by Jacob Tomsky
Not good at being kind, polite, and expressing positivity? You don’t have to do that either.
Just hand over a twenty at check-in and say, “Give me something nice.”
But after the Italians ran their surprise attack, all we had left that night were the good rooms. And soon the lobby was quiet once more, the bellmen organizing the luggage according to a rooming list I printed and over-packing the bell carts like slave mules.
All this we did without the knowledge or assistance of management. A fifty-room group? The sales department might have informed front desk about the bus arrival so we could staff properly. The direct sales contact might have even visited the lobby to ensure his or her group got in smoothly. Something was truly wrong here, and the disease ran very deep. The Bellevue was the hotel that service forgot, and like a termite infestation the damage was extensive. Nothing less than ripping out the entire foundation would do. The staff consistently set the bar so low that just showing up to work (not even on time) was good enough.
Just when I thought we couldn’t be more secure in our laziness, Orianna, part of the “business center” staff, caught me unawares. She snuck up and scared the life out of me. In the men’s room.
Orianna was heading the campaign to turn our humble front desk, which included the business center, into union positions. And she was dead serious. She, above everyone else, had two reasons to be. First, her position as “Queen of the Copy Machine” was in danger. Management was sniffing around and realizing they needn’t pay someone to sit in the business center all damn day when, for the cost of one month’s salary, they could install a credit-card-operated copier for the guests to handle their own business and draw in a nice profit on top. Her second reason was infinitely more serious. The full nature of that reason I did not discover until much later.
She followed me like a silent ninja into the men’s room, and I jumped, turning to face her, my finger holding my zipper (which was already down). In her hand was a little yellow card, and in her mouth was the word “union.”
Why the bathroom? Well, anyone caught trying to form a union on company time or company property was volunteering for instantaneous termination. That was it for you. Get out. However, if, by whatever means inside or outside work, you could get more than 51 percent of the staff to sign a union card, then the union, by law, was able to come inside, right through the lobby doors, and legally protect our right to unionize.
In New Orleans no one was union. Not so in New York. Housekeeping was union. Bellmen and doormen were union. Minibar was union. Room service was union. What did that mean? First of all, no favors. Whereas I was able to beg and plead for extra rooms from my New Orleans housekeeping staff, even pay them cash for the assistance, that was illegal here at the Bell. Management needed more rooms cleaned? Take someone off layoff and bring her in. No one on layoff? Hire another housekeeper, thus bumping everyone up in seniority and making room for another lady to have Christmas off. Not even union members could do favors for other union members. My previous company touted the policy that each one of us worked in every department. Water on the lobby floor? Mop it up. A room service tray sitting in the hallway, the hollandaise sauce starting to congeal and smell like a dead bird? Take it to the service landing. But not here. Even if a fellow union member from another department was caught moving a room service tray, there were serious consequences. Even if a guest came out into the hall, stood there with arms crossed, and asked me to remove it: I could not touch it. I could only promise to have someone come take care of it. But then, my promise was worth jack shit if the man working that floor was on his union-mandated break. I saw all of that as pure nonsense. A license for laziness. Nonsense.
“Sign this,” Orianna demanded and handed me a yellow card.
“Hey. I was going to urinate right now but …”
“What are you, ten? You can’t hold it? Sign this first.”
“Well, I’m just not sure about a union, you know? Doesn’t it breed laziness?”
“Only if you define laziness as job security.”
“That’s what I mean. People are so secure in their positions that no one has to do anything.”
“Is that an argument against the union? Job security and no one has to do anything. Sounds great. Sign it.”
“Aren’t unions bad for luxury service?” I asked.
Oh, God, listen to me go! That company Kool-Aid done fucked up my brain juice! I was still putting the hotel first. Which is fine, if the hotel turns around and puts you first. I was pretty certain that wasn’t the case here.
“Look, they are going to eliminate my position, Tom. If we go union quickly, they will have to find another job for me, even at the desk. Or they have to buy me out based on years worked. I’ve got plenty of years here, and they won’t be able to afford that. Do you want to guess what my rights are when they eliminate my position and I have no union?”
I signed it.
After I took a leak.
“Here you go,” I said and handed it to her. “I just hope that—”
“It’s signed? Good. Shut your mouth. That’s 60 percent of the staff. Mañana comenzamos la revolución. Congratulations, white boy.”
“Thank you.”
Sometimes people force you to do the right thing.
For many reasons, joining the union proved incredibly wise. One reason: the economy, years later, would turn to a bag of shit. Prior to America’s coming recession, hotel job turnover was legendary. It almost wasn’t worth shaking a new hand; the person would be a no-call/no-show a week later, just disappear, and someone new would be wearing his or her name tag. I had friends who picked up a desk job only to work a week’s worth of overnights. They were just after that one check, and then they’d go gamble it away like idiots in Atlantic City. But once CNN started telling everyone there was no money, no jobs, no hope, and we should praise Jesus every day for our shoe-shine positions, our staff hardened up like the marble lobby floor. And our new union kept it solid.
Extreme job turnover never occurs at the bell stand, union or no union. When you are hired as a bellman (unless you can’t stomach the position), you go nowhere. You hold down that gig forever, slowly crawling up the ranks to better shifts as older, ancient, sage-like bellmen wander off into the woods to die. Ask a bellman how much he makes a year, just try to get an answer. You won’t. Not even their wives know the kind of cash these guys pull in yearly. Not even their wives. Actually, especially not their wives. (“I keep all my big bills, give my wifey the ones.” —50 Cent.) I’ve been friends with bellmen, eaten Thanksgiving dinner with their families, done a bit of jail time with them for smoking a blunt on an Upper West Side street, and you think I know exactly how much cash they clock a year? They roll like doctors, and not just because they wear gloves.
Speaking of doctors, with the union we now had free health care. That is not a situation most people (well, Americans) experience in their lives. That was, coincidentally, Orianna’s second reason for pushing so hard for the union: the health care. She had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant, and she and her husband had reached a dead end. They tried pills, banging around in funny positions, and timing sex to death. The last option was in vitro fertilization. And that ain’t cheap. It’s also not guaranteed to take hold, and they don’t exactly offer refunds or consolation prizes. However, under the umbrella of the union health care, it was completely covered. Something that would have cost her over a third of her yearly salary now came free with union dues. Soon enough, she had a beautiful baby girl.
That’s a union baby.
Everything was free. For the cost of the weekly union dues (same price as a Long Island Iced Tea in a midtown bar) I could roll into any union clinic (one for every borough), without an appointment, and see a doctor: get blood work, get scanned, poked, pressed, and comforted without even showing identification. Just rattle off my Social and away I went to the land of free health care. The only time I ever opened my wallet was for medications
, and the total never exceeded five dollars.
Despite all of this, another class of employee wasn’t interested in joining the union one bit. If anyone in the hotel business is arrogant enough to pretend they are not in the hotel business, it’s the people who work the concierge desk. Now, I’ve met a few good ones in my time, but most of them? Free meals at the finest restaurants, comp tickets to everything, heavy cash kickbacks for booking tours, free limos, open-bar invitations: if you mix these up into one cocktail and make someone drink it, well, eventually it turns that person into an arrogant, shitty elitist. The concierges just kept strutting around in their tiny rat hole, feeling superior to the employees, superior to the guests, even superior to each other. The union umbrella now covered almost the whole lobby, with the exception of their desk by the elevators. Why would they need a union? They had the keys to the city! That gaggle of idiots would soon learn a serious lesson.
Unioned up and settled in, just when I thought everything was close to perfect, I was pulled aside by Eduardo the doorman, who laid a dirty hand on my shoulder. “Tommy, you seen the news?” he asked, giving me that bristly mustache smile, this one apparently intended to express concern. “Your town, New Orleans, it flooded, man.”
I walked off the desk and headed down to the employee cafeteria. Everyone was watching the news. Everyone. And in a New York hotel that means representatives from every country in the world. The cafeteria is like the UN, languages flying everywhere, a small pocket of Nigerians next to a pocket of Turks. Chinese at the same table as a pair of Bangladeshis. Russians trying to talk louder than the two French cooks across from them. Usually, everyone’s at their tables, talking their own languages, but that day everyone was standing, and they were all staring at the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Later we’d watch the tsunami coverage with Indonesians and the earthquake with the Japanese. But right now we were watching New Orleans, and New Orleans was underwater.
I hadn’t been concerned about all the warnings. During my residency there I had been evacuated over five times, and nothing ever seemed to happen. The twisting top of the storm would always seem to do less damage than predicted or at least veer, like a badly rolled bowling ball, into Texas or Florida. This time it went right down the middle, and all my friends were there or, God willing, evacuated, and I watched the news for weeks, even though it really didn’t help. It certainly felt as if there was nothing I could do to help.
I am so excited to stay here!” she said.
“One night, checking out tomorrow.”
“It’s my birthday!”
“Nonsmoking, king bed. I just need a credit card.”
“Is it a good room?”
“Yes. How many keys?”
“Can I have four? Hey, Thomas,” the guest said, squeezing her tits together and leaning over the desk. I had recently gotten a new name tag because I had recently and deliberately lost my old name tag. So, technically, I stole it, took the old one home to add to my collection. Not that expanding my tag collection was a supreme joy, but I wanted to force them to carve me a new one. It was time for another change. After all these years on the Bellevue’s desk, I requested a tag that read “Thomas.” Why? A couple of super-great reasons. First of all, I was tired of guests rattling off my name as if we were friends. Hey, Tom, listen, Tom, I meant to ask you, Tom, would you mind, Tom, good to see you, Tom, I would like to speak to your manager, Tom. They don’t know me, even though they love to read off my name as if that makes us friends. Which it doesn’t. And no one in my life has ever called me Thomas, not even my mother. So the name tag forced the formality and made them call me Thomas, which I decided was a form of respect. “That’s right, guests, it’s Thomas to you.” Also, on a parallel note, it helped me determine which managers truly knew me and which ones were just reading the tag. If I corrected you and told you to call me Tom, we became closer. If I told you to call me Tom and you continued to call me Thomas, we became co-workers. If I never bothered to correct you and just let you call me Thomas, I never liked you.
The name tag wasn’t the only change. With the union backing me up, I’d been front desk long enough to learn a bit about the hustle. I began to notice the cash game and study it, see how it was played. They hired another FNG, a Cuban named Dante, who’d recently been catching some evening shifts. He was new to the Bellevue but clearly not new to the game. He actually brought clients with him to our hotel. A front desk agent that brings his own guests? Say what?
The second shift we worked together, he left me alone with a line of guests. While doing all the work myself, I watched him round the desk and pass a set of keys to a shady individual with a disgusting mustache who was lurking in the corner. Then I saw the handshake, a money shake, like a drug handoff in Tompkins Square Park. I could tell Dante was some kind of sick pro because, while slowly walking back to his terminal, he never even looked into his palm, never checked the bill. Then, when he saw me clocking him, he smiled and made a show of adjusting his tie, straightening the knot, using the motion as cover to slip the bill into his inner coat pocket.
You see something like that, you start taking notes. I would discover later that acting as a guest’s single point of contact could be very profitable. Making all future reservations, preassigning the best rooms, supervising the bill, and essentially being a private concierge could put you where Dante was: in the corner getting tipped for services no one had even seen him perform.
There was cash floating around out there, and I was trying to learn how to float some of it into my pocket. I certainly wasn’t a pro yet.
And it wasn’t just the desk agents on the hustle; it was the guests, too. They complained, tried to name-drop, brought down roaches in Ziploc bags, roaches that looked brittle and five years old, and a thousand other techniques to get upgrades or comps. People who bring down forensic evidence in a Ziploc product make me angry.
So this birthday girl with the breasts: I figured that’s what she was about, cajoling, not cash, and she was getting nowhere. It might not even be her damn birthday! Faking a birthday or anniversary is another popular guest hustle. So she could be running the birthday hustle and coupling it with the most transparent of techniques: a woman flirting to get an upgrade. I work for cash, not nipple-slips. She might be pretty, I honestly hadn’t even looked, but I knew for certain there would be no money, and I wasn’t interested in anything else she was claiming to offer.
“Thomas, it’s a big birthday for me, please,” she squeezed, “anything you can do.”
It was my birthday last week. I turned thirty years old. Where were you and your breasts on my birthday?
“It’s my thirtieth,” she said. I looked up from my terminal, and she was smiling. Okay, it was a pretty smile, very sweet. And we both just turned thirty. That’s truly what softened me up. I decided to take care of her.
After all, my thirtieth birthday was horrible. I had just returned from a short vacation with a bunch of the bellmen, a few lobby porters, and one concierge (who the hell invited him?). We’d taken a trip up to the Poconos to stay at Trey’s cabin. Of course it’s the pale, scrappy, five-foot-nothing New Yorker who has a big cabin with a breakfast nook, vaulted ceilings, and heated marble floors. We drank beer for breakfast, vodka for lunch, and whiskey for dinner. As soon as it was over and we hit the Holland Tunnel, it felt as if my body started to shut down. My kidneys were clearly disappointed in me. My kidneys were very, very angry. Irate even. Now, three days before my big thirty, I was suffering intense pain on the desk. I scheduled a doctor’s appointment and was referred to an outside medical agency to scan me up (also free!!). Unfortunately, I had just received word the appointment was scheduled to take place on my thirtieth birthday. That was depressing, turning thirty and the only present I could count on was a free scan and the definitive knowledge that I was weakening, starting to die. Obviously, I was working the desk with a solid grimace. It felt as if someone had stabbed two spoons into either side of my lower back, right up into the kidney
s, and at timed intervals this bastard was pushing down on the protruding handles, leaning down on them, scooping up chunks of my body and compacting them into my ribs. I was finding it hard to provide any kind of service with that kind of pain. So, of course, while at my weakest, I was approached by a monster of our modern age. Something had happened to her face, something unfortunate. She had poisoned herself with Botox. She looked positively simian. But she didn’t seem to mind that her face frightened most of the world. She did seem to mind that her reservation had not been upgraded. She parted her hideous lips and said, “Ugh. I never get upgraded. It’s my fifty-third birthday. I have a black card. Give me an upgrade.”
The Bellevue had recently started a partnership with AmEx, and we were now included in their Fine Hotels and Resorts program. The FHR program (also short for Frequently Hostile and Rude) was only accessible to members with platinum and black cards. To qualify for the black card, you have to spend $250,000 every year on your AmEx. But wait! There’s also a $7,500 membership fee! The black card, though I doubt this perk is specifically indicated in the brochure, allows you to be an asshole at every property you visit* (*including restaurants!). I assumed this woman easily reached her quarter-million-dollar quota with visits to Dr. Puff and Stuff.