(Zing!)
I moved into a room underneath the elevated JMZ train line in Brooklyn one Saturday night, and began working at the Guggenheim Sunday morning. I curled my fingers around that slippery bottom rung of the art world ladder, the audio guide salesperson rung, for eight dollars an hour. My new manager Nadine, an Australian woman, let me in the side entrance before the museum opened and handed me a stack of glossy fliers.
“All right, mate, we’ve got a line of people outside, waiting to get in. I need you to bookmark ’em.’’
What could it mean to bookmark something that is not a book, but a person? To abandon him after splitting him in two with a thin promise to come back later, perhaps? Or could it be a new sexual practice, some thrilling act that previously evaded human imagination? That’s right, I walked in on the two of ’em! They was there on the floor, and they was bookmarking! No, gentle reader. “Bookmarking,” as Nadine was compelled to explain, “is where we stand outdoors, hand each person a flier, and tell them ‘Hello. We have audio guides available at the box office.’ Can you try that for me?’’
Try it I did, five mornings a week for the next six months. I proclaimed to untold thousands that we had audio guides available at the box office. And that was actually just an odd lie, because there was no box office at the Guggenheim. There was an admissions desk, yes, but it was neither box nor office. Nobody paid me much mind, anyway. Human beings, you see, display a rather narrow range of responses when they are told that audio guides are available at the box office. Very few are wildly enticed by this revelation. The great majority of museumgoers I approached did not respond at all, staring blankly past me or even studiously ignoring me. A smaller percentage would huff something like, “I can think for myself, thanks,” as though the audio guide were an Orwellian contraption designed to erase their real thoughts and replace them with propaganda. And rarely—just every now and again—some middle-aged woman in a windbreaker would get a glint in her eyes and utter, “Oh, I always do the audio.” She would say this with a sense of muted defiance, as though doing the audio were a right someone had tried to take away. I imagined her like a gambling addict, sneaking out of the house twice a week, squandering the family money on doing the audio.
“It’s important that we speak to every person,” Nadine reiterated to me one day. “I watched you miss nine this morning. And make sure to smile and be persuasive. You’re not convincing people. Our company has a permanent arrangement with the Metropolitan Museum, but not the Guggenheim. Once we get that contract, we can all relax a bit. Won’t that be nice?”
Curious about how this other half lived, I strolled over to the Metropolitan after my shift that afternoon. Sure enough, the operation was more relaxed. It took me five minutes to even find the audio desk, which I finally discovered unmarked and tucked away in a forgotten corner of the vast lobby. A sleeping woman staffed the desk, her hands and face pressed against it, recalling Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
No one napped at the Guggenheim. My colleagues and I assembled the audio gadgets at 8 a.m., as Nadine’s right-hand woman Shira, an aspiring commercial photographer fresh out of serving in the Israeli army, stood behind us with a stopwatch shouting “Faster!” as though commanding an underling to propel the Starship Enterprise into warp speed. Then, with the urgency of paramedics, we wheeled the devices on rolly carts down the spiraling ramp of the museum. I would sometimes glance over the rail for a quick and vertiginous view of our destination: the empty museum floor below.
Down on the floor we received hordes of patrons who came tottering through the rotunda, flicking sentence fragments at us from yards away. “Coat check?” We transformed ourselves into human racks, hanging headphones from our forearms. Shira manually adjusted our arms if they were not outstretched at precisely ninety degrees.
Scattered across the rotunda was an archipelago of island-desks, each with its own set of inhabitants. Mildly stylish, former art students staffed admissions, exchanging knowing glances amongst themselves as they listlessly dispensed tickets to the public. Scandinavians oversaw the concierge desk, with the help of one Chelsea gay guy who used to style the crafting guru Martha Stewart before she was sentenced to prison for insider trading. “Once Martha’s probation is up, she’s going to be bigger than ever, and we’ll work together again,” he once mumbled, putting his hands together like Renfield awaiting the return of Dracula. At the neighboring desk, the membership headquarters, mysterious figures in business attire took turns disappearing into and emerging from hidden offices.
We, the audio guide attendants, had no desk. We were the occupying force in a foreign land—or were we refugees, squatting on the outskirts of the Info station? Seeing the giant block letters that spelled INFORMATION looming above our heads, patrons often approached us with questions. However, we had been strictly forbidden from answering general museum questions, as that was not in our contract, and as, furthermore, that duty belonged to the Info Ladies.
The Info Ladies were a breed of well-to-do New York seniors who worked on a volunteer basis. There were usually at least two of them at a time—these birds did not fly alone. And yet, the desk went unstaffed more days than not. I came to understand that the Info desk existed more as a social club, a see-and-be-seen destination, than an actual service to museumgoers. While the administration furnished the station with pamphlets, exhibition catalogues, and maps, the Ladies often acted put-upon when approached with questions. Their title, after all, did not oblige them to supply information. Rather, they offered something much snappier: Info. Frances, a dainty, bejeweled creature, might inform you, for instance, that she’d been invited to a party on Park Avenue but had to decline. “Too bizzy!” she squeaked. Cookie, a butch flâneur not famous for her patience, would tell you her name if you asked, but would be unimpressed if you remembered it, though she never recalled yours. “Yep, Cookie’s the name. It was Cookie last week and it’s Cookie today.” Then there was Thelma. Thelma didn’t tell, she showed. Every time she appeared she donned a skin-tight body suit bearing cartoonish images of ropes, whips, and chains—a festive BDSM wallpaper pour le corps.
Finally, Florence. Florence didn’t have to utter a word for you to know she was Queen of the Info Ladies. By far the most elegant in dress and apathetic toward patrons, she waltzed through the Guggenheim in cream leather pants, wrapped in a cashmere shawl, with her platinum sculpted bob and long burgundy fingernails that radiated their own light. But Florence needn’t even stand at her Info post for you to understand her to be the most refined fashionista and chaste Info-giver. Eventually emancipated from the desk, Florence passed into an upper echelon, floating out into the Info-sphere. She became like Yoda after he died, acquiring the privilege of metaphysicality, just appearing, oh, here and there, as a hologram; you see, at a certain point Florence stopped coming in for her Tuesday shift. Thelma and Cookie took her place behind the desk. And yet: Florence still breezed into the museum every Tuesday, still walked to the Info desk and proceeded to chit-chat with the other two ladies, remaining the entire time on the other side of the Info desk as though she, having come full circle, were now an Info-seeker. As actual seekers approached, Florence just smiled and checked her nails, allowing Thelma and Cookie to fend off the seekers on their own.
I am Florence, Patron Saint of Info Ladies. I am named after that city which is home to 85 percent of the world’s art treasures. That is naturally why I was given my job at the Guggenheim. I was appointed. To understand what Info is, you must understand what Info is not. Info is never an answer, dear—Info is an attitude. Info may change. Something that was Info yesterday may very well not be Info today. So go ahead, ask me anything you want. Just remember: I may point you toward the exit, but you must find the elevator on your own.
While bookmarking outside, I was always on the lookout for intriguing New Yorkers. Back in the Midwest I had striven to put myself under the tutelage of the sophisticated and eccentric, and I figured pickins might be better in NYC—taste,
