“She comes down, screams at me because she saw some guest has a trash bag outside his door. She told me I should be up there, taking everyone’s trash out. Lady’s nuts.”
“Once you work here long enough, you’ll begin to realize anyone who chooses to stay at a hotel is a lunatic.”
“No kidding.”
“So,” I say, trying to stop the words from coming out of my mouth and predictably failing, “you find any owls to pet yet?”
She blushes and laughs. “No. Not yet.”
If I was a pervert, I might claim to have something similar to an owl in my pants that she could potentially stroke. Correction: if I was a pervert without fear of consequence, without fear of rejection.
She rests her hand on my arm and the tiny television set in my heart switches to a channel broadcasting loud, disorienting static, and I’m worried the bulimic girl might witness this scene and crush all chances of us ever marrying.
“Listen,” she says, “I just wanted to apologize if I came off as a little weird the other day. I’ve been going through…a lot of stuff lately…and I guess it’s all made me a little…loony.”
“Everybody’s loony. It’s all good.”
“Thanks. But seriously, though…I wasn’t kidding about the owl outside my house. I want you to know that. Just in case.”
“The one that hoots when you’re sad?” I smile, but I’m the only one.
“I think it’s stalking me.” She flinches and covers her arms over her head, as if expecting a strong blow from above.
“Are you okay?” I try to help her but she backs away, shaking. Lines of blood trickle out of both nostrils.
“I’M FINE! Sorry. Just a bad headache. Been having them a lot lately. You think about owls long enough and you start to become one.”
“Sure. That makes sense.”
Blood continues to drip down her face, but she doesn’t seem to give a shit. “Anyway, the drawer’s at three hundred. The only thing to pass on is that Yates guy has a clogged toilet. He’s expecting you.”
“Awesome.”
“I gotta go now, okay? I gotta go.”
“The owl awaits?”
Mandy 2 closes her eyes, blood dropping from her face to the carpet. “The owls always await.”
* * *
Hotel guests are not human beings. At best, they are dogs too dumb to ever be properly house-broken. If not for night auditors, hotel guests wouldn’t survive the night. They might freeze to death after failing to comprehend the thermostat, or they might starve on the toilet while trying to figure out the flusher. If the hotel caught on fire, the guests would just sit in their rooms watching the flames spread onto the beds, waiting to receive directions to stand up and exit the building. Most guests would request the front desk staff to wipe their asses if they thought they could get away with it. Hold them on our laps and burp them at the climax of their meals.
It’s bad enough we have to smile and ask how they’re doing. But the truth is, nobody gives a shit about how anybody is doing at any point in time, and we all know it’s bullshit yet we all continue playing along lest we disappoint a make-believe business executive jacking-off behind an invisible desk in an office that doesn’t exist. We tell the guests good morning even though the morning is nothing close to being good and we ask how they’re doing and sometimes they nod and tell us they’re doing all right and sometimes they spit in our faces and they shit in our mouths, they shit right in our goddamn mouths and we don’t break our smiles even as their massive turds trickle down our throats and stain our teeth brown and even as we choke to death we still smile, we still ask if there’s anything else we can do to accommodate their stay, and of course there’s something, there’s always something.
Night auditors do not see hotel guests as human beings and guests sure as hell do not see night auditors as human beings. Perfect example: cell phones. Guests love to check-in while on their cell phones. They’ll typically enter the hotel, already on the phone, and toss their license on the front desk. Direct eye contact is unfathomable. Any sort of recognition that I’m a real person and not another automatic robot designed to satisfy their every need is a laughable dream. The frustration builds up to volumes so immense I have to bite my knuckles. There are many questions I need to ask this guest before I can complete the check-in process. Even if they already have a credit card on file, I still need to swipe the credit card again. I need to inquire about the purpose of their stay. I need to inform them of breakfast hours and the Internet passcode and various other amenities. I need to inquire which hole of mine they’d wish to penetrate. However, even when I try to gain their attention, they shun me, like a small child trying to impress their overworked parents with crayon drawings.
Being ignored is a direct cause of anger and depression. We all believe we are the center of the universe, and when this delusion is shattered by something as irritating and harmful as neglect, it beats the shit out of us. Few things are more dehumanizing than someone refusing to acknowledge our existence. We all share this rock together. We all burn under the same stupid, bastard sun.
The truth none of us are willing to admit is that, while we all view ourselves as the protagonist of our life stories, there are an infinite amount of other stories being written at the exact same moment, and the significance of each one is incomparable. What doesn’t matter to one person matters a great deal to someone else, and vice versa. It is extremely difficult for myself to recognize that, because I tend to view others as side-characters in my life, others will thus view me as a side-character in their own. Maybe this is common knowledge to others, but for people like myself who spend the majority of their time isolated with only their thoughts to keep them company, this can be a difficult truth to accept.
Nobody’s duty on this planet is to serve some other person. We are all serving ourselves, in one way or another. We all have our own desires. Our own plots.
The rude guest on his cell phone does not see me the same way I see myself. He doesn’t see the hero to an uneventful, anticlimactic story about owls and masturbation. He sees a blurry face whose sole purpose on this Earth is to further delay the time it takes for him to walk into the hotel and to enter his reserved room. To him, I am a film extra unrecognizable in the background. The guy on the subway reading a newspaper with one leg crossed over the other. Instantly forgettable.
But now there’s an issue with the reservation. Maybe the credit card he gives me is declined, or the type of room he reserved had been sold to another guest sometime earlier in the day. Shit happens. Now I’ve delayed his plot. This was supposed to be a simple process. Maybe he’s on the phone with somebody important, maybe he’s just shooting the shit with some girl he hopes to one day fuck, I don’t know—the phone call is important to him, and that’s all that matters. Now not only does he have to delay entrance to his room, but he also has to interrupt his phone conversation to further deal with what he expected to be a brief and forgetful moment in an otherwise significant story. Imagine Atticus Finch attempting to check into a hotel, only to be delayed thanks to the desk clerk having trouble locating his room key. Nobody wants to read about him standing at the front desk, sighing with impatience. No, we want to skip this scene and fast-forward to the cool bird-killing chapters.
So, understandably, the guest is pissed. He is pissed the same way he might get pissed if his WiFi was slow or his car battery died. He paid a certain amount of money for these things and he expects them to do their jobs without any issues. Now I’ve become yet another problem in an ocean of problems that should not exist.
I’ve reluctantly evolved from side-character to antagonist.
Thinking of the guest with the cell phone in this manner does not comfort his inevitable temper tantrum any more than showering the wilderness in gasoline extinguishes a forest fire. But it does help me understand why the guest reacts this way. Many times a guest will shout and slap the front desk and I will be left baffled. I think, what kind of human being t
reats another human being this way? And the answer to this is: all human beings. Because when Person A is expecting some type of service from Person B, Person A no longer views Person B as a human being, but as another machine with specific coding installed to exclusively serve Person A without failure.
And the truly terrible and funny thing about all of this is that, meanwhile, I’m viewing the guest as somebody who has interrupted my own story. I don’t want to be stuck dealing with this asshole any longer than I need to. There are other tasks I’d like to accomplish and cross off my never-ending list of shit. Because he or someone else screwed up somewhere down the line and I have to deal with the problem, I am bitter and my hate for this guest increases. I hate the guest for no other reason than he is standing in front of me and is not already in his room. And the guest hates me for the same reason.
We are two main characters clashing against two supporting characters.
We are fighting ourselves, pissed at the reflection in the mirror.
If I can keep this in mind, maybe the next time a guest screams at me about something beyond my control I won’t completely break down and spend the rest of my shift wishing I had some whiskey. The ability to not only understand empathy but to utilize it as much as possible is essential in not losing what little of our sanity we have left to lose.
But this is all easier to think about than it is to actually initiate.
Guests don’t give a good goddamn if I empathize with them. All they want is free shit, and they think if they scream and bitch long and loud enough, they’ll get it.
And they are one hundred percent correct.
Part 4
The clock reads 1:30 A.M. and I’m fucking exhausted. This shift is murder. The number one cause of mind-decay, ask any reasonable doctor around. The night shift destroys not only your body, but also your mind. It’s a whack-job psycho killer with a taste for blood. I need a better job, one with day-time hours and more pay. One that someone would be proud to claim. Like a hot dog vendor or a televangelist.
Later, if the hotel quiets down, I’ll go up on the roof and masturbate. It’s the only way to relieve stress these days.
The elevator dings open down the hallway. I sigh and wait. The scariest sound in the world is the elevator descending to the first floor.
A few minutes pass and nobody bothers me. False alarm?
“Hey!” a man shouts from the elevator doors. “Hey, is anyone here?”
“Uh, yeah.”
A series of heavy footsteps follow as a man runs down the hallway, into the lobby, wearing underwear and a tank top and nothing else. Beer drips down his face, soaking his hair, soaking everything. Waving an empty can of Cools Light, he says, “I couldn’t find you. I was scared.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Thank the gods. Can you tell me where the Wendy’s is? I’m so fuckin’ lost, dude.”
I tell him where it is, but remind him of the time and that they won’t be open right now.
“Okay, yeah, okay, but where is the Wendy’s?”
I repeat myself.
“Look, I just want some goddamn breakfast.”
I tell the drunk guest that the restaurant is going to be closed, although I don’t know why I’m even bothering. Just let him go and figure it out. Screw it.
Then the guest says, “Okay, yeah, sure, but what about the other place? Wendy’s?”
I open my mouth to respond, but the guest interrupts with a scream: “NO, WAIT, I MEAN DENNY’S! FUCKIN’ DENNY’S! YEAH!”
He spins around, runs out of the lobby, and punts the empty beer can across the parking lot, yelling, “GOOAAAALLL!” as he sprints away from the hotel.
After ten minutes of silence, I sit back down behind the front desk and try to relax. I grab my copy of Michael Cisco’s massive novel, Animal Money, and flip through a couple pages, then set it back down. Too tired to read. Too tired to live. My eyeballs are dying planets under an exploding sun.
The doors open. Shit. The guy’s returning already. He’s going to bug me all night, I just know it.
I peek over the front desk. No, not the crazy guy. Just some woman. Probably also crazy. Her hair stands straight up like she’s recently been electrocuted. Her grey sweater is clearly covered in animal hair. Most likely a cat’s.
“Hi, ma’am, can I help you?”
She brushes her hands through her hair and starts rambling. “I’m so, so sorry, young man, this was a bad idea, just ignore me.”
She flees from the hotel.
Well, that was remarkably painless.
Two seconds pass and she storms back into the lobby, rambling psychotically. She tells me that she’s terribly sorry but she’s afraid there are people after her. “I don’t know how but they’re…well, they’re following me, okay? They’re all around. They’re in my GPS.”
“They’re in your GPS?”
“I am so, so scared, and they are closer than ever. They are in my GPS and they are screaming and I can’t, I can’t take it anymore, I just can’t.” She pauses to catch her breath. “Come with me. Please, just come outside. Please. You can hear it screaming, too.”
“The GPS is screaming?”
“Nothing has ever screamed louder.”
I have never heard a GPS screaming before, so of course I can’t pass up on this opportunity. I lock the register and follow the lady outside. As we walk through the parking lot, it occurs to me that this could be a set-up. She’ll get me to the other side of the hotel and bam, I’m face-to-face with some guy holding a knife. But after considering my wallet and the laughable amount of money in my bank account, I manage to relax a little.
We arrive at her car and she grabs my shoulder, trying to shush me despite the fact that I’m not making any noise. “Quiet! Do you hear that?”
“Uh, no.”
“Shhh!”
We lean forward off the curb, straining to listen to nothing.
She shrugs. “This always happens.”
She takes out her cell phone and squeezes it until her knuckles turn white, then pulls her arm back like she’s going to throw it, then thinks better of it and returns the device to her pocket. She tells me “they” are using her cell phone and GPS to stalk her and she is so fucking sick of it.
“Those fuckers are out there. Just listen.”
“Ma’am, do you want me to call the police?”
She shakes her head. “Fuckin’ pigs are useless. Already talked to ’em and they said to consider a restraining order. CAN’T GET A RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT, NOW CAN I, DUMBASS PIGS?”
Her screams unravel into incomprehensibleness. I slowly back away and return to the lobby. I’m fumbling for the front desk phone to call the police when her car screeches out of the parking lot. I stand like an idiot with the phone in my hand and watch the car disappear into the darkness.
Sure. Why not.
I return to Animal Money and continue consuming dead trees.
The phone rings. I slam the book down.
Room #504.
I stare at the ringing phone and gulp, seriously debating not answering. Shit.
But of course I answer it. It is my job. My duty. My only purpose in life is to answer this phone. My father and mother fucked and pried me from her vagina just so one day I could answer a telephone in South-Central Texas. This is my moment. This is my destiny. So I do. I answer it and ask how I can help her.
And she responds, “It’s about fucking time!”
“Sorry, ma’am, I was helping another guest.”
“Yeah, right, and I was born with a dick.”
I almost choke. “Uh…were you?”
“I gave birth to these children, didn’t I?”
The only thing stopping me from hanging up is knowing that she’d just come down to the lobby to scream in person. “Ma’am, how can I help you?”
“I need some wake-up calls. Seven-fifteen and seven-forty-five. Think you can manage that?”
“Yes, ma’am,
of course.”
“Good.” She hangs up. Thank Christ.
I start to enter the wake-up calls she requested, then stop. I’ll be out of this place by seven in the morning. If she happens to not receive a wake-up call for some reason, I won’t have to listen to her bitching. Maybe by missing a single alarm, her entire day will be ruined.
I erase what I had already entered into the system and smile. The night is just beginning but it’s already looking up. It’s amazing what spite can do for the soul. I leave the front desk to store my lunch in the break room refrigerator. When I return, the phone’s going insane.
504. Again. Somehow she knows I didn’t enter the wake-up calls. Oh crap, oh crap.
“What do they even pay you people for?” she says after I answer.
“Sorry, ma’am, you caught me when I was helping another guest.”
“Whatever. My son is sick. I need some extra towels. Now.”
“Sure. How many do you need?”
“A lot! Jesus, do I have to hold your hand every step of the way? Just bring up some fucking towels already.”
I hang up without another word and rush into the backroom for a stack of towels. A part of me wants to just forget she ever called and make her come down and pick up the towels her own damn self. The thought makes me smile deep down inside. But she would just end up bitching at me even more. It’s not worth it. This lobby is my home, my nest. She is not welcomed here.
I knock on 504 with about ten towels stacked against my chest. On the other side of the door I can hear the woman saying, “Jesus Christ, it’s about fucking time. I’m so sick of these lazy hotel assholes.”
The door swings open and the woman stands in the opening wearing only a bathrobe, practically snarling at him. The bathrobe is not tied properly, revealing one enormous, sagging breast poking out. Purple veins have rotted it like the dead roots of a tree. She grabs the towels from me and holds up a plastic grocery bag. The top is tied in a knot.
“Throw this away.” She shoves it at me until I accept it.
The door closes and I’m left alone in the hallway, holding a mysterious soggy grocery bag. The smell hits me hard. Vomit. The bitch has given me a bag of vomit.
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 3