I’ll tell you what I really miss, living in New York City. Sure, I miss the sound of a breeze blowing the leaves together on an autumn night, and the elusive three-dollar-and-fifty-cent pint, but right now, most of all, I miss stairs. Steps. Flights. Staging areas for the Slinky. And I don’t particularly miss ascending stairs — witness my arrival at Regina’s apartment just a couple of weeks ago, when, midway up flight number three, I grabbed her by the shirtfront and wheezed angrily, “You…smoke…cigarettes! Why…don’t you…live…in…a first-floor…a…part…ment?” — or descending them, given my propensity to tumble down them in a weak homage to Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford imitation. But I sure as hell miss not having an alternative to elevators. Living in Manhattan, you eventually accustom yourself to the myriad vagaries of negotiating elevators, but I mean to tell you that I have just about had it.

The elevators in my building, small wood-paneled cars that we might charitably describe as “moody,” do not help. I like my building okay. I’ve never heard gunshots; it doesn’t smell; only one of the doormen is a dealer. But it’s a “pre-war” building, and while that posh real-estate-section designation ostensibly refers to residences built prior to the Second World War, I suspect that my building came into being much earlier. Like, prior to the Peloponnesian War. And possibly to the invention of the wheel. And most certainly to that great moment in the history of human ingenuity when man discovered that a functioning hot-water heater did wonders to improve the disposition. But the elevator…dear Lord, the elevator. The elevator frequently refuses to come at all. It is common practice for tenants who work outside the home to come out of their apartments in bathrobes, press the “down” button, go back inside, dress, style their hair, pay a few bills, watch a segment of Good Morning America, put on their coats, and return to the hallway to find the “down” button still obstinately lit and no elevator. In a building where three-quarters of the residents refer to Strom Thurmond as “that young whippersnapper from South Carolina,” and thus aren’t storming the elevator at promptly eight-fifteen every morning, there’s just no logical explanation for the fact that the elevator often declines to stop at a given floor for up to twenty minutes at a time, regardless of the hour…or for the way the elevator will flirt with opening the door at a floor, then change its mind and dump everyone on the up-bound car back downstairs in the lobby…or for its tendency to ignore the buttons you press completely…or to turn off the light behind the “down” button and not stop…or to stop when the “down” button is still lit and then change directions. It’s like living with that kid from the third segment of the Twilight Zone movie — you don’t know what it’ll get into its head to do next, and you’re scared to death that you’ll wind up confined to an upstairs bedroom with no mouth.

Because the building, a hotel until the early eighties, has a complicated system of fire doors on the stairs, we can take the stairs down if we absolutely have to, but we can’t take the stairs up. Yes, I know that it’s nine flights. Yes, I know that I smoke a pack a day. And I’d still take the stairs. Why? Because “1” is on the lengthy list of floors to which the elevator will develop a sudden and irrational non-liking, and it’s annoying to wait in the lobby for ten minutes, but it’s even more annoying to wait in the lobby for twenty minutes, and it’s very annoying indeed to wait in the lobby with everyone else in the goddamn building who isn’t currently suffering from acute agoraphobia, and it’s really, really, extremely annoying to reenact the scene from Sixteen Candles where all the geeks wedge into the bathroom to see Samantha’s underpants, particularly when seventy-five-year-old men carrying string bags of pointy, sticky-outy vegetables play the “geek” parts and the elevator is the underpants, and when the elevator finally deigns to grace us with its presence, we all go “oooooh,” and then all the agoraphobics file off the elevator and turn right around to wait for it to go back up, and then I have to ride up nine floors with Grandpa’s celery romancing the back of my knee.

And the elevators like to toy with us once we’ve gotten on, too. A lot of older New York elevators hitch and crawl along — I’d call it “lurching,” but it isn’t fast enough to qualify as lurching, really — and make moany, creaky noises and generally give the passenger the dreadful impression that a consumptive nine-year-old girl with Crisco’ed palms is manning the pulleys in the basement. In the newer New York buildings, ascent proceeds at a pace that pushes you down towards the floor, fighting to keep your knees straight while the top of your skull flattens downward from the centrifugal force. The elevators in my building do both of those things, sometimes inching along at the pace of continental drift, other times swooping down glider-style on nothing but an air current and a prayer, then slamming the brakes on about half a foot below the desired floor, leaving us to clamber out as though departing a Venetian gondola — all while rattling their chains in the threatening manner of Jacob Marley. I don’t even notice the ominous clatter anymore, and in fact find it difficult to sleep without the ghostly clinking sound coming from the hallway, but nobody who visits my apartment fails to comment on it. Every single resident of the building has complained numerous times about the elevator, and the board has promised numerous times to “fix” it, but unless they hire Max Von Sydow to put on a priest’s habit and wander around near the laundry room with holy water, I don’t think there’s much anyone can do.

And I’d just like to take a moment — if by “take a moment,” we mean “rant angrily, without ceasing, all day and well into the night” — to discuss my fellow passengers. You’d think that the elevator situation would occasion a feeling of camaraderie, a “let’s pull through this together” attitude in the residents of the building. It does not. It occasions exactly nothing, save for the customary rude behavior of the people in the world who believe that they inhabit a St.-Exuperian planet all their own. I understand that people have waited, sometimes for days, for the elevator to arrive at their floor, but I do not understand why they must burst into the elevator before the door has fully opened. I do not understand why they think that shoving the door open with a shoulder will help, or why they can’t let the people who have just spent the last forty-five minutes on the elevator, trying to reach the correct floor, or, really, any floor at all, so that we might perhaps avoid throwing up or suffering a massive claustrophobic panic attack, off of the elevator. And it’s always the people on the second floor, too. Take the stairs, people on the second floor. It’s one flight. It’s down. Don’t anger the gods with your sloth. Walk down. You bastards.

I don’t understand why people have to hold the door open and talk to each other with seven other people in the elevator. I don’t understand why the men at the front of the elevator have to form a human pyramid in order to let the women, inconveniently arrayed at the back of the elevator, step off first. I mean, I do understand, but I also understand that it’s not 1948 — we appreciate the thought, gents, but for the love of God, just get out of the elevator before it changes its mind and ejects us through the top of the penthouse! We dames will fend for ourselves! Move! It! Along! And I don’t understand why the dog owners don’t take the service elevator, which actually works because it’s manned by a human and which they should take according to about seven dozen of the bylaws, instead of crowding onto the passenger elevator with their canines. The elevator has probably already made me absurdly late for my date; I don’t also need a yappy little mop launching itself at my knees because it smells the cats, on top of looking like I recently finished a relaxing stroll through the bottom of Death Valley because I had to stand in the ninety-one-degree hallway so long waiting for the elevator.

But here’s what I really don’t understand. I really don’t understand the women with the strollers. I guess I should add that I just don’t understand the strollers, period. I don’t remember my own stroller-going days, but I remember my brother’s, and back in the late seventies, a stroller consisted of a couple of poles and a little canvas butt-sling and a set of wheels and that’s it. You plunked the kid into it, you fastened the little plastic seatbelt — done. Twenty-odd years later, the average stroller is a behemoth. There’s a roof, there’s about sixteen storage areas, there’s all sorts of attachments, the kid is held in the seat by some sort of pneumatic contraption developed by NASA, and the wheels have hubcaps, people. And that’s an average stroller. Do the parents who live in my building settle for the “average” stroller? No, they do not. They buy the stroller equivalent of the Spelling mansion, the one that’s barely a CB radio away from entering itself in a monster-truck rally and flattening a chorus line of Pintos while surrounded by TEN THOUSAND POUNDS OF MUD MUD MUD, and the newfangled strollers have better safety features, sure, but first of all, it’s a two-year-old — what’s he going to do if you put him in a smaller stroller, call his union rep? He’s two! He doesn’t need a system of tubes piping oxygen-enriched air directly into his nostrils! Second of all, I peek into these SUV strollers, and some of these kids look like they shave, for real. Come on, Mom. If he’s celebrated his bar mitzvah, he can get his ass up and walk, and you can spare us all the aggro of waiting ten minutes for you to parallel-park your Playskool Expedition in the elevator while we all do our rendition of “nineteen frat boys in a phone booth” to make room for you, and the stroller, and the U-Haul you’ve got hooked up to the back. At least get power steering on the fucking thing. I’ve got people I’d like to meet in a few days, so let’s hurry this shit up. The same goes for the folks with eighty-eight suitcases, garment bags, hatboxes, backpacks, duffels, rucksacks, steamer trunks, and shipping pallets. This isn’t a Wharton novel, so unless you’ve got a body in there, either pack lighter or throw all of it out the window, because it’s faster, and I’d really rather not force my mother to identify my flattened body amid the rubble in the basement if it’s going to be festooned with your wife’s underpants.

Oh, forget it. I’ve had the same damn complaints for going on five damn years now. It’s never going to change; the board will keep promising to get an elevator repairman in here, and the elevator repairman will spend fifteen minutes trying to fix the elevator and then run, screaming and green of face, into the bosom of madness, and I’ll continue watching the Cartoon Network’s “Spiderman” marathons for tips on how to belay down the side of my building without accidentally crashing through a fifth-floor window or coming General-Zod-style through the ceiling of the doctor’s office next door. Now if you’d please excuse me, I’d like to go to the post office on Thursday, so I’m going to go wait for the elevator.

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