I once had a client that needed violin lessons. I reasoned that recent music graduates had no money, and they would be overqualified to teach someone how to play the violin—especially at the beginner level. They might not have had the roster or the résumé, but they definitely had the ability and passion. Not only that, but they’d be willing to work cheaper than someone who was an established tutor. Instead of sitting around looking for temp jobs, they could work in their own field, earn some cash, and spread their knowledge. It was win-win-win.
* * *
I had called the Juilliard alumni association in the past, and they happened to have a list of recent grads available for work. That’s how I met Vicki. Vicki was a cellist who mostly did chamber music, moonlighting in little orchestras. I had a vision of these beautiful angelic women with long wavy hair and chiffon evening gowns, playing “My Funny Valentine” as the train pulled into the station. Vicki herself was attractive in a very classical music sort of way, with her black hair slicked back in a tight ponytail. She looked sophisticated.
“So can you help me out?” I asked her.
“Well, I don’t really know a string quartet per se. But I can put one together myself. That won’t be too hard. Where should we be standing?”
It was two cars down from the dining car. But I had no idea where on the platform that was, and if I estimated incorrectly then the effect would be lost. It would seem like the band was playing there at random, instead of putting on a show specifically for Julian and his wife.
I didn’t want to go back to Elipto at Penn Station and figure out where it was. It would be like when a salesman keeps pushing after you’ve agreed to buy something, and ends up talking you out of the sale. Elipto and everyone else must have been joking about me and my attempts to bring romance back to train travel, and I was walking a tightrope between endearing and irritating.
I looked through the phone book and I called the number for Amtrak, working my way through the phone directory until I got to someone who oversaw Penn Station. I didn’t want to risk having to explain the whole story for the twentieth time, so I just lied. “I’m meeting my cousin coming from Washington, D.C.,” I said. “He’s handicapped and I want to make sure I am precisely on the platform where he will be getting off. He’s going to be two cars down from the dining car. Can you tell me how far back that would be?”
“Uh … I’m not sure.”
“Well, can you tell me how long each train car?”
A very, very, very long pause. “I don’t know.”
“Is there someone else there who can help me?” I said.
“I’m not certain who would have that information,” he said.
You know what? I figured. I’m just going to go back. I’ve come this far. I went back to Penn Station and dropped Elipto’s name to get myself down to the platform. There was a train docked there already so I could see exactly where the people would be getting off. I found the nearest landmark—a garbage can with a big sticker on it—and counted the paces until I reached the door of the train. With flashbacks to Rosie Perez, I knew I couldn’t leave anything to chance when it came to the directions.
The day of the event, I faxed Vicki an itinerary. I told her to ask for Elipto, and to mention his name if he wasn’t there himself. I told her how many paces down from the garbage can, and which garbage can, and which track, and what Julian looked like. It was an entire flowchart to anticipate every possible problem.
Every possible problem except for my having forgotten about the white roses.
Oh, crap. There was a place right by Penn Station that dealt with roses and only with roses. I called them in a mad panic.
“We’re already closing for the day,” the guy told me. “Sorry.”
“No, no, no, no, no!” I said. “You have to. You have to, you have to, you have to! This is a very big deal.”
“I’m locking up.”
“I’ll send money right now. Right now. In a taxi. Please!”
“Fine. But if he’s not here in fifteen minutes, we’re leaving.”
“He’ll be there.” I hung up the phone and went out into the street to hail a cab. I gave the driver a twenty-dollar tip, took down his medallion number just in case, and sent him down to the flower shop with an envelope full of cash.
The flowers made it to the platform. Vicki and her string quartet made it to the platform. Everything went off without a hitch, and it became a big deal. Julian was delighted, and his wife had the biggest surprise of her life. It even got some press attention—I really did bring the romance back to train travel.
Now part of me began to feel like I was some sort of concierge cupid. Instead of saving these great ideas for the guests who really appreciated it, like Julian, I started being more proactive in my advice. I obviously had never refused to offer service in the past, but now I brought up what I felt were better alternatives. Almost every single time, people took my suggestions—and they came out seeming wonderful in the process.
It wasn’t that hard to make the hotel guests seem impressive, because most of them were so generic to begin with. Very quickly, the businessmen that stayed at the hotel all began to look the same to me. They were all so polished in how they acted and how they thought and how they dressed. Their hair was always smoothed back, like airline pilots. They wore Brioni shirts—with monogrammed cuffs—under Canali suits. The hive mentality even went a step further with some of them.
As a service to our guests—and a commission for us—we had tailors come to the hotel and set up shop for three or four days. The businessmen would go in and get measured and the tailor would make custom suits for them at a cost of upward of $3,000. Custom suits—that all looked the same. We even had a shoemaker. He would make custom shoes made to fit, for exorbitant prices. The plain, shiny oxfords would really stand out in a crowd, in the same way that Where’s Waldo stands out in a crowd.
Their thought processes were often the same as well. Though it’s the most obvious choice that anyone could possibly think of, each and every one of them believed that they invented the idea of strewing rose petals about the room to create an air of romance. I used to keep rose petals on hand just for that very purpose. It got to the point where, after an event, I’d go scour the flower arrangements. I’d even pull roses out of the garbage and just take the petals off. The chances were very high that, at some point, a guest was going to ask me—a complete stranger, mind you—to throw rose petals in a path from their hotel room door to their lover’s bed. I had a couple of days before the petals smelled not so fresh. I’d go in the back room and find a cold corner to keep them chilled. If I got really desperate, I could pull out the moldy ones and use the rest. There would be no magic if I revealed that I kept a garbage bag full of secondhand petals, so I would charge twenty-five dollars to the guest as if they had come from a florist, and everyone was happy. It was like recycling!
One night I was approached by one of the generic InterContinental hotel guests. “I want to do something that’s really special and really romantic,” he said.
“Of course,” I said, mirroring his energy.
“First I want to go to a great dinner with my wife, but I want a surprise when I come back.”
“Do you have anything particular in mind?” I asked, bracing myself.
“I was thinking maybe if you just put, like, rose petals on the floor. Can you do that?”
He was a nice enough guy and he caught me in the right way, so I felt comfortable being honest with him. “Well, you know that’s okay. People do that.”
“Oh, really?” he said, deflated at the realization that he wasn’t first to patent it.
Now the mercenary side of me kicked in, and I started seeing dollar signs. I started brainstorming with him like I did with Julian. “You know what could be really fun? Why don’t you just fill the whole bed with flowers? Like the whole thing. Just buy two hundred roses—not the petals, the entire flowers—and cover the bed in them.”
“Wow,
that’s pretty interesting,” he nodded. “That’s a good idea. What else?”
“What else?”
“Yeah, what else should I do?”
The thing with a brainstorming session is that you throw out many, many ludicrous ideas in the hopes of stumbling upon one or two fairly good ones. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to function. I started thinking of all the varied Valentine’s Day clichés. “Well, does she like chocolate?”
“Absolutely.”
“What about if you let me know before you come back from your dinner? I can fill the tub with chocolate and the two of you can take a chocolate bath.” I don’t know where the hell I came up with that one. Even as I said it, it sounded absurd.
He stood there quietly for a second, speechless. “You’re brilliant. That’s it! That’s what we’re going do. I love that. I absolutely love that. So it’s tomorrow night that I want go to dinner at eight. Will you be working then?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be here until midnight or so.”
“Here’s the plan. I’ll call you when we’re forty-five minutes away, to let you know that we’re coming. And it’s got to be Godiva. That’s my wife’s favorite.”
“No problem,” I told him. “I’ll take care of everything for tomorrow.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, handing me a a hundred-dollar tip.
This can’t be so difficult, I thought. Godiva had these little hot chocolate kits. I could buy twenty of them and it would only cost around a hundred dollars. I wonder if that’ll be enough. How many gallons should I buy? There was no point in me trying to figure it out on my own. I’d never had an aquarium, so water volume was lost on me. I picked up the phone and called Kraft Hardware.
“Hello,” I said. “Can you tell me what the capacity of a standard-sized bathtub is, in volume?”
“Sure,” the hardware guy said. “You’re looking at just over eighty gallons of water before it reaches the overflow.”
“Eighty gallons? Okay, thank you very much.” I hung up the phone. Eighty gallons was a lot of chocolate. The Godiva came in eight-ounce packets. I’d need boxes and boxes and boxes of the stuff; if I got twenty, it would have just looked like frosting. We were already talking thousands of dollars.
When the guest came through the lobby not too long after, I called him over. “Is everything okay?” he wanted to know.
“There’s an issue. The Godiva would be exorbitant.”
“How exorbitant?”
“Thousands of dollars,” I told him.
He didn’t blink. “Well, what’s the alternative?”
“We’re going to need gallons of chocolate. I was going to start calling restaurant suppliers,” I told him. The service bug had bitten me, and I was going to make this happen for him no matter what.
“Well, whatever works. That’s fine with me.” He handed me another hundred-dollar bill.
Now I realized that it couldn’t even be chocolate at all—chocolate would harden. I needed to get chocolate fudge. There was nothing for me to do that night, since everything was closed. But the first thing I did when I came in the next day was to call around until I found a restaurant supply company.
“Yeah, we have Hershey’s fudge,” they told me. “It comes in big plastic jugs, and there are six jugs per box.”
“I’m going to need about eighty gallons’ worth.”
“Eighty gallons? Well, each jug is a gallon so you’re going to need at least a dozen boxes in total.”
“Perfect!” I gave him the shipping information and took care of payment.
Later that evening, they delivered all the boxes to the hotel. Oh my God, I thought to myself. This is actually happening now. I’m really going to be filling up a bathtub with fudge. As the delivery guys unloaded box after box, I realized that it wasn’t like somebody was delivering flowers. I couldn’t just put all the chocolate in some corner and not draw attention to it.
I ran to the security office in the bowels of the hotel. “I’ve got a ton of chocolate because some guest wants to fill his bathtub with the stuff. I need you to cover for me while I get it upstairs.”
“I’ll help you,” one of the guys said.
“Terrific.” We went back to the lobby. I started opening up the boxes and pulling out all the jugs. I called to make sure the guest’s room was empty, and then we started to bring the chocolate upstairs. Thankfully the staff ignored what I was doing. They figured I was up to something marvelous—not, say, turning a human being into a living sundae.
Finally, I got it all up there and stood for a second looking at this room full of bottles of fudge. Well, it’s too late now! I thought. It’s got to happen. I went back downstairs and waited for my signal.
As planned, the guest eventually called me from the restaurant. “We’re going to be there in about an hour. Will everything be ready?”
“Absolutely!” I told him.
“Thanks again. You’re the best.”
I went back upstairs. Oh, crap, I thought. What a goddamn hassle this is going to be. I stood there opening bottle after bottle and—glug, glug, glug—pouring it in. Forty-five minutes later, I was finished. It turned out that I didn’t buy nearly enough; it must have settled, or maybe the tub was bigger than standard sized. But it did make a big impact. It was a lot of fudge—and it was a big mess.
I was a little disappointed because my fantasy was that it was going to be grander than it was. This isn’t that great, I realized. It’s actually pretty gross. And it’s not hot, either. It’s tepid. I should have done a bubble bath and been done with it.
Now I had dozens of empty, unwieldy jugs to dispose of. I got some commercial-sized garbage bags and schlepped the bottles out of the room. I took them through the back hallways where the housekeepers were so that no one would ask any questions. I didn’t want to leave them in the hotel at all, so I just went out the back and took them out to the street on my way home.
I knew that I had to follow up the next morning. I wasn’t working, so I called the guy in his room. “So?” I said. “How did it go?”
“Brilliant, fantastic,” he told me, tickled out of his mind. “Thank you so much. You’re absolutely great. I left a tip for you at the desk.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
“I’ve just got one question.”
“Yes?”
“What am I supposed to do with all the chocolate?” he asked me.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay, perfect.”
We weren’t really supposed to be at the hotel when we weren’t working, but I couldn’t have him call up housekeeping and explain that the concierge desk had filled his bathtub with gallons of chocolate fudge. I snuck into the room, and there I saw the tub again. It was just this smooth placid pool of velvety, dark liquid. In fact, it looked pretty much like I had left it.
Then I remembered that still waters run deep. And deep under these still waters was the drain, and I had to put my hand in through the muck and who-knows-what-else to pull the stopper. Did they even step foot into it? I wondered. Did they fool around in the chocolate? Out of the corner of my eye I saw a towel bunched up on the floor. If I didn’t know that the stain was fudge, I would have been very much disturbed. As it was, I was indifferent. I just wanted to get it cleaned up and get the hell out of there.
I rolled up my sleeve and dove my hand into the fudge, feeling around for the drain. I pulled out the stopper and waited for the chocolate to pour down the pipes. I could see it start to drain—barely. There was a vague ripple on the surface. I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
It was very, very slow going. Now I started to get a little scared. It was possible that it would clog a pipe or something. Maybe it would take forever to drain and I’d get busted. I knew I needed some help, but I wasn’t sure who to call. It wasn’t like I could’ve dialed up Willy Wonka and asked for his advice on what to do.
Rupert, I thought. Rupert will help me. Rupe
rt was the engineer in the hotel, which effectively meant that he was like the handyman for the entire building. He was an old guy I got along very well with. He also—like everyone else—loved to be in on anything scandalous. I tracked him down in the smoking lounge. There was only one thing for me to do: fess up and ask for his mercy. “Rupert,” I told him. “I think I did something wrong.”
“What? What did you do?”
“Can you come upstairs?” I whispered. “I need to show you something.”
Now he knew something good was happening. I took him up to the room and showed him the pool. From the sides of the tub I could tell that it had barely drained at all while I had gone to get Rupert.
“What is this?” he said.
“A couple wanted to do something romantic, and I decided it would be a good idea to fill the bathtub with chocolate.”
Rupert got a twinkle in his eye. Even though he was an old man, he still liked being witness to a room where naughtiness probably happened. “So now what?” he said.
“Now it’s not draining.”
“Did you open it?”
“Yes,” I said.
Just to make sure, he stuck his hand in and felt around. I couldn’t blame him, as I would have done the same. He thought for a second about what to do. “I’ll get a plunger and some Drano,” he shrugged.
It was an obvious solution, but I’d tried to think of something else and had come up short myself. “Thanks,” I said, passing him a fifty. “And let’s just keep this between us.”
Later, I watched as he ran the water forever, and plunged the mess, and poured in the Drano—over and over and over. At the end of the day, I kind of thought, Well, that was stupid. I worked hard for that moment, and it totally wasn’t worth it. Why did I have to do that? Flowers would have been fine.
And from then on out, I decided that flowers were fine.
Whenever one of the generic businessmen came up with that look on their face, I was standing there like a loaded gun. “Hi,” they said. “I wanna do something romant—”
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