There was a season of my life where elevators were part of the daily transition from who I was to who I needed to be. Before I went to college, I could probably name all of the buildings I’d ridden an elevator in. Then, my freshman year, my room was on the seventh floor, and while I took the stairs more than anyone I knew, I also used the elevator aplenty.
DING
During our senior year of college, my boyfriend and I set out on a road trip that started with a hotel stay in Atlanta. We were playing house in many ways, pretending to be the kind of adults who stay in hotels and eat at restaurants while we were very much still students without much of a plan, working retail jobs for spending money. We were staying in the Buckhead area as if we had money to shop with or somewhere important to be.
I remember wanting to stay in the hotel, not explore or do much of anything. These were the days of lingering. Pre-smart phones. Pre-streaming TV. Also, this was years before I was aware of my introverted tendencies. As for entertainment, you got what you got whether you like it or not. After rotting inside, I allowed him to convince me to leave the room. We weren’t going anywhere in particular. We’d canceled our dinner plans. We were just going out. There. To get some air and walk around.
The elevator arrived, and we got on. We were staying on a higher floor of the Sofitel so we had a ways to go to get down to the lobby. The elevator stopped on the way down and when the door opened, in walked J.C. Chasez. From N’SYNC. I was in total shock. I considered myself a devoted fan, choosing them over the Backstreet Boys. I also chose him over Justin Timberlake. And there he was.
For a second, I didn’t believe it. I imagine my mouth hung open wide enough to see my permanent retainer. I remember looking at my boyfriend to see if he knew what was happening. I could tell he sensed something but wasn’t clear on the stakes. I looked back at J.C., my crush of crushes for so many years prior. Or rather, I should say, I looked down at him because I towered over him in my heels and with my height. And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t tear up my heart just a bit. He didn’t acknowledge me, but he smiled, so I knew that he knew that I knew who he was.
He started to say something to the normal-sized man beside him as the elevator door opened to the upper lobby level. I jumped off quickly, leaving my boyfriend confused both by the palpable emotions in the elevator and the fact that this wasn’t where we needed to get off. I was completely breathless and nearly lost my footing as the door behind us closed.
I usually think of myself as someone who pushes aside their fears and steps into a moment, but this wasn’t one of those moments. For the first time in my life, I lost my mind by the end of the only second-long elevator ride.
DING
For a very brief moment in time, I worked for a large university cancer center that had a satellite office location in Santa Monica. Every day, I drove from my apartment in Palms, west on the 10, over the insanity that is the 405 interchange, and exited just before you were close enough to get a glimpse of the Pacific. The traffic was always horrendous, morning and night. The distance from my apartment was just long enough that riding my bike on surface streets seemed too far.
Every day, I passed the beautiful office complex that housed the PR firm I had never made it into. I’d gone on a night-time informal interview the same week I started an advertising job, feeling like I was a moral scoundrel. I’d taken an editing test, which I was confident I’d done well on. A second interview didn’t net out. My friend of a friend who had gotten me the interview said she worked on Burton, the snowboard company, and the interview was about generating press for Wal-Mart. I think I tanked myself. But every day, I drove by wondering what if.
Because parking was non-existent, the cancer center gave all employees parking spots in the underground deck. I parked my silver Civic, bitter that my commute again took over thirty minutes to cover the five-mile drive. I expected to ride the elevator up to the lobby and then switch to the stairs to avoid the front lobby, where patients were already accumulating.
The highlight of this thankless job of scheduling one cancer patient after another for their infusions and appointments was without a doubt my coworkers. The instant comradery turned into hijinx so quickly, the six months I lasted in the job filled up my heart with friendship and laughter for years to come. Together, we unfolded the reality of working in the field of big medicine. We took on an abusive doctor. We spotted the medical director mattress shopping with his mother. We knew who wasn’t certified to be inserting injections and who was drinking on the clock.
Three of us were there, showing as much compassion as we could, to patients who all started to sound the same. A fourth kept getting hired and then they would move on. One girl took her shoes off and we knew it without looking. There was once a guy that joined the team and he brought in DVDs to share, no doubt terrified by our friendship and inside language.
The scheduling software was running on DOS, which looks like you ended up in the mainframe. It took backward learning to understand how to slot-in various appointments into the system. We also spent time building our MySpace pages, showing each other the new song or glittery background we’d selected for that week.
When I rode the elevator to the lobby, I decided at the last minute not to take the stairs. That was where our morning drinker got his first fix, and I didn’t feel like running into him. So I waited to ride the patient elevator up and was joined at the very last second by a man who boarded looking down with a hat that hid his face. I slid over to space out and gave him one side of the compartment. He slowly looked up, and I could see that he was handsome. A Black man in his 50s. The elevator dinged, and he smiled at me. A wide, gorgeous smile that felt like genuine kindness.
At the front desk, a coworker was organizing the papers for the day.
“I think I just rode the elevator with Denzel Washington,” I said to her, half joking.
“He’s here!?” she said, dropping all her papers and running around the desk to catch the elevator.
I could see him still inside the car as the doors closed, his smile fading, and his head dropping to look at the floor and hide his face again.
DING
Back in the Obama years, before politics became entertainment and everyone became rabid, I worked at the DNC, which is housed only on the third floor of the building with the name. The elevator was commonly used as a measurement of sorts. By knowing the building layout, you knew where people were going. The basement housed the media center, so it wasn’t uncommon to see electeds taking the elevator to record a voiceover or stream an interview. The second floor housed the DCCC. Staff who got off there were oil in the water of staff who rode to the third floor.
Too many people were stuffed into that peachy pink stucco building that sat between the House side of the Capital and a DC power plant. You could easily work there for a year and not see every person from the building. And in the seldom times that we got visited by motorcade-driven electeds, you saw even fewer. They draped the windows in black tarp so no one outside could see through them and used keycards to lock doors we usually had access to.
Once, we had a tornado warning - an actual tornado in D.C. - and had to file into the underground parking garage via stairs. I was pregnant at the time and was permitted to use the elevator to get down there and back up. When the threat had passed and we were rereleased to the wild of Capital Hill and Twitter, I realized how many of my workaholic peers appeared to be in cardiac distress from climbing up four floors of stairs.
When my cousin came to visit my office, I took her on the elevator to show her where I spent my days looking out the window at Sharon Armesto Memorial Park. We looked down at the few townhouses that were used for special events, and I showed her my desk in what was a former breakroom. They’d removed two lower cabinet doors from a kitchen counter and called it a desk. Only when I told them I was pregnant did they get serious about a chair.
As she was leaving, I rode down to the lobby with her, and the elevator stopped on the second floor on the way down. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro stepped in with some members of her staff. My cousin looked at me, but her face wasn’t one of recognition or awe. I’m not sure if she saw that in mine either, despite feeling a bit that way. We let the congresswoman off first and then plodded to the lobby to say our goodbyes while I fired off a text to my coworkers back upstairs about my most recent star sighting.
DING
The season of elevators is over for now. I hardly ride them anymore. There’s no elevator in my house or my favorite coffee shop. Our library is all one story. The one at the gym is for cleaners and handicapped people; plus, it’s the gym. Lacrosse fields and playgrounds have no need for them. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have another season of elevators. I don’t want a job in a box ever again. I don’t want basement parking or workaholic headline chasers as my peers. I don’t ride elevators anymore. Like the blazers I’ve donated and the office clothes that gathered dust, they are part of a past that was gone long before I noticed it was missing. I’ll have to find a new reason to be in elevators. I guess I’ll have to travel more.