Chapter One
Crazy In Love
In the summer f 1992, at the age of twenty-three, I moved to New York City and went to work as a hotel doorman.This wasn't exactly the culmination of a lifelong dream. I'd gone to Manhattan to become a model, and, in fact, I'd been signed two years earlier by Click, one of the more reputable agencies. But other than occasional low-paying gigs, I wasn't making much progress, and I was beginning to wonder why I'd ever left Naugatuck, Connecticut. You'd be hard-pressed to find it on a map, but I'd been born and raised there,and my family still calls it home.
I missed them. And I missed small-town life. I barely knew a soul in New York. I was renting a room on the Upper East Side from a girl I'd met at the hotel, but that was already becoming something of a problem. She was lonely too, and she had managed to convince herself, misguidedly, that I was the answer.
New York is very tough on lonely people. When m
Chapter One
Crazy In Love
In the summer f 1992, at the age of twenty-three, I moved to New York City and went to work as a hotel doorman.This wasn't exactly the culmination of a lifelong dream. I'd gone to Manhattan to become a model, and, in fact, I'd been signed two years earlier by Click, one of the more reputable agencies. But other than occasional low-paying gigs, I wasn't making much progress, and I was beginning to wonder why I'd ever left Naugatuck, Connecticut. You'd be hard-pressed to find it on a map, but I'd been born and raised there,and my family still calls it home.
I missed them. And I missed small-town life. I barely knew a soul in New York. I was renting a room on the Upper East Side from a girl I'd met at the hotel, but that was already becoming something of a problem. She was lonely too, and she had managed to convince herself, misguidedly, that I was the answer.
New York is very tough on lonely people. When my shift ended at the Paramount Hotel, I'd walk forty blocks from West Forty-sixth Street to the apartment in the East Eighties, and see all these happy couples on the street, arm in arm or hand in hand, smiling and cooing at each other, and I wondered when it was going to be my turn. I wanted to be happy too.
At night, I'd look at all the lit-up windows in the surrounding high-rises -- millions of them -- and I'd imagine all the happy people sitting down to dinner, watching a romantic movie on TV, then crawling into bed to make love for hours on end. When you're lonely, you tend to think you're the last lonely person in the world. You can't even imagine that there are there people out there -- single people, couples, even married people -- who are just as lonely as you are.
But they're out there, of course. They're everywhere. Some of them even stayed at the Paramount. There were women who would slip me their phone numbers when they tipped me, asking me to please call, they were available. And there were lonely men too. I remember one guest in particular, a man in his early forties, a regular: he always buzzed the front desk just as my shift was ending and asked the clerk to please send me up with the afternoon papers. It became something of a running joke at the hotel: "It's Michael's boyfriend again, pining for him." I'd go upstairs, newspapers in hand, and he'd open the door in the buff and ask me to come in.
"I can't," I'd say. "I'm sorry."
"Oh please, Michael. Just for a minute or two. You're so handsome."
"No," I'd repeat. "We're not allowed to fraternize with the guests, even on our own time."
And he'd look at me with those big puppy-dog eyes, like he was about to cry or something, and ask if I was sure. "I'll do anything, Michael. Anything at all. Just say the word. Tell me what you want. Spell it out."
To be honest, I felt kind of bad for the guy. I could relate to that kind of loneliness.
I was meeting people here and there, sure, but I couldn't afford to go out. And the problems with my roommate -- I'll call her Sara -- were only getting worse. She had taken to wandering around the apartment in nothing but sheer undies. She had a much nicer body than the lonely guy back at the hotel, and I was tempted, but I knew I'd only be asking for trouble. And I couldn't afford trouble -- couldn't afford much of anything, in fact.
I didn't get much modeling work that fall, but I got promoted to bellhop. I wasn't sure how to take this. Did it mean I was finished as a model? That my future was in hotels?
One night I was feeling pretty low, so I went out for a beer with a struggling actress who worked the desk at the hotel. She was feeling pretty low herself, and we ended up in bed together, but the relationship didn't last. They usually don't when they're based on mutual despair, I guess. But it went beyond that: she had a snore like a foghorn, and it kept me up all night. I needed my beauty sleep, especially if I had any hope at all of making it in the modeling business.
She wasn't exactly thrilled about getting dumped, and every time I walked past the front desk she gave me the evil eye. I kept thinking about quitting the job, but I wasn't getting more than an hour's work here and there as a model, and I couldn't leave -- not yet, anyway. So I scraped by. Day after day. Hoping for the big break and hustling off to one cattle call after another with the rest of the wannabe models in New York City.
Then it was back to the big glass doors at the Paramount Hotel.
"Welcome to the Paramount, Ms. Dunn." "Have a nice evening, Mrs. Freedman." "We've missed you, Mr. Goddard."
One day, en route to yet another casting call, I saw a fellow model on the subway. We both had our portfolios under our arms, clearly going to the same place. We half smiled, shrugged at each other, and got to talking. As it turned out, he was also repped by Click. When the subway reached the station, we walked over to the audition together ...
Continues...
Excerpted from The Other Man by Bergin, Michael Excerpted by permission.
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