The Club

On Fridays, The Big Executive, aka my boss isn't in the office. He is sitting poolside at his Hamptons home smoking cigarettes and sipping vodka tonics. This creates an extra long and lazy day for me, The Lazy Secretary. After Free Friday Pizza at noon, The Big Executive called me from the Mercedes dealership and asked me to run an errand for him,

"Can you take my dues to The Club? They're going to put my name up in the entryway because I haven't paid in three months!"

Its a free 20 minutes out of the office for me! Hooray! So I grab the obscene check and head to the Fifth Avenue Club.

As the door opens the chilly air conditioned air puffs out onto the pavement and my heels snap on the marble: large, loud thuds like in an extra quiet library. In this enormous lobby reminiscent of Grand Central Station 15 old men are sitting around in armchairs wearing blazers and having drinks. Not talking to each other-just loitering, staring. Its 1:00 in the afternoon! As if they are homeless, they give me that haggard gaze-that too many years in New York look. In my mind they are smoking pipes, of course they weren't but they should have been.

And I thought to myself. This is it. This is the New York I imagined before I moved here. The "dahling, please take me to 21 for cocktails" Breakfast at Tiffany's New York. The clean New York. The everything here is the best New York. Not the filthy subway, fat tourists, sweaty arm touching, black snow, weird food smelling, Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking New York City of my reality.

At least I caught a glimpse of it, if only for a minute.