my neighbor ken
This one truly is so I’ll remember. You can skip it if you like.
I was sitting in my cubicle at Jersey City. It was the [counts] eighth Citibank-Citicorp-Citigroup building I had worked in, not counting the multiple stays at the onetime headquarters at 399 Park Avenue.
399 Park was not the most elegant building, but its lobbies had two giant paintings of primordial seas, one at each end of the building. They seemed as if they might have been commissioned for the space. One day I looked at the little plate under one of them and saw they had been painted by William Wegman, better known for his photos of Weimaraners. And on the second floor, outside the chairman’s office, was a breathtaking Thomas Hart Benton painting of an approaching storm. I was sent to that floor once and foolishly asked the guard if I could take a picture of it. No, he said. Immediately I wished I had asked forgiveness instead.
The other thing 399 Park had going for it was, for a while, the subsidized cafeteria. You could get a main and sides for about four bucks, which even then was a steal. The cafeteria was literally in the sub-basement, floor B, and the path there was depressing. But it was always full, partly because of deals like the $3.99 meat-and-two and partly because in those days people actually took lunch. It was decorated with vintage European travel posters, mostly trains, and over time I grew fond of it. Then one day they sent around a memo, written in the most spectacular bureaucratese I’ve ever seen, announcing the change to “market-based pricing,” and that was the beginning of the end of that.
One more: they had a hot dog special every day, a footlong for 99 cents. I was never tempted by that. One afternoon I snuck out early to go to a baseball game at Shea Stadium, which had the same food service vendor as Citi’s cafeteria. The very first thing I did was spend $10 on two hot dogs.
OK, one more. It was directly opposite the Seagram Building. My colleagues had no interest in that - they looked across 53rd Street and saw rectangles. I thought it was magnificent. Once I was sent on an errand there, and walked up the front steps and across the barren plaza in front, the plaza that redefined Park Avenue. Walking up to and into that building was an extraordinary experience. The offices had floor to ceiling windows that made it seem like you could walk out into the air, thirty stories up. We were surrounded by great architecture at Park and 53rd - Lever House, the old GE headquarters with its clock and its cathedral crown, and the actual church two blocks away, St. Barts, where you could get a better-than-usual lunch and admire the Byzantine details. If any of my coworkers cared, they never let on.
But as I was saying: I was sitting there at 480 Washington in Jersey City. I had been there a couple years. My introduction to the Compliance group on the 19th floor had been the holiday Christmas party, technically before I had even joined my new team. It was loud and funny, and then loud and stupid, and then someone brought the house down during the gift exchange when the gift he’d chosen was insufficiently masculine, by responding with his best imitation of a mincing faggot. By the end of the party I had learned a healthy suspicion of my new colleagues.
And so, a couple years later, while I was sitting in my cube, probably rehearsing what I was going to say the day I finally walked out, a new occupant of the cubicle next to mine arrived. For a few days shipping cartons had heralded his arrival. The previous occupant had been surly and preoccupied with the unfairness of having been shuttled off to Jersey. That was a pretty common state of mind no matter where you worked; people hated being sent to Broad Street, they hated LIC, they hated Greenwich Street. They hated disruption, I suppose. I always kind of liked the opportunity to spend a little time in a new neighborhood, but then working in New York City always felt like a little bit of a miracle to me.
My old colleague Mike McBride and I were talking once about working on Wall Street. That was a terrible building, a squat 1960s-vintage concrete box dense with desks, impervious to phone service, and boasting crowded bathrooms where the taps were set to maximum pressure that blasted water all over your pants. From the elevators and bathrooms you had to walk up a small incline of a foot or so, because it had been built just before the computer era and they had to retrofit it with a raised floor to run the cabling. The rumor was that Citi desperately wanted to sell it, but that it was full of asbestos - probable enough, given the vintage - and they couldn’t give it away.
Anyway, Michael was an Irishman of modest background, and there he was in the financial district, running a technology project. He and I were sitting in his office - it might have been the day I bought him a muffin to break the news to him that the users hated what he and his team had built - and talking about the feeling of working on Wall Street. Even then, after just about all the banks but Citi had moved elsewhere, and after even Citi itself had given up its main office with its palatial banking hall at number 55, even then walking down the hill from the subway past the stock exchange and Federal Hall and the old JP Morgan headquarters, walking down that narrow cobblestone street had the power to thrill a certain type of person, a person from the country who arrived in Manhattan full of wonder and infinite possibilities. “When you work on Wall Street,” Michael said, “you know you’re in New York.” Or maybe I said it. We might have said it at the same time.
Jersey City: when you work in the office district called Newport, you might think you’re in Omaha. Granted, the view across the Hudson can be compelling. But otherwise, there’s a mall with a food court and a Panera, and a Sears that each time I visit manifests a little more of the sad decline of a once-great American institution, of a whole era, really. Surrounding it are big glass office towers and ugly brick apartment towers, a few midrange hotels and a Cheesecake Factory, and all of it’s depressing. A friend from the not-for-profit world came to visit me and wanted to eat in the cafeteria to see what corporate life was like. He looked around and said, “This is the back office, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it is.
My new neighbor arrived that one day. He was an enormous guy, 6-foot-4 or 6-5 and easily 300 pounds. Blonde thinning hair, metal-rimmed glasses, the standard uniform of khakis and a button-down shirt and loafers. He wasn’t happy about being sent to Chilltown. He had cause. He lived in Connecticut, and not even coastal Connecticut; his commute consisted of a drive on winding roads to the Metro North to Grand Central, and then the shuttle to Times Square, another subway train to the PATH, and the PATH to Newport. Out the door at 5:30 to arrive sometime after 8:15. The folks in Premises who decided to vacate the Long Island City tower were unmoved by his plight.
Long Island City might have been my favorite stop in my travels. My first boss at Citi - she wasn’t really my first boss, that would have been Monica, and Monica deserves an entry of her own, but Betsy was the first boss who actually mentored me - Betsy used to describe the LIC building as “a stray that wandered away from the pack.” Fifty slender stories, the Citi logo lighting up at the top, and nothing else above five stories on that side of the river within miles. The E train connected it to the headquarters one stop away, like a horizontal elevator; you didn’t even have to go outside at either end. It was covered in green glass that gave it an almost tropical appearance. Up on the 45th floor, until the LIC’s long-awaited real estate boom finally arrived, we had the best view in the city: You could see all the way from the Brooklyn Bridge to Yankee Stadium unobstructed, the United Nations proudly in the middle; go around the corner and watch planes coming in at LaGuardia and peer at Citi Field, as if you could see the action on the bases. There actually was a good cafeteria there, with windows and everything, but there had to be because the outside options were Subway, an overpriced burger joint, and an appalling Thai place. At the higher altitudes where my little group huddled to prepare the SEC filings required when Citi had to buy back toxic securities it had foisted on borrowers and investors alike, the swaying of the building made the swells in the window offices seasick, while peons like me listened to the moans of girders rubbing against each other.
But my new neighbor was bounced out of LIC to Jersey a few years after I myself had made that trek, and he was none too happy. He loathed his bosses for it; he loathed them for not letting him work at home. He could have given them another four hours a day if they didn’t make him commute, he said. He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t going to change any minds, either. Ken belonged to that species of corporate drone who tolerated the horror and the drudgery of middle management or, worse, being a 50-something “individual contributor,” by fuming at how much better he could do his boss’s job. That’s all of us some of the time, and some of us, like Ken, all of the time.
Ken, that’s what my new neighbor’s name turned out to be. I maintained my healthy suspicion of the other occupants on 19, so it might have taken me a while to learn his name. I’m not sure they ever put a nameplate up for him, and for him to have asked for one would have implied acceptance of his JC fate. Mornings he would arrive a bit later than me, typically while I was leading some global conference call in which the participants, like caged animals, had concluded their only recourse to the situation was to turn on each other. At Derek Delgaudio’s show In and Of Itself, I quite sincerely took the card that identified myself as “Lion Tamer.” Ken would drop his leather satchel on the desk, pull out a stack of papers, log in and begin cursing the applications Citi Technology had provided for him to do his work.
Ken worked in Branch Exams. I knew that bit before he arrived; that was the small group who shared our corner of the 19th floor. We were strange bedfellows - our work had nothing to do with theirs, but we were small teams that Premises could shove next to each other. Neither of us really understood the other. I gathered they would go around to various offices to make sure laws were being obeyed. They had to confirm the right signage was in place, the signs that say
Not FDIC Insured
No Bank Guarantee
May Lose Value
I think they had more important considerations to examine than that: “Are you steering your clients to mutual funds with high sales commissions? Are you selling 30-year term life policies to 90-year-old childless widows?” That sort of thing. Some of the offices were in New York, and some of them were in places like Tampa or Houston. I winced picturing Ken squeezing himself into a coach seat flying to Houston. He didn’t seem to mind the travel, though. He and his team would talk amongst themselves about the better hotel to stay in in Miami, the best restaurants that would fit into the per diem. And I think he found satisfaction in the actual work, making sure the firm was living up to its obligations. There was too little of that, too much of chasing after attestations and confirming that the right boxes were checked.
I don’t know how it happened. How does it ever happen? “What’s in the cafeteria today?” “Why is it so hot in here?” Maybe it was Fleet Week and we all had gone over to the windows overlooking the harbor to watch the Navy sail in. Maybe he had come back after a two-week absence and I asked where he’d been. You start to talk, the way you might find yourself talking to the passenger next to you on a flight, the world’s longest and most enervating flight, albeit one with more legroom and free internet.
And working in a rabbit warren, one overhears things. And one is aware that one’s coworkers overhear things, and sometimes you feel the impulse to explain, to vent, to demolish the pretense that we had privacy. If it’s actually private, of course, you walk down the hall to a conference room, or if it’s really going to be bad, take the elevator down and take a walk. But the rest of the time you usually pretend and others politely pretend in kind.
So I overheard that Ken was a Giants fan. He lived and died with the Giants, mostly died - I think their Super Bowl year came before his exile to JC. He may have hated the commute to Jersey City, but he was more than willing to go the several miles farther to Met Life Stadium on a Sunday afternoon. Eventually he discovered I was suffering from the Browns, an affliction for which he had no pity whatsoever. Only once did I have anything to lord over him, when Cleveland traded a king’s ransom in exchange for the Giants’ star Odell Beckham, Jr., and I posted a cartoon of OBJ in a Browns uniform in the window of my cubicle. “You’re a bad man,” said Ken. Of course, that trade worked out in the most Browns way imaginable, which, had we not by then been exiled by Covid, would have filled Ken with even more scorn.
And I overheard that Ken had a daughter, who was going to NYU. I learned that he was divorced, and was friends with his ex, although every now and then the old conflicts would rear up, as they do. Usually around the daughter and NYU and life for an undergraduate in the Village. (For what it’s worth, it’s my opinion that for most young people NYU is the worst college choice they can make, but that’s for another day.) He adored his daughter. His daughter drove him to distraction. That’s the way it goes. Most of the distraction centered on a boyfriend. Ken had a name for him - Scumbag? Sleazebag? I can’t remember. But he’d be on a call with his ex and I’d hear “and then she went over to hang out with Sleazebag, and Sleazebag …”
And every now and then he would turn to me and sigh, or shrug, or say some version of “the kids today …” And another little thread would be weaved between us.
He traveled to Africa with his daughter once to see gorillas in their native habitat. I think it ranked among the highlights in his life, and how could it not? To have that experience, with a daughter you adored, and have it turn out to be all you had hoped?
One day he overheard that I was traveling to see family in Ohio, and he asked me where, and I said north of Columbus, and he asked if I was familiar with a little town called Mount Gilead. My approximate response was, “How the hell …” And then, before he could answer, “Ohhhh - you’re a car guy.” Mount Gilead is vaguely near the Mid-Ohio Race Course, which is not actually near anything - I would have said Lexington, I suppose. He was envious when I told him I had actually driven around that track, although he was less envious when I told him we were following a pace car that was going about ten miles per hour. But he was unquestionably a car guy, the sort who watched Top Gear and wore racing jackets. I should remember what he drove himself, but I don’t. I don’t think he completely minded the twisty roads between his house and the train station.
One of my favorite memories with Ken was when somehow we ended up talking about the episode of Top Gear where they launched a Reliant Robin into space. I remembered the Reliant Robin from my year as a student in England, although I never knew the name. It’s possibly the stupidest car ever built - as they say in the Top Gear episode, “a complete joke.” Someone on the Exeter campus had one, and I’d watch it trundling down the hill from the main quad like it had been doing shots of Beefeater. My colleague David had never heard of it, so Ken and I began by explaining all the reasons a three-wheeled automobile - with the single wheel in the front - was a terrible idea. Just watch the video, I can’t do it justice. And know that I take a great deal of pride recalling that the three of us wasted a few thousand of the shareholders’ dollars and the company’s bandwidth going down Reliant Robin rabbit holes that morning.
David was the butt of Ken’s jokes as often as not - and deservingly as often as not. He’s a great friend, one of the few actual friends I’ve made at that place, but to say David has idiosyncrasies is to insult idiosyncrasies. He would constantly dial into radio contests and try to goad us into being his accomplices. (When I complained one day that I had actual work to do, our colleague Mary, occupant of the fourth cube in our little pod, ended up winning a trip to Universal Studios). David was too cheap by half, constantly crowing about a coupon that would lead him to buy more fried chicken than he could eat, or chiding me for going to Panera so often that they would never offer me the teaser promotions he was getting. (He wasn’t wrong about that, either.) In any event, Ken had less patience for David’s schemes than I had. And Ken had had a prep-school education like mine that led him to drop allusions to literature or world history into conversations, allusions that went sailing over David’s head like - well, like a Reliant Robin does not sail. Ken would observe, with a wink, David’s lack of refinement.
I sometimes worried we were being to hard on him, but if David ever stung from it, he never let on. David’s great strength is his imperviousness to others’ opinions of him. He was the child of immigrants who grew up working by his mother’s side in a garment factory, wearing coke bottle glasses to public schools in Queens and hoping to hold onto his lunch money. And along with that - and maybe related? - his great strength was his affection for his friends. David deserves a post of his own, too.
Ken’s great strength was the honesty of his friendship, his ability to communicate, even when he was rolling his eyes at you, how fond he was of you. You could talk to him about cars or novels or travel or even work. You could complain to him about your boss and he would know when to listen and say “I’m sorry,” and he would know when to say “Here’s what you could do.” He had no illusions about his career and promoted no illusions about ours. He was your fellow passenger on that cruise to middle age, and we passengers were in steerage together defending ourselves from the idiots on the bridge.
He was erudite and curious. He was interested in things. He had an expressive face with a warm smile and an equally warm expression of concern. He had a slight stammer that might have been an impediment or might have been his way of finding the right words. He almost always found the right words.
The spring of 2020 rolled around. By then, the Premises folks had moved us a couple of times, so Ken and I were no longer next to each other, but I would search him and his team out from time to time - I was also friends with Michael, from the next set of desks over, who had a penchant for terrible puns and a habit of falling asleep at his desk. I was planning two weeks in Japan that winter, and I knew Ken would be delighted by that. I consulted with him about Tokyo hotels and looked forward to telling him what I had seen.
We were hearing about a virus that seemed to be making its way to Japan. People started saying I couldn’t think about going. I was optimistic. I said we’d wait and see, it might all be in the past by May. Ken was doubtful.
Of course he was right. I went to Ohio in March to see family, and didn’t return to the office for a year and a half. We’ll talk about that year and a half another time. When I was next in Jersey City, Ken was nowhere to be found - almost no one was anywhere to be found, we were on odd schedules and a decent percentage of people were holding out completely.
After a while I found Michael. We caught up, we said the same rehearsed lines about how things had gone, he assaulted me with a couple of jokes. I asked about Ken and learned he had a health dispensation and was working from home. “Well, when you talk to him….” And more time passed, and I would check every now and then, but sooner or later I suppose I concluded I wasn’t likely to see him again.
One bright afternoon this spring I was walking out of the office to take the ferry back to Manhattan along with my boss Fran. We were lost in some conversation whose unstated topic was “we’re not in the office anymore,” and I glanced briefly at the one other person waiting for, as Fran calls it, the SS Minnow. “Chris?” he said. I looked over, and looked again. It was Ken, still tall and smiling, a hundred or more pounds lighter. I’m not sure I would have recognized him had I not recognized his voice. He had a lovely tenor.
“You’ve lost weight,” I said, and I knew why before the words were out of my mouth, and I tried and failed to snatch them back before they reached his ears. He’d gone 15 rounds with Covid, and while he ended up the victor, he suggested in a very few words that the outcome hadn’t always been clear. He was at the office, he said, to drop off his badge and his laptop and collect whatever things he might have left in the office two years earlier. He’d done the math, and reflected on the recent past, and with the daughter’s NYU days done he’d realized he could make it work.
We climbed to the top deck and chatted for the ten minute ride across the Hudson. We talked about - what you talk about after not seeing someone for two years. What he was planning to do - travel, of course. My job change. We talked about divorce, and he knew just what to say. The horrors of dating in 2022. The kids today. His daughter, my parents.
There are people who - most people, I suppose - you don’t know when it’s the last time you’re going to see them. You plan on getting together again, but those plans are never quite realized. Or they die unexpectedly, or even expectedly, but you thought you had more time. Life happens. I knew I was seeing Ken for the last time on that ferry ride, and it felt like a gift, and the best thing about it was that neither one of us behaved like it was going to be the last time.
The ferry arrived and let us know we were done, and we walked up the ramp and past the group waiting to sail back to Jersey. We shook hands and said goodbye. I turned and walked with Fran down the esplanade toward Chambers Street. I explained who Ken was and thanked her for letting us catch up.
And then I said, “Wait a minute,” and I ran back and called after him. He turned. “Ken,” I said, “I just want to tell you, I couldn’t have asked for a better person to sit next to.” I started to choke up as I said it, which was embarrassing, but Ken was Ken. He looked at me, and smiled, and said, “Thank you, Chris. That means a lot to me.” Then he turned and walked into the evening.