Chapter One


The night I went to the St. Regis hotel and accidentally crashed the birthday party of the Princess of Spain was the same night I was crowned superintendent of 287 West 12th Street. Both events took me completely by surprise and both led me to Gregory the exterminator, who wound up saving me in ways I didn't even know I needed to be saved. (I don't mean saved in a Jesus way. This is not a Jesus-saving kind of story.)

To be honest, I was not even aware that Spain still had a princess until I was standing under the chandeliers in the hotel's Cavendish Room with my mouth stuffed full of her free tapas. I thought modern royalty was the purview of the British--Charles, Harry, William, tragically dead Di--something to keep the international tabloid business afloat. And I certainly didn't know I was at a birthday party. My black silk Ann Taylor sheath with cracked rhinestone brooches on the shoulder straps, a fifteen-dollar score at Housing Works Thrift Shop, was not meant to be employed in a way that would infringe upon a personally meaningful event: birthday parties, like wedding receptions, were off-limits under a set of hastily conceived crashing criteria. Tag and I had agreed upon this moral distinction a year ago, beneath the Akoustolith tiles outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, right after we were unpleasantly outed at the sixtieth birthday party for the CEO of a door-hinge distribution company.

Tanya Granger, known as Tag to distinguish her from a nursery school classmate named Tanya Tokowsky, had called me an hour earlier to announce that she was hungry.

"I've got frozen pizza and orange juice," I told her, proud of my stocked fridge.

"Julia Child would have been thrilled. No, we're going to the St. Regis for croquetas and calamares," Tag informed me. "King of Spain. An anniversary of some kind of truce. Or a trade agreement. Something."

Tag's days were bookended by strong coffee and even stronger alcohol, and not always in the order you'd expect. We'd begun crashing out of financial necessity--finding free food and drink in New York City was a crucial means of survival--but the entertainment value of our pursuit had rapidly become apparent. And Tag had been in dire need of entertaining around the time we'd started freeloading. Usually rational to a fault, she had impulsively married a Swedish businessman and divorced him six months later, all before the age of twenty-four. "Never accept a marriage proposal made immediately upon surviving the sinking of a Thai ferryboat," she'd warn me sternly, as if this was a peril that regularly presented itself.

Since her narrow escape from wedlock, she had approached fun very seriously, as seriously as she did her work on behalf of the Museum of Natural History, which required her to slit open the bellies of sharks in places like Madagascar and Borneo. Whether she had a Fallkniven F2 fisherman's knife in her hand or a dirty martini, Tag was all business, and she took charge of the ground rules.

In the bowels of Grand Central, decked out and slurping cheap chili in the food court, we agreed that proms were acceptable crash targets. Even though at twenty-seven we were hardly past our prime, we were just old enough to instill some Mrs. Robinson excitement among the restless male members of the Teaneck/Mamaroneck/New Rochelle senior class, who would otherwise be slamming into each other to the beat of "Rock Lobster." They knew we were interlopers and they welcomed fresh blood. The chaperones kept mum because our enthusiasm on the dance floor--we hit proms for the eighties music--lured the future of America into chaperonable view. Occasionally, one...