Spitting Off Tall Buildings

by Dan Fante

Chapter Five

  DURING THE NEXT few weeks I went to work for another office temp place that I found in the want-ads; Workpower. I was drinking like always but the depression was okay, under control. I showed up for my assignments on time and didn’t lose any days.

  I like change. Workpower sends its people all over New York for its temp gigs and I began to learn how to get around the city; Wall Street, Union Square, Hunts Point in the Bronx, downtown Brooklyn. I became familiar with the important bus routes and began to get a functional knowledge of the subways.

  Edna Green was my contact at Workpower. She was better than Herrera with the nicotine fingers. Calmer. If I’d call in to quit a deal Edna never pressed me for excuses or asked about what the supervisor said that made me want to leave or what I said back after what they said or what I did then. That crap. If she received no serious complaints on the employer-return-form everything was okay. I needed work. Edna needed to fill jobs.

  I like to come and go. Nothing else. I don’t want to hold stock or participate in the goddam profit sharing, or be groomed for something, or climb someone’s rectum company ladder. The personality puke that always seems to go along with a regular gig - the pissing matches and favoritism, the politics, like what happened so quickly at the movie theater job - can nearly always be avoided if you stick to temp work; one call and a request for reassignment usually repairs any fucked circumstance.

  But even with somebody nice like Edna you don’t want to get bumped working temp. Getting bumped creates problems.

  I did okay for a while, did half a dozen assignments without incident, then because of drinking and miscommunication, I got blown out twice in a row.

  Number one was when I was a fill-in night dispatcher for a ten-truck twenty-four-hour commercial plumbing service. It was supposed to be a month-long post but I got canned after the fourth day because the boss’s wife disliked me and said that I appeared to always look sleepy when I came to work.

  Number two happened back to back with number one. Edna sent me on a high-stress mail sorter/collector gig at an office building cattycorner across the street from Carnegie Hall. I’d had a couple of shooters on my lunch break the second day. Just enough to take the edge off. I was bumped for making a mouth gesture to the lesbian Puerto Rican amphetamine-sucking freak supervisor everyone on the staff had nicknamed ‘Duke.’ ‘Duke’ embarrassed me in front of a pretty secretary. She loudly reproved me for not being fast enough when making the rounds with the mail cart. I put my hand to my face and made a licking motion, forcing my tongue in and out between my fingers.

  After ‘Duke,’ when I’d call in, Edna would tell me that business was quiet or some other shit which I knew was code for ‘Take a walk, asshole.’

  For a week I stayed in my room and worked on my play. It had a new direction and a new name, Calliope. About an intense, selfish carnival barker on the Southern circuit who wants to become an evangelist. Better than Elmer Gantry because my guy discovers that he really has powers to heal. But he’s also a selfish scumbag which makes for a nice twist. Act II, Scene i.

  Chapter Six

  THE EAST END Hotel/Apartment is located on the east side of Manhattan on Fifty-first Street between Third Avenue and Second Avenue. Nowhere near East End Avenue.

  It is a small, fifty-room deal that serves free rolls and bagels and coffee in the lobby to its guests every morning from seven to ten o’clock. It was once remodeled, years ago, and needs it again.

  The ad I saw in the Sunday Times read: ‘Rsdnt Nt Mgr Est Sd Htl Slry+Furn Apt. Snd Res.’ The ad gave the address of an office building on Second Avenue and a suite number where the Res should be mailed. I’d lived at hotels and I once knew a guy with cancer named Phil who owned a fifteen-unit motel on Ocean Avenue in Long Beach in L.A. called The Captain’s Lodge. For years old Phil had been on tour with Johnnie Ray and saved enough money playing the piano to retire and buy the motel. When his cancer got bad and he had to take his heavy pain meds, he paid me to cover for him at the desk three or four nights a week. I’d check people in and out, light the pilot lights for the gas heaters in the rooms, change the sheets in the shack-up fuck rooms, put towels in the bathrooms, and run the vacuum in the lobby when Phil told me to. I knew just enough about the motel business to apply for the East End Hotel’s Night Manager job.

  I got lucky.

  I typed up a quick résumé but instead of mailing it like the ad required, because I was broke, I decided to take it over in person. I had nothing to lose.

  That Monday morning at eight-thirty I wore a tie and boarded the cross-town bus from Fiftieth Street on the West Side. My head was clear and I’d been on beer only for the previous two days.

  Half an hour later, getting off at Second Avenue, I walked south until I found the street number of the office building mentioned in the ad. Then I took the elevator to the eleventh floor.

  On the door to Suite #1121 were written the words ‘Arena Corporation.’ Beneath that was Jeffrey M. Mistofsky’s name. I showed Mistofsky’s receptionist the ad and was told to wait. I assumed that he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not he wanted to talk to any unscheduled, spontaneous applicants. Half an hour later he buzzed and the receptionist walked me in.

  Jeffrey M. was not a hotel man. I knew almost as much as him. He was a real estate speculator who’d picked up the property by default in a foreclosure. He had a guy named Shi (short for Chicago) who’d managed other hotels running the place for him. When Jeffrey M. read my résumé and saw that I’d listed ‘Playwright’ as a hobby, he stopped. He’d been reading up in trade magazines about increasing hotel bookings through marketing and networking to travel agencies and he’d been trying to find a Night Manager but he was also looking for someone who was good at writing letters and could do marketing too. My mouth mentioned some ass-kissing crap lie about always having an interest in marketing. My next lie was that I was also good at typing.

  Jeffrey M. appeared interested. He shook my hand and sent me over to the hotel to meet Shi, the General Manager.

  I walked to save the carfare.

  The hotel had a big lion-faced knocker on the door and thick, dark ivy creeping up the block-brick façade. Shi let me in after I buzzed. While I was introducing myself, he slid the metal cage grating on the front desk closed, fastened a lock on it, and sat with me in the lobby on an old flower-patterned couch near the vending machines. We drank the hotel’s free guest coffee out of foam cups and had an interview.

  Shi was hip and cool and well-mannered. He never talked above a whisper. He was a light-skinned Afro-American with straight, processed hair. After important sentences, Shi would pause, nod his head up and down, then smile. I assumed this affectation was the kind of shit that they teach in hotel college somewhere.

  Our interview went good. The Night Manager requirements were simple, Shi said; be on duty at the front desk five hours a day, from four to nine, then ‘on call’ the rest of the night. After the desk closed the Night Manager was essentially off but was required to stay in the building for emergencies and to answer the phone. The Manager’s apartment was downstairs. The Manager could go to sleep or read or watch TV, but he had to be around in case the phone rang or to check in the occasional shack-up couple or accommodate late stragglers arriving from the airports. Shi’s shift came on at 8 a.m. which is when the Night Manager’s shift officially ended.

  He got up and I followed him to the entrance door to the Night Manager’s quarters. It was next to the lobby entrance behind the front desk.

  Shi flipped on an uncovered bulb and we descended the half-dozen steps to the basement apartment.

  The place was clean and looked okay. Two good-sized furnished rooms with a crapper. The crapper had new plumbing fixtures and a yellowing plastic shower curtain depicting frolicking mermaids in some form of dyke embrace. He said that a color TV, a front desk phone extension for local calls only, and gas and electricity were all free and came with the apartment.

  The only natural light i
n the place came from four narrow, opaque, chicken-wired windows located high up on one wall.

  The kitchen had a stove and refrigerator and a heavy old dinette table with chairs.

  We sat down in the kitchen and Shi talked some more, always remembering to nod and smile at the end of each barely audible sentence.

  He himself did not live at the hotel. He lived in an apartment in the Bronx with his wife and kid. Shi’s main complaint about being the General Manager/Day Manager for Jeffrey M. at the hotel was the turnover in the job I was interviewing for. He had fired the last night guy three days before, a person named Bill. A sixty-year-old retired post office clerk on a 3/4 pension. Bill had seemed responsible. Well-spoken. A non-drug-user. He’d looked okay too. The hidden deal about Bill was that he was divorced from a crazy twat who, when she located him at his new gig, began arriving in the middle of the night, banging on the front door with the hotel’s heavy lion iron knocker and screaming deranged shit about Bill for the world to hear. Shi had been forced to give the guy the bag because of his ‘X.’ Shi went on to say that he had stayed late for two weeks of evening shifts to train Bill and firing him had been Mistofsky’s idea, not his.

  The man before the last guy had lasted only two months. His name was Isaac. Isaac was okay too, Shi said, except Mistofsky began noticing that receipts were down on the night shift. One night, worried that Isaac was running a game, stealing, Jeffrey M. sent a ringer in as bait. A fake guest. The ringer watched Isaac slip the cash into his pants’ pocket instead of the receipt drawer. Next morning, ba-boom, Isaac is history.

  Shi paused for effect, looked me up and down, then bent across the table. ‘I’ll be direct,’ he said, always remembering to whisper. ‘I want to fill this position. I’m looking for the right man. Are you that man?’

  I felt the question was stupid so I didn’t answer.

  Shi took out an expensive-looking gold pen from the inside pocket of his suit coat, then pushed it and a piece of paper across the table to me. He told me to give myself a grade from one to ten as an employee on my hospitality industry job in California. Then, he said, he wanted me to write that grade down on the paper and pass it back to him. Another jelly-dick management maneuver acquired at hotel college.

  I looked Shi in the eye, nodded up and down for effect the way he did, then gave him a big grin, the biggest grin my face would make. ‘I’m a goddam ten,’ I said. Then I wrote the number ten down on his paper in big numerals, circling it a few times in a flurry, then pushing it back. ‘I’m your guy, sir! Hands down! I’m ready to begin work immediately! Today, if you want me to.’

  I was pretty sure that I had the gig. That afternoon in a pre-celebration mood, on the way back to my room, I purchased a jug of Mad Dog and nipped at it from the bag while riding back cross-town on the Forty-ninth Street bus.

  My first day of on-the-job training began the next afternoon at shift-change time. Four p.m.

  I was at the desk with my new boss. We’d been going over the check-in and housekeeping forms when a good-looking woman walked up the front steps to the hotel entrance. She was pulling a yellow dog which Shi informed me was a pedigreed Lhasa Apso dog.

  The woman began searching in her handbag. Seeing this, Shi abruptly stopped what we were doing, left the desk and ran around to open the entrance door for the woman.

  Her name was Tonya and her dog was named Bobo.

  Tonya was in her late thirties. Tall, with long legs and flowing red hair. Fifteen or twenty pounds too heavy but very classy; wearing a sexy, outstanding, green dress.

  For the first time Shi’s fake composure disappeared. He introduced us, beaming like he’d just won the lotto, talking in a real voice instead of his regular dufus management whisper: ‘Tonya,’ he said, ‘this is Bruno, our new Night Manager. Bruno this is Miss Von Hachten. She’s a resident of number three-sixteen.’

  Miss Hot-shit did not stop or turn her head from tugging at Bobo, she mumbled something condescending like ‘Oh, hello,’ or ‘How nice,’ then continued across the faded yellow tulips patterned into the lobby carpet. To me the communiqué was clear; she had no time for hotel flunkeys.

  After Tonya was up the steps and down the hall Shi rocked forward on his elbows, picking up a pencil, and relapsed into his mumble. ‘Rather amazing, isn’t she?’ he hissed.

  I nodded but I didn’t mean it. He wasn’t looking anyway. His expression was elsewhere.

  Everything changed. He only wanted to talk about Tonya. I was filled in on every fucking detail of the half-conversations and asinine bits of moron shit that had transpired between the two of them. Not even Jesus Christ himself, nails in his hands and feet, strapped to the post with chicken wire and duct tape, would have given a rat’s dick about such nonsense.

  My gut built to the point where it was beginning to knot and cramp and I felt a terrible need to punch Shi’s face again and again.

  To escape the insanity, I lied and said that I needed a bathroom break, hoping maybe my leaving and coming back might derail this imbecile cocksucker’s brain and get us on some other subject.

  When I was down the steps to my apartment I locked the door behind me, smoked half a cigarette, pissed, then took a long pull at the vodka jug I’d stored in the freezer.

  But I was a fool. The minute I returned to the desk it started again. ‘You know,’ he began, as if I’d never gone anywhere, glassy-eyed, ‘her first week here she left two pairs of her panties in the dryer. I knew they were hers because I saw her going up and down the stairs to the laundry room. I folded the panties and brought them back up to her apartment. After I knocked on the door and she knew it was me, she opened up and recognized her personal garments in my hand. You should have seen her expression.’

  My gut was back in a worse knot than before. My brain screaming at me for the immediate death of this mad nigger.

  ‘Another time,’ Shi snickered, ‘she clogged the toilet in her apartment with too many paper towels - it might have been Kotex - I had to use the big plunger from the maintenance closet on the second floor. Then a snake…’

  My mind’s command was clear; it told me to remove the dullest pencil from the pen and pencil holder cup in front of us on the counter and plunge it deep into the side of this fucker’s neck, watch arterial spurts gush out onto the panelled walls and the flowered carpet until his lips went ashen and he was completely dead and his body no longer quivered.

  I stopped him. Interrupted. I said that I’d forgotten something in my apartment, then excused myself.

  Back down at my refrigerator, between gulps of air, I hammered more long hits at the vodka jug until finally I felt the click. Before going back up, I squeezed a wad of toothpaste into my mouth from the bathroom cabinet.

  ‘Another time,’ Shi went on through his moving lips, ‘she saw a man. You know, nobody, a guy in an army jacket…’ I nodded. I didn’t give a fuck anymore…‘Tonya’s funny. She gets paranoid sometimes - about guys. She thought he’d followed her up from the subway stop at Lexington Avenue. It happens - she thinks that men follow her.

  ‘She’s standing there in the lobby, shaking-like. Afraid…So what did I do? The guy’s still out there, you know…so I close the grate on the front desk and go outside under the awning by the curb and inform this individual lingering there, whatever, actin’ like he’s waitin’ to use the pay phone - runnin’ some kinda pervert game - I look him in his face and I say, “Hey, my man, I don’t know you or your deal but, you’re loitering in front of my hotel, you know? So take a fuckin’ walk.” Then I push my finger up in his chest a few times to make my point, you know. So the guy leaves and moves on down the block, you know. I’ve spooked him. Okay, sure, he’s sayin’ shit as he goes, like “Fuck you” and that but, he’s spooked…

  ‘Anyway, I’m back inside and Tonya gives me this look. This big wet smile with those cat’s eyes of hers. Man, you know. We really connected. Know what I’m sayin’?’

  I nodded ‘Yes’ again. A broad smile because now I was b
uzzed and couldn’t give a shit even if there was a nuclear war.

  Shi wanted to know if I’d noticed Tonya’s moles, above the ‘V’ at the top of her breasts. There were two. I hadn’t but I nodded again and smiled again.

  ‘From then on I knew,’ Shi said. ‘From that day on.’

  ‘Knew what?’ I asked, drawing a thicker and thicker circle around the dark ‘X’ I’d made on the message pad in front of me. ‘Knew what, Shi?’

  ‘C’mon man. Vibes. You know.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Course Mister Mistofsky’s got his rules. A policy about never fraternizing with a hotel guest.’

  He reached under the desk and produced a gray loose-leaf hotel manual, flipping it open to a tab where there were two pages of numbered employee procedures and policies. ‘See,’ he said, ‘Mister Jeffrey M’s got a directive for everything.’ He thumped the plastic page with his finger. ‘Frankly, personally, I regard most of this as over-management. You know, excessive.’

  I nodded. I knew excessive.

  Later on we did a walk-around of the hotel. The building had only four stories. There was no elevator.

  Shi showed me the laundry facilities and the roof sundeck. We went from floor to floor with him unlocking doors and pointing out the differences in amenities in the remodeled rooms. Some had newer carpeting. Each had a toaster oven, a small refrigerator, a color TV, and Hawaiian-type pastel bedspreads featuring exotic, stupid flowers.

  Room number 316/318 was next to one of the hall toilets. ‘Remember who lives here?’ he asked, unable to contain himself, as we passed Tonya Von Hachten’s apartment.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Blanche-fuckin’-Dubois?’

  The beginning of the end for me started the night before my scheduled first day off which was Sunday. My stuff had been in and unpacked and, except for a couple of times when the phone had rung past twelve, there had been no late-evening activity in the hotel to disturb me. Zero check-ins. No problems.