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

by Jacob Tomsky

  Despite my dedication to excellence, though, when management wasn’t looking, I did tend to enjoy myself a little more than proper, and during the overnight shifts management was never looking. For three nights in a row, El Salvaje and I had taken a geriatric power scooter, on hold for a guest arriving next week, up to the sales office hallways on our 3:00 a.m. break. After attaching a rolling office chair to the back of the scooter, tied to it with a bedsheet, El Salvaje and I would take turns gunning the life out of the scooter and dragging each other behind on the rolling chair, careening around corners, slamming into walls, and inevitably smashing into the back of the scooter after a hard stop. At least El Salvaje’s hair acted as a helmet. I was going raw.

  We would have had a fourth night of action if Julio hadn’t pissed all over his own shoes. But that night we had a new manager. The hotel shifted one of the day managers to cover until a replacement could be found.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked me, as a sort of hello.

  “I’m Tom,” I said, tapping at my name tag.

  “Fucking new guy. Listen to me, FNG, run the reports and flip this bitch into tomorrow. Something explodes, call me in room 1402. I’m gonna throw a juke, watch SportsCenter, and pass out. This is bullshit.”

  I didn’t even know what throwing a juke meant (now I know it’s not performed while watching SportsCenter, oh no). And nothing ever exploded. Just a few “late night” women limping out of the hotel, exhausted looking, avoiding eye contact with everyone, and hurrying back out into the streets.

  Like milk and cereal: whores and hotels.

  William Faulkner, in his 1956 Paris Review interview, stated: “The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do … The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society.”

  Hotels are the brothels of today. You rent a bed, and you’re allotted a certain amount of hours. But now it’s just BYOW (the W stands for “prostitute”). And there I was, the midnight landlord, watching the cumings and goings. The whole process is amazingly discreet. There are women who look like prostitutes but are not (they are actually gold diggers). And there are women who look like business execs; however, beneath that beige, it’s all black lace. Professionals never stop by the desk, or at least they shouldn’t. I see them strut into the lobby already glancing at their cell phones, referencing the only piece of info they need: a room number. Then they look up, and there I am, the landlord, throwing a finger to indicate the elevator banks. Off she goes.

  One particularly busy Friday night, women constantly streaming in and out of the hotel, I took a few notes, cataloging the attire and times of arrival so I could cross-check them with the time of departure and then estimate length of service. But, you see, again, you never know. Some people rent a woman just to talk. Some of them could be married women stopping by to see their lovers. You never really know, and, believe me, never really knowing is how everyone wants it.

  Faulkner wasn’t the only writer to man a front desk, bordello or otherwise. Nathanael West worked the overnight shift at a failing Manhattan hotel while completing Miss Lonelyhearts and even offered up free lodging to his writer friends, like Dashiell Hammett and Edmund Wilson. In return they helped promote his work, providing blurbs in lieu of paying room and tax. That was the 1930s, though. On my overnights I wasn’t even allowed to offer myself a goddamn stool to sit on.

  Two months on the graveyard shift and one night an Ecuadorian comes in and stands next to me, wearing the same uniform suit, same uniform tie.

  “Who are you?”

  “Hector,” he said, taking off his name tag and putting it on the desk in front of us. We both looked down at it.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m jew. Jew going to deys, mang.”

  “I’m going to the day shift?”

  “Jew didn’t know? They never tell people shit, mang. It’s like the fucking army.”

  The bellmen were the first to intimidate.

  “Listen very closely to me, FNG. I see you handing guests their own keys, I’ll stab you. I hear you asking them if they need help with their luggage, I’ll stab you. You don’t ask them shit. You call ‘front’ and hand the keys to a bellman. Let them tell me to my face they can take their own luggage and my baby girl has to starve. I catch you handing them keys, I figure you’re the one who wants my baby girl to starve. In which case I will find out what train you take home and collapse your throat as soon as you step into your borough.”

  New York pep talk number two! The first, from my roommate in Brooklyn, promising to throw me out if I didn’t make rent, seemed like a pillow fight in comparison. Jyll’s verbal “encouragement,” which forced me to unwillingly reinsert myself into the hotel business, had, in turn, led me to this pep talk, administered by a bellman exactly one minute into my first evening shift. Three of them had pulled me to a corner of the lobby, and while the pack leader gave me the rundown, the others stood at each flank and nodded in affirmation. The head of the triangle, according to his name tag, was Ben. Ben the bellman. I know now he was just trying to be helpful.

  “I hope for your sake you don’t fuck this up,” he concluded and all three dispersed.

  That’s how I was welcomed to my new 4:00 p.m. to midnight schedule, the evening shift, the major leagues, the show. The overnight shifts had been a sobering return to the business: the echoing emptiness of a 3:00 a.m. lobby, layered by the low drone of a vacuum, punctuated by the rattling cough of a hooker returning to the streets and the sound of my own thoughts as I stood behind a front desk again, alone for eight hours.

  Alone no more. I returned to the desk, a little off balance from the attack, weaving my way through a line of waiting guests. No one had “assigned” me to someone or asked me to “shadow an agent” as they had in New Orleans. In New York, management didn’t even bother to check and see if I showed up.

  But once I was on deck, logged in, and ready to work, I calmed down. After all, I’m a veteran desk jockey: I can sling keys like a motherfucker.

  It was immediately clear that one factor was of the utmost importance in this new environment: SPEED. In New Orleans, it was like living in syrup; no one was in a rush. The pace of a Manhattan evening shift is four finger lines of cocaine dumped into a five-hour energy drink. After a week of shifts I began to triple and quadruple task. I realized that while the credit card (or CC, we don’t even have time to say “credit card”) is authorizing, it’s best to utilize those five seconds to write the room number on the key packet, confirm the rate, or start running down the list of mandatory information I was responsible for covering during every check-in process. In New Orleans, the one thing I might utilize a whole five seconds to do was, maybe: Take another sip of my Heineken? Or smile for Christ’s sake? You stand on the island of Manhattan and smile while the CC is authorizing, just waiting around for five seconds smiling? That makes you a moron.

  The evening shift also acquainted me with the Bellevue’s place in the Manhattan hotel scene. It had a good reputation. Unfortunately, that reputation was ten years old. We had a few working-class celebrities, nice guys like Tony Danza who stuck it out Bellevue-style because the bellmen here weren’t afraid to scream, “Ayo, Toneee,” when he would swagger into the lobby and, you could tell, Danza loved that shit. Business travel put a lot of heads in beds too, and the clientele was extremely international. Truly a fresh joy of the New York hotel business, something not present in New Orleans, was the multiculturalism: Australians who flew in from South Africa to take the Queen Mary to England. Jews from Catalonia who needed a non-Jewish escort for Shabbat: someone to press the elevator button, open the elect
ronic door lock, and maybe, just maybe, turn on SportsCenter before inching back out of that holy hotel room. As well as a huge Japanese clientele who all wanted two twin beds to avoid sleeping next to their wives, bathtubs, and ample space to bow. (The average Japanese businessman bows more than five hundred times a day. He even bows on the phone.)

  And it just kept coming with these damn bellmen. Well after my two-week anniversary on the evening shift, they continued to rattle me: at least twice a day I had to dramatically jump out of a bellman’s rolling luggage path to avoid getting a Samsonite to the balls. But as time passed, I grew sympathetic to their plight.

  Nature’s bellman: an anachronistic, virtually obsolete animal. People drag their luggage through their own house, down the driveway, into their car, up to the airline desk, off the luggage carousel, into the back of a taxi, through the revolving doors, up to the desk, and now, now some guy with a crew cut wants to help? You’ve taken it twenty-five hundred miles, and this dude wearing gloves wants to jump in for the last twenty feet and get tipped for it? “No thanks, I don’t need any help.”

  Hence Ben the bellman’s “I hope for your sake you don’t fuck this up” speech. Now, the princess of Abu Dhabi, she has a fourteen-piece luggage set, more bags than her well-dressed bodyguards can handle … she’ll need some help. I’m not saying she’s going to tip, but she’ll need some help. And so will the family of seven who all brought their own pillows. (In case you didn’t know: hotels provide pillows. It’s a standard hotel worker pet peeve to see BYOP guests. This is a hotel, not summer camp.) However, the other 98 percent of travelers would gladly refuse help, and a bellman cannot survive with a 2 percent kill ratio. Therefore, as I learned at my new perch, he uses two tools to maximize his percentage: guilt and fear. If I ask the guests “Do you want help?” the answer’s going to be no. Every time: no. But if I signal a bellman silently or with the code word “front,” put the keys into his hand, and then lay a strong declarative sentence on the guests, such as “The bellman will take you to your room,” the kill ratio goes way up. You can see the guilt and fear well up in their eyes. They feel cheap about not taking the help, and they are terrified of telling the bellman (who has their keys in one hand and the other aggressively gripping their luggage) that they can do it themselves. Often they were so afraid of the bellman they would turn to me and say, “Um, you know, it’s okay really, I can take it.” I love that. A real “Please, sir, please!! Call off your dogs!!!” moment. I’ll benevolently nod at the bellman, and he’ll relinquish his hold on the guest’s throat and sink back into the woods to wait for another kill. I actually invented the mind-controlling declarative sentence and later added, “This is my good friend, Ben. Ben will take you to your room,” bringing the bellman’s life into reality, and hence bringing the guilt to the next level. Eventually, I began to throw in “This is my good friend Ben, godfather to my child and confidant to my wife,” but only if they were real-deal Japanese and wouldn’t understand a word I was saying anyway. But Ben grew to love that line. It won’t get him a “front,” but it sounds so damn suspicious we can’t get enough of it. Confidant to my wife.

  Now, the doormen, they get to touch every bag. The cabbies pop the trunk right when they pull up. Hence, the car isn’t even in park before the doorman has touched your personals, like it or not. If he just applies a little guilt and fear, you’ll pay him to stop uncomfortably lurking just outside your personal space. Bellmen have to do a lot more hunting.

  It’s a tough world out there. Am I suggesting you always take help and always tip? Yes. I suggest you do that. However, in reality, there are times when guests don’t want to be escorted by a gloved chatterbox. Maybe your life is falling apart, and you’ve no interest in telling a stranger “where you came in from.” The best way to get back the keys to your room (and your freedom) from “the gloved hand” is to say, “I can go up alone, but thanks anyways.” “No thank you, but I appreciate it.” “I think I would rather just go up alone, if that’s okay.”

  Of course it’s okay. Just be polite about it. I even once saw a guest tell a bellman, “No worries, but thank you,” and still give him two dollars, just for not helping. The rest of his stay that guy was famous. Like a guru. There goes that guy who gave Ben two dollars because he didn’t need the help. It was almost more effective than if he had taken the help and dropped a twenty in the room.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the bellmen and the doormen I had to contend with: the Bellevue’s regular guests were giving me the business as well. I had opened the hotel in New Orleans: we all started together from the beginning, both guests and employees. At the Bell it would take me years before I knew as much about the hotel as some of the guests. Mr. Sandbourg, who’d stayed here three nights a week for fifteen years running, had no patience for the new guy pretending to know about the hotel. Sandbourg has stayed in every room, literally every room, and eventually I took to listing room numbers, offering potential options for his current stay, and letting him shake them off like a pitcher on the mound. Room 1503? No. Room 702? No. Room 4104? No. How about a goddamn fastball?

  Another frequent guest refused to stay in any room where the digits didn’t add up to nine. It said that on his profile: “Room digits must add up to nine.” That meant I had to do math. If I had maff skillz, I wouldn’t be a key monkey, so … this was difficult for me. Plus, he’s a light sleeper (one of many psychological problems, I’m guessing), which means nothing close to the elevator. Room 1503? Room 702? Room 4104? Curveball?

  My new co-workers often tried to help me out, warning me about our guests’ idiosyncrasies, oftentimes right in front of the guest. Kayla, an early-thirties Colombian with wonderful black curly hair, called me over to her terminal during a particularly difficult check-in, saying, “Hey, Tom, come see if you want to give her this room.” Her manicured index finger was indicating the space where you enter and search for a guest name. On the screen she had typed: “Don’t sweat this hag, she only complains at the desk, tell her you love this room, any room, and get her out of the lobby. She won’t come down to complain.” We would often use that space on the screen to type messages to each other, most of them tactical communiqués designed to stealthily discuss a guest issue within the guest’s hearing range. But also some that said things like, “Will you ask your guest if she’ll let me put it in her mouth?” After you read a message like that, it’s a pretty fun game to look up, a weird smile on your face, and go back to assisting your guest as if nothing happened.

  The first time Kayla utilized this technique, I picked up the game pretty quickly.

  “Oh, perfect. Mrs. Lansing, you are going to love this room. I promise. Front. This is my good friend Ben. He will take you upstairs.”

  “I better love this room. And I don’t need a bellman,” she said with palpable disgust. “It’s on wheels.”

  Bernard Sadow: the man all bellmen hate, though they’ve never heard his name. In 1970 he invented the wheeled suitcase, the bane of the bellman’s existence. Before that the bellman was a necessity, a provider of ease and comfort, a useful member of society. After Sadow sold his first prototype to Macy’s in October 1970, he instigated a catastrophic change in the hospitality environment, causing the once noble species to retreat, rethink, and reemerge as a hustler fighting for survival. Sadow might as well have invented the phrase no bellman wants to hear, the phrase that leaves bills unpaid and ruins Christmas: “No thanks, I got it.” Or that surprisingly prevalent and ignorant phrase: “I don’t want to bother him.” Don’t want to bother him? The man has a family. No one is getting bothered here.

  So, these poor anachronistic hunters roam the plains of lobbies across the world, starving for a kill. And just as any predator must adapt to a more savvy, conveniently wheeled prey, each bellman develops his own hustle, his own style. I studied Alan, bellman at the Bellevue for nineteen years, second in seniority. I watched his interactions until I finally realized his angle. Fifty-something with a salt-and-pepper c
rew cut and silver-framed glasses (incredibly reminiscent of the bellman I met on my first visit to New York), Alan will squat down and make your children love him. He will high-five them and ask them what game they got going on their handheld, tell the little girls how “Manhattan stylish” they look, ask the kids if they are going to get some famous New York cupcakes, and stuff like that. If Alan checks in your family on Friday, then on Saturday your kids will be running through the lobby to get one of Al’s high fives and tell him all about “wha, wha happen did last night and, um, um, um.”

  Just when the parents are marveling at what a wonderful man, and probably what a wonderful father he is (because you best believe he’s already told you about his children), he will cut the parents off cold and stare them into shock through those ice-framed glasses. They had not even considered that this wonderful bellman should be compensated for the unique and memorable experience he is providing. Alan has now turned to them with a look full of meaning and power. He will nonverbally make them understand that he should be tipped for this level of service: all of a sudden he has placed a check on the table for services rendered. Someone might take that opportunity to ask if there is an ATM on property. Alan will entertain your children while you go withdraw some cash.