Our department went by the name Central Control. My official title: traffic control assistant. We had six employees in our section, each designated a particular function pertaining to the wonderfully literary pursuit of placing print and illuminated advertising copy into thousands upon thousands of locations nationwide. The media we dealt with included billboards; one-, two-, and three-sheet posters; bus and train car-cards; airport and terminal backlit dioramas (Grand Central station, with its spectacular and numerous dioramic displays and high volume and demographics, being the Taj Mahal of that business); as well as assorted other media, from subway clocks to ads alongside bus shelters, which, in fact, TDI pioneered. (I’m not quite sure what Mr. Belsky actually did, but during my first week there, I spent an afternoon by his side, taking various measurements of a shelter just around the corner from the agency: I think he, a former big shot with the MTA, had a lot of pull, for within a year or so, new bus shelters were being put up around the city, with redesigned structures that allowed for the inclusion of a glass-enclosed frame at the side for the insertion of three-sheet ads, mostly for Broadway shows or cigarettes, the ancient ancestors of those computer-generated ads you see now. But that’s the only thing he seemed to have accomplished while I was there, his position, I believe, a payback to the company for some favor in his earlier capacity as an MTA exec.)
Though I had just started out, I soon became responsible for most of the ads that went into the interior of LIRR trains, at the rate of about twenty-five each car, as well as the stand-up ads and dioramas on the station platforms; then most national airports, thousands of spots to be filled, all such work orders done by hand, and our records kept in ledger books, for computers had yet to come into use at the company. (And even then, a few years later when the company finally decided to modernize their inventory system, they were these bulky, time-consuming things that took forever to format and input, while producing reams and reams of hole-punched green and white paper records that were hard on the eyes.) In those days, if you saw a Marlboro Country diorama in Grand Central Terminal or in an overhead display at JFK or La Guardia airports, not to mention any number of other facilities around the country, chances are I had issued the work orders.
Some days, I’d spend the morning making copies of work orders on a Xerox machine, which was always breaking down; afterward, I’d send off a few sets of orders with one of the routers from our warehouse in Long Island City, for use in what we called the “field.” Our men, union members all, with ladders, buckets of paste, and brushes in hand, would then spend the next week or so putting those ads up in car after car, and station after station, until they’d have to take any number of them down, the whole cycle beginning again.
It was, I have to say, incredibly tedious and painstaking (to stay awake) work, requiring a good aptitude for numbers (which, being able to cipher in my head, came easily to me), a lot of patience, and an ability to look the other way about some things: The salespeople, having sold X number of spots to an outfit like the Philip Morris corporation, whose Marlboro Country ads were already just about everywhere you looked in the city, always wanted to sweeten the pot with freebie bonuses, which we were continually pressured to fulfill for the big accounts, often at the expense of someone else’s space — a fooling with the books process that someone there called “taking from Peter to pay Paul,” with a wink.
But the position I would eventually become most identified with at the company involved the very underworld which, on some level, had always made me queasy: the subways. Or to be more specific, the glowing white-dialed clocks, some fifteen hundred and seventy-six of them, with their illuminated ads adorning the platforms. I allocated those spaces but, as well, often went out into the field with my counterpart over there, a roguish Irish fellow named Charlie, who comported himself much like a cop, especially when we’d ride the trains into some pretty rough parts of the city (he’d keep a hand inside his right breast pocket under his coat, as if to imply that he had a gun — I don’t know if he did). Sometimes, I’d pass half the day down there, showing executives their ads — how those MTA guys and transit cops do it full-time I can’t imagine.
Along the way I learned a few things: Ever stand on a platform and watch a half-full train pass your station for no good reason? It’s to keep the train supposedly on schedule. Ever wonder who ran those chewing gum and candy bar dispensers in the old days? The mob. Those machines, never turning much profit, were maintained by guys who were also running numbers. And if you’ve ever wondered why the system ran so badly for years, it had to do with the resentments the older MTA workers, mostly Irish, felt toward the newer workers, who tended to include Latinos and blacks: Pissed about their incredible entry-level salaries, a lot of those workers, upon retiring, wouldn’t bother to divulge the intricacies of switching systems and such. Such were the subjects, among so many others, that came up between me and Charlie while riding around.
Somehow, all of us got through those days, pacing ourselves and finding small routines for breaking the utter monotony of what, in essence, became fairly mindless (and soul-destroying) work. Thankfully, smoking, though never in the mornings, helped me pass the time — all the desks had a heavy hard plastic ashtray stashed in one of the drawers — and, about once an hour, as a matter of habit rather than out of any urgent need, I’d go off to the men’s room in the outer hall just to stretch my legs, often (I swear) recognizing Mr. Belsky’s brown cordovan shoes just visible along the floor in one of the stalls, where it seemed he’d spend half the day reading The New York Times from first page to last; I’d also often bump into one of my favorite people, a quite tall, silver-haired Irishman whose name, by coincidence, happened to be John O’Connor (he’d laugh wildly when I’d tell him that I had Irish forebears and a Cuban great-grandmother named Concepcíon O’Connor). He had a stately manner about him (paging Buck Mulligan) and, as one of the “go-to” troubleshooters and jack-of-alladvertising-trades, could make his own schedule as he pleased. Like Bannier, another World War II veteran, he had flown nearly a hundred missions as a B17 bomber pilot in the Pacific, and cheerfully aware that he was lucky to have survived at all, never had a bad thing to say about anyone or anybody. (When I once asked him, “How’d you get through the nerves?” he answered: “Booze.”) He’d always check himself out in front of those bathroom mirrors before going off to his meetings, or perhaps to see a lady friend, for he was always dapperly dressed. I envied him, I have to say, and the universe in which he seemed to live, for to his generation, the war had been a kind of life-affirming ritual, which my own seemed to have lacked: Hence, a restrained self-confidence emanated from his every pore, while I continued to move through my days without any certainty about myself at all.