Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality

by Jacob Tomsky

  His office was the house car, a black BMW 7 Series, owned by the hotel to facilitate short trips for VIPs around the city and the occasional airport pickup or drop-off, which Perry was throwing me a lot of recently and I appreciated. Airport trips got you off the line for about an hour, the hotel paid you twenty in cash for the time, and the guests would often tip twenty on top of that. Plus, either there or back you’re alone and get to recline the seat, slide open the sunroof, and listen to whatever you want as you pimp through New Orleans in a black BMW 7 Series. The hotel gave one airport gig to Walter, one; a drop-off, and he came back five hours later. Said he washed the car. But it was clearly still dirty.

  Perry put the key in the ignition of the BMW so we could put the radio on low and recline the seats.

  “Tommy, you know Trish, right?”

  “Front office manager?”

  “Right, the FOM. She’s looking for someone to bring up there and was asking me about everyone. I told her you’re good with the guests. That’s why I been putting you on those airport gigs heavy, because you good with the guests. I’ve told everyone about the position, but she might have her eye on you. Play cool for a time down here. A few more weeks and maybe Trish will bring you upstairs. Inside the hotel proper. What you think?”

  “What do I know about front desk? But I guess I want to advance.” A sparkling vision of being a GM flashed quick in my mind. Just a few months on the line had already laid dust on my dream. I’d begun to see the hotel for what it really was and gotten an idea of just how many rungs were on the ladder. “And I like it down here, working with you. Why should I leave?”

  “Money. Career. It’s the right thing to do. Listen, I’d do anything for my baby girls, and that’s why I nailed down this captain gig. I know you ain’t got no family, but do it for you. And do it now. A man should always want the best for himself. It’s goddamn hot out here. Get up inside that air-conditioning, ya heard?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “See that you do. Now get out. Imma get our baby here detailed from my boy uptown.”

  Definitive fact concerning cutthroats in any tipping business: nothing makes turn-jumping, gig-stealing, tip-snatching hustlers angrier than having it done unto them.

  I don’t know who was up for the ticket, Walter or Keith. I was last in line and had just received a generous ten-dollar tip from (if you can believe it) a Honda enthusiast. Walter grabbed a set of keys from the ticket pouch and walked off calmly toward the garage. Keith said, “HEY,” nice and loud so that it reverberated through the porte cochere, drawing the attention of Sanford the doorman and Perry, as well as the group of five or so guests sitting on the marble benches, waiting for their vehicles. “I’M UP, MOTHERFUCKER,” Keith ripped out, now taking off in stiff-legged strides toward Walter, who was still strolling calmly, just as before.

  I think Perry knew what was about to happen. I believe he deliberately let it happen.

  About a foot behind Walter, who had not turned his head an inch, Keith raised his arms and wrapped his hands around Walter’s throat from behind. He was, in full view of everyone, choking him from behind. Walter twisted under his grip, spinning quickly, and planted his own thumbs on Keith’s throat. Perry started to say, “Whoa, whoa,” but still had not moved from behind the key dispatch counter. They brought each other to the ground, hands crushing each other’s windpipes, rolling around on the tile floor, squeezing, cursing, the guests standing now, mouths gaped in pure shock.

  New Orleans Times-Picayune want ad: Two Valet Positions Available at New Luxury Hotel Downtown. Drug-Free Workplace. Competitive Hourly Wage + Tips. Please Fax Résumé. Psychopaths Tolerated. Up to a Point.

  Two new valets started the following week. One looked like Eddie Munster and couldn’t drive a stick shift. Pretty damn crucial. He would run all the way up the stairs and then walk all the way back down, keys hanging sadly from his hand, shaking his head. “I couldn’t get it to move, you guys.”

  “Damn, Perry. He’s jamming everything up.”

  “At least he ain’t choking out co-workers, ya heard me? But, yeah. Listen, keep an eye out for a stick-shift overnight ticket. Something grimy, not too nice. Take him up to the top stretch, and learn him on it, dig?”

  And that’s what I did. We burned the life out of a guest’s clutch teaching Eddie to drive. It smelled like a metal-and-oil barbecue up there.

  Turns out that was just the beginning of Eddie’s problems. Now that he could drive everything, he could efficiently wreck everything. He scraped five front bumpers taking the tight turns in the garage. He put a scratch down the side of our house car, nice and long. I saw the stress in Perry’s face when his BMW was damaged. It was all he could do to avoid reverting to his old ways and pistol-whipping Eddie into a coma. Perry was doing a seven-year bid in Orleans Parish Prison while I was attending seventh-grade social studies.

  “This dude is a moron. My man, I almost miss Walter and Keith. Least they was men. Look at this head-hanging, little-boy shithead.”

  Then Eddie managed to do it right. He set a record, I would wager, still unmatched in that garage. While trying to pull it out of a tight spot, he artfully embedded a Porsche’s front end deep into a deluxe van’s automatic side doors. The vehicles had more than ten thousand dollars in damage. Each. (“Oh, shit, Lord Jesus Christ.”)

  But even that wasn’t the end for him. It was a busy Friday afternoon, plenty of guests arriving for the weekend, pulling in to the driveway to unload luggage and drop off their vehicles. The situation called for a little extra hustle. So Eddie jumped into the driver’s seat of a car and threw it in reverse, hoping to slip it out of the line and get it up into the garage. But he failed to check the rearview mirror. Had he thrown it a glance, he might have seen the rear window obstructed by the trunk, which was still popped. He might have then intuited that someone might be digging around inside that trunk for the last of his or her luggage. But Eddie failed to look and jammed his tiny foot down hard on the gas, backed up the vehicle, and, to the shock and terror of every single human being in the porte cochere, scooped up the guest who was, in fact, removing the last of his luggage from the trunk. The guest screamed as the back bumper lifted him off the ground by his knees, and that scream became muffled once the guest, still at the mercy of Eddie’s backward momentum, was face-planted into his own trunk, into his own goddamn luggage.

  It wasn’t until that scene Eddie left his valet position.

  Management promoted him.

  They had to take that boy’s tiny foot off the pedal. So they put a phone receiver in his baby hand, taking valet dispatch calls and lining up the tickets for us to bring down.

  They took my foot off the pedal, too. My dedication, positive attitude, and lack of thievery, violence, and drugs had made a favorable impression on the executive committee. Trish came down one pleasant autumn afternoon, into the coolness of the porte cochere, and asked me if I might be interested in a front desk position.

  I said yes.

  A promotion to be proud of. Tennis shoes to dress shoes. “From ashy to classy,” Perry said to me my last night on the line. He put his hand around my arm, smiling so proudly, as if I were his son. Then he let his hand fall back to his side, took a hard look at me, his eyes focused, and said, “Don’t forget where you came from, Tommy.”

  I never have. Valet 4 Life, motherfuckers.

  I attended the Monday morning 7:00 a.m. meeting, held in the offices behind the front desk. I stood in a circle with my new co-workers, looking like an idiot in my valet uniform and dusty black tennis shoes. Everyone seemed to be looking down at my sneakers. Less than a week ago I’d been running for a ticket and kicked what I thought was a shoe in the middle of the Level 8 straightaway. But when I followed the projectile, brown and certainly shoe-like, it rolled over heavily a few times and then righted itself, assuming its natural rat-like posture, and waddled off, wounded, to the far corner of the garage. I looked down at my shoes, shivering again at the meat
y memory of that rodent slammed against my black K-Swiss.

  “I would like to introduce you to Tommy,” Trish said. “His uniform suit is being tailored, so today he will stay back here, in the heart of the house, and train on the system. Please assist him with any questions he may have.” That was the first time I heard the term “heart of the house,” which refers to the back offices and hallways, the storage closets and freight elevators, the white-painted rooms filled with dirty off-white sheets to be cleaned, as opposed to “the front of the house,” meaning the polished marble foyers, vacuumed Oriental rugs, gold-plated railings shined to perfection, and the lobby’s center table sagging with fresh-cut flowers that cost the hotel thousands of dollars a week. Trish then continued the meeting, reading off the meeting sheet, something I would grow very familiar with, containing all events for the day, hotel occupancy broken down by check-in/checkout, as well as a healthy dose of company service training, very similar to the two weeks of classes we’d received prior to opening. That whole “party line” fell apart in the garage, but up here they were still pounding the Kool-Aid. And I was taking my first sip.

  One member of the staff had just finished reading a service story off the meeting sheet from a sister property in Florida: something about an employee buying a chew toy for a guest’s puppy and the guest cried from joy or whatever. “Ladies and gentlemen, have a wonderful day. Start the show,” Trish said, and with that the crew dispersed, some pushing through the door to the front desk and lobby to relieve the solitary overnight agent, others down the hallway to man PBX, or the operator stations. Trish told me to head to the general manager’s office for a brief meeting with Mr. Daniels.

  “Take a seat,” he said to me and indicated a plush coffee-colored leather chair in front of his desk, the same type that populated the Wine Bar in the lobby. “Welcome to the hotel proper, my boy. You handled yourself wonderfully down there in the garage. I heard you witnessed ‘the choking.’ Things can get pretty fucked down there, right?”

  “Yes, sir.” I appreciated the profanity, the deformalization of the situation. This man knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Now you are truly in the hotel business. Front desk. The brain center of the hotel. You’ll learn how a hotel operates, son, from check-in to checkout: billing, room features, upgrades, taxes, cash handling, amenities, VIPs. Lots to learn. You excited?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. I started at front desk myself. Should an employee have his heart set on my position right here, GM, and believe me, this gig is fantastic, front desk is half the battle. The other half is housekeeping. If you know how to get a guest into the right room and know everything about what it takes to make sure that room is spotlessly cleaned, then you can run a hotel, end of story. But you can’t run a luxury hotel. Luxury is more than chandeliers and horrible oil paintings of horses. Obviously, it’s about service. And that is what I want you to learn, Tommy. Take care of our guests. They will love you for it. I will love you for it. I know you heard that lie we told you that every employee, every day, has a large available budget to service our guests in creative ways? It’s actually true. Use it. We will support you in your decisions. Now get your ass out of that leather chair and embrace our property management system. Learn the system so you can rule the world. Go get ’em. I’m very proud of you.”

  Chuck a cool motherfucker.

  I walked back down through the lobby and pushed open the door to the heart of the house, determined to prove myself, ready to execute my vision.

  “I hope your brain isn’t as dusty as your shoes, homey.”

  And with that, Andy, who was waiting for me in the back office, began training me on the property management system (or, uh, PMS for short). A strange thing to see a hotel translated into a program, every room and floor represented, every guest assigned a profile, rate, and requests. A portion of the work involved learning the room codes: NT = No Tub. NC = No Closet. SB = Small Bathroom. And here is a great one: NE = Near Elevator. Or another guest favorite: NV = No View.

  Andy set me up on the test system, the exact program (different color screen!) running for some reason on an arbitrary date in 1983, and there I could create reservations, assign rooms, check guests into one room and then move them to another, check them out, post and remove charges, and generally screw things up nice for all the fake 1980s guests.

  “Okay, okay,” Andy said, “you’ve got this.” I think he was disappointed. Maybe he had planned to close the door to Trish’s office, assume a relaxed seated position that indicated they were close, friendly, almost equals, and say, “Listen, this new kid, the valet? Ain’t got the brain for it, Trish,” and then brush some dirt off his crossed knee, a disappointed frown on his face. It never turned out that way for him.

  So Andy led me down the hall to PBX, or the operator department, explaining this portion of our job on the way. “So, at most hotels, the front desk agents are just agents, and the phone operators are just operators. But here, they are smarter about it. FDAs operate the phone system. Now, why do you think that’s a smart move?”

  “Well, I suppose if the guest dials zero and needs something from the front desk, the operator doesn’t have to transfer the call? They can take care of everything from the first point of contact?”

  “Where did you learn that term, ‘point of contact’?”

  “That’s not really a hotel term, is it? And I learned it in college.”

  “Oh, college. You went to college,” he said and nodded at me, actually frustrated.

  Andy, apparently, was an elitist prick. Which is exactly why he was picked as front desk trainer, because it takes a superior prick like that to really get off on telling you everything you need to know. It’s sad, but he got his rocks off knowing more than a new hire, who knows nothing. Which actually makes him an effective choice: I was getting thoroughly trained.

  “And make sure that red light is on before you talk some shit because otherwise the guest can hear you, and you don’t want that, so keep an eye on the red mute light here in PBX, and also no one knows why it’s even called PBX, but some people say it’s phone booth exchange because—”

  “Actually,” Trish said from the doorway, looking pretty, leaning casually, “it stands for private branch exchange, going back to when the systems were operated by hand. Not that I was around back then, of course.”

  “Of course not, Trish. You weren’t at all,” Andy stuttered out.

  “Anyone know what’s wrong with this moron?” I asked rhetorically, but, you know, internally, making sure my red light was on and all that.

  “Suit’s ready, Tommy. Let’s wipe the valet off you.”

  As soon as they had a suit on me, they escorted me out to the desk and stood me in front of my very first front desk terminal.

  Oh, Mr. Anderson. The very first guest I ever checked in. I remember you.

  That’s a lie. I don’t. It was a blur, a simple check-in that bled into the five million other check-ins I would come to perform in my life.

  I was nervous, though; that I remember. Andy posted up behind me while I prepared myself, staring down at the system, room codes and F-key shortcuts racing through my head, my check-in verbiage piled up in a heap that I hoped to extract and hand over phrase by phrase in the appropriate order, all while smiling and not sweating.

  Sanford the doorman came around the corner, pulling a gold bell cart behind him stacked with luggage. He was my favorite doorman. As big as a bear, when he grabbed your hand in greeting and pulled you to his chest for the half hug, he’d rip you forward, and you’d bounce off him. Apparently, he spent almost all of his tip money at Foot Locker. “Tommy, I got over five hundred pairs of tennies. My son, he got about fifty pairs. I got a shoe problem, me.”

  Now he caught sight of me posted up behind the front desk. “Look here. All in a tie and shit! Tommy! You look sharp, son.”

  “Thanks, Sanford,” I said, and we shook hands over the desk. “Waiting on my first check-i
n.”

  “I got your boy right chere,” he said, looking down at a luggage tag. Andy flinched behind me, hearing garage language used in his lobby. “Anderson. Man, I gots to tell Perry. Have him come up here and scope you out. We all proud of you. Believe that. Here come this dude now.”

  Sanford began superfluously adjusting luggage on the cart until the guest approached the desk. “Mr. Anderson, this is Tommy for your check-in. I’m going back downstairs, sir.”

  “Fine. I’m checking in. Anderson.”

  I didn’t even see Sanford slip off without a tip. I was busy pulling up the reservation, swiping the credit card, and issuing phrases one after the other, voice a bit shaky, fingertips a bit wet, but functional nonetheless.

  Done. He walked off ahead of his luggage, a bellman falling in behind. Just like that. Done. Baby’s first check-in. That one was for Chuck Daniels.

  The next check-in I dedicated to me. The one after that for Perry. The one after that for Trish. After that for Chip and all those who never made it. After that for the human tumor, fuck it. After that for me again. After that for Louis Armstrong, why not? After that for Andy, I guess. After that for posterity.

  And every check-in after that?

  For the paycheck, son.

  I’m getting ahead of myself with that last line. Never for one minute in New Orleans did I work for my paycheck. I worked for my company, my GM. And I had a tremendous talent for it.

  The front desk really is the brain center of the hotel. After a few months I saw the hotel itself as a puzzle: king-bed pieces, bathtub pieces, views-of-the-Mississippi-River pieces. And then there’s the predatory, demanding horde of 350 checking-in guests who all want king beds with bathtubs overlooking the Mississippi River. I wanted to make them all happy, but in the puzzle of a hotel not everyone can be an edge piece, not everyone gets a corner suite.