POSTCARD FROM THE BRONX

When The Crimson was soliciting postcard editorials in the last weeks of the school year, I had visions of writing to Plympton St. From some exotic port. But these visions were only delusions of grandeur. Getting ready for my second year at Harvard, I knew I would have to favor fiscal prudence over extravagance. So, instead of traveling the world, I merely commute--from my home in the Bronx to Park Avenue to work as a doorman.

While I can make the trip from staid door to chic door in half an hour, Park Avenue is the proverbial world apart, providing enough culture shock to satisfy the stymied traveler in me.

Last summer, my first on this job, I read Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." While reading the misadventures of Wolfe's Sherman McCoy, I searched for the real McCoy among the building's tenants. To my consternation, I could not label any one tenant "most likely to suffer a startling fall from grace after a hit and run accident."

But I wasn't the first to fail to find the real life analogue of Sherman McCoy. Hollywood, after all, settled on Tom Hanks, America's icon of decency, to play the pathetic McCoy.

If I've failed to apply "Bonfire of the Vanities" to the real world in the particular, this summer I think I might have succeeded in the abstract. The image suggested by Wolfe's title exists in the daily routine on Park Avenue: there, people sacrifice efficiency to pretense and ceremony. While the bonfire is not the conflagration that consumes Sherman McCoy, it is kindled by petty vanities.

Needing some symbol of their status, the residents of Park Avenue have commissioned a largely symbolic guard. The Vatican has the Swiss Guard; Park Avenue has its doormen.

Befitting the ritualistic nature of the tenantdoorman relationship, some tenants have refused to open the door for themselves even when greatly inconvenienced by their abstinence. When my colleague was indisposed on one winter morning, an impatient tenant knocked on the door with his umbrella, beckoning him to open the door. Evidently, enduring snow and sleet was preferable to eschewing pomp and circumstance.

Quizzically, people who have amassed great wealth by prizing efficiency come home and gleefully abandon efficiency.

As an ostensible security measure, the doormen control all the elevators in the building. In theory, a doorman will recognize a tenant and send him to the appropriate floor once he shows up on the elevator camera. Thus, any criminals wily enough to get by us diligent doormen would still be unable to get up to an apartment. In practice, doormen often daydream and forget who has just returned. While I generally can keep track of everyone on the weekends (when there is only a trickle of people entering or leaving at any time), I can get lost in the incessant comings and goings on weekday mornings and afternoons. Forgetting who has just come in, I have tried to deduce a person's identity from the elevator camera's glimpse at the top of his head. While bald men have a reasonably good chance of being sent to the right floor, others have little luck. And should someone be sent to the wrong floor, he oftentimes arrives at a foreign landing with a peculiar indignation--as if my mistake were more insolence than inattention.

Likewise, it would be all too pedestrian to have mailboxes cluttering the ostentatious entrance to the building. Without such mailboxes, the post office is under no obligation to sort the mail. Each day, the mail for ninety families arrives to be sorted and delivered by the doormen on duty, cluttering the lobby while it is sorted and tying up the elevators while it is delivered.

Even with these difficulties, it is easier to get mail up to apartments than it is to get guests up to their hosts. On Park Avenue, a ubiquitous reminder of class is the sign in every lobby that informs, "All visitors must be announced." We doormen are to herald the arrival of all guests at their host's court. Normally, this is a pro forma procedure. The host knows someone is coming, awaits that person, receives a call from us when the guest arrives and instructs us to send him up. This system prevents uninvited visitors. But for every Jehovah's Witness it frustrates, it also seems to keep out unexpected but eminently welcome visitors. With a sadistic pleasure, we detain tenants' friends and relatives, keeping them in the lobby until their host returns home, wakes up or gets out of the shower to vouch for their good character. I hope those who are kept waiting find some solace in our obeisance to the rules and rituals.

I'd be remiss if I were to fail to mention one last symbol of power that I encounter daily on Park Avenue. Each day, as I wade through piles of second class mail, I am beset with magazines from Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The best and brightest of the past few generations are living well and are inundated with mail from their alma maters. Sadly, too many of the Harvard alumni show some sort of interest in me only when they learn that I go to their alma mater. Only then do I cease to be an automaton, only then do they realize that I will be working there only for the summer and not for the next thirty years. Their reliance on symbols to preserve status utilizes doors, elevators, letters and colleges alike. While Harvard should be something more, many denigrate it to a symbol of privilege.

David F. Browne '01, a government concentrator, will move into Winthrop House in the fall. He plans to visit Ireland before returning to Harvard.