by Jacob Tomsky
“This is extremely covert, sir, and frankly I am all about it.”
“You see, the photographer is going to follow us and secretly take pictures when I drop my knee in the dirt. Then, on our wedding day, I’m going to give her the photos she doesn’t even know were taken.”
“Well, damn. That is. That is borderline … you know, what with the photographer in the bushes and all? But when I picture the wedding present on wedding day, it’s amazing. I am your man, sir.”
And that is exactly what I did. I like to think the photographer would have missed them if I hadn’t been there to flail around like a maniac when the couple passed through. And after I saw the soon-to-be-groom’s gigantic smile on the way back in and the woman’s eyes glued to her diamond ring, I sent them wine and a personal note.
Yesterday I got a letter from him. It said he’ll never forget me. It said the Bellevue is their New York hotel for life. It said they’ve decided to have the honeymoon here.
Beneath that letter is one from Mr. Palay. He’s the big hitter we hustled into becoming a frequent-stay guest. The letter, which came out of nowhere and included, um, a fat-ass personal check with my name on it, said he has never experienced service of this caliber before. The fact that I have given him my personal e-mail and I respond even when I’m not at work (I’ve helped him while I was drunk at a bar before) has convinced him my hotel is the place for his next group block. Turns out he’s the president of a huge investment firm and the group totals more than 150 rooms. That’s over seventy-five thousand dollars in revenue. In one night. He sent a second letter to my GM explaining the excellent service I provide, mentioning our e-mail correspondence and my twenty-four-hour service. Mr. Tremblay told the FOM to tell the assistant FOM to tell the manager on duty to tell me that I was no longer allowed to give out my personal e-mail to guests. Apparently, that was inappropriate. At seventy-five thousand dollars, how inappropriate can that be?
Weren’t these people all about money? Was it possible to please them?
Another is a letter from the Bekkers. The letter where they offer to house me in their mansion while assisting me in finding adequate lodgings. The one where they thank me again for making their wedding so special and giving them a home in New York. The one where they say, again, that I should get on a plane, fly into Cape Town, and be taken care of. I received that letter a while ago but still kept it in my pocket. I really liked that letter.
All of these little pieces of proof were now in my shaking, angry hand. Sara was looking calmly at me, one hand flat on her thigh, the other softly resting on my write-up; that current write-up, plus one more, and they could fire me. Maybe Tremblay had offered a trophy for the manager who finally succeeded in terminating me. (What would that trophy look like? I wondered. A gold figure of me with a boot up my ass, probably.)
Clearly, they really, really did not want me here. But, damn it, I love this hotel. The Bellevue is my home. I love the Bellevue. I loved what it had been. It had changed now, and I was having trouble accepting that.
I’m not proud of it, but at that time, in that moment, I felt I had one move left. Apparently, that move was to snap. So I snapped.
“You want to fire me for poor service? I don’t GIVE poor service. And if you need proof, read these,” I said, pretty goddamn loudly, and then tossed the letters into the air.
Considering the consequences of this action, I remember it in slow motion: the letters slowly twisting in varied trajectories, unfurling, arranging themselves high in the air like leaves on an invisible tree, and then slowly, slowly falling down on all of us.
The beginning of the end.
I know I’m to blame. Because this is the goddamn hotel business. You either strap it on hard or, if you can’t handle it, go wait tables. I flashed back to the image of Keith and Walter, those two valets, flopping around on the concrete, screaming, trying to choke each other to death. Maybe those cats had been running cars for two decades, and they’d had enough. I recalled Chip, drop-kicking those two shiny quarters, and I saw his image clearly in my mind now, specifically recalling the face he made while he executed the kick: It was furious. It was determined. It was psychotic. And behind that, it was filled with so much sadness.
Now I understood. Maybe I’d had enough.
I gave myself another long weekend. Even after my two days off, I called in sick Monday and Tuesday. I needed the time. I really, really needed the time. It was like self-prescribed mental leave.
I dialed Julie, whom I’d been out of touch with for a month, and she invited me out to dinner. We dined on caviar, scooping it into our mouths with tiny spoons, and drank seventeen-dollar cocktails that arrived in whatever color you wanted. I chose blue.
“Stop slumping.”
“I’m depressed.”
“Well, drink more, then, baby. Get another. A happier color. Get orange maybe. Orange is a power color.”
“Orange? Okay.”
“So you hate your job, Thomas. Be comforted by the universal truth that everyone hates their job. Or, you can change it. Get a new one.”
Finding another hotel gig in New York made no sense. Beyond the fact that I would be forced back onto the overnights, I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent after dropping back down to starting pay. A few years ago, feeling financially stable, I moved farther out into Brooklyn, deep into an area called Bushwick, where I could afford to live alone. Having my own apartment improved my life but doubled my rent. It was either stay at the Bellevue or clear out of the city altogether.
“Why don’t we move to L.A. together, Julie?”
She set her cocktail down carefully on a napkin. Hers was yellow. It looked like urine. I wondered if urine was a power color too.
“Nonsense,” she said quietly.
We’d discussed it in the past, moving away together. She could easily find work out there, and you know me: if there’s a hotel, then pass me the drug-test piss cup because I start tomorrow.
“You think it’s nonsense?”
“It is, Thomas.” She still called me Thomas because, in a way, she was still a hotel guest. “That doesn’t mean it’s not a possibility, though. You know we could make each other perfectly happy.”
Here I was, expecting a guest to take me away, to pay for my life. Ben the bellman, as always, had offered some sound advice on this flawed plan: “You fucking moron. Never get involved with a hotel guest. Bang ’em on the minibar, but leave it there. You’ll never be on their level. Get you a nice Russian housekeeper. Russian housekeepers, Tommy, now, they know how to love.”
I drank a whole rainbow that night.
Soon enough it was the following Friday, a week after the tree of letters shed its leaves down on everyone. During the intervening shifts I’d been extremely timid, almost overservicing the guests, earnestly trying to make up for my previous week’s deficiencies. I also, in an effort to avoid confrontation with anyone about anything, handed out breakfast certificates like they were free samples.
As if stuck in a repeating pattern, I was informed that my presence was required in HR, again on a Friday after my shift, when I should be walking out of the building. I wasn’t worried: I assumed Sara wanted to finish what she started last week in the company of HR, since, if I recall, I had walked out without giving her a chance to ask me to sign the write-up. Which I wouldn’t have signed anyway, because we all know the union rule about not signing anything but your check. The delegate does sign it as a “witness.” But we hadn’t even gotten to that point.
I walked to the back office to get Orianna and bring her down there with me.
“They’re calling me down to HR. What’s up, you think?”
Orianna was concentrating hard on the computer screen. I should have sensed something was horribly wrong. She never concentrates hard on anything.
“Orianna?”
“I’m not involved anymore. There is a delegate down there for you,” she said, picking up the phone receiver, though there was no incoming call.
“What’s going on here?” I said, actually out loud, before turning and walking back through the lobby. I found Jay, the union delegate for the bellmen and doormen, and ran my situation by him. He’s got the perfect kind of psycho-terror for a delegate.
“Yeah, Orianna’s stepping down as delegate,” he said.
“Now? She witnessed the whole thing, and she steps down now?”
“It doesn’t look good for you, chief.”
Downstairs I was introduced to Teo, a union delegate from housekeeping whom I had never, ever seen before: not in the halls, not in the locker room, not in the cafeteria, nowhere. One thing was clear: he didn’t speak much English. But, whatever, let’s get this over with, I thought. Just take my write-up and move on with my shitty little life.
The director of HR was leading the witness. She kept saying, “And then?” which made it clear to me she was hoping to fast-forward directly to the letter-throwing incident. I certainly wasn’t falling for that. So I continued on my slow path, explaining the certificate policy calmly, going over all the reasons I was being punished for doing my job properly. Teo, my delegate, was struggling to keep up. It wasn’t just the language barrier; there was a lot of front desk minutiae here, a lot of little policies and rules that are nowhere near his expertise. That’s why you’re supposed to get a delegate from your department, someone who knows what the hell you’re going on about. I don’t even think the director of HR was following it all.
It seemed so tedious to me, all of it.
Somehow, while continuing to explain my side of the situation, I figured out what happened with Orianna. Her husband had been walking down Queens Boulevard when a car driving down the road paddled him with the passenger side door. Which was fully opened, like a wing. I can’t imagine why something like this would happen. You try to figure it out. No serious damage to the husband, he was out of the hospital two days later, but Orianna took advantage of the situation, as any union member would, and secured two months’ Family Medical Leave to help her loved ones through this emotionally devastating incident. It was the end of the summer, so she went to the Dominican Republic, as you might do after a vehicular paddling. Last Friday marked her first day back after the two months off, the day I snapped. She came back tan, happy, relaxed, and unprepared to be thrown back into the cage-match environment of the hotel. She still had sand in her toes, and me getting loud and throwing shit was too much. Plus, she had all the seniority she needed to avoid a layoff, which was one of her initial reasons for seeking the position. So she stepped down as delegate. I was considering this fact, realizing how bad this really was for me: my union delegate stepping down implies my guilt and leaves me without a witness, without a defense.
Orianna could have said, “No, Tom never threw anything. Maybe he tossed them onto the table but certainly never meant to hurt anyone, and he never threw anything, not that I saw.” Then I could say, “What she said,” making it two against one, and we would walk out unscathed. I might have bought Orianna a bottle of Brugal for her trouble.
“We have testimony that you threw objects at her face.”
“At her face? I never threw anything at her face, I—”
“Stop. Thomas, listen …”
Just then I was thinking: Why isn’t Sara here?
The director of human resources cleared her throat. “We have decided to terminate your employment here at the hotel.”
Teo heard that shit. He said, “Ess yuse me?”
“I’m fired?”
“Yes, Thomas, we have decided to terminate your employment. Effective immediately.”
There followed a long, long silence during which all the blood in my body sank to my feet and started pooling up, filling my legs like a pitcher, leaving my face dead white.
“I’ve never been fired before. What do I do?”
I really sounded, and felt, like a lost little boy at that moment.
“Get your things, turn in your bank, and leave the property.”
That sounded easy. It seemed as if that’s all there was to it; get your shit and go. Things went white for a while as I sat there, Teo staring at me as if we all just found out I had cancer. He looked as if he didn’t even want to touch me.
Soon enough, I was helped to my feet by Mike, a big, aggressive security agent.
“Let’s go, Tom. You gotta get your stuff and go.”
“Am I really terminated? Can I tell people?”
“No, just get your stuff and go. Quietly.”
Fuck that. I walked through the lobby with big bad Mike’s hand on my elbow, telling everyone, bellmen, doormen, concierge, and guests alike. “I GOT FIRED. MY EMPLOYMENT HAS BEEN TERMINATED. THEY FIRED ME.”
And the strange part about it? Everyone thought I was joking. They were all smiling at me, shaking their heads like, “Oh, Tommy. He’s so funny.”
I told Ben in the back office while cleaning out my mailbox.
“Fired, huh? I get it. Cleaning out your mailbox, right? Your mother.”
Twenty minutes later I was pushed out the back employee entrance. They had provided me with two guest laundry bags to shove all my shit in. Almost a decade’s worth of detritus: letters, photographs, pins and pens, a book about Bob Dylan the Gray Wolf tried to force me to read, deodorant, a bunch of socks—a life’s worth of what now looked distinctly like garbage stuffed into two hotel laundry bags.
It was Friday, 5:30 p.m. Happy hour.
I dragged the bags across the street to a bar on Ninth Avenue. I had passed this stupid-looking bar before and after every single shift I had ever worked at the Bellevue and never once stepped inside. We certainly drank in the area but never here because this place was for tourists. But that’s where I went. Maybe because it was closest; that was definitely one alluring factor about it that afternoon. Maybe I went there because I knew, without a doubt, I wouldn’t run into any co-workers. It was filled with tourists and strangers, a new environment. I took a stool at the bar, right across from the hotel, a nice view directly into the lobby, set a laundry bag on either side of the stool, and ordered a shot of tequila and a beer. Fuck me.
One tequila in me and half the beer to wash it down. That was step one. I had to accomplish step one before even beginning step two, which was to order another round and drink that. Step three was to start thinking again, to start processing. My whole life was shifting, like a fortress coming down into the ocean, everything was sliding and cracking open, and the noise and movement was tremendous, deafening. There was a lot of dust. I poured another shot and another beer onto the dust and waited for the whole mess to slide into the ocean so I could sit in silence and figure out something, anything, get a fresh look at the new landscape.
On one side my heart grew strangely light. I thought about the depravity, the hustling, the utter childishness of the hotel, the managers, the fighting, the faxes. I was free from having to raise my hand to go to the bathroom, free from whispering to hookers and trophy wives, free from guests coming down with Ziploc bags, claiming they found a bedbug, though the only thing in the bag was a sunflower seed shell. I no longer had to wear a name tag. My name tag was somewhere at the bottom of a laundry bag. Garbage. Buried garbage.
On the other hand, despite happy hour, right off Times Square a shot and a beer came to fourteen dollars, and I’d failed to hustle any cash that Friday. I only had a five-dollar bill in my wallet. My cash-hustling days were done. I brought out my debit card and, shamefully, started a tab.
That was the first real ramification: someone had poked a hole in my money balloon. It was no longer filling; it was now hissing, shrinking, floating back down to earth.
But I had plenty of escape money.
In a way, I’d mastered New York City, come here with nothing and had my way with the city, that nasty, thieving whore: I had stolen thousands from her tiny whore purse, and now it was time to move on.
I thought about Julie and Los Angeles. I thought about the Bekkers and their villa in Cape Town. I
thought about Julie in Cape Town.
If I recall correctly, I hadn’t wanted this job to begin with, right? Now I was forced to make a change, a good change. I had had five beers and five shots, and you know what? I felt pretty damn good. I brought out my phone and put it next to my beer, perhaps to browse for international flights. Maybe I was just drunk (I was absolutely drunk), but I couldn’t help thinking: Even in this cold, touristy, expensive bar the sun was shining on me. Summer may be dying here in New York, and snow was on the way, but halfway across the world, on another continent, spring was approaching. Everything good was making preparations to bloom.
“WELCOME TO THE FRONT DESK: CHECKING OUT?”
Did I make it out? Am I writing this on a mosquito-netted porch while a thick red sun sets over Africa, a book on the table next to me, its pages shifting gently in the warm, fragrant jungle breeze? Sorry, dear guests. I’m in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I’m wearing a name tag while typing. I’m gonna be thirty minutes late for my morning shift.
Again, it was that damn yellow union card. All weekend, once the news circulated that I’d been fired, my phone exploded with texts and voice mails from co-workers. About 95 percent of them were total insincere horseshit. You see, I’d been holding down my seniority for years, and at the time of my firing I was almost at the very top. That gave me weekends off. That gave me Christmas off. And that gave me a huge target on my back from everyone below me who figured, as a single white male with zero children, I didn’t deserve a goddamn thing, especially not Christmas off. When the news hit that the number three in seniority was gone, everyone flocked to the back office to look at the schedule, ready to pick apart my shifts like vultures, ripping at the fleshy Sundays off and screeching and pecking at my morning shifts. They called their husbands and said something wonderful had happened. Then they called me and said they couldn’t believe something so terrible had happened.