How do you pay only $440 a month to live in Manhattan?
Short of being lucky enough to benefit from rent control, you could try to save money by moving to a really small place in a really bad neighborhood. Even in 1991, though, with violent crime at a historic peak in New York, that was a stretch.
My solution was to live in International House on 124th Street, which required an application and a personal essay. It was, and still is, a place for graduate students and young professionals, with two-thirds of the residents being from other countries. My room was 8 feet by 11 feet with a sink and a shared bathroom in the hallway.
I really liked living there, except for one small thing. Well, hundreds of small things. When I moved into my room, it was infested with roaches. I’m no stranger to them having been born in New York City, but I mean INFESTED. The previous resident hadn’t bothered to throw away his food and it had been there for a while, turning the room into an insect picnic. They came running out of the dresser so I couldn’t put my things away and had to keep my suitcase sealed. I’d often wake up with roaches in my bed. The silver lining? They scored me a dinner with Henry Kissinger.
What do roaches have to do with the recently departed diplomat? If you’re one of his harsher critics that might not sound like a stretch. In my case, though, as a graduate student in International Affairs at Columbia and also at the Harriman Institute for Soviet and Eastern European studies, he was near the top of my list for people whose brain I would have liked to pick at that moment. This was less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and three months before the end of the Soviet Union.
About a week into my stay at International House I was trying to spend as little time as possible in my room. The office thought I was exaggerating and told me I had to wait another week for the exterminator. One Friday night there was a party for new residents. It featured a raffle for a set of luggage from a travel agent in the building (remember them?) and also one to either have a seminar with or to attend a dinner with a keynote speaker at International House’s $1,000 a plate fundraiser. That speaker was Henry Kissinger so I put in my name for both.
I got tired of waiting for the winner of the luggage raffle to be announced so I went to the bar in the basement and then to bed. I was working 30+ hours a week that semester and taking six classes so I was really tired. Bright and early Saturday morning I was woken up by the phone in my room. Brushing a roach off of myself, I picked up and heard a cheery greeting from Barbara Evans, who was the wife of the president of I-House, Gordon Evans.
“We were looking for you last night. Congratulations–you won the luggage!”
The unwanted wake-up call up by someone who was (sort of) in a position of responsibility for my squalid living conditions didn’t spark the most gracious response. I told her how upset I was about the roaches and the lack of response. As soon as I put the receiver down, I realized how rude I had been. Later that day I left a handwritten note in the office apologizing. Mrs. Evans was (or is, I hope-here’s an article from just three years ago about her and Mr. Evans and their experience at a retirement community at Oberlin College) a cheery, trailing wife of a member of the WASP foreign policy establishment. She had married him and left college before graduating, living all over the developing world, including Pakistan, Ghana, and Nigeria, from the 1950s to the 1970s.
A couple of days later I received a lovely note back from Mrs. Evans suggesting that I scatter some boric acid to control the roaches (I did and it helped). I also felt like even more of an ass for being so rude to this lovely woman. We exchanged a couple more notes. About a week later I was informed that I had somehow won BOTH of the other raffles–the seminar and the dinner.
This was obviously her doing. Not only that but I was seated at the table with Mr. & Mrs. Evans and the guest of honor himself. Various people who had paid $1,000 to hear his wisdom kept walking over to be introduced to the great man.
Also seated at the table were John Whitehead, who had been chairman of Goldman Sachs and Deputy Secretary of State, and his wife, Nancy Dickerson, the “First Lady of TV News.” I was such a naive dummy that I had only the vaguest idea of what Goldman Sachs was. Years later my favorite boss ever, then CS First Boston research chief John Conlin, joked that if I got an offer from Goldman he’d pack my bags himself.
Others knew better and, during the reception, a young Asian woman barged her way into the group as I was chatting with Messrs Kissinger and Whitehead. Ignoring Henry, she shoved her résumé into Mr. Whitehead’s hands. His wife looked horrified so I guess the ploy didn’t work. My I-House buddies Vik and Phil laughed at me for not asking for an internship.
Anyway, Kissinger is the man I was awed to meet. I wasn’t too smooth, fumbling questions and looking less-than-sharp in my $130 suit. I actually had a very hard time understanding his froggy-voiced, German-accented answers. I didn’t know enough to ingratiate myself and ask someone for a job.
I do think I got more out of it than a nice memory and a funny story, though. It was an early lesson in being nice to people. It isn’t just the right thing to do–occasionally what goes around comes around. Lacking family connections, I got my start in my first career, Investment banking, and my second career, financial journalism, through chance meetings. (Hi Zoli, hi Gabby!).
Ironically, this was probably the high point of my foreign policy geekery. Several days earlier my I-House and SIPA buddy Vik told me about his sad life as an investment banker before going to grad school. I had zero idea about finance, but I was curious about his weird, lucrative former profession. He said I could just take all the finance classes at Columbia Business School (which is why I was taking the maximum six classes a semester instead of four) and get hired to privatize companies in Eastern Europe. I spent a fascinating and financially-rewarding decade helping to do that. I’m so glad I did it that way instead of working for some stuffy nongovernmental bureaucracy or as a diplomat.
Likewise, I’m very fortunate that I didn’t become an academic. I have lots of respect for people buried in archives and presenting papers at conferences. Newspaper articles with a fraction of the depth but multiples of the reach are more my speed. In college I was fascinated by Kissinger, the ultimate academic-diplomat. It felt almost unreal to have dinner with him, but neither of those paths would have been right for me.
Spencer Jakab 