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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
On a particular snowy Monday in February, at 5:02 P.M., I’m sixty-six flights above the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, looking down at streets swarming with hats and jackets. All the guys who work in midtown are spit into the frozen city, hunting sugar for the dolls they’re trying to muddle from sour into sweet.
From up here I can see Lex fogged with cheap cologne, every citizen clutching his heart-shaped box wrapped in cellophane, red as the devil’s drawers.
If you happen to be a waiter at the Cloud Club, you know five’s the hour when a guy’s nerves start to fray. This calendar square’s worse than most. Every man on our member list is suffering the Saint Valentine’s Cramp, and me and the crew up here are ready with a stocked bar. I’m in my Cloud Club uniform, the pocket embroidered with my name in the Chrysler’s trademark typeface, swooping like a skid mark on a lonely road in Montana. Over my arm I’ve got a clean towel, and in my vest I have an assortment of aspirins and plasters in case a citizen shows up already bleeding or broken-nosed from an encounter with a lady lovenot.
Later tonight, it’ll be the members’ doll dinner, the one night a year we allow women into the private dining room. Valorous Victor, captain of the wait, pours us each a preparatory coupe. There are ice-cream sculptures shaped like Cupid in the walk-in. Each gal gets a corsage the moment she enters, the roses from Valorous Victor’s brother’s hothouse in Jersey. At least two dolls are in line for wife, and we’ve got their guy’s rings here ready and waiting, to drop into champagne in one case and wedge into an oyster in another. Odds in the kitchen have the diamond in that particular ring consisting of a pretty piece of paste.
Down below, it’s 1938, and things are not as prime as they are up here. Our members are the richest men left standing; their wives at home in Greenwich, their mistresses movie starlets with porcelain teeth. Me, I’m single. I’ve got a mother with rules strict as Sing Sing, and a sister with a face pretty as the Sistine’s ceiling. My sister needs protecting from all the guys in the world, and so I live in Brooklyn, man of my mother’s house, until I can find a wife or die waiting.
The members start coming in, and each guy gets led to his locker. Our members are the rulers of the world. They make automobiles and build skyscrapers, but none as tall as the one we’re standing in right now. The Cloud Club’s open since before the building got her spire, and the waitstaff in a Member’s Own knows things even a man’s miss doesn’t. Back during Prohibition, we install each of the carved wood lockers at the Cloud Club with a hieroglyphic identification code straight out of ancient Egypt, so our members can keep their bottles safe and sound. Valorous Victor dazzles the police more than once with his rambling explanation of cryptographic complexities, and finally the blue boys just take a drink and call it done. No copper’s going to Rosetta our rigmarole.
I’m at the bar mixing a Horse’s Neck for Mr. Condé Nast, but I’ve got my eye on the mass of members staggering out of the elevators with fur coats, necklaces, and parcels of cling & linger, when, at 5:28 P.M. precisely, the Chrysler Building steps off her foundation and goes for a walk.
There is no warning.
She just shakes the snow and pigeons loose from her spire and takes off, sashaying southwest. This is something even we waiters haven’t experienced before. The Chrysler is 1,046 feet tall, and, until now, she’s seemed stationary. She’s stood motionless on this corner for seven years so far, the gleamiest gal in a million miles.
None of the waitstaff lose their cool. When things go wrong, waiters, the good ones, adjust to the needs of both customers and clubs. In 1932, for example, Valorous himself commences to travel from midtown to Ellis Island in order to deliver a pistol to one of our members, a guy who happens to have a grievance against a brand new American in line for a name. Two slugs and a snick later, Victor’s in surgery beneath the gaze of the Verdigris Virgin. Still, he returns to Manhattan in time for the evening napkin twist.
“The Chrysler’s just taking a little stroll, sirs,” Valorous announces from the stage. “No need to panic. This round is on me and the waiters of the Cloud Club.”
Foreseeably, there is, in fact, some panic. To some of our members, this event appears to be more horrifying than Black Tuesday.
Mr. Nast sprints to the men’s room with motion sickness, and The Soother, our man on staff for problems of the heart and guts, tails him with a tall glass of ginger ale. I decide to drink Nast’s Horse’s Neck myself. Nerves on the mend, I consider whether any our members on sixty-seven and sixty-eight might possibly need drinks, but I see Victor’s already sending an expedition to the stairs.
I take myself to the windows. In the streets, people gawp and yawp and holler, and taxis honk their horns. Gals pick their way through icy puddles, and guys stand in paralysis, looking up.
We joke about working in the body
