by Jacob Tomsky
“Wife, you got that for life. Never let that woman leave you. She raising your children. The boo, she talk all day, maybe you leave some clothes over at her apartment, maybe put in some toward rent, and she’ll talk shit all day about you leaving your wife, but you and she both know that shit won’t never happen. Now, the freak? She don’t say nothing. You don’t buy her nothing. You just get in there, get your dick sucked, and get out. But the wife, you cherish that. Still and all, though, a man needs all three, yerd me?”
We stopped by the dry cleaner, picking up two shirts—one for me and one for Perry. My shirt, extremely oversized, was brown silk with a teddy bear DJ airbrushed on it, his teddy bear paws scratching some turntables, his teddy bear eyes bloodshot, from teddy bear marijuana, I presumed.
“Where I’m taking you, Tommy, you got to look a certain way. Otherwise those ma’fuckers’ll put a bullet in your white ass.”
We both laughed hard as I buttoned it up, too drunk to care how ridiculous I looked, plus it was already dark, and we got back in the truck. We drove farther away from anything I’d seen, and the bottle of Crown was finished by the time we made it to the club, where most of the valet department, all of the housemen, and more than half of the housekeeping ladies were already inside drinking and dancing. We drank thug passions (Alizé and champagne; classy as fuck, basically), and there was even a cake for me, which read, “Bon Voyage Mr. Tommy,” the “Mr.” coupled with my first name being a common form of respect in New Orleans (Ms. Trish, Mr. Terrance, and so on). It was so sweet and crazy, and all the ladies had their hair done and wore the same club clothes they always wore to work. I danced and said good-bye to everyone, giving and getting sweaty hugs, and some people got sick in the bathroom or outside the club but still came back in and kept going.
It was five in the morning when Perry drove me home. We each had one more cold beer pinched between our legs, taking slow and unwanted sips.
It was really quiet in the car and really sad. I left New Orleans the next day, flew to Atlanta, and boarded a plane to London.
What can be said about the following year in my life? Very little about hotels. Quite a bit about hostels. The word “hostel” is just one s away from “hotel.” And that s has got to stand for “sharing.”
First night in London, on my way to Paris, I stayed at a massive shithole with the welcoming name of the Generator. The only thing that building could generate was bedbugs and STDs. No room keys, just combination codes for the door locks, and when I opened my door, I found my allocated bed, one of six in the room, occupied by a passed-out young lady. Back to the desk, only to be informed that I should wake her and ask her to move. I told him no, give me another bed, and he did. Then off to Paris, where I checked into a tiny shithole with the American-friendly name the Woodstock Hostel.
It was a terrible time to be an American abroad. Bush had invaded Iraq, thoroughly displeasing the French, who only grew more indignant as American idiots started ordering freedom toast and freedom fries at Denny’s and Waffle Houses across the United States. Trying to find an apartment in Paris was near impossible as an American, even as one who could pay six months’ rent in advance. The benefit of getting all the money up front did not seem to outweigh the fact that I was born in the United States of Assholes. So they hung up the phone in my face. Finally, I secured a small apartment in the third arrondissement from an incroyably drunk landlady who did understand the benefit of money up front. I spent half a year walking the city and being roundly ignored by the locals. After an extended trip through Europe, even getting over to Russia, I returned to Paris, immediately repacked my (still just one) suitcase, and moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, a town I had fallen in love with during a brief two-day visit.
I spent that long summer in Denmark. Though in winter it approaches permanent night (the sky only growing mouse gray for a two-hour span before plunging back into darkness), in the summer the sun sets at 11:30 p.m., only to rise again at 1:30 in the morning. My friends and I (six months in Paris = zero friends / six hours in Copenhagen = ten lifelong friends) would lie in the park, often smoking spliffs or straight hash, and play backgammon until the unbelievably long and luxurious afternoon faded. Then we’d mount our bicycles and ride to the Søerne (the Lakes) to watch the sun rise again, the occasion normally calling for another spliff. We went on and on like this. Every afternoon (and it was always afternoon) we splayed out in some sunshiny park drinking Tuborg beer and rolling in the grass, pawing at the earth, not doing a damn thing. Because there was a national focus on recycling, each beer bottle could be returned for a substantial refund, which in turn created a job for people who’d simply tour the park and, after asking politely, remove your empty bottles for you. Aware that they were, in effect, taking your refund, they would also remove all trash, including bottle caps and cigarette butts, which they got on their knees to pick up. All of this created a wonderful side effect: the parks were always immaculate. The whole town was immaculate. I saw a production of Hamlet put on for free at the foot of a Danish castle. There is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark. Well, the winter, the winter is pretty rotten.
And then the money, as it has a tendency to do, ran the fuck out. I had reserved enough for a plane ticket to America and some funds to get back on my feet, but certainly my time overseas, along with my traveler’s visa nine months ago, had expired. I couldn’t conceive of returning to New Orleans. It would feel like reversing the tape, rewinding the video, as if it would erase all the places I’d seen and the people I’d met. I sat for a long while at the Nyhavn canal, also called the longest bar in the world (where Hans Christian Andersen lived), and got Euro drunk, staring at the colorful spectrum of shoulder-to-shoulder buildings, thinking about what exactly I wanted. And where exactly I wanted to get it.
New York. New York City. There was an option that tightened the sack. Despite all my adolescent relocation, we never moved to any major East Coast hub. Though when I was seventeen, long before I’d moved to New Orleans, I visited New York on a tryst with my first love. We’d driven up from North Carolina, where my family was “stationed” at the time, and stayed exclusively in Times Square, magnetically transfixed to the area by all the lights and movement, neon and action.
I remember checking into the Hotel Edison. While I was asking about the elevators, my bag was basically shoplifted off my shoulder. When I turned to investigate, I was face-to-face with a New York City bellman, who was already talking. He fast-talked us into the elevator, his jaw moving with that New York rhythm and speed, just on and on about whatever, while the two of us, just kids really, held hands in fear and stared up at his square jaw opening crookedly to speak and, above that, his wide, pale forehead corrugated with massive pulsing veins, responsible for pumping the blood necessary to keep the jaw working, veins that went straight up to the top of his skull, where they were covered by a prickly gray crew cut. He chased us into the room with his talking, and I remember the end of his long speech was incredibly abrupt and almost exactly like this: “But, you guys, at least, you know, came here to the city and got to meet a character like me.”
And then the deafening silence of the room. The kind of sound vacuum only a hotel room can provide. It was like listening to the mounting hiss of cicadas instantly halt, the kind of smack in the face caused by an explosion of silence.
He was staring right at me, those forehead veins deflating.
Oh, I thought, he wants something from me. Oh! A tip! The moment my wallet came out, it was as if his face switched back on, and he started jawing again. I ripped opened my Velcro wallet and handed him a few ones. Instantly, we were alone in the hotel room, our bags by the door.
I never forgot him. No idea who he was, but now I know who he is. He used the shock of silence to make it clear to a young person, who normally has no idea what to do in that situation (and neither do some adults in fact), that it was time to tip. That, dear guests, is a true New York City bellman. All over the world, bellmen are serious about a
dollar, but in New York everyone is serious about a dollar, so that makes the bellmen absolutely psychotic about a dollar.
I lifted myself up off the Nyhavn canal ledge, gave all my empties to the nearest bottle collector, and jumped on a plane to New York City. After a sleepless flight, I found myself entering that city once again. Immediately, one single issue stood out, glaring and omnipresent. I would come to find out that this particular concern, the same one referenced above, was to wake me up in the mornings and put me down at night.
Money.
Money concerns.
Specifically, the lack of it.
I secured a bedroom in a four-room apartment in Brooklyn, in an area then called Bushwick. My rent, though already disgustingly high, was soon to rise when they started calling the neighborhood East Williamsburg and then Williamsburg proper. This was even before the 1980s came back to Williamsburg, when men still wore men’s pants. But it was all coming: Style was in the air. Style and bullshit. And rent was always due. First month, I had it. Second month, well, I didn’t. I borrowed money from my family and went smoothly into debt. It seemed as if New York adored poverty because everyone did it so well.
Trust me, I was looking for work. But not hotel work. I had been fast-tracked for a career in hospitality but went AWOL. And though my résumé displayed little else, I continued to feel moving on was the right decision, a bullet dodged. Now here I was in New York, and I had my pick of careers. So for three months I tried getting a job doing anything else. Anything. I thought now was the time to parlay whatever I’d learned into another direction, another career.
Wait. What exactly had I learned?
During this time I was truly scared. Just deep down scared. I felt, though time had certainly passed, I’d gained nothing. I had a philosophy degree that didn’t apply to any job, and I’m not even certain the education itself affected me in any real way. (That’s not true: it made me smart as fuck.) But what of actual value had I accomplished since I turned sixteen? Well, I’d done seen some shit: Europe, strip clubs, bar bathrooms, coke parties, a dead homeless man scooped off the street like a hardened piece of dog shit, a knife fight, the backstage area, a roulette game in Russia, the hood, the basement, the penthouse, uptown, downtown, and everywhere else. But what was all that? And now here I was in a huge apocalyptic city that certainly failed to notice my arrival and promised to be uninformed of my departure, whether it be by bus or death.
All of that big pile of nothing and still I had to get a damn job.
I led a full-on attack on the publishing business. Here were all the publishing houses, encased in huge fortresses all over Manhattan. Surely some of my experience, added to my long-standing love of books, made me an asset to any publishing house. Apparently not. I couldn’t even get interviews. I couldn’t even get responses that said they didn’t want to interview me. I couldn’t even get inside the buildings. But sometimes I would stand outside in the cold and look in. That, they allowed me to do.
I was still holed up in the four-bedroom apartment, in what was now officially Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with three female roommates, none of whom I was banging, and as it stood then, I didn’t have last, this, or next month’s rent, it was dead-cold winter, and I was drinking myself homeless on 99-cent, 24-oz. Coors Original cans.
I would stand at the big front window, like some broke-ass Gatsby, and look down into the building’s internal courtyard, not that it was used as a courtyard, more like a trash dump and Grand Central Station for huge city rats. But all of that nastiness was being covered by a thick blanket of white snow, the fat flakes still falling and resting, building. My roommates, to their unmistakable exasperation, could always find me in the large communal loft space, playing a record, drinking from those tall sickly yellow Coors cans, my forehead pressed against the snowy window, a paper bag filled with empanadas on the couch next to me, the only food in the area I could afford. At first, the dollar-empanada man, operating out of a shitty food cart parked next to a shitty dollar store, did not recognize me. Then, as my visits grew more frequent, he would reluctantly acknowledge my existence. Later, as it became clear his empanadas were the only thing keeping me alive, well, he felt pity for me, which came out in the form of irritation and then a determined refusal to recognize me once again. Still, God bless him. He came out even in a blizzard, and he is still there, on the corner of Grand and Humboldt. After eight years he has only raised his prices by a single quarter.
“We’ll give you fifteen days to make rent, otherwise you don’t get your deposit back and you’re out.”
This little pay-or-you’re-out pep talk was administered by the apartment’s ringleader. She was sitting inside a fully erected two-man tent she’d recently set up in the apartment’s ample front loft space. I had to bend down and peer into the tent to receive this information.
“I don’t care what your deal is. Fifteen days or you’re out. Totally. Fucking. Out.”
Jyll. Jyll with a y. We never got along. She wore all the latest fashions (which, coincidentally, were the latest fashions from two decades ago), and her boyfriend, though older than I, dressed, for some reason, like a British schoolboy with bow ties, sport coats with elbow patches, and khaki shorts above beige socks inside brown wing tips. I disliked her quite a bit, which I also found to be a ubiquitous attitude in New York. In New Orleans people made a determined effort to get along, to find common ground and enjoy each other’s company. Here (and, man, would I get good at this) it was easier to just go ahead and, you know, hate.
“Can I use the fax machine again, Jyll?”
“No, because it’s in my roooom. Ugh. Fine. Two faxes only. Let’s go,” she said, shimmying out of the tent.
At that moment, the empanada bag almost transparent from grease, the last sip of my tall boy warm and nauseatingly flat, snow still pounding down on the city, I broke. I broke like a little bitch.
Two faxes. Faxed to, yes indeed, two luxury hotels.
Two days later, two interviews.
Once a hotel whore, always a hotel whore.
I had been like some prostitute trying to get a secretarial position, only to have the interviewer come around the desk, get uncomfortably close, maybe lay an inappropriate hand on my knee, and say, “Look. You’re a whore. You’re a good whore. Why don’t you stop messing around and get back to working the corner, huh? Come on, baby, it can’t be that bad, can it?”
The first hotel was a Historic Hotels of America member. That meant it was unrenovated. And that meant it was beat to shit. I was interviewed in a basement office with a yellow flickering light.
Though the ad in the paper was not clear, it turned out to be a housekeeping manager position: running the boards every morning and all of that mess. My lack of enthusiasm was, even in the buttery flickering light, all over my face. I didn’t want the job. The old man slowly administering the interview didn’t seem to care if he filled the position either.
“Okay, son, the pay is not good. And it won’t get better. But at least things aren’t too serious here, you know? Long hours, though. You want the gig?”
No.
In fact, since neither of us seemed to give a shit, I told him I couldn’t be in at 7:00 every morning. Plus, I asked for five thousand more.
“But maybe I could roll in around 11:00 a.m.?”
“We can’t even give you five dollars more, son, and how do you plan to run the boards at eleven?”
“So then … no?”
No.
Because it was for a larger hotel, the second interview was quite a bit more professional. I actually had my initial interview at the hotel’s corporate office on First Avenue. It took place, strangely, in the building’s large airy lobby, the walls covered in enormous, terrible pop art. I was interviewed by an insanely hyperactive Korean-American woman who couldn’t stop smiling and talking and certainly couldn’t stop shaking her crazy knee up and down as if voltage were tearing through it. We were sitting on a modern, almost abstract couch together,
the sitting angles a bit too creative, which was awkward. After I dazzled her with my experience and dusted off my luxury phrases (“guest loyalty,” “exceptional service,” “empathize and react,” “attention to detail,” “Very. Easy,” “blah blah bullshit”), she cooed in delight and directed me to the hotel where I would be working.
I took the subway, then walked to Ninth Avenue, right near the heart of … (Lord Jesus Christ, protect me!) midtown. The hotel was two avenues west of Times Square, but two avenues weren’t enough. Despite the winter weather, the sidewalks and delis were filled with tourists, cameras flopping, maps unfurled in the icy wind, bundled children attached to those human leashes, just an incredible hustle and bustle of visitors, surrounded on every side by the thousands of service industry employees necessary to keep this tourism machine churning. Either you were a tourist or you had a name tag; that was my first impression of midtown.
I walked into the warm lobby of the hotel, and before I asked for the HR department, I took a little stroll, cruising by the front desk to the right of the revolving doors. I noticed their uniforms were a bit shabby; some of the men’s black suit coats were flat and shiny from years of washing. The whole environment was a little worn: The decor was dark brown marble and yellows, essentially the same color scheme as a microwavable meal of Salisbury steak with buttered mashed potatoes. The couches were from the 1980s and sagging as if they were trying to take a nap. The front wall, which was the first thing you saw upon entering the lobby, had a large, silver-framed antique mirror hung too high to reflect anything but the dirty crown molding above the entrance behind you. Below the mirror, one tiny flower arrangement sat on a useless table. I saw the restaurant to the left (same frozen-dinner color scheme) almost vacant, though I assumed lunch would be in full swing. Walking past the front desk on the right, I found the elevator banks, and with the exception of a tiny hole in the wall that I thought was a coat check but turned out to be the concierge desk, three of them packed in there and banging shoulders like a bunch of windup toys in a small box, there was nothing else to the lobby. Front desk to the right of the entrance, front wall displaying flowers of about the same mass and quality I’d bring to a dinner party at a friend of a friend’s co-worker’s house, that crazy useless mirror, sleepy couches hoping to crack a leg and die, dead restaurant to the left, and, down a hallway past the desk, the elevators and concierge rat hole. That was it.
