by Jacob Tomsky
Nice.
Let’s call the hotel, for various reasons soon to be obvious, the Bellevue Hotel.
Welcome to the Bellevue.
After my secret tour, everything accelerated into hyper-speed. They shuffled me through the system so fast I was pissing into a drug-test cup before I asked exactly what position I had qualified for.
“Position? Oh, front desk. Already got a uniform suit for you, too. Last guy, well, he no longer lives in New York. He no longer lives, actually. Just kidding. Good news is he was just about your size. Any surprises with that drug test?”
“No, sir.”
“You took one of those detox teas? Just messing with you. I hope you did, though. Anyway, okay, so, uh, what’s the name on the name tag?”
So, what’s the name on the name tag? It was like a warden asking me what number I wanted on my orange jumper. But I needed the money, and even though it was just a front desk gig, I couldn’t believe the hourly they were offering. Not that I was incredibly surprised; the hotel business has a very competitive starting wage. If hotels didn’t keep a high starting wage, they would have the same turnover as McDonald’s. You’ll notice McDonald’s isn’t really known for customer service. You have to pay a little more if you expect someone to train properly, stick around, care at all, and, you know, not sort through luggage looking for iPods to steal.
So, what was the name on the name tag? It was time for a change.
“Employee X958B27.”
“What?”
“Tom.”
“Oh, Tom. T … O … M. Got it.”
I looked at my new boss (“Same as the old boss.” —The Who), and he looked at me.
“Well … welcome aboard.”
Does every new boss in every new job say this? Or just hotel gigs? Welcome aboard. As if getting hired were similar to stepping onto a yacht, which it isn’t (unless you’re boarding the yacht to clean the toilets).
Well, I was aboard. Three months of searching for any other kind of profession and nothing. After I broke down, it took forty-eight hours before someone was already carving me a name tag in the hotel business. Fine. Whatever. Sure. Fine. Whatever. I needed to make rent. Whatever. Thanks, New York.
Jyll was actually disappointed. I believe she wanted to keep my deposit and have her ridiculously dressed boyfriend move in.
After getting the job, I stayed up all night pounding Coors after Coors and staring out the window again, waiting for day to break. I was so far from everyone I’d ever known. My family was scattered across the country. My friends, all those I left behind, perhaps no longer retained a memory of our acquaintance. Only a handful of people in New Orleans would remain my friends, and certainly, as I sank into this city, they might soon forget me. Now here I was, drinking alone in an apartment with three strangers who only wanted my rent and my absence. I stayed awake until the sky above the city grew felt gray before locking myself in my bedroom to sleep the entire day away. I had to. I started my overnight shift that night.
There I was, name-tagged up again, pinned down, literally. It’s standard procedure to start on the overnight shift and work your way up. Even beyond the fact that most people can’t stand working the graveyard shift, so the new hire must slug it out until there is a change in the regiment above (a.k.a. someone gets fired), it also happens to be an ideal shift to train on. The desk is dead. Plenty of time to struggle with the new system and be ignorant about your own property. People don’t expect crazy quality from front desk agents at 3:00 a.m. They just expect them not to be totally crazy.
So I set myself to the task of learning a new property, getting a headache from the new PMS (forgive me), and locking down the answers to the questions I was going to be asked over and over and over again, beginning at the beginning. For example: “Where is the bathroom?” Well, where the hell is the bathroom? What are the gym hours, cost of continental breakfast, do we have the Golf Channel, how does one dial out internationally, where the fuck are the ice machines, how do I lock the in-room safe, who makes our pillows because they are fabulous, how do you get rid of the blinking light on the phone, where is the closest place to buy cuff links, what’s the fax number, is the room available that has the tub and two twin beds facing north at the end of the hall with double sinks in the bathroom and one of the desks against the window so you can look out over the Hudson River while you surf porn on the free wireless? I’m sorry, sir, that room is a fantasy that only exists in your frequent-traveler brain. And wireless is not free, it’s $9.95 for a twenty-four-hour period.
While getting up to speed on the system and hotel info, I was also going slightly mental. Living the vampire lifestyle is taxing in more ways than you can imagine. You can’t sleep properly, you can’t eat properly, you can’t even get drunk properly. It is quite possible to spend week after week being confused. Just generally bewildered, as if you took a blow to the head. But some people love the graveyard shift. That’s what a property really wants, dedicated overnight agents. Maybe the agents are going to school during the day and can’t afford to miss classes. Maybe they have children, and working overnight alleviates the need for babysitters (though husband and wife never see each other). Maybe they are just crazy, scary, freaky night people. Whatever their reason, they are a godsend to any hotel. Most commonly, hotels get stuck with an agent who is forced into the shift and always calls in sick on the Friday overnight, causing the poor Friday late shift to stay and cover (the Friday late shift being just slightly more desirable than overnight and usually an agent’s next rung on the shift ladder).
I was dependable, though. Always on time, I clocked in at 11:00 every night (even getting in a little early on Fridays to relieve the evening desk workers; those guys are ready to get the hell out as fast as possible). I wavered behind my terminal, bewildered, bracing myself on the desk at 2:00 a.m., splashing water on my face at 3:00 a.m., eating a chocolate bar and drinking a Red Bull at 4:00 a.m., popping into the back office to slap myself hard in the face at 5:00 a.m., greeting the early-riser guests and beginning to check out rooms at 6:00 a.m., my mouth tasting like the smell coming from the wilting and unchanged flower display at 6:05 a.m., counting the minutes at 6:06 a.m., feeling as if I’ve ruined my whole life at 6:21 a.m., dreaming about dreaming at 6:32 a.m., squinting with hatred at the sun sliding into the lobby at 6:43 a.m., thinking about absolutely nothing, my head sort of rolling around, eyes twitching and staring down the hallway at 6:51 a.m., at the end of which, next to the elevators, is the door that leads to the employee locker rooms, where my relief, hopefully, is on time and changing into uniform, then stumbling downstairs at 7:01 a.m. and fighting with everything I have, mustering all the strength and stamina and intelligence left in my sizzled brain, focusing and concentrating on one solitary task, determined not to let it break me—untying the double knot on my right dress shoe, which always seems to get stuck, picking at the knot with blurry fingers that seem to be made of string—then taking the train home to lie in my bed, the bed I’ve been absolutely fantasizing about all night, only to find the sun painting yellow neon on my closed eyelids and my body waking up for some reason, wanting now to move and be active, but I put a pillow over my face and take deep, deep breaths until I fall into a hot, twitchy sleep that lasts no more than three hours.
I might have been confused (all the time), but I could already tell something was wrong with the overnight manager. His name was Julio, and though the policy in almost every hotel is to remain clean shaven (with the exception, absurdly, of allowing mustaches), he kept it Latin-style scruffy. I also noticed, during certain interactions with late-night guests, he would throw me a cautious look and then escort them to a saggy couch to finish discussing his business in private. These were guests who paid cash, guests who were accompanied by prostitutes or who would be shortly once they wrapped up this shady business deal with Julio. We talked very little (his choice), and he was often absent from the lobby for hours at a time.
There was definitely somethi
ng wrong with the overnight bellman. But his something wrong I liked. He was flat-out manic and, as if he were born for this shift, full of energy. I don’t know what his fuel was. It seemed like cocaine. But it wasn’t. He was clean. His name was Filipe, but everyone called him El Salvaje (the Savage). Even his hair, black and wild, had too much energy. Most of the time he expended his energy lamenting the Mets and attacking the desk and marble walls with huge shoulder checks, constantly in need of releasing the gigantic surplus of frantic energy he was packed with. We got along extremely well. If I was dealing with drunk guests who were slurring and swaying (most guests who drop by the desk after 2:00 a.m. are drunk), El Salvaje would come behind them and do a mock impression, wiping his mouth and rocking side to side to match their rhythm. Usually, I could hold it together, meaning refrain from laughing right in the guests’ faces, and finish the transaction. Not to mention drunk guests aren’t particularly aware of what’s taking place before them, much less behind their backs.
Though once, dealing not with an intoxicated guest but with a German traveler who took the red-eye, I lost it. In this particular situation the gentleman had failed to book his reservation correctly for his purposes. He arrived, exhausted, around 4:00 a.m. and found no room available for him. So he started to scream at me.
Before describing the circumstances that caused me to laugh in this poor man’s face, I should explain a bit about what generally happens to a hotel system when today becomes tomorrow.
Somewhere around 2:00 a.m. the front desk will temporarily shut down the PMS and then “flip the system.” Once the PMS is back up, three things have happened. One: the system will now reflect tomorrow’s date. Two: all occupied reservations will have been auto-charged the room and tax. Three: all unclaimed reservations due to arrive earlier that night will be canceled and marked as a no-show.
If one plans to arrive after 3:00 a.m. and expect a room (as was the case with my exhausted German traveler), there are several things to know. The only way to absolutely guarantee that you will have a fresh, clean room waiting for you after a red-eye is to book it for the night before. Period. What’s more, unless you want to be considered a no-show, you will also need to ensure that your reservation is pre-registered, or pre-reged, meaning checked in prior to your arrival. This is accomplished by you (or, you know, your assistant) calling in advance and informing us of the situation. The hotel will check you in the night before to a VC (or Vacant Clean, as opposed to VD, Vacant Dirty) room and add the term “pre-reged” after your name in the system. Though you are arriving early in the morning, you will be charged the previous night’s room and tax, charged for the privilege of having a room waiting for you.
My German guest got it all wrong. He booked it for Saturday, which was, technically, the date he would arrive. Unfortunately (for both of us), we had no room available that early in the morning. Essentially, he was eleven hours early for his Saturday check-in. This made him, well, angry. Irate. He started making these sharp hand-chop movements while spitting out threats, trying to convince me I was in the wrong, the hotel was in the wrong. El Salvaje, hearing the commotion from the back office, popped out his wild finger-in-the-socket head of hair and then crept up behind the guest, who was loudly letting me have it. From behind this man’s frame El Salvaje kept leaning over and popping his head out from one side, then the other, his elbows out, like some sort of synchronized dance. That was fine. I could handle that move. But when he started popping out and rotating his fists at the corner of each eye, making the international sign for crybaby, then, well, my mouth kind of exploded. I laughed so hard and so unexpectedly that spittle flew at the guest, my lips buzzed trying to hold it in, and I bent over, grabbing at my mouth. Having no plan for this kind of situation, I ran off the desk, pushing quickly through the door into the back office to calm myself.
I could now hear him speaking to El Salvaje, and clearly he picked up on the fact that what had happened was not an explosion of illness but instead violent and unexpected laughter, and certainly at his expense. We called the manager on his cell phone, something I had rarely done, and Julio came down coked to the gills. I mean, he must have taken two fat rails immediately before rushing down to the lobby from whatever housekeeping storage closet he was partying in. The guest’s anger was, in an unexpected way, no match for Julio’s nonstop talking-jag energy, his accelerated apologies and tweaky explanations. Julio, in a rather brilliant move, scanned the in-house list (as in the list of rooms already checked in) for a reservation with the “pre-reg” tag, as I mentioned before. Finding one, he checked that guest out, who was only “due to arrive,” and quickly, raining a downpour of heavy coke-fueled typing into the keyboard, checked the German guest into the now Vacant Clean suite and sent him on his way. Julio turned to us, his face jumping around like an agitated bunny, and then hopped off again, heading to the elevators without a word. A brilliant move, though. That is unless the pre-reged guest who had his room stolen arrived before housekeeping had time to come in and flip another room for him. Which, of course, he did. To deal with that situation, Julio simply lied to the guest, said that his reservation had been made for the previous night but, since there was no indication that he was arriving the following morning, it had been canceled and sold to a walk-in arrival at 5:00 a.m. The guest cursed his poor assistant, who’d actually done her job properly, and apologized for his attitude. Julio bought him breakfast, and the guest wandered off way more pleased with the hotel than he should have been. And we made it through another goddamn night.
Early-morning arrivals don’t always have to be so complicated. My advice, after seeing it all play out a thousand times, is this: If you simply must have a room at 7:00 a.m., then you must book the night before and pre-register yourself. However, if you want to take a risk and possibly save an entire night’s room and tax, call the property and find out the occupancy for the night before. If the hotel is running at 65 percent, then 35 percent of the rooms might be Vacant Clean and ready to check in, even at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. (excluding those rooms that have been “dropped” and left dirty). Therefore, if the occupancy is low the night before, you can potentially roll on up and have an insanely early check-in. Requesting early arrival isn’t enough. The best possible move is to call the property directly the morning you’re scheduled to arrive and let the agent know you are on your way. Tell the hotel 7:00 a.m., even if you know your train doesn’t hit Penn Station till 11:00 a.m., and ask to be pre-reged into a Vacant Clean suite. If the hotel has it sitting there and you call for it, it will be pre-reged and waiting for you when you arrive. Even if you have to call from the airport at 6:00 a.m. before you even board the plane and ask to be pre-reged, it’s your best possible assurance that when you roll into the lobby and everyone in front of you is getting their luggage stored and waiting for an afternoon check-in, your reservation will have been checked in and waiting since 6:00 a.m.
Two nights after the German debacle, I came into work, passing through security on my way to change for a shift, and both security guards were staring at the monitors, too engrossed to even throw me a glance. This isn’t particularly unusual, because there can be some high-quality viewing material on those monitors. I’ve since seen tapes of midnight sex sessions in the public business center, two guests getting oral on top of the pay-to-play fax machine. I’ve seen footage of close-packed fistfights in a rising elevator (fights in an elevator are incredibly confined and extremely interesting to watch, especially if there are unrelated people along for the ride, backs pushed against the wall and hands protectively raised before their faces). And, of course, drunk guests staggering down a hallway and bouncing from wall to wall like a bowling ball thrown down a lane with gutter bumpers. The video they were replaying that night was very similar to the last situation; however, it wasn’t a guest. It was Julio the manager. He was walking crookedly down a hallway, his arms cradled against his chest, hands full of something.
“What’s he got there?”
“Loo
k at this motherfucker. Those are minibar bottles, Tom. What a moron. Keep watching, though, keep watching. It gets better.”
Julio ran his shoulders along the wall, bouncing off door moldings, until he reached the emergency stairs and pushed the door open.
“Okay, okay. Now we cue up the other camera on this monitor. Check it out, check it out.”
On a second monitor, filming the stairwell, the video looked frozen or paused until the door to the hallway pushed open and Julio walked through, bending down to set the minibar bottles against the wall and take a seat on the stairs. Leonard, the overnight security guard who was queuing up the videos, put it into fast-forward, creating a comical little vignette of Julio drinking bottle after bottle at hyper-speed, his head bouncing up and down like a bobble head. The whole scene looked sort of jolly until he slowed it back down to normal speed and I saw immediately just how depressing it actually was.
“Here he go. Here he go.”
Julio lifted himself up, spilling and rolling minibar bottles everywhere, used a palm to brace himself against the wall, and started urinating on, actually on, the stairs.
“What!? Are you kidding me?”
“Believe that? Look, look, it’s rolling back down onto his own shoes. What a dumb, crazy, nasty motherfucker.”
Let me take a moment here: Coming from a true luxury hotel in New Orleans, I was certainly not used to this. I was shocked. What in César Ritz’s name was going on here? Was it like this everywhere in New York? Or was this hotel just cursed? It was interesting, no doubt, but I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t a part of this. I wasn’t a part of this. I was just picking up checks until I could pay off my debts, get a little money in savings, and then look for other work elsewhere. I also promised myself I would keep up the high standards I’d been raised on. This hotel might be filled with criminals and drug addicts, but that didn’t mean I had to stop saying “my pleasure,” “good evening,” and slopping out incredible service.