Among The Hired Help
Twist the doorknob. Pushing open that door. Dizzy with excitement. Gut seething in fear of the unknown. My first job in New York. Boldly stepping where no one from Kansas had gone before. Among the great turning points in my life.
It was the way into my surreal future with the Lockwood Trade Journal Company, Inc. Ninth floor of the French building. In Manhattan. At the corner of 45th Street and Fifth Avenue.
That was a portal for me into another dimension, a parallel universe. I was entering into a relationship that would last in widely varying ways– for the good, the bad and the ugly– for more than 30 years.
It was to be a fractious union ending at last in ruins among lawyers and lawsuits. From a most humble beginning it would become a golden cage that I’d ultimately escape from only with tribulation.
Yet it also would be a weirdly, wildly creative one for me, invested with my fulsome obsession, the ultimate concern of my bipolar euphorias, my undoing in manic rage.
And too, lucrative beyond anything I could have ever imagined to be my fortune.
I’d been hired as the Lockwood production manager. My excitement in that beginning was in equal measure to dread at having stepped into what I’d connived for in desperation, in fact what I knew nothing about, magazine production.
Two inebriated scions of the eponymous owning family had hired me late one afternoon. Coy alcoholics, they hired me over their habitual after hours glasses of scotch on April Fools Day, 1977.
A day without irony to me until many years later.
Receiving my entrance that first day was Susan, the receptionist. She was a pitiful quite-slight girl of 18 from Staten Island. Each time the front door opened, I learned, she would be profoundly startled and stare at whomever in abject wonder. For the rest she’d sit reading true life romances.
Susan remains the most unusual receptionist in my experience. Her swimming eyes set back deep in a squeezed skull. An attenuated young person. A captivating homeliness.
Her one duty, answering the phone, she did proudly with “L-o-c-k-w-o-o-d”. A memorable laconic drawl, sonorous and all through a closed nose. It was rendered so amply it could be heard by everyone in the company.
Also she stank and filled the reception area with her noxious effervescence. It was a nauseating welcome to the Lockwood Company.
Estelle Levine, Lockwood bookkeeper and kind heart, tried talking to Susan about hygiene. Nothing changed.
Estelle bought two self adhesive deodorizers and had me come in early to stick them under her desk. That was not a success either.
Then Susan fell in love with the postman and he with her.
At the end of day his mail truck parked at the corner of Lex and 45th, directly on my way to Grand Central and home.
Passing, I’d hear “Good night J-o-n-a-t-h-a-n” coming from the pile of mailbags inside the darkened tuck where the lovers nested. When they married we lost Susan and the mailman. We pitched in to buy her a gift.
We were all invited over to Staten Island for the nuptials but only Estelle went. The rest of us could not face the stench of love. Estelle thought it a lovely wedding.
A Bear
Lockwood Trade Journal had shrunk drastically from what it once was. It occupied a suit of six offices plus a conference room. A small space for small people, a work force of nine. This including three Lockwoods themselves.
A father, George Lockwood and those two mewling sons chafing at his rule.
None except newcomer me, at six feet, were more than 5’5”. Some were not even five feet. For my first few days I walked those offices feeling like Gulliver among the Lilliputians until ‘snap’ they shrunk me to their own measure.
Six men, three women. No blacks, no Hispanics. Four Wasps, three Jews, one Italian, one Irish.
By the time I arrived the Lockwood company entailed only one magazine, Tobacco International. Then a bi-monthly TI was the leading business journal for the wealthy and booming worldwide tobacco industry, covering everything from leaf crop to the cigarette and cigar factory, cigarette and cigar products.
This panoply was then a rich cult where its members worshipped themselves. Soon I felt like a member too, steeping myself in the arcanery of Virginia, burley, Oriental blends, wrapper and filler, hogsheads, paper and filters, casings, making and packaging machinery.
In addition to TI the company published an annual Tobacco Industry Buyers Guide & Directory of several hundred pages, encyclopedic of everything needed to produce a pack of cigarettes or a box of cigars. Also something called The Dixie Directory—an extensive yearbook, for their eyes only– of the US tobacco leaf empire, wealthy itself as Texas oil.
These Lockwood products were put together in-house in a cottage industry in tandem with a Pennsylvania, Water Gap printing company. There was also an independent commercial artist for design work and front covers.
In sum I’d been indentured in my poverty to managing the annual production of 26 publications with almost 1,000 pages of editorial and more than 1,500 pages of advertising. This meant an company income in excess of $1.5 million during the 70s. Against sum expenses of perhaps $350,000 not including their own salaries and expenses extending to cars, clothes and ‘entertaining ‘ on The Indian. After their salaries and expenses I learned the company never showed a profit. All the rest of the money disappeared into their accounts.
For the Lockwoods it was a vrai tabac as the French would say, a true tobacco shop.
And they carefully kept it so by clutching down the lid on overhead. Their rule was to scrimp on everything, keeping cash moving into their hands according to their set expectations by paying everything, everyone, everyone else that is, as late as possible. It was not infrequent for Mr. Lockwood to disappear into a bathroom stall to avoid the manager of the French Building because rent had not been paid. It had gone instead up to Sutton Manor in New Rochelle.
Achieving this meant they maintained overhead to a strict bare minimum. Although no Lockwood deigned to go to Business School they survived by adhering to this one simple business model.
Their signal success was in the near poverty-level salaries they offered their non-Lockwood workers. To me most of all along with the young girl from Staten Island, the lowly receptionist.
While the Lockwood clan lived in some comfort, I came to learn they were notorious for their parsimony with the outside world. It never occurred to me then to figure what insignificant percentage of company income my paycheck might represent.
All I could think then was that if I were a Christian I’d have exclaimed “praise the lord” at receiving even such a below-subsistence-New York remuneration. I survived it only because my slum rent was an astonishing $150 per month.
The Lockwood’s soothed this over with a strategy of being charming and nice. Rarities in small Manhattan companies where a culture of bullying reigned.
Conversely, the Lockwood philosophy was to kill their sins of slave labor with kindness. It worked. Helped too by hiring the desperate, the young and struggling like me, or older workers with the eyes of starving children.
While the employees complained in hushes to one another all rowed the Lockwood galley in servile gratitude for a seat at the oars. The family therefore only very occasionally allowed their corporate veil to be breached. But when it was what an ugly hint showed forth of their arrogance and hauteur, their contempt for those who kept them rich.
The Lockwood’s sprang from a sprawling Miss Havisham house in the elite enclave of Sutton Manor in New Rochelle. Directly on Long Island Sound. Tidal water lapped literally at its foundation.
They were all characters. They were all diminutive but with a ruling class presence to hide it, as if they’d been born in platform shoes. They were also sea faring and might even entertain one once a year or so, noblesse oblige, at the New York Yacht Club where they were members, for a bad seafood meal.
George Lockwood Sr. led the company. His nickname, behind his back, was ‘Smokey’. This due to his resemblance to Smokey Bear, the emblem of the US Forestry Service. Round face, puffed up shoulders and no neck.
Smokey and his sons were so parsimonious the they brown bagged their lunch everyday from home. If George Sr. found that his wife, Catherine or ‘Kitty’, had provided something he didn’t care for he would try to sell it to the lowly receptionist. Otherwise he and his sons would buy a hotdog from the handiest Sabrett vendor on Fifth Avenue.
Smokey owned the Indian, among the largest wooden yachts left sailing in the US. I ran across a fellow once in Chicago who still recalled the wild parties thrown on the yacht. The old man kept a framed photo of it in his office.
Every summer they sailed the Indian to Bar Harbor. They sailed to Havana too where until the Revolution Lockwood kept an office to report on Cuban leaf and cigars.
Smokey had gone to Cornell, as had Kitty, herself the daughter of a Cornell professor, and too the majority of his five children. All went to prep schools.
When I began working for him he’d just sold the company’s reference business publications for the US paper industry, Paper Trade Journal and the Lockwood Directory, which it had owned since 1872. The company’s core business had in fact been paper, not tobacco, as it had also owned a German paper industry magazine and still owned the French magazine La Papeterie.
According to my friend Estelle the old man had disposed of three-quarters of his company because he didn’t believe his sons capable of continuing on after him.
Once a week Estelle would sit a morning long with him going over the offers she’d found for promotions for opening bank accounts hither and thither. This was his hobby. Estelle was a loyal soul and only once burst out in mirth, “I wonder how many toasters he has!”
Smokey, however, had but one mistress. She was a Miss Tomas, a handsome Greek lady of his own age who he kept in an apartment in the Bronx. She’d worked for the company for decades. She came to the office fairly regularly to sit side by side with Smokey in his office. Once I walked in on them inadvertently finding them silently holding hands.
Smokey paid little attention, none actually, to me. Our longest conversation was when he asked me what subway train I took home, and then to tell me how many his own steps were precisely from his Metro North train in Grand Central to the office door. He’d counted them.
My invisibility ended when I foolishly taped a photo from Screw Magazine to the cabinet above my desk: woman with cigar in snatch. This was long before Clinton and Monica.
One morning I could feel his rotund short dignity in my office. Looking up I saw him simply standing and staring at the photo. A steady unsmiling stare. It was clear enough. I took the photo down and put it in the trash. Throughout he said not a word.
Our last encounter was the day when Estelle came into my office and whispered that she feared Mr. Lockwood had had a stroke in his office. Indeed so, I found, when I looked in at him.
He refused to permit a call to 911. The only help he asked for in slurred speech was to be taken to the mens room. I rolled him there in his big leather baronial armchair, a New York boss chair. Propped him up at the urinal. Turned on the tap to help him release.
Finally Kitty arrived by car from Sutton Manor. It was pouring when I rolled him out, still enthroned in his chair. He died two days later.
We took bets on whether Mrs. Lockwood would allow Miss Tomas to come to the funeral. We heard that she did.
I did not attend.
Getting from lower Manhattan up to New Rochelle and back was something I just couldn’t afford.
My Sicilian
Where I grew up in the western half of Kansas there were no Italians. At the time I joined the Lockwood company I had visited Italy a couple of times but not enough to prepare me for Peter Sangenito.
Both of Pete’s parents had been born in Sicily, coming to America when very young. In temperament and flamboyance he was a true Italian New Yorker. He was editor of Tobacco International magazine. My direct boss.
Pete was picturesque. He rolled like a tank parting the throng on Manhattan’s sidewalks. He was square shouldered, monolithic. He wasn’t fat, just short and stocky, a brick shithouse of a man.
Dressed impeccably in tasteful, expensive clothes, wherever he went he drew glances. In his 50s he was still a quite handsome man. Olive shaped eyes that were naturally outlined in eyeliner. Long lashes exaggerated from birth by Sicilian mascara. Raven hair.
In York no one ever messed with Peter Sangenito. He’d stepped down directly from The Godfather screen. Certainly he knew so.
“What a guinea you are Sangenito, what a star!” he’d exclaim to himself when feeling prime, out loud for the benefit of anyone near. Then he would kiss all his fingertips, both hands.
Hands that were fascinating but terrible. Two slabs, short thick digits. Finger nails gnawed back to quicks, some beyond. Glistening with his saliva, a bloody red aspect.
He was, unusual for an Italian, an only child. His father was dead. He lived adoringly with his mother, Josephine, in Kips Bay Towers, the elegant housing block by L.M. Pei on 33rd Street. They each had their own apartments. This of course indicated money about which Pete was mysteriously silent.
Peter careened between kindness and bullying. He had a mean tongue. His wit was cruel. When aroused he would glower. He hid his shortness by sitting beside me, too close and thrusting his powerful upper body at me with studied intimidation.
Soon enough he caught on to my having conned the Lockwoods into hiring me. He accepted this without browbeating me although using the unspoken to cow me.
He’d sit crowding me close in my small office, filling it with threat. Patiently he’d walk me through the upcoming issue of TI teaching me basics in folios and magazine structure. One can bet I learned quickly.
But if I thought this would end these weekly sessions that I came to fear, I soon saw it not to be the case. His patience turned to abrasive fault finding.
“If I make you nervous,” he’d thunder, “Go jack off in the toilet!” So typically Sangenito.
Soon I began to understand that beneath the Mafioso pretention, his bluster and swagger, Pete was a closet queen.
As bad as he made it for me, never knowing what mood he’d be in from moment to moment, he made work a nightmare for his assistant editor, Tom Cogan. He, the company’s requisite quintessential New York Irishman.
In him Pete had a sunny eccentric soul who had wandered through the offices of a legion of trade magazines never finding one tolerant enough to keep him. New York then was the capital of ‘trades’ and they were inexhaustible. They employed thousands.
Of this, Tom cheerfully proclaim, “I’ve yet to work for Fatty Acid Journal. I probably will.”
Tom, the broken Pierrot, was a perfect victim for Pete’s Capitano.
Each work day Tom would get up early to bake muffins for the people of Lockwood Trade Journal. Often they were barely edible. Salt instead of sugar. Burnt black.
Pete was a noisy critic of these. “What’d you put in this? Your floor sweepings?” And so forth.
Tom was in his mind a snappy dresser. He wore three-piece suits, mostly good tweeds, but with mismatched ties and shirts. Some days he was a hypnotic crisscross of patterns and jarring hues.
“You know, you are really color blind. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?” Pete would say. Or “You know, you should really look in the mirror before you come here.”
Pete’s most rancorous running battle was with Lottie. The Lockwood circulation manager, a woman of 70 some. When they had a cat fight, spitting and clawing, his favored line was delivered in a screeching soprano, “If I were Hitler, Lottie, you’d be the first in the oven!”
Pete had rules for his ‘staff’ – me and Tom that is. We were his ‘guests’ every day for lunch and a digestive stroll down Fifth Avenue, I understood he was showing us off to New York. See what I have. Don’t touch.
Along with this he insisted we have drinks with him after work, down in the Cattleman’s bar at the street level of the French Building. Drinks he’d pay for so neither Tom nor I could plead poverty and avoid playing his attendants.
It was in the Cattlemans that Pete made his one pass at me. Discretely sliding his hand, that hand!, up my thigh. He was tipsy.
“You know, Jonathan, you’re a good looking fellow.”
My apt quote of his own wisdom, given to me on my first day, diverted him. “You’ll be OK as long as you never sleep with the hired help.”