by Jacob Tomsky
“Give me an upgrade. I want an upgrade. You better or I want to see a manager.” I was partially worried that the spittle flying off her stiff lips might be poisonous acid. Is that possible? “You give it to me. I want an upgrade now. It’s my fifty-third birthday. Give me the upgrade, or I want to see a manager.”
And that’s when I broke. Someone leaned down hard on the spoons in my back and whispered in my ear, “This is where you are now, Tommy. You’re turning thirty, and your body is dying. You’re a key monkey, and you have no other options. You’re a lifer here. Give this rich woman exactly what she wants. Now. It’s your job.”
Those who do not have will always serve those who do.
I passed the check-in to a co-worker and walked off the desk before the tears came. Oh yes, I wanted to cry, wicked bad. I hurried to the second-floor storage room, where the hotel holds long-term luggage and larger items like cribs and bicycles. In long-term storage, the possibility of a bellman coming to bother me was remote, and I often came here during my break to read. El Salvaje came here on the overnights to throw jukes. He was kind enough to keep it to the same corner, indicated by a sign with a veiled reference to a jukebox. But in the other corner, behind the shelf, there was a cache of stolen minibar items for us to enjoy.
I took a Hershey’s bar, sat down in the sea of luggage, and cried like a little bitch, biting off big pieces of chocolate and letting the tears fly. It was one of those unforgettable, pivotal moments in my life.
Why was I so sad about everything? I didn’t have money problems. Didn’t have kids. But nothing was changing for me. I couldn’t afford to leave my position, and where would I go? Another hotel? Perhaps this hotel alone was the source of my pain? That’s absurd. First of all, I know for a fact that another hotel would be the same shit, different toilet. Plus, changing properties would not only drop me back down to starting wage but cause me to lose all my shift seniority and throw me on the overnights again for an untold amount of time, and, again, for less money. No way. Leave the business altogether? I was even less qualified than when I arrived in this city. And New York had already changed me. Being surrounded by so much wealth, so much potential, eventually made me want it all. I wanted to have a black card. I wanted to see Broadway plays. I wanted to speak to a manager.
I had no interest in joining our management staff. The hours here at the Bellevue were even longer than at other properties because the hotel couldn’t seem to keep a manager in-house for more than six months. In New Orleans the managers cared. They would work extra hours to help out the overnight manager on a busy night. They would sacrifice a day off because a pop-up group of a hundred businessmen rerouted their conference from Las Vegas to New Orleans at the last minute. They would take you aside and ask you how you were doing. At the Bellevue they would call in sick, just like the employees, an hour before their shift from some bar in Queens, screwing the current manager into working a last-minute double. Then the manager they screwed would do the same thing to the next manager to keep it, you know, fair. Bellevue managers got fired for doing drugs or getting a front desk agent pregnant or stealing money from their banks or pissing on the stairs, and the ones who did stick around all of a sudden had to cover those extra shifts. Plus, I was getting paid more than they were. I couldn’t conceive of making that move to madness, especially as I grew more proficient at the cash game. But what did I have to be proud of? Nothing. Job security. Shift seniority. Fuck all.
I had that candy bar, though. I ate the rest of it slowly and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then I walked back down to the desk and finished my shift.
And then, because I had to at that point, I turned thirty.
And now, a week later, here was another guest asking for special birthday treatment. But, you know, she didn’t look ostentatiously wealthy, and she wasn’t being rude. And we both just turned thirty. So I took care of her.
“Understood,” I said to her breasts. After ten short seconds of typing, I’d upgraded her to a Central Park view and reissued her keys. “Park view and I’ll send some red wine. Enjoy. Next guest please?”
“Thank you. My name is Julie,” she said.
“Feliz cumpleaños. Next guest please?”
Five minutes later Kayla told me room 3618 was holding for me.
“Good evening, thank you for calling the front desk. This is Thomas, how may I assist you?” (There is that phrase chunk again!)
“Hey, it’s Julie. Thank you so much. I LOVE IT!”
So this one was really sweet. It was clear how happy she was. Hearing her yell about the room made me a little warm inside.
“Great. I’m glad.”
“I’m having some friends over, all girls, and if they come to the desk, will you send them up, please?”
“Sure. I’ll put you down on our event sheet, just in case they come to another agent.”
“Thank you again. I really, really love it.”
“I’m really, really glad,” I said, actually smiling.
An hour later, another call on hold.
“Thank you for calling the front desk, this is …” I am a robot, I am a robot.
“Hey, Thomas, it’s me.”
“Need something?”
“Can you come up?”
“Excuse me?”
“Can you come up here for a little bit, to visit?”
“I can’t do that.”
“It’s a lingerie party, Thomas. There are eight girls up here in their underwear and—”
“I really can’t be—”
“Hold on, let me finish. And we have champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries. Eight girls in expensive lingerie, Thomas.”
“Listen, I work here. I can’t hang out in the rooms.”
“When you get off then?”
“No. I can never, ever party at my own hotel.”
“Oh. Well, that just makes me sad.”
I put the receiver back on the cradle. Ben the bellman walked up.
“Fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Eight girls in panties, Ben. Room 3618, eight girls in panties.”
“That’s what’s up. I’ll go knock and see if they need ice cubes. You know, for their nipples.”
Three hours later I was counting my bank in the back office, done with my shift. Dante informed me I had another call on hold from room 3618. I told him to say I’d gone home.
“What did they want?” I asked.
“Wondering if we had Bibles.”
“They wanted a Bible?”
“That’s what they asked for, chief.”
“Now, what exactly is that about?” I asked.
“Prayer meeting maybe? Though it sounded like a goddamn girl-on-girl party up there.”
Next day I had an envelope waiting. No money inside, just a phone number. Fair enough. I called, she asked me out, and on the first date I brought up the Bible request. They just wanted to roll a joint, simple as that.
There are no Bibles in the Bellevue Hotel.
I ended up seeing Julie on and off for the next few years. Her life was very different from mine. She’d come to New York to live the posh life and had, after securing a good position in the financial industry, essentially succeeded. She dined at the best restaurants and saw every play. She was invited to open-bar events at MoMA and went to Kentucky Derby parties on the Upper East Side where people wore ragtime hats and drank sidecars. She hired limos. She drank champagne.
“I only drink champagne, and I don’t wait for anyone.” That’s a direct quote.
We got along very well, though. She didn’t come from money and therefore had the ability to forgive me for not having enough of it. It gave her pleasure to make me her proverbial “plus one,” and we had sex in public places, like freight elevators and once in a Michelin-starred restaurant’s vanilla-scented bathroom.
“What is your natural hair color?” I would ask. I loved asking her that. “Seriously, what color is it really?”
Her pretty face woul
d bunch up in anger, and she’d point a finger at her head. “This color.”
That seemed so indicative of New York City. It didn’t matter where you came from or what kind of person you originally thought you had to be. Here you could be a pill junkie, drag queen, singer-songwriter, cowboy, hip-hop head, painter, anything.
What kind of person are you really? Just point at your own head and say: “This person.”
What kind of person was I? A servant to the rich! And an increasingly unsatisfactory servant as well! After spending years around my fellow agents, I had started picking up their habits. I called in sick to work (to “bang out” in the parlance of the bag jockeys). I even started banging out two consecutive days in a row, which, according to union rules, only counted as one sick day, one sickness. Then I grew even more bold and started banging out the two days before my weekend and then the two days afterward, calling it two different sicknesses and essentially ripping a six-day vacation out of thin air, whenever I wished. For this I received my first piece of documentation, my first piece of disciplinary paperwork. Management listed it as calling out “in a pattern.” I was taking six-day vacays all over the damn place, and it was undeniably a pattern. But union strong, I had to go to almost insurmountable lengths to be fired. Dante, beyond hustling every guest he touched, also clocked a record-shattering forty-five bang-outs in his first year. Was he fired? No. Therefore a precedent had been established, the bar had been lowered all the way down to the basement, and we could all attempt to achieve that impressive number and be certain to receive no more documentation than he had.
We were running around wild, the weeks smearing together, only punctuated by a few outstanding occurrences.
Por ejemplo: One afternoon, I checked in the Who’s Roger Daltrey, and the transaction went down like a coke deal. He came in, eyeing me sideways, and moved his face a bit closer to mention his pseudonym.
Here’s a list of a few of my favorite celeb pseudonyms:
Doug Graves
Dick Shunairy
Tim Tation
And a tricky one, perhaps the best, popular with rock bass players for some reason:
Saul Goode
So Daltrey hit me with his pseudo, and I kept leaning forward to confirm info into his suspicious side eye. I slipped him his keys as if room 4202 might have three kilos of Colombian hidden under the bed skirt. He ducked his head and crept away to the elevators. The following day, after the Who performed at Madison Square Garden, a weirdo with a swollen man-child look bumbled through the revolving doors, crying so hard his tears were hitting the lobby floor. He headed to the concierge desk, and I must admit I was thoroughly entertained watching him sob it up over there while he passed across an envelope.
Ten minutes later, a concierge, a new girl named Annie who hadn’t yet had the time to evolve into an arrogant elitist, brought over the tearstained envelope and asked me for advice.
“Listen, did you see that chubby guy crying all over the place?”
“I did. What’s the story there?”
“Well, apparently he has ‘the bone’ for Roger Daltrey and somehow knows for a fact that Daltrey’s here. He passed me this envelope and made me swear I’d forward it along.”
“He knew the pseudonym?”
“Of course not,” she said. Then, looking down at the envelope, she continued, “I almost want to pass it on, though. He was really upset. What do we do?”
I took it from her hand and said, “We read it is what we do.” I slipped it into my pocket, and then, as if to test my resolve, Roger came slinking up sideways to the desk, sliding his keys over like a secret.
“Been a pleasure having you, Mr. Daltrey, and we hope to see you again.”
Right after he hit the limo, we ripped into the letter. Window to a freak show. Apparently, the man had attended the concert, and during one of Daltrey’s rock moves where he grabs the mic by the cord and swings it around like a propeller, the mic unsnapped from the cord and flew into the crowd like some kind of Mongolian field weapon. It had “brazed” the man’s shoulder, and “after an initial feeling of elation” he “could visibly see how disturbed Roger was, how deeply concerned Roger was for the fans in the center area.” He had then immediately regretted that “initial feeling of elation” and was “ashamed by personal selfishness and devastated that Roger had saffered all that drama [yeah, sic].” That night he cried and cried for Roger, knowing he must be concerned for the fans, and now, as any weirdo might, he absolutely had to tell Roger that no one was harmed and that he loved him very, very much and please, Roger, please respond to this and let me know when we can meet to talk about it. He apparently didn’t plan to stop crying until this was resolved. The closing sentiments included eight separate pieces of contact information. Two phone numbers, three e-mails, two street addresses, and one P.O. box.
“Oh my God,” Annie said.
“This letter is the shit!”
“That guy has some serious mental issues.”
“Best. Letter. Everrrrr.”
“That was the right move, not passing it on.”
“Sure was. Daltrey acted like I was going to arrest him at check-in, so I’m sure this letter wouldn’t have sat well in his stomach.”
“Now what do we do with the letter?”
I took a moment to consider. “We respond?”
Just then, Dante wrapped up a long, tedious phone call trying to ensure a dubious guest that, yes, he swears, we have valet parking, he promises, and her vehicle will be taken care of. He slammed down the receiver in mock frustration and said he loved my idea. We didn’t need to fill him in on the public display of crying or the contents of the letter, because while hammering the same point home fifty times with the guest on the phone, he had also been listening intently to our conversation. In this way, front desk agents are like bartenders. I can simultaneously and effectively call housekeeping for a rollaway while signaling for a bellman, while authorizing a credit card, while fielding questions about the equipment in the health club and still keep an ear on Kayla’s phone argument with her husband next to me, listening closely to her responses because when she hangs up, she’ll want me to have heard it all so I can assure her she was being reasonable, even though she wasn’t. We hear and see everything going on at all times in our lobbies. It’s part of the job. It’s not even hard. It’s just a self-generating skill, like how a basketball player can spin a ball on his finger: you don’t need that move to play the game, but it develops anyway.
“We respond,” Dante seconded. “We mail him a handwritten letter from ‘Roger’ himself, inviting him to London for a private concert, right? All of the details and flight info are included in the letter. All he has to do is show up at JFK at the appointed hour, and his guide and ticket will be waiting. He’s going to pack a bag, crying from joy, then head out to the airport only to wait around to have his dreams slowly crushed! Either that, or we write a letter where ‘Roger’ expresses reluctance at not having aimed better and smashed the mic right into his face. We could close that letter with ‘Fuck You, Fanboy. The Rog.’ ”
In the end we decided the last one was funnier.
Then we decided they were both unforgivably cruel. Plus, maybe that’s the kind of joke that upgrades a stalker from Class A to Class KILL.
Soon after Roger-gate, I was lucky enough to meet the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. I wasn’t initially a huge fan, you know, just the hits please, and only when I was drunk and needed some happy music. But there he was, looking seven feet tall, wearing track pants, and hunching his shoulders like a teen at a dance. I wasn’t checking him in, unfortunately. I was checking in an older lady who had the contents of her mildewy purse dumped all over my desk, all crumpled tissues and hard-shell cases for her spectacles. She was rummaging for what I’ve described as a “method of payment,” and in fact Brian Wilson wasn’t checking himself in either. Two comfortably dressed gentlemen were negotiating his situation with Kayla, who, even if I took the time with her to
outline Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ impact on popular music, couldn’t care less.
“Yeah, but why does he stand there all stupid and shit? Reminds me of my uncle Ramón, used to stop dancing and stand there just like that, same look on his face, because he just pissed himself from being such a borracho.”
Like a seven-year-old at a museum, my man Brian was playing it cool. Not touching anything, just sort of rocking back and forth, his expression timid, his face saggy. The old lady in front of me had finally succeeded in peeling all the wet tissues off her Wells Fargo debit card, and I’d managed to conclude our relationship, save for me essentially forcing her to take help with her luggage, calling a bellman with our code word “front” so she doesn’t get wind that some dude wearing gloves is going to rip the suitcase from her feeble hand and then, once in the room, pretty much demand she give him money. And not 1920s money, not jingle-jangle quarters the bellman can two-step back down the hallway with like some happy-go-lucky shoe-shine boy, no. That kind of coin tip gets left right outside your door for you to find on your way out, supposedly working on that “you need it more than I do (you cheap piece of shit)” theory. (Tipping change is bad luck, people. If you can’t round your generosity up to a whole dollar, then just embrace your cheapness. Don’t try to pay off your own guilty conscience with quarters.)
Anyway, so I rip out a huge “FRONT!” because these bellmen are half-drunk from last night, showing each other cell phone video of some sexual act they recorded, or busy counting up their ones. Plus, it was hectic in the lobby, and I had to make myself heard. So I roar out a nice “FRONT!” and the F alone caused my man Brian to pop about two feet into the air, landing back down with a look of sheer terror on his face, terror, his eyes reddening as if he might cry.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Mr. Wilson,” I said, inching over, my hands leveled out there with reassurance, as if he might sniff them and learn to trust me. “I really am sorry, sir. It’s a pleasure to have you here,” I concluded, giving a business smile to his two handlers. I’m always throwing out a heavily loaded “pleasure to have you” when it comes to celebrities, or a rare “an honor to have you,” but only if it actually is an honor, and in truth it never comes off well anyway.