3 Excerpts from Mr. Jefferson's Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories

 

  A little BACKSTORY FOR MR. JEFFERSON’S PIANO

  I’m a darned good storyteller, so I had no problem producing stories for Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and the Fourth of July. For some reason, a Labor Day post this year had me stumped. One of my advisers told me I shouldn’t get political with my FB posts since I’m trying to sell romance novels, not social revolution.

  Normally, I’d agree with my consultant except that my next book, Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories, is a workplace memoir about working in a NYC housing agency with the mission of finding and creating affordable housing for low-income folks. I thought it would a fabulous idea to link the release of my workplace memoir with this year’s Labor Day celebration. What better way to celebrate Labor Day than to release a book about working?

  While I said my new book, a workplace memoir, isn’t a romance novel, it kind of is. I’ll admit it now. I fell in love with my job in housing. I’d worked a variety of jobs in my adult life, but I’d never found one I truly liked long enough to stay and make a career of it. Whenever I took on a new job, I always vowed I’d stay three years and no more.

  At seventeen, I worked during my last year of high school. I was a sales clerk at O’Neil’s, Ohio’s equivalent of Macy’s. I stayed on the job a year and returned to work the holidays for another year. A few years later, I worked as a sales clerk for the real Macy’s at Herald Square after a stint at B Altman’s on their “executive flying squad” training to be a junior executive. I hated being on my feet all day. I hated waiting on rude, annoying folks who never bought anything anyway but wasted plenty of time pretending they would.

  I also worked in New York’s other housing agency, the one with the projects, as a housing teller, then as a senior housing teller. My job was applying rent payments to tenant accounts. I also charged additional fees when tenants were late with their rent or when tenants caused stoppages, broke windows, and damaged elevators. I hated explaining new additional charges to people who couldn’t afford pay regular rent. Forty years later, I still remember the abuse I took back then. Thank God the payment windows in the office were bulletproof and doors were reinforced steel with a buzzer access system. I wanted to deal with people in a real way and not the numbers they represented. I couldn’t wait to leave that bean-counting job.

  My next job as a real property manager just seemed to fall in my lap. I was working nights at Macy’s when a friend told me how the city needed people to manage their portfolio of distressed properties. Property management was to become the career I hated so much but the career I loved so much too. I found working in the field for city housing to be exciting all the time. I never knew what the next day would bring.

  On Monday, I could be evicting drug dealers from a vacant apartment. Tuesday, I could be rescuing a kitten from a sealed-up wall. What I hated was how I couldn’t get things done in a reasonable amount of time so life would be easier for the tenants under my purview. There was always some rule or regulation to follow that I never heard of, which always said I had to get permission from some suit downtown to do what was needed. The same “suits” made it clear they didn’t give a damn about me or my work problems or making life better for tenants.

  I’m a stubborn cuss, so at first, I stayed on my real property manager job because I couldn’t admit defeat. I had issues with authority figures who demanded things that didn’t make sense. I wanted to beat the suits at their own game. Funny thing, I started to find my way around the regulations and rules the suits designed to entrap me. I got good at avoiding all the pitfalls and lures. I discovered I could actually help my tenants if I just thought things through and developed a strategy. I started to feel proud of what I did and the job I had with the city of New York.

  Read more about my experiences working in the field with my less fortunate brothers and sisters in the following selected short stories and blog posts from Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories.