by Jim Thompson
He burst into consciousness from his stupor with his room filled with acrid fumes and his bed and himself literally floating in water. He did not need to ask the assembled company—which included the porter, clerk and bellboy—the cause of his plight. That was all too obvious. All he could do was thank them for saving his unworthy life, and offer recompense for the damage.
He tipped everyone handsomely. He distributed additional gratuities (without knowing it) when he paid the clerk’s claim for damages. Then, because he had been so tractable in a trying situation, he was transferred to another room at no charge.
“It’ll have to be one that’s been slept in,” the clerk explained. “But I know the former occupant quite well, and I assure you—”
“Not at all,” the man protested. “Very kind of you.”
So they took him down to the other room and put him to bed on a mattress and under bedclothes that were still warm with his own body.
News of this stunt spread throughout the hotel, and the employee participants were marked as men on their way up. As for their scapegoat, the management’s attitude toward his part in the affair was also characteristic. Here was a man who got so besotted that he could be lifted and moved about without waking. Obviously, anyone who habitually attained such a condition was a menace to himself and the hotel.
So his name was entered on the “heel list”—a catalogue of undesirables—and he ceased to be a guest.
Since practically every hotel man worth his salt had begun his career as a bellhop, the tendency was not to be too severe on a sinner who, on the whole, appeared to be a “good boy.” If you didn’t “cry” (crying was bothering the management with a problem), if you were, by and large, personable, punctual and perspicacious, if you were an all-around boy—one who could fill in instantly for the valets, food checkers, waiter captains and the operators of elevators, switchboards and Elliott-Fisher machines—if you were all that, you were entitled to consideration no matter what your misdeed.
There was only one elevator operator on the night shift, and he was often too busy with guest traffic to bother with mere bellboys. Thus we were in the habit of opening up one of the driverless cars and transporting ourselves. This fact led to my first experience with the strange ways of hotel discipline, and a singularly terrifying experience it was.
I had been on the job about two months at the time, and was attending a party of vaudevillians in a third-floor suite. I had also been imbibing freely with those vaudevillians, so much so that I was very far from being sharp and on my toes. I left their rooms and trotted back to the elevator banks. I inserted a key in the door of my chosen car, swung the door open and stepped inside.
Inside the shaft, that is. Another boy had come along and taken my car.
I fell five floors in all—the three above-ground and an additional two into the basement and sub-basement. It wasn’t an unchecked fall, of course. I was grabbing at cables and gear all the way. But you may take my word for it that even with full catch-as-catch-can privileges and no holds barred, a five-story fall is a hair-raising and painful ordeal.
I lay at the bottom of the pit for a few minutes, too shocked and pain-wracked to move. Then, groaning and mumbling dazedly, I sat up.
The pit door snapped open, and an ashen-faced engineer looked in at me. He helped me out, then ran to inform the room clerk of my accident.
This particular clerk—one of several I was to work with—was the epitome of all clerks: crisp, cool and cynical. He looked me over, the corners of his mouth quirking strangely.
“Hurt pretty bad, eh?” he said. “Like to take the rest of the night off?”
“N-no, sir.” I suppressed a groan. “I feel fine.”
“You’re drunk. You’ve got a breath that would knock a horse down.”
“I haven’t had a thing to drink,” I said. “I’ve been chewing a new kind of cough drop.”
“You’re drunk. That’s why you fell down the elevator shaft.”
“Me?” I laughed shakily. “I didn’t fall down the shaft, sir. I was—uh—”
“Go on. And you’d better make it good, understand?”
“I—uh—I save tinfoil, sir. Off of cigarette packages and gum wrappers. I climbed in there to look for some.”
The engineer turned suddenly and departed. The clerk was abruptly stricken with a spasm of coughing.
He recovered from the fit, jerked out a pad of fine slips and began to write.
“You’re going to have to sharpen up,” he said curtly. “Get on your toes and stay there. You’re a fairly good boy—show quite a lot of promise on some occasions—but you’ll have to do a lot better.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right.” He ripped off the fine slip and handed it to me. “Now get yourself washed up and cleaned up, and get up on that floor! Right away, understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and I looked down at what he had written:
To J. Thompson, bellboy, $1 fine.
Caught in general untidiness.
My next experience with the peculiar ways of hotel discipline came one morning when I had been held over onto the day shift. I was very tired and had taken a few drinks to pep myself up. Those few set so well with me that I took a few more, after which, as nearly as I could reconstruct events, I sat down in one of the lobby sand jars and went to sleep.
The bell captain promptly spotted me and I was hustled down to the locker room. The assistant manager, the same one who had hired me, followed us, vowing that I ought to be murdered.
“Of all the no-good blank blank blanks,” he yelled, “you’re the world’s worst! You’re fired, get me? Fired!”
“Y-yes, sir,” I said.
“Another thing,” he snarled, turning toward the door. “One more thing. Don’t you dare come around here asking for your job back—for at least a week!”
To the best of my recollection, I was fired six times during my several years at the hotel. I was always rehired, sometimes within the same night. Five of my firings were for drinking, the other for smoking in a guest’s room—all very serious offenses. Yet the hotel consistently rehired me where it curtly refused jobs to boys discharged for nominally trifling reasons. Failure, it seemed, could only be offset by ability. The “sharp” received every consideration, the dull got nothing.
This was all wrong, I am sure. But as a frequent traveler and diner-out, I often look back with longing on the days when an employee might be discharged on a moment’s notice, without severance pay for himself or penalty for his employer—simply on the grounds that he was unsuited to his job.
19
As a bellboy I supposedly drew a salary of fifteen dollars a month, but in practice I seldom saw a penny of it. It was almost always consumed by fines, cleaning and pressing charges, insurance fees and the like. My earnings were in tips which ranged from virtually nothing a night to as much as fifty dollars.
On a bad night, a Sunday say, with no parties going on and few guests arriving, I might make less than a dollar. But on a good Saturday or during a lively convention, it would be no trick at all to knock off twenty-five, thirty-five or fifty or more dollars. Or, I should say, it was easy enough to do after I learned my way around. My first week on the job, I barely earned enough to pay for my cigarettes and carfare.
During normal times, only two bellboys were used on the night shift, and they were often idle except for the hotel’s endless untipped “dead work.” My first working companion, a “boy” of some forty years, took advantage of my ignorance to the end that I did the lion’s share of the dead work and got a very small lamb’s share of the profitable “bells.”
He would take a call over the bell captain’s telephone without letting on that it was a call. It would be a wrong number or a guest inquiring about his mail or something of the kind. Then, having saved up four or five bells, he would take care of them all on one trip. He also sent me on calls to empty rooms, and gave me bells which he knew to be trifling while he took
the good ones.
After a week or so of this, I began to get wise to Pelly, or Pelican, as he was called, and I retaliated with the same stunts he had been pulling on me. I tried to reason with him. I pointed out that as surely as he tricked me, I would trick him and that we would both lose money as a result. But Pelican took this as a sign that I was weakening. He told me, in effect, to do my damnedest and that I would find his damnedest considerably better.
We night boys had many duties which took us behind the desk, chores such as cleaning the key rack and sorting mail. So, around three o’clock one morning, I removed a rate slip from the room rack and called Pell from a mezzanine house phone.
I spoke in a high, pseudo-feminine voice. I told him that the window in my room was stuck and asked for a bellboy’s assistance in opening it.
Pell promised to take care of the matter, but I could tell he was suspicious. Peering through the rails of the mezzanine, I saw him hurry to the room rack, then nod triumphantly as he saw that there was no rate slip for the number I had given him. Obviously, or so he thought, the room was unrented. Actually, it was occupied by one of the crustiest old dowagers ever to curse a hotel with her patronage.
Pell snatched up the bell captain’s phone and rang the room. I crept down the stairs, slipped around behind the key rack and returned the rate slip to its proper place. Then, I sauntered up behind him, listening to him read “me” off.
“I’m comin’ after you,” he was saying. “You keep up that squeaky-voice crap an’ I’ll come right up there’n get you. I’ll turn you wrong side out. Kick your tail end right out through your teeth. Who I think I’m talkin’ to? Why, you goofy pin-headed granny-dodger, I’m—I’m—”
He had turned and seen me. A look of pure horror spread over his face.
“Y-you,” he stuttered, pointing a wobbling finger at me. “I th-thought that you—”
“Yeah?” I grinned at him. “As I was saying, Pell, I think we’d better stop rooking each other, don’t you?”
He slammed up the receiver, silencing the outraged shrieks that were pouring over the wire. Lifting it again, he gave hasty instructions to the night switchboard operator. She was to say that the call had come in from the outside, from whom she did not know. If she made the story stick, he would buy her a five-pound box of candy.
Well, she made the story stick, and Pell escaped the penalty for his lack of sharpness. But never again did he gyp me on a call. We got along so well together that I felt quite depressed when he was literally chased out of the hotel. I was saddened by the event, but I still think it was one of the most hilarious I have ever witnessed.
Pell and the then room clerk, a Mr. Hebert, detested each other. Pell was constantly stating his intention of quitting or getting a transfer to days. Just as constantly, Hebert announced his intention to fire Pell or have him transferred. Yet neither did either. They chose rather to stay on the same shift, making things tough for each other.
Being in authority, Hebert would appear to have had the advantage of Pell. He could fine him, load him with dead work, bawl him out cruelly before other employees. Having done those things, however, and being unwilling to fire him, there was little else he could do. Pell, a mere bellboy with no authority, could do plenty.
He was a very smooth talker, a wonder at insinuating himself into the good graces of touchy and exacting guests. Having convinced such a person that he was “all for him” and hated to see him mistreated, Pell would reluctantly reveal that the man had been given the worst room in the house and at double the usual rate.
“They call this the dead room,” he would say (to repeat one of his lies). “I think there must be some kind of germs in the wallpaper, the way everyone dies that stays here. Now, I know you won’t let on that I told you—I just think you’re a very nice gentleman, and I don’t expect any big tip for tipping you off, but—”
At this juncture, the guest would usually tip Pell handsomely, step to the telephone and sulphurously demand that Hebert switch him to another room. Hebert would want to know why, naturally. The guest, enjoined to secrecy by Pell, would refuse to explain. He simply wanted another room, and he wanted it right now, by God, and he’d better not, by God, be gypped on the price.
Red-faced and bewildered, wondering, aloud, what the hell was getting into people, Hebert would do his best to satisfy the man. But the suspicions of a man who had been placed in the dreaded “dead room” at a double rate were not easy to assuage. By the time he had finished talking to the guest, Hebert was on the point of talking to himself. Sweat was pouring from his face and he was trembling in every joint, and there was a wild look in his eyes.
It was Pell who spread the rumor that Hebert wore no pants behind the high marble counter, a canard which—according to the sex and temperament of the guest—resulted in looks of disgust, scowls and howls of laughter for the baffled and blushing room clerk. Pell was also responsible for the widespread belief that Hebert maintained a stable of whores in the hotel, renting them out at very low rates to gentlemen who could prove they were “all right.”
“He don’t care about the money, see,” Pell would explain. “He’s one of these guys that gets a bang out of it. Now, don’t let on that I told you—”
Poor Hebert. He had a strong hunch that Pell was at the bottom of his many and maddening difficulties, but he could not prove it.
If Pell had had as much patience as ingenuity, I think he might have succeeded in his announced intention of driving Hebert nuts. But harassed as he was, Hebert stubbornly refused to crack up. And, annoyed by this perverseness, and emboldened by success, Pell attempted a master stroke.
As I have mentioned, there were two assistant managers. One was a primly urbane man who managed to be both exquisitely efficient and completely unimpressive. The other, the “Mr. Mushmouth” who had hired me, was likewise an able hotel man but so turbulent and foible-filled that he seemed to mirror the strange world he worked in.
Essentially kindhearted, he was always a little wary, ready to leap down the throat of anyone who seemed to take advantage of him. Short and paunchy, he was also very vain—vain and sensitive. He was ever ready to interpret a friendly smile as condescension or a helpful gesture as a jibe. And hell had no fury like his when he felt himself slighted.
I got along very well with him, probably, I suppose, because we were much alike.
He would come in at the side door at around six in the morning of his long day, his shoulders hunched like a prize fighter’s, his sleep-haggard face set in a deep and watchful scowl. Crossing the lobby at a steady but wary gait, he would pause at the end of the long marble counter, where he liked to find me stationed, and slowly turn sideways to it. Then, he would remove his beautiful Homburg hat and diffidently thrust it at me.
“Mrningjim,” he would grunt.
“Mrningsir,” I grunted back at him.
“Srningouside.”
“Rnedallnightsir.”
“Huh.”
“Yuhsr.”
At this point he would usually turn and scowl at me and I would scowl back at him. But sometimes, when the feeling was upon him, he would continue the “conversation” for several minutes, deliberately speaking with increasing unintelligibility and being replied to similarly, until we made less than no sense at all.
I was the only one he would speak to until he had had his breakfast. Hebert, poor soul, insisted on crying out a cheery “good morning” to him, but all he got in return was a hate-filled glare.
After breakfast, the assistant manager would return to the lobby for a brief report on the night’s events from Hebert. Then, he would reclaim his hat and make an outside inspection of the hotel. His routine was always the same. He was always the same. Vain, sensitive, quick tempered. Thus, the raw material of Pell’s plot against Hebert.
There was a great deal of paperwork on the night shift, and Hebert was supplied with a rubber stamp of his name to use on the countless invoices and charge slips which required his en
dorsement. Pell obtained an impression of the stamp on a piece of paper. He had a duplicate made and brought it to work with him. Then…
The explosive and suspicious little assistant manager was in an even more terrible mood than usual that morning. He barely grunted at me, and he looked like he could have killed Hebert for the latter’s insistently cheerful greeting. Shoulders hunched, hands clenched into fists, he disappeared into the coffee shop.
Pell plucked the Homburg from my fingers, and went behind the key rack. I followed him immediately, but he had already begun his vandalism and nothing was to be gained by interfering with him. I could only stand and watch as, over and over, until the fine silk lining was a mess, he stamped the name E.J. HEBERT in the assistant manager’s hat.
“Now,” he said, “you and I had better get out of here. We don’t want to be around when Old Mushmouth comes after his lid.”
“You’re telling me,” I said.
We hid on the mezzanine directly above the cashier’s cage where Hebert was working. We waited, listening to the occasional thud as Hebert used his stamp. The assistant manager returned and they conversed briefly. Then, seeing that neither Pell nor I were around, the A.M. asked Hebert to hand him his hat.
“Certainly, sir,” said Hebert. And still carrying his rubber stamp, he went around behind the key rack.
Pell and I returned to the lobby, he by the front stairs, me by the rear. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, but Pell took up a position on front post, only inches away from the window where the assistant manager was waiting.
Hebert came back with the hat, carrying it tenderly crown-up as he had found it. He passed it through the window.
“Ankyou,” grunted the assistant manager, starting to lift it to his head. Then, he paused, eyes popping, and said, “Wottnell!” He looked up, glaring terribly at Hebert, and an almost subhuman growl came from his throat.
Hebert smiled nervously. “Something wrong?” he said.
The assistant manager made no answer. He simply grabbed Hebert by the necktie, hauled him halfway through the window and began beating him with the hat.
