrepit building near the line of the
woods and sure enough there was a damn elephant in there. An African bush
elephant, it must have been two tons, just standing there.
"Jesus, does anybody know there's an elephant
back here?"
"That's what I was telling you. Like they
should do some serious advertising, right? Nobody ever comes back here.
Now I'm the gamekeeper, so I really gotta take care of him, you know, prepare
the diet, clean the enclosure, monitor his behavior. This guy eats 350 pounds
of elephant grass a day, and drinks maybe forty gallons of water.
But they made this one job provision about fifteen years ago when this big
guy turned twenty-five. See, when a male elephant comes into maturity he
enters this condition called musth. Really he's looking for a female. He
starts secreting this junk from the temporal glands behind the eyes, he
urinates a lot and he becomes very, very aggressive. I mean, what would
you do if you were forcibly transported to another country with no females
around for the rest of your life? So the Parks Department created this job,
it sort of falls in between the cracks. You work a little bit in the morning
and a little bit in the afternoon and, like, the rest of the day is your
own. And when I saw that announcement with the last mailing, I said, 'I
gotta get a Twenty % Tipper up here to hang out with me.' The two of us
can get so high together, you'll be writing the stories of your career.
Those are weird stories you write, man."
I looked over at a rack against the wall of
the building and saw a collection of long weird-shaped brushes and a very
old-fashioned football uniform complete with shoulder pads and helmet. The
uniform had a big number nine on it. This sinking feeling came into my chest
and I was afraid to ask anything else about the job. I only asked one question.
"Eddie . . . does the job involve those brushes?"
He smiled, relieved that I understood everything
so quickly. "Yeah man, you gotta put on the football uniform and jerk the
elephant off twice a day. The uniform's for protection. That was the old
White Plains Hellcats of the old Inter-Regional League from the 1940s. Good
old number nine. The job itself doesn't take more than an hour. And like
I said, the rest of the day is your own. This is Van Cortland Park, man.
It's beautiful up here. We can go back near the burial grounds during lunch
and get all fucked up. I can tell you so many stories, things that happened
to me back in the '60s, give you a lot of ideas, man."
"I gotta go, Eddie."
"Oh, don't be that way. It's a secure job.
Department of Parks and Recreation. Lots of people got their start at this
position. Do you know Geena Davis did this job before she became a big star.
She was able to go on casting calls in between her morning and afternoon
shifts."
"Yeah, what about Sally Jesse Raphael?"
"No, she never worked here, but Liz Holtzman
did this job for a while a long time ago, before she got into politics."
"Thanks for thinking about me, Eddie," I said
as I turned and walked away.
Another dead end. It was a trek across that
long open field as I made my way back to Broadway and went into the coffee
shop of the Van Cortland Park Motor Lodge. The place was a dump and I had
one of the ten worst cups of coffee of my life. Definitely top ten. There
was a woman at a nearby table dressed in a business suit with the want ad
section of the Sunday Times folded on her table. She looked like she'd been
walking around all day. There was also a business card on her table belonging
to the old age home next door. Maybe she just had an interview there for
some kind of manager's position.
"God, you look awful," I told her.
"Thanks," she replied. "I got laid off recently.
The first time in ten years I've been without a job. The last thing I need
is to be left alone with myself all day."
"Tell me about it." She looked into space
for a while. Then she spoke again. "There must be a job out there that you
can go to in the morning, come home from in the evening, and not feel like
a total piece of shit."
I nodded my head and gave her a good look
up and down. I liked her. I finished my coffee and wished her luck, heading
back to the number 1 train to return to my neighborhood.
When I got home, feeling dejected, I found
four incoming messages on the answering machine. I hit the playback button.
The first call was from Eddie, the same one I had retrieved earlier. Absent-mindedly,
I headed into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed with all my clothes on,
immediately dozing off.
" . . . So come up here and check it out.
The last stop on the number 1 train. Eddie Smalls. Just ask for me. OK,
man."
BEEP
"Hi Ken, this is Andrew Schwartz, I'm on the mailing list. I just wanted to call and say that the stories you guys send really make me laugh, even when I'm feeling down. And I'm sorry I don't have a job to offer you. And by the way, Schwartz is spelled SCH. You might want to check that."
BEEP
"Hi Kenny, hi Christina, this is Sandra. Kenny, I'm sorry about your job. Listen, don't take this the wrong way, but, um, until you find something, I guess Jeff and I can stretch our paycheck four ways. OK, I just wanted to say that. I'll talk to you later. Give me a call."
BEEP
"Hi Ken honey, it's Christina. You didn't call me at work all day. What happened? I'm going down to Chinatown now to buy some fresh chicken and some hong jo to build up your red blood cells. I'm going to make you a good soup. Please, don't be depressed. I love you. I'll see you later tonight. And don't lay down on the bed with your pants on, you haven't changed them for three weeks. You're such a filthy pig."
BEEP BEEP BEEP
-- sent out as announcement for 1/12/95 & 1/26/95 shows at the Continental