LOS ANGELES « In Which Ruben Keeps A Chair In His Elevator »
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 2:23PM 
Ruben’s Elevator
by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG
Ruben Pardo works six days a week, eleven hours a day, operating a manual elevator at 5500 Wilshire Boulevard, on Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile. He is sixty-six years old. He wears his own uniform of slacks, gray sweater vest, collared shirt, and tweed blazer. He takes one bus and one train, almost two hours, to and from work. He calls himself a “stubborn son-of-a-gun.” He believes exercise keeps a person happy. He smiles often from a mouth with a scarcity of teeth. He was born in Mexico City. He voted for Obama. His wife makes him a different kind of sandwich everyday for lunch. He is one of the last manual elevator operators in Los Angeles, and next year will mark his 33rd year in the elevator—his elevator.
I visit Ruben on a Wednesday at half past noon. He’s in the middle of opening the elevator door for a willowy twenty-something who works at the art gallery upstairs. "Bye Sarah!" he says. "Bye Ruben!" she says, smiling. He turns to me, "She always gets me coffee."
I tell him who I am and why I’m standing in his elevator and he asks me to come back on Friday at five o’clock. "Because you see they keep me very busy here, in and out, in and out." Ruben smiles all the while he talks, fast, with an eager, Latin accent.
A young man approaches with a mop. Ruben sees him and points to the end of the lobby corridor good-naturedly, "Go over there for a minute, we’re making a business deal here." And then to me again, "So you come back Friday and ask me fifty, one-hundred questions because it would be my honor. Is that OK? You must have a thousand appointments. You come back here on Friday and walk in this way right here just like you did and we will make a story." He sees me to the exit. "Hasta Viernes. I know Spanish!"
At this time of day, the lobby corridor is cool and dim. If you visit, you’ll find Ruben here, walking back and forth, going up and down, and listening for the ding of the call button. It's a breezeway more than a corridor, with glass double doors on the north and south sides and a staircase to the second floor beside the elevator. Display windows face the elevator, enclosing posters of the photography exhibition one floor up, Violent Times.
Ruben keeps a chair in the elevator, but it’s a relic from decades back. He rarely sits. He feels standing is better for the metabolism. "This old timer used to sit in here and do his crossword and not go up until three buttons were lit,” Ruben tells me. The elevator is cozy and heavy and antiquated. The doors are framed by dark green marble. The old dial above the frame hasn’t worked for years. The tile floor of the corridor is a beautiful, fragmented art-deco pattern.
Twelve stories above, a big blue sign wraps around the building’s narrow tower for all the city to see: DESMONDS. If you ask Ruben about this, he’ll take your hand and lead you outside and show you that, contrary to popular belief, this is not the Desmond’s Building. "I’ll prove it you," he says, pointing to a plaque beside the front entrance, "Wilshire Tower." And there it is, completed in 1929.
When Ruben began work here in 1976, the building still housed the old Desmond’s department store, but it had already fallen from its deco glory. Today, the grand curved windows flanking the ground floor, once showcases displaying designer clothing to traffic on the Miracle Mile, advertise a Hollywood Video and a Kinkos. But inside the lobby corridor, when I return at five o’clock on Friday, you wouldn’t know. The late afternoon light slants in just enough to warm the mustiness into nostalgia. I am a woman shopping in pearls and here is Ruben, refined in his tweed, effulgent, greeting me at the door.
He remembers my name and we go right to the elevator. Someone is buzzing. "We’re going up," Ruben says. He cranks the lever and up we go. The door opens and it’s a man from the gallery. "This is Brian." Brian says hi. "This is Yvonne, she’s interviewing me." And down we go again.
Ruben stops the car tenderly, levels it exactly with the floor. "As an elevator operator," he says, "what you have to know how to do is level the platform with the floor. In other words, it’s gotta be even, it’s gotta be straight. Otherwise someone might fall."
We all step out and Ruben tells Brian to have a good weekend. "You enjoy your 48, I’ll enjoy my 24!" We walk to the door; Ruben leans on the handle, into that romantic slope of late light and smiles. "I’m a workaholic," he says. His wife doesn’t mind. "I met her on the streets in East Los Angeles. I was taking the bus from downtown and every time she was coming on another bus vice versa. So I kept seeing the same girl over and over. And I was interested. So eventually, with time, I asked her for a date. Guess what was our first movie?"
“What year would it have been?" I say.
"We got married in seventy-two. I think this was the late sixties. But anyway guess what was our first film together? And we will never forget it."
"Fellini?"
"Gone with the Wind!"
Ruben likes to dance. He shows me one of his moves, a jazzy slide. "I was a big dancer," he says, "in my prime time." He raises his arms and spins around. "I love music. I believe that people who have music in their lives, they’re more happy, people who have humor in their life that’s healthy, who do a lot of exercise like me, every twenty four hours, that’s healthy. In other words I'll cut it to you short, I have a positive mind so I do everything positive. Because I believe that people who are always complaining and criticizing and grouchy, I believe that—oh someone’s coming." Ruben heads for the door, then stops. The someone had the wrong building.
"Do you have a secret to happiness?" I ask.
"It’s all in control," says Ruben. "We all have will power. So when you put your will power to work you can correspond it to any channel of your life. For instance, do you know what a phase is? P-h-a-s-e—" the phone rings in the elevator, a real bring-bring, the kind you don’t hear much anymore. Ruben hurries to get it.
"Wilshire Towers,” he says. "Oh OK I’m going now." He looks at me. We’re going up.
The elevator makes a satisfying creak when Ruben closes the door. I hear the hum of the pulleys as we rise, the machine at work. This time the door opens to an older man with small round glasses, an architect.
"Hello Ruben," he says. Ruben greets him and begins explaining the trick to opening the elevator door. "It’s heavy,” he says, "I open it with two fingers." He holds up his middle and forefingers. "You really have to put your weight in it. It’s difficult."
"Not as difficult as Ruben would have you think," says the architect. He smirks.
"Okay, okay then," says Ruben. "Enjoy your weekend sir."
We’re downstairs again and it’s getting close to seven, the hour Ruben closes up the building and goes home. I ask him why he loves elevators.
"The public,” he says. He clasps his hands behind his back and muses. “I love the public. The people coming in and out. You live and you learn from them."
Ruben’s dream was to work in an elevator. He came to Los Angeles from Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up after his family immigrated from Mexico when he was a child. He was unemployed and desperate for work when he found an advertisement for the job at the unemployment office downtown. He had tried janitorial work, delivery work, but what he looked for day after day was an elevator operator opening. The ad was the smallest on the board, just a "little piece of paper."
"I’m a Taurus. When I want something I go for it," Ruben says. "Nine times out of time I get it. Like this job. This is the way it happened. I came to look for the job here because I found the want ad little piece of paper. And I even brought the little paper with me. I brought it with me because I wanted to make sure it was the right address, the right name, the right everything. So I came over here to this elevator all dressed up like I like to dress. I don’t like to dress sloppy. I do it just for myself. For kicks. Not to follow the leader. Anyway, I rang the bell and they had this old timer there. I told the old timer, please take me to 11. I have an appointment with the manager. So this guy took me to the 11th floor and at that time the woman used the whole floor as a second home. And she had a fireplace. She said hi, Are you Mr. Pardo? Yes, I’m coming for the elevator operator position, can I sit down? And then she said would you like to have a cup coffee? And then guess what? This is the funny part. You know what was my—what’s the word?"
"Reply?"
"Yes, thank you. You know what was my reply? I told her I’ll take the coffee after you hire me. She tried me for eight hours the next day, and I prayed please, please God to keep me strong."
"Do ever read a book while you’re working or get tired?" I ask.
"No, no. I got too much in my mind,” Ruben says. “I like to focus on what I’m doing so I can do it more professionally. Oh you know that joke about the cup of coffee? She never gave me the cup of coffee!"
I ask Ruben if he’s a religious man.
"Yes and no. When I was a kid, in my prime time, we had to go to Catholic school at a certain time, to church at a certain time, everything had to be spic and span. That must be where I learned to dress. I'm only religious now in my heart and in my conscious. It’s just between me and Him. I’m going to tell you something Yvonne, always think positive. If you have a problem, find a solution. Don’t worry on it so much. That’s what I always say. Don’t try to control so much. That’s when you mess up your brain."
I say that writers generally have messed up brains. "See, you are a writer," Ruben says. "Think positively on all levels of your life and put that to your writing."
I ask Ruben if he wants a cup of coffee. He says oh yes, it will keep him going. He tells me to try Quizno’s down the street. The traffic outside on Wilshire is bright and loud. Leaving Ruben, and being suddenly amid the noise of the city, it seems to me there is Ruben, and there is the world. His lobby corridor is the kind of place one dips into from the rain, newspaper overhead, and discovers a secret. The building manager says Ruben is the go-to guy. The gallerina upstairs says everyone loves Ruben. That he hopes to retire when he’s seventy, that his departure is an inevitability, is the sort of quiet loss this Boulevard will feel immediately as a blip, but eventually, resoundingly, as an absence.
Ruben worries about his retirement, his benefits, his income. He doesn’t know if he’ll have enough. He and his wife go to downtown Pasadena on Sundays. She likes to go out to eat, Ruben says, because she cooks all week.
Quizno’s doesn't serve coffee. And neither does the caveish Indian Restaurant next door. The diner attached to the El Rey Theater, is, inexplicably, a diner that doesn’t serve coffee. It’s been 15 minutes and I told Ruben I’d be five. I hustle down a few more blocks to Ralphs. I almost run. I should have told him it would take longer.
Ralphs is a mess. I find someone who directs me to the coffee and gives me a cup. I choose the Guatemalen blend. I bring the cup to the register and the clerk says, no charge, don’t worry about it, you can have it.
An act of giving in a corporate environment is heartwarming, even heartbreaking, and I can’t believe it. This coffee is for Ruben. When I get back to the building he’s fiddling with keys. I tell him about the coffee. "Really?" he says. "I told you! It’s all about thinking positively."
It’s time for Ruben to close-up and he has a bus to catch. "But I wanna tell you something,” he says. "You can call me here anytime, whenever you want and ask me anything. Just call up and I have the phone in the elevator."
"Do you have the direct number?"
Ruben says yes and pats his pockets. He files through his wallet and takes out a card, hands it to me, and tells me to copy it down. There’s a handwritten number and above it, also handwritten, and in all caps, black ink: RUBEN’S ELEVATOR. "You call me anytime!" he says.
Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She tumbls here.
"Waiting" — Shiny Toy Guns (mp3)
"Turn to Real Life" — Shiny Toy Guns (mp3)
"Le Disko" — Shiny Toy Guns (mp3)
Shiny Toy Guns website
Reader Comments (13)
my heart is warmed
this is so good! one of my fav things TR has published i think.
It is rumored that Ruben is currently cheating on his wife.
When Ornette Coleman first came to LA, from Houston, in the early 50s, his day job was elevator operator at the Bullocks Wilshire department store, about 3 and a half miles up the street (but, mysteriously, also on the Miracle Mile).
love this story
Great story. It put a smile to my face:)
i am ruben's brother-in-law, joe. i grew up with this guy! he is one of the coolest people i have ever known. i am a writer also, and one day i hope to write his story.
hi joe-- that is great! everybody loves ruben.
I'M RUBEN WIFE, MY BROTHER TOLD ME ABOUT THIS ARTICLE (JOE VASTANO), MARRIED TO THE GUY FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS, AND HE'S NOT CHEATING (ALEX). I WAS SURPRISE ABOUT THIS ARTICLE,SOMETHING RUBEN FORGOT TO TELL ME (A LOT ON HIS MIND).
It is rumored that Ruben's wife may soon kick my ass.
hi trudy--- alex's jokes arent always so funny
I used to work in this building, and Ruben was easily the best thing about it. His enthusiasm and good spirit are practically Rudy-level (as in the Notre Dame film Rudy. Not Giuliani or some other inferior Rudy). Thanks for this article; he deserves all the recognition in the world.
I Thank God every day for my Brother Ruben. He brings a smile to your face no matter how bad things get. As we were growing up I think We were not as close as we are today. We get together for sure on all holidays. I love cooking for him. He loves animals. We had a dog named tiger which loved to play football soccer for years and Ruben would make it a point to come often on his day off on Sundays to spend time with tiger. I truly believe that
tiger did not give up and lived to be almost 15 years old because of Ruben. Ruben is a special Man and am proud that He is my Brother. I love You Ruben!!!