by Jacob Tomsky
Tread lightly, and beware of any employees not wearing name tags. They are up to something and don’t wish to be identified.
With this kind of history, it’s easy to see how the floodwaters of irritation that I hoped would recede in New Orleans were quickly back to storm surge. I received immediate documentation for abusing the call-outs, which I deserved, but in addition kept getting bombarded by mean guests.
Tremblay had also implemented a wonderful new policy. In the hotel game, a gift of wine or liquor to your favorite employee is a cherished tradition. I mean, you bring a bottle to a dinner party. You hand over an expensive one on a birthday. And you give one to the front desk agent who always upgrades you and never even hints he knows how often you cheat on your wife. Or maybe we remembered you from your honeymoon three years ago and immediately went to work making it your second honeymoon. That deserves a bottle of white, eh? But hotels do have a general rule: you cannot take liquor out of the building that is also sold in the building. That would make it just too easy to, you know, lift an errant bottle from the back room and then parade it to a manager, convincingly grateful about the bottle the couple in 912 left you. That makes the gift of hard liquor difficult for a hotel worker to get out of the building and into his or her liver. If I get a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, let’s say, I will put it in a bag that I wrap up in a sweater that I put in another bag, that I then cover with dirty black dress socks, all of which I then put in a backpack. I’ll try to fly past security as if my crosstown bus stops running in five minutes. Even if they do stop me to peek in my bag, which they are supposed to do every time, they aren’t going to dig through my work socks. They will tilt their head back and say, “Get out of here. And wash those socks.”
“That’s the plan, boss.”
But a bottle of wine shouldn’t require a Shawshank Redemption type of operation. With so many wine varieties the possibility of matching a brand sold at a hotel is very low. Not to mention sommeliers like to order and uncork five-hundred-dollar vintage bottles, not the nasty cylinder of Yellow Tail a guest left me. With a wine bottle, we show it to our immediate manager, and he or she will get us a “red tag” signed by the director of security. You could haul a fifty-inch flat screen out through security as long as it’s red tagged.
Apparently, though no official memo had surfaced, the policies had changed at the Bellevue. And I found out because Kayla was in the back office. Crying. This girl cries for no one. She is more liable to rip out hair and cut a bitch. But there she was, leaning against the schedule posted in the luggage storage room, crying hard. Her hands weren’t even covering her face, just hanging limp at her sides, letting me see the full extent of the damage, the crushed-up cheeks and mascara and total sadness.
“Baby, oh, what’s wrong? Kayla?”
“This place, Tommy. It’s cursed. Sometimes, when I’m in the basement changing, I get this death feeling, like they built this hotel on an Indian burial ground.”
Al flew by dragging a purple carry-on and said, “I commute here from a town called Massapequa. This whole damn country is built on an Indian burial ground.”
“Good point, Wolf,” I said to his back as he flew out the door to the lobby. “But, Kayla, what did they do to you, girl? They write you up?”
“Well, I also got written up, yeah. But they do that every week now. It’s not that. No, they stole from me.”
“An employee?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but no. You know the Howells, that old white couple? Well, they never give me anything. But I help them all the time, and the wife really likes me. I mentioned about how my husband and I were having problems, you know? Since the last baby? I just mentioned it quickly to Mrs. Howell. She said there is no situation a good bottle of wine won’t improve, and nothing two good bottles won’t cure.”
“That was cute.”
“Yeah, so she brings me two bottles of wine yesterday, and I don’t know, but they looked like expensive bottles. I couldn’t take them home after work, because I was going to the gym because my ass is getting fat. So I put my name ALL over them and left them in the manager’s office. I told my husband, for some reason, what Mrs. Howell said, and he took the day off work to stay home and cook all day. All four kids are in the Bronx with their grandma and he’s cooking for me and I’m bringing the wine and we were supposed to eat and drink the bottles and then fuck. And maybe make a sex tape like we do on Valentine’s Day.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I know.” Now she started crying again. “But when I came in today, the wine was gone, and they told me the policy had changed and we can’t take any more liquor out of the hotel. I even had the handwritten note from Mrs. Howell that talks about the wine, and still they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Something dropped in me at this point. She was really shooting out tears and still not hiding it with her hands. I hugged her, and that made her cry harder at first but then less hard. When she pulled back, I had mascara all over my white work shirt, but I didn’t fucking care. I had some serious hatred spinning around in my throat.
Why doesn’t she just buy another two bottles of wine? Her husband, a bellman at the DoubleTree, broke his arm a year ago. You can’t sling suitcases with one arm. The doctor even told him that due to the nerve damage, since it was crushed (long story), he might never be able to do heavy lifting again. For six months he couldn’t find work and then finally pulled a gig as an elevator operator, up and down all day in a building’s delivery elevator, and the pay was garbage. And they have four kids. And they are now almost four months behind on bills. And that wine was special. The kindness of it, the thoughtfulness with those words of encouragement, would’ve given those bottles a power no other bottles could have. Why doesn’t she just buy another two good bottles of wine? Open your eyes.
Before I know it, I’m on the way up to the GM’s office. I was furious and shaking in the elevator, watching the numbers rise and thanking God there were no guests in there to look at me and ask me things. I found him standing in the hallway with none other than the director of security. Perfect. Our fat eggplant of a GM looked like an inner Russian doll next to the gigantic director of security, who was unaffectionately known as Lurch. Our old DOS, before the takeover, had been about five feet four inches and an ex-cop (as basically all DOSs are). But we all loved him. As Italian as possible, loud and always accusing me of being high on coke, though I was pretty sure he knew that I, above everyone, never touched it. I used to call him “Cop Show” because everything he talked about, even if it was just the mac and cheese in the cafeteria, sounded as if he was on CSI or some shit. After they fired him, they brought in Lurch, who looked like two “Cop Shows” stacked on top of each other, wrapped in a crazy suit coat as big as a wind sail. No one liked this guy. He wasn’t a born-and-raised New Yorker, which is a bad start for any NYC DOS. I looked way up at his pale head next to our squat fuckup of a GM and waited for one of them to open his mouth so I could cut him off.
“Is ther—”
“Why have the liquor policies changed? Since when can we not remove wine from the hotel?”
“Four months ago. Haven’t you noticed? I guess you don’t get a lot of gifts.”
“None that you can drink, Mr. Tremblay.” What a prick. But I probably shouldn’t have said that. It’s always best for a hustler to keep quiet. Real hustlers are never, ever flashy. (“Let them tell it, you was just another guy in the crowd.” —T.I.) “Well, Kayla is currently crying on company time because she left two bottles in the manager’s office and now they are gone. Care to tell me where they are?”
“You can no longer take liquor out of the hotel,” Lurch said, like some big gigantic gorilla asshole.
“We covered that. My question is this: Where are the bottles now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” and here my emotions were burning neon bright, “have they been placed on our restaurant menu? Are you now turning a profit on gifts giv
en to your employees? Or, and perhaps this is it, did one of you take those bottles home and drink them? Did one of you confiscate a gift, a gift accompanied by a corroborating note”—Cop Show would have loved to hear me drop that word—“a gift given to a front desk agent with ten years of service, given for no reason other than she utilized exceptional service to create customer loyalty … did one of you take those bottles to your own house and drink them? Which one of you drank Kayla’s wine?”
Man alive, I was balls-out ape shit.
Tremblay was giving me a burning stare. Say what you want, here is a man who doesn’t have much fear in him. The whole hotel hated him, even the managers who kissed his ass in the staff meetings. Did being universally hated behind his back bother him? No, not really.
He began to speak and very slowly, “Well, Thomas, all bottles of wine and liquor are now disposed of in the loading dock.”
“Excuse me? You are throwing out full bottles of wine?”
“No, security assures me they are uncorked and poured down the drain in the loading dock.”
“You are going to look me in the eye and tell me that this guy,” I said, pointing a thumb at Lurch, who was so tall it looked like a normal thumbs-up, “is uncorking bottles of wine and pouring them down the drain?”
“Yes, Thomas. That is exactly the policy.” And then he smiled at me. One of those smiles that, like a magnet, can somehow cause a beer bottle to smash into it.
Here was my GM, looking me right in the eye, lying to my face, and then smiling about it.
Where have you gone, Chuck Daniels? Little Tommy Jacobs turns his lonely eyes to you.
Because what the fuck do you do with that? What would you do?
I walked away. I went back to the first floor, and looking up into the lobby at a line of guests, all expecting exceptional service, I logged in.
I typed in my password, pressed enter, and said, “Can I assist the next guest?”
So here is the following day in my life. But not just any day, a day that ends with me completely losing my shit in the manager’s office.
I woke up hungover, out all night with a few doormen doing the passé New York club scene. Meatpacking District and all that. After the confrontation with upper management, I wanted to get lit, and if you want to get lit, you cannot beat partying with doormen. They have cash for days, huge knots thick with twenties, and usually they grew up with the club owner (or if not that, the bartender, or at least the guy working the door).
What’s good for a hangover? I’ll tell you what’s not good: getting absolutely bombarded by checkouts. And we’ve got the usual complaints. I removed at least five hundred dollars in minibar charges throughout the morning, trying to ignore the guest’s twenty-minute headache-inducing explanation about how she put her sister’s organic wheat bars on top of the cashews so that they would be cold when she came back from getting fitted for her wedding dress in SoHo, and so why were they charged for the cashews? They never ate the cashews. They never touched the cashews. I’d removed the charges long before she started going on about wheat bars, much less the non sequitur wedding info, even attempting to cut her off to assure her the charges have already been removed, but even that won’t often stop an intricate and useless story from growing more intricate and more useless.
Then an unpleasant old man interrupted me while I was in the middle of a guest checkout.
“Hello, sir, EXCUSE ME, I want a card for my free breakfast.”
I apologized to the guest he was interrupting and told the interrupter I’d be with him in a moment.
“Breakfast ends in ten minutes, and I want my card.”
The guest before me, who had waited patiently in line, tilted his head and gave me a nod with a half smile, one of those expressions that say: “Go ahead and help this jerk, and also, dude, sorry your job sucks.”
“Okay, sir, were you given breakfast certificates upon check-in?”
“Yes. My rate comes with breakfast. You can look it up if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“Sir, I am not insinuating anything. However, were you not given enough certificates at check-in?”
“Look, they are up in my room, and I won’t go get them. Breakfast ends in ten minutes. You are wasting my time.”
In the drawer next to me, buried beneath a pile of loose staples, is a stack of breakfast certificates. The policy is, however, that we cannot hand out extra cards. He could have his daughter sitting in the lounge, who lives on the Upper East Side and is not actually staying at the hotel, hence shouldn’t get a certificate. Therefore getting this extra cert from me could cost the hotel $35. But was I worried about the hotel losing money? Was I trying to follow procedures like a good little boy?
Not really. I was training an asshole that being an asshole only jams up your life. Showing fiscal responsibility and adhering to company policy: that was just the spoonful of sugar.
“I am sorry, sir. You will have to retrieve the original certificates from your room. However, I will alert the lounge to your situation, tell them you are on your way, and make certain they wait before breaking down the buffet.”
The old man gave a look to my waiting customer, trying to get him to witness and verify the terrible service I was giving. My guest pursed his lips and shook his head at the old man, who walked away, probably assuming that reaction actually confirmed I was a bad employee.
“Sorry about the delay, Mr. Peterson. Thank you for your patience.”
“Hey, not to worry. You’re doing a great job.”
Something special happens to guests when they see another guest act like a child. If I’m at the desk getting loudly reamed, screamed at, and abused, that is the only time I can guarantee that the next guest I help, the very next guest, the one who saw the scene from an outsider’s perspective, will treat me with dignity and extreme patience. If a guest sees another person publicly humiliate himself about something minor (and believe me, it’s all minor), when his turn comes, I could tell him he is staying in the basement rat room for fifteen hundred dollars a night, and he would say, “Hey, not to worry.” Maybe even lean in and add a concerned, “Have a nice day, okay?”
But the guest after that? The one who failed to witness the public reaming? Watch out.
About an hour later the old man is back, again standing to the side of my line, trying to skip past everyone waiting. Just one errant second of eye contact from me was all he needed before he stepped up and pushed a breakfast certificate right in my face. I am talking close to my face, so close my release of an irritated breath rattled the card. Or maybe the card was rattling because this old man was now livid and his hand was shaking in anger.
“You tell me where on this card it says my room number. You tell me where on this card there is a bar code or number or anything that makes it not just a piece of paper that you could have just handed me. You tell me why you couldn’t give me another one and made me walk all the way back upstairs.”
Honestly, I wasn’t even bothered by this. I’ve been rocking this desk so long I don’t even pay attention when people are yelling at me. In truth, I look at their faces, distorted in anger, and think about other things. (“I don’t get mad, I just get money.” —Young Jeezy.) Though I especially didn’t like that he was still holding that damn card up against my face as if I were a dog that chewed up his slipper. I’m not paid to be abused. I’m not paid to relinquish my personal space.
Also, I had four people waiting in line, and it was my job to process them through the system. That’s all I wanted to do, just get them checked into their rooms so they could begin their New York experience. But first I had to get this card out of my face and this old man off my ass.
This, dear guests, is what management is for.
“Sir, I understand you are unhappy, but I was simply following the policies set forth by management. I understand that you disagree with these policies, and the best possible course might be to express your concerns directly to management. Would you l
ike to speak to a manager?”
You read that verbiage?! I’m like a politician! There has got to be a better job for me somewhere, talking some official garbage like that.
“You’re goddamn right I want a manager … Thomas.”
We all know what that means, including my name at the end. Not my concern, though. There were now seven people in line, and number five was the tour manager for Kings of Leon, a really nice guy. But he’ll definitely want the four VIP pre-reged keys for his group immediately so he can deliver them to the band, who are hiding in the tour bus so they don’t get fan-fucked in the lobby. Number six is the CEO of 7-Eleven, who is also a really great guy and far too busy to wait. Number seven is just a normal guest, but she deserves efficient service like everyone else.
Sara, our newest manager, responded quickly to my phone call and took the old man (and his precious certificate) to the far corner of the lobby.
A few hours later some Jersey mafioso is fondling his roll of cash, rubbing his thumb over an amazing collection of hundos, asking if there is something special I can do for him. After my day, after my week, I could use a brick, maybe treat myself to a nice lunch and avoid the shiny, greasy meal they were serving in the employee cafeteria. I unblocked a VIP suite, held for a famous actor, who I think is a bit overrated anyway, one who thinks every role and every day is Halloween. I leaned in and whispered, giving this dude and his bankroll the full performance, authorizing a hundred-dollar-a-night upgrade for four nights, not to mention leaving the actor unblocked and room-less. As I passed him the keys, calling the Gray Wolf over to grab his luggage, he slipped the money roll back into his pocket and put out his empty hand to shake. No question about it, I could tell from the way he held out his hand that it was empty. Goddamn it. I should have seen it coming: he was fondling the money too much, too obvious. I got played. I told him if he needed anything at all to ask for Terrance (when you give a fake name, it’s important to avoid names of employees currently working at the property and that it be a name of someone from your past whom you hate) then walked off, leaving his hand floating over the desk, unshaken, and he knew exactly why.