Before the Mortgage

Real Stories of Brazen Loves, Broken Leases, and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood

Christina Amini, Rachel Hutton, Christina Amini, Rachel Hutton

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416940821
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The swank apartment, the killer job, and the perfect boyfriend/girlfriend haven't yet fallen into place. Is this really adulthood? Welcome to life before the mortgage. Here's what you need to know. Christina Amini and Rachel Hutton have brought together the very best writing on this unpredictable -- and often hilarious -- time. This book features essays by celebrated writers such as Joel Stein, Thisbe Nissen, Thomas Beller, Found magazine's Davy Rothbart, and ReadyMade 's Shoshana Berger, as well as exciting new writers.

Portrait of the Bagel
as a Young Man

by Thomas Beller

His hands were large. My résumé lay flat on his desk. He had cleared a space amid the clutter, and he ran one of those big, sensitive, but also violent-looking hands over it again and again while he studied it, as though his hand were a scanner and would impart some key bit of information that reading never could. I later discovered that this was in fact what he was doing—he couldn’t read very well, and seemed to place as much importance in a document’s texture as in its contents.

The boss—sitting behind an impossibly cluttered desk, in an impossibly cluttered room, with the sound of the bagel factory in full swing upstairs, churning away with the noise of a ship’s engine—looked down at the résumé and chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. Then he abruptly looked up with the penetrating, profound, and fired-up expression of a prosecutor who is about to ask the question on which the whole case would turn. He said: “If someone buys three dozen bagels, and they get a free bagel for every dozen, how many would you give them?”

I thought I heard everyone else in the room collectively catch their breath. There were five of them crammed into the tiny space. They had given me a cursory once-over when I walked in, but now I could feel their eyes upon me. I had seen the ad in the New York Times, and it occurred to me that I was part of a long parade of applicants that had come through the office that day. I wondered whether it had been on this question that they had stumbled, one after another.

“Thirty-nine,” I said.

Mr. H didn’t respond. He went back to studying my résumé, chewing his lips and running that large hand over it again and again. Then he looked up at me.

“Are you Jewish?” he said.

I like bagels, but I never craved them, never viewed them as something special, out of the ordinary, or exotic. They were a fact of life, personified, when I was growing up, by the local store that baked and sold them, H&H Bagels, on Eightieth Street and Broadway, which was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides selling bagels, the store performed a kind of community service by perfuming the air in its vicinity with the smell of baking bread, which gave the chaotic stretch of Broadway north of Seventy-ninth Street a neighborly, friendly feel. There is something about the smell of baking bread, in its diffuse form, that civilizes people.

Once, during an autumn college break, I was walking along Broadway late at night on the way home from a party when an unexpected snow began to fall. It was exhilarating and beautiful, and I rhapsodized about the beauty of the city and of the snow, paid careful attention to the little clumping sounds of my feet on the whitening sidewalk, and scarcely noticed that I was cold.

Then, after a few blocks, I noticed. I progressed very quickly through the various stages of cold until I felt on the verge of freezing to death. I walked faster. I had no money in my pocket for a cab, just a couple of quarters, and with each block the distance home seemed to increase.

And then, amid dark and shuttered Broadway, there appeared an oasis of light and warmth—H&H Bagels.

A lone cashier stood behind her register, white paper cap atop her head.

“What’s hot?” I said.

Behind the cashier was the oven, and just then one of the bakers in his white uniform slid a wooden platter into the maw of the oven and removed a squadron of steaming plain bagels, which he dumped into a wire bin. My two cold coins were enough for a hot bit of sustenance. The bagel burned my numb fingers. I walked the rest of the way home with the warm dough permeating my senses.

It was this kind of memory—vague, nostalgic, innocent—that had sprung to mind that day in early September 1992 when, amid a bleak session of scanning the New York Times help-wanted ads, I came across an ad placed by a bakery that identified itself as being located on the Upper West Side.

I looked up and thought, What other bakery is located on the Upper West Side? And then I ran to a fax machine with my résumé.

At that time I was a fledgling writer with a graduate degree, a couple of publications, and a few jobs under my belt—bike messenger, gallery assistant, office temp. I took these jobs to make money, but there was also an aspect of penance to them. I don’t know exactly for what sin I was repenting. Maybe the sin of having gone to graduate school for writing. On some level I saw these jobs as a kind of karma insurance. It was a way of testing myself: You want to be a writer? Can you handle this? How about this?

I wasn’t so noble and pure-minded about literature that it was my only interest. I also played drums in a rock band, and I took these temporary jobs because it seemed that, on any given week, everything could change, we could sign a deal, record, go on tour. I wanted to pay the bills, take things a week at a time, and be ready for the big break. I was still high from a two-month road trip/tour the band had taken two years earlier. When that was over I only wanted to do it again. At the time it seemed inevitable, but two years later it was fading in the gauzy haze of fantasy, and I was descending into a panic.

I don’t want to romanticize this panic. I think the breaking wave of the present tense is always accompanied by a whitecap of panic, as true of the moment of this writing as it was then, when I was looking for a job to pay the rent and wondering what the hell was going to happen next with everything that was important to me.

I got the job, in spite of being Jewish. Besides being the truth, this seemed to be the expedient answer when applying for a job at a kosher bagel factory, but it turned out that it was a minor liability. Mr. H was worried I might demand to be let off on each and every one of the many holidays—apparently some long-ago employee had given him all kinds of headaches on this matter.

My job didn’t have a title, but I knew right away that it was special. I was to be in charge of inventory, which seemed a position of considerable gravity, as it included all sorts of items out of which the bagels were made (poppy seeds, raisins, sesame seeds, sourdough, salt, sugar), and I was to be paid ten dollars an hour, which I intuited was at the very high end of the pay scale at H&H. I was also to function as a kind of right-hand man to Mr. H, which meant, among other things, that I had to arrive at eight in the morning and call a series of automated voice-mail systems belonging to several different banks, get that day’s balance on several different accounts, and write it all out for him so it was there as soon as he sat down at his desk at nine.

My immediate superior was a young man named Rick, a lapsed classical trumpet player from Buffalo, whose blond hair was cut Marine-short and whose glasses had small round rims that made him seem efficient and fastidious. His career had ground to a halt several years earlier when he stood backstage at a recital and found that he was incapable of going onstage. Rick had been at the bagel factory for three years and was in the midst of an extremely gradual exit. He commenced exiting, as far as I could tell, almost as soon as he got there, and it seemed possible the process still had another year or so left in it.

Rick showed me around the ground floor, where the bagel-making took place, and the downstairs, a dungeonlike space illuminated by bare lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. There was one long hallway, which led to a series of crevices that were used for storage, for locker rooms, for the mechanic’s room.

Descending the stairs from the ground floor to the basement felt like entering another world. Each stair had a rounded edge, worn down from years of use. At the bottom of the stairs was a long passageway where one was immediately in full view of Mr. H sitting behind his desk, way at the other end. The first time I went down those stairs, I was brought up short by a very peculiar image: a pipe leading straight down from the ceiling spewing water into a white porcelain sink. The water splashed into the sink, careened around the white porcelain, and disappeared down the drain.

“What the hell is that?” I asked Rick.

“It’s water from the oven, to cool the engines. It just pours down twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It never stops.” This was a metaphor. For something. I hoped not for my time at H&H bagels.

Rick taught me the ropes.

Concerning perks: All the bagels you want, for free.

Concerning theft: You cannot steal money, but you can steal food (tuna fish, lox, orange juice, soda, ice cream). It was tacitly acceptable for us—the exalted, white, downstairs-dwelling, Mr. H’s right-hand men—to do it, but the Puerto Ricans who worked upstairs were strictly forbidden, so as a matter of courtesy we should make a point of being surreptitious.

Concerning Mr. H: Sporadically bighearted but for the most part a hard-ass in the mold of a boss who has worked his way up from the bottom. He was a Vietnam vet. A Puerto Rican from the Bronx, the youngest of eight kids, he had converted to Judaism when he got married. Some of his brothers and other relatives peppered the staff, but they got no preferential treatment, no extra pay. His oldest brother arrived at the factory in the small hours to load his truck with bagels for his delivery route. Mr. H himself had started out as a driver for the previous owners of the bakery.

There was a certain artistic quality to the precise movements of the bakers upstairs, the way they pushed slats of “doughs” into the ever-rotating carousel inside the ovens, and then flipped them, and then later removed them, but Rick assured me that Mr. H was the best, fastest, most dexterous baker at H&H and that he had once stayed up for twenty-four hours helping bake a special order, which he then single-handedly drove down to Philadelphia on no sleep.

Days turned into weeks. I could feel myself falling, gleefully falling into H&H Bagels, into its reality, reveling in the sheer physicality involved in making such a delightfully tangible thing, the sensuous, arduous, choreographed world of the bagel factory.

And nothing entranced me more than the huge, ancient ledger book in which all the inventory details were recorded, a book that would come to dominate my days, and eventually my nights as well.

When I saw that huge, decrepit, almost biblical-looking ledger book in Rick’s hands, filled with tiny numerical entries, my heart leapt with recognition.

The ledger book became my domain. I studied it. In the mornings I wandered around the factory with the thing open in my arms, a pencil behind my ear, counting. All around me was the chaos of the men in white uniforms making bagels—the roar of the oven and, at the other end of the floor, the dough mixer, a hilarious machine into which huge globs of dough were fed and which then spat out measured dough sausages. A conveyor belt to another machine, which grabbed these dough sausages, rolled them into a loop, and dropped the loops onto another conveyor belt. A team of men stood at the end of the conveyor belt and, with expertly Chaplinesque efficiency, plucked them off one at a time and placed them on wood platters.

Other men took the platters to a boiling cauldron and dumped the dough loops in. Still other men fished them out with a wire scoop the size of a shovel. They flung the dough loops down a moist steel gully, a bit like shuffleboard, where another crew took the boiled rings and placed them on wooden slats. Then another group of men took the slats and expertly shoved them into the oven, which had within it a continuously rotating carousel, onto which slats were pushed or flipped, and from which bagels were removed and dumped into large wire bins. The bins were then placed next to an open side door, where a huge industrial fan blew on them to cool them off.

Thus: the bagel smell on Broadway.

I counted the fifty-pound bags of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, caraway seeds, sourdough, pretzel salt, and regular salt. I counted boxes of cinnamon and raisins. I counted the number of whitefish salads, the kippered salmon salads, the tuna fish salads, and the jars of pickled herring. I counted the number of sliced lox packages, nova packages, and the whole whitefish (complete with their head, and the one dead golden eye that stared at me while I counted).

I counted the Tropicana orange juice (Original, Homestyle, Grove) and the grapefruit juice and the sodas. I counted the frozen fruits and Häagen-Dazs in the freezer up front. I counted the number of mop heads, broom handles, Brillo pad boxes, and Ajax. I counted coffee cup lids, coffee cups, and the little plastic sticks people used to stir their coffee (a thousand to a box). I counted plastic forks and spoons and knives. I counted napkins, paper towels, and rolls of toilet paper. I counted the number of white paper bags, the ones that held two bagels and the ones that held four, and six, and a dozen (plus the free extra one). I put on a coat and a scarf and a hat and entered the walk-in freezer, which held a galaxy of cream cheese products so diverse my mind reeled. I searched out the smallest, most minute things and counted them, entered the number in the ledger, and later compared the current number to the one a few days ago to determine our rate of use and to figure out how much more to order. These long periods of contemplating the ledger book were probably the closest I’ve ever come to Talmudic study.

And then there was the brown sugar. Right in the middle of the bakery, like a huge chimney rising from the floor behind the cashiers, was a huge stack of fifty-pound bags of brown sugar. It sat there like a monument to its own importance.

The recipe for H&H bagels is, Mr. H informed me with a wink, top secret. But I feel, given the size and visibility of this sugar monument, that I am not betraying any trust in saying that each and every one of the bagels made there has a dollop (a pinch? a smidgen? a teaspoon?) of brown sugar in it. Twice a week a truck arrived and workers rebuilt that four-sided column of sugar from its diminished status to a magnificent, proud height. When the sugar stack was low, I felt a pang of fear in my heart; after a delivery, I could stare at it for ten straight minutes and feel all was well with the world.

Downstairs, in a small crevice off to the side of the main office, was a row of desks. I was given one. To my left was Jay, who had been hired the same day as me. He was a slightly built Hispanic man with a thin and neatly groomed mustache, and for the first few days he arrived at work in a long black leather coat, black pants, pointy black cowboy boots, and a huge black cowboy hat. He played trombone in a Latin band that performed regularly at S.O.B.’s and other dance halls around the city. I respected his outfits. They obviously meant a lot to him. He came all the way down from the Bronx, first on a bus and then by subway, and though he spent his days hunched next to me making calls to various delis and grocery stores around the city asking after unpaid bills, he see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Copyright Information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Work:Still An Intern After All These Years
• Put Your Best Face Forward
• I Was an Entry-Level Fiction Writer
• Regrettable Interview Quotes
• Confessions of a Professional Flunky
• Getaway
• Outstanding Intern Moments
• Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man
• Overheard in the Cubicle
• Brian-Sensei
• Home:Where The Cockroaches Are
• The First Thanksgiving
• Apartment Search Horror Stories
• Paradise Considered
• Roommate Pet Peeves
• In My Tribe
• Budget Recipes
• People Like You
• Parents Are the New Friends
• “So…Are You Two Together?”
• Love:The Fling, The Disaster, “The One”
• Taking Off
• On the Fringes of the Physical World
• Fake Dating
• He Said/She Said
• The X-Factor
• Relationship Red Flags
• Always a Bridesmaid
• Top Ten Signs He Might Not Be Prince Charming
• On Finding the It Guy: An Inquiry into the You’ll Know Theory
• Unacceptable Dating Behavior
• Life:From Costco to Yoga and Back
• Peaking at Ten
• Costco-Obsessive Disorder
• Forty-three Tickets for Brooklyn
• The Breakfast Club
• Budget Living
• Co-op Confessional
• Another One Rides the Cometbus
• Last Twenty-four Hours in New York
• Things to Do Before the Mortgage
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments