It’s tucked behind the dining room, between the massive metal walk-in refrigerator that’s the size of my bedroom in Forest Hills, and the hotel laundry, with its humming industrial front-loading washers and dryers emitting hot chemical vapors morning and night. When the wind is right, and even when it’s not, the stench of souring, cheesy milk spills out through the walk-in’s rotting rubber door gaskets, which are disintegrating with age. The peeling EDR doors—wood-framed, double-screened from top to bottom, torn in spots, the desiccated carcasses of ancient flies trapped and rattling between them—swing open and closed all day, with employees going in and out for free cups of industrial coffee that tastes like a metal pipe. We range in age from sixteen to thirty-one, and we gather at the EDR three times a day; a green plastic transistor radio sits on the windowsill, blaring an endless loop of America and The Allman Brothers and Pure Prairie League. The groundskeepers—we call them the Yardbirds—come in for breakfast first, because they’ve been doing manual labor since before dawn and are starving.
