Russian Customers be like…

Russian Customers at Trader Joe’s are the best!

“I have a Door Man.”

When I die. Correction. If I die, and my life flashes before my eyes, there’s going to be a long stream of people at the register telling me, “I have a door man.”

At our Union Square office, at the wine shop, we work with a third party company that handles our delivery transactions. We deliver wine to anybody living in Manhattan only. Manhattan loves this about us. Brooklyn? Not so much! The most love we get comes especially from that Zone 3 Fraternitrocity.

Manhattan Island is split up into four zones:

Zone 1 is Battery Park to Canal Street (the rich folks living in the financial district);

Zone 2 is above Canal to 34th (rich people living in Gramercy);

Zone 3 is 35th to 84th (Highest concentration of rich people with door men);

Zone 4 is above. Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, and Corresponding hoods.(Rich-ish people and their kids moving into places with newly designated names given by realtors, kids living their post-college years who still need familial support, moving into new buildings that look like Lego-Castle Greyskull from He-man, but we also get poor well-meaning people throwing parties with their income tax return checks or a rare child support boost from that bitch ass dad who decided to come through once every fortnight. Zone 4 is everybody. But it’s also the most expensive zone to deliver your wine. 

So you can imagine the kind of people we get from Zone 3. Rich people with door men. It almost always happens. We spot a shopping cart full of wine. We mentally brace ourselves…

“Would you like this delivered?” Johnny Cashier asks. “Or should I wheel this out to your Rolls Royce?”

“Yes, ah-erm.” clears throat for no reason than to alert cashier that customer is of another economic class and lives in Zone 3. So there’s no need to tell Zone 3 customer that we have three window times to deliver the wine because customer zone 3 “has a door man.”

I hear it two or three times day, and maybe three or four times a night in my dreams. “Ms. what zone do you live in and what window would you like your wine delivered?” 

I have a door man?

I have a door man.

I have a door man, so…

I have a door man, send it anytime.

My door man doth attendeth; therefore speaketh thus with mine door man, for verily I will be attending a friend at Tavern on the Green, si vous plait.

Sometimes I joke with Zone 3 customers.  “Do you trust your door man?” They all scoff. Nobody has ever laughed at that. Rich people laugh at trust the same way poor people laugh at it. Because the joke is not funny. The joke is a sobering reality: door men and the people they serve worship the same god. They worship green paper that reads  In God we Trust and that’s the ultimate joke; it’s really all the trust we need no matter how much we have, right? That’s funny, guys.

For verily door men are poor men who are temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Millionaires pretend to be rich in spirit but are permanently displaced citizens of heaven.

Therefore, I will make my point in bold lettering, thus:

Door man X is a dude with big dreams holding the door for people who are living the nightmare Door man X yearns to have.

One time I asked this zone 3 lady:  “What’s your door man’s name?”

Silence.

One lady asked: “I’m looking for a gift for my door man. Any suggestions?”

I suggested a Grand Cru French Bordeaux. She had no idea it tasted like Merde, that it was a right bank Bordeaux that was dirty, that tasted like water after watering a fucking plant. I’m almost sure Door Man X wants a Moscato, something cheap and sweet like his side chick. 

I glory in small victories.

Look.

None of us know your name. Nobody appreciates what you do because it’s the easiest thing on the  planet to fucking do. And a union backs you up for it. But it’s better than opening the door in front of a McDonald’s and getting enough change to buy a couple of nips, or if you’re a pimp, get your ho to do it and make a guy like me feel bad and give you more money, oblivious of the short pimp watching you. Never mind that.

In Zone 3, you’re a better class of door man. You’re standing there for years watching kids grow up and grow down. They go from hugging you, to loving you, to confiding in you, to sharing their secrets with you, to visiting your church in Harlem, to ignoring you in their adulthood for the next twenty years, to handing you keys to a nice car without looking at you, then eventually walking past you asking if you got a delivery of wine from Trader Joe’s. And did you like that Grand Cru wine? No? You like Moscato? They sell that grape juice everywhere!

Being a cashier is a game of how do I make my time at the register meaningful by maximizing the number of beautiful women I get to flirt with? But sometimes Johnny times it wrong and he gets a rich person trying to get cases of cheap wine. The strategy, then, is to minimize the time you spend with them before they treat you like their nameless, faceless door man.

I greet them, I shake their hands, but really, if I do anything else, I’m just another door man. I’m the guy ringing up their wine, handing stickers to their kids, so they can all sit in a terrace with a view of Central Park and forget that they don’t live too far away from folks like me and folks like the guy who opened the door for him downstairs.

I feel sorry for them sometimes while I sit and drink the same wine they bought. I think about scripture:

What profit does a man have if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? Let him have his heaven now; I’d rather have it later. I have learned to be content regardless of what life throws at  me.These guys? They throw themselves off the roof at the slightest inch of paradise lost.

While this world has been dominated by the rich and their whims, it was never made for the rich, and that is why we all suffer, but that is also my comfort, that the things they value are not the things I value, that a life motivated by greed is not a life worth living.

Instead, I tell them, “Have a nice day. Your wine will be delivered to your door man at your convenience.”

A Paper bag would be Great!

Hi, How are you? Doing well, thanks. What a lovely day today, huh. This weather is quite Disney-esque. Were there any birds or squirrels singing on your shoulder? After the winter we had, we certainly deserve a gorgeous day like this! How’s your day treating you? How was work? Did you kick butt and take names? Your mother died?

May I have a look at your ID, young lady? 1967. No way. Ah, where did you discover the fountain of youth? You wake up and choose happiness? I couldn’t agree more.

I must say, I am jealous of your selection today. This wine here is like liquid silk! And this one here – I mean for 2.99 it’s surprisingly…ok.

You have a boyfriend? Great! How’s he doing? Sober? Right. I wish him continued success with that endeavor.

Would you like a paper bag, or plastic? Plastic? Plastic? Absolutely not!

You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor! TAKE HER AWAY!