Concierge Confidential

by Fazio, Michael

  “It’s a big step,” he said. “Think about it.”

  Of course he was right. It was a big step—too big probably. What if I couldn’t get hired? Where would we live? I weighed the pluses and minuses in my head. “Let’s meet halfway,” I eventually told him.

  “Halfway where?”

  “Florida. We can stay with your mom or dad until we find a place, and I could go back to singing on cruise ships.” Years before I had worked the cruise ship circuit, the fancy ones that held three hundred people. This time around, I could put together a CD. If I focused less on fancy and more on enormous, I could book myself on a ship with three thousand people. I felt confident I could capture 10 percent of them every week. If 20 percent of that audience bought a twenty-dollar CD, that would mean $1,200 a week—plus my salary. With those numbers moving didn’t seem quite as big of a step.

  “You should be singing, and I trust your plan,” Jeffrey said. “I’m so over L.A.”

  I went to travel agencies and looked at the brochures for cruise lines, studying the system so I could figure out how it worked. Cunard Cruise Lines had the most prestige; it was the Titanic of cruise ships. I called them up and gave them my most name-dropping spiel. “Oh, I used to sing at the Mondrian where Michael Feinstein performed,” I told them, “and I played at the Playboy Club. The Sportsman’s Lodge, too. Let me send you my clippings.”

  I had made a collage with every little clip from the newspaper that had my name in it. Even if it just said, “Live on Saturday nights: Michael Fazio at the piano bar,” I kept a photocopy. To emphasize my profile, I added pictures of my name in lights. Literally, there was a photograph of my name on the marquee at two clubs where I had performed. It was very twelfth grade, but it impressed them at Cunard enough that they offered me work on the QE2 right away.

  We packed Jeffrey’s turquoise blue Honda Accord to the gills and then bought a cell phone because we were going to be driving across the country. It was 1993, and the damn thing was the size of a baguette. I was booked to start on the ship two days after we arrived at Jeffrey’s mom’s apartment in Aventura, Florida.

  Cruise ships are the place once-big acts go when Hollywood stops answering their calls and their shows get farther and farther off the strip. But to me, a celebrity was a celebrity and there were a good number of them working the cruise. Thanks to working with Glennis and Dolores, I knew how to push myself into the inner sanctum. I quickly found out that Lou Rawls was a total gentleman, Nell Carter was simply brassy, and Susan Anton seemed like she had just stepped out of a beauty pageant.

  The ship set me up at a bar named Raffles in the back, and every night I put on my white dinner jacket and sat down to play songs on a clear Lucite piano. At the start of the week there would be nobody there, but by Wednesday it would be packed with people listening to me sing campy Broadway standards. Straight people from all over the world couldn’t get enough of me. I was like their little gay clown—“Gay people are so fun!”—and I sold CDs left and right.

  Things were going well, but I found bad news waiting for me when I called Jeffrey back at home.

  “My dad’s really sick,” he told me.

  Oh no. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s melanoma, and it’s stage III.” He paused. “There is no treatment for stage IV.”

  I knew that I had to get back to Florida to be with him so I got on the phone and called whomever I could. The first guy I managed to contact was a sleazy old L.A. has-been you wouldn’t buy a used car from. Vic had his own version of a twelfth-grade brochure complete with a collage of photos of him with a cavalcade of stars … from thirty years ago. To his credit, he managed to find me a really lucrative job singing at an upscale South Beach club. As quickly as I could, I got out of my contract on the QE2. Soon I was making $1,500 a week on salary at the nightclub, but I was also clearing a ton in tips—the scar-faced drug dealers came in and threw hundred-dollar bills at me all night. Things were once again good, but it wasn’t long before Jeffrey’s father passed on.

  “We’ve got to get out of Florida,” Jeffrey said. “I grew up here and now I’m remembering why I left.”

  “I can commute,” I told him. “Let’s move to New York, and I can fly down here to work. Airfare is only around two hundred dollars. I can do that for a while.” True, I was making good money. But being in Aventura, Florida, I couldn’t help feeling a little like Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?” Everyone around me felt really fake, posturing like they were larger than life. And though I really enjoyed singing, now I was realistic about my future: I wasn’t going to be a superstar and I didn’t want to be a fifty-year-old lounge act singing for tips in a bar the rest of my life.

  “What are you going to do once you stop commuting?” Jeffrey asked me.

  “I’ll figure it out.” But what else am I good at, I wondered, besides singing? I knew how to look after people. I knew that I could make people feel cared for since it was what I had done during my time in Los Angeles. Maybe I could work in theater with classically trained actors who might not be as demanding to deal with as the Rosie Perezes of the world.

  I called around Manhattan and got an interview with the president of a small talent agency. I was ecstatic. To me, not being a native New Yorker, he epitomized everything I thought a “New Yorker” was. He looked just like a professor, with the little reading half glasses and everything. His office was a mess, but with “smart” stuff; all theater. “Yeah, you have some potential,” he said.

  “Really?” I was thrilled.

  “This is what I do for new agents. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars a month. It’s all commission, so you have to go get some clients.”

  A $1,000 a month? I was making $1,000 a night in Florida.

  “Great. Let me get back to you.” I went back to the apartment Jeffrey had found for us on East 10th Street. The place was so small I couldn’t understand how humans were supposed to live in it. It was a one-bedroom—in the sense that the bedroom accommodated precisely one bed, and that was it.

  I told Jeffrey about the whole agenting situation, but by this time he was getting fed up. “You’d better figure something out,” he said. “You’re all over the place. Do you want to sing, or do you want to be an agent? It’s not cute anymore.”

  “I’ll find some job I can work at night so that days can be free for interviews,” I said. If I was a waiter or a bartender I knew I’d get completely fried, but if I worked the night shift at a hotel, checking people in at the desk, I thought I could manage. It would keep my days free and it would give me spending money—definitely more than $1,000 a month—and I could think and construct my next career move.

  Within a day, I wrangled an interview at the InterContinental Hotel on 48th Street. When I walked in I was struck by how old-fashioned but opulent the lobby was. The people walking through it seemed to be arriving from far and distant lands; all the men were in suits and the women wore the Chanel equivalents with big gold buttons. It was clear that none of them was there simply for pleasure.

  “I’m here to meet with Ian,” I told one of the staff.

  “He’s right over there.”

  Ian, the resident manager, was a handsome light-skinned black guy who defined elegance. He was meticulously put together, down to the silk pochette sticking out of his breast pocket. “Right this way,” he said. I followed him to his office in the hotel’s executive suite. It looked like a gentlemen’s smoking room, with big leather wingback chairs and a tufted chesterfield sofa. His huge desk even had clawed feet.

  “So tell me a little bit about your background,” Ian asked me. “Have you done any hotel work before?”

  “I have not,” I said. “What I have done is a lot of work in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. I worked a great deal with celebrities, making sure that their accommodations were taken care of and that their needs were met. So I’m a hard worker with great attention to detail.”

  Ian cocked his head a little bit. Something had cl
icked. “A chap like you would be good as a concierge.” He didn’t call me a chap because he was British. He called me a chap because people who worked at places like the InterContinental used terms like that.

  “Ah, that’s it!” I said. Of course, the thought had never occurred to me, but as soon as Ian suggested it I knew it would be fun. If I’d often used concierges to do my job for me in Los Angeles, there was no reason I couldn’t do theirs when I was in New York—aside from the fact that I knew practically nothing about the city. “That would be perfect.”

  “You need to meet Abbie. If you think this is something that you’d like to do, then let’s move forward.”

  Two days later, I reported for orientation. I learned the rules of the hotel along with fifteen other new employees (mainly housekeepers and sanitation managers). I’d never been in a corporate environment, and I felt way out of my element. I had to learn arcane bits of trivia like that the hotel was founded in 1926—as if the guests would come up to the concierge desk and start to quiz me. There was no creativity or even room for creativity; if ambience were a color, this corporate world would be like a deep shade of beige—and on my first day I was scared out of my mind. It all started to hit me at once; I hadn’t even thought about how I was going to have to wear a uniform. Oh my God, I’m going to hate this job.

  Of course it didn’t help that I was totally unqualified to pass as a New Yorker. I did background work on my own time, trying to guess what people would be asking for. I found the shoe repair, where the museums were and what their hours were, and what restaurants were right around the hotel. I tried to be as prepared as I could, because they were throwing me into the deep end of the pool.

  The next day I went to sit in on the desk with Abbie. She had a gigantic smile and walked with a Bette Midler swagger, in addition to looking a bit like her, too. I knew we’d get along because Abbie wasn’t just Jewish; she was New Jersey Jewish. And even though I was Catholic by birth, I was a Jewish boy at heart. I loved Yiddish words and I loved Jewish people. Hell, I even lived with a Jewish guy.

  Abbie knew all the little nuances of New York and her enthusiasm was contagious. She taught me everything from the Rolodex to ordering cars to all the other minutiae which eventually wore on my attention span. That was until she said, “Let me tell you about theater tickets.”

  Finally, something I could sink my teeth into.

  “We could use brokers,” she said, “but if you’re resourceful, you might do very well on your own. If we buy them from a broker, the tickets might be two hundred twenty-five dollars and they only give us a twenty-five-dollar commission. But if we buy them ourselves, then the tickets are eighty-five.”

  “So how much do we charge for them?”

  “Two hundred, obviously. It’s a win-win. The guests don’t know where you got them from and they don’t care. If you sell that ticket for two hundred twenty-five dollars with an eighty-five dollar cost, that’s obviously a lot more money.” She didn’t make it sound scandalous because it was just how the system worked. If I worked the system then, with a little more effort, I could make a good deal more cash. In the same way that a store takes their product, marks it up, and makes a profit, I would be like other middlemen specializing in hard-to-get items.

  I spent from three to five o’clock with Abbie, but after that I was on my own. I wasn’t too worried, though. I had my little cheat sheet and had gotten used to the phone; eventually I stopped disconnecting people on accident. But by 7:00 P.M. the three phone lines were lighting up constantly. I made sure to be calm, so it seemed like I knew the answer to whatever the question was. I could guess from people’s accents—and there were many—what kind of food they were looking for. I didn’t know what “halal” meant, but I knew enough to look in Zagat’s for Middle Eastern.

  “Good evening, concierge. This is Michael. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Hello, I’m calling from room 1212. Do you know where I can get some good chateaubriand?”

  She didn’t have an accent; therefore, I had no idea where to send her. “I’m pretty sure I know exactly where to send you. Let me look up the address and I’ll call you right away.”

  Chateaubriand sounded French and it also sounded like a brand of wine. I got out the phone book to call the local liquor store. “Do you sell chateaubriand?” I asked them.

  A pause. “No, we don’t.”

  “Okay. Where do you think I can get chateaubriand?”

  “I don’t know. A steak restaurant?”

  “Huh? Oh, it’s a steak?”

  “Yes, chateaubriand is a cut of steak,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Thank you very much.” Smith & Wollensky was on my short list of places to send guests already. Why, I was practically a natural at my new job!

  As my first shift was coming to an end, a man straight out of The Sopranos approached my concierge desk. He was a total cliché: shiny skin, shiny shoes, a little rotund, with his hair greased back and too much gold on his fingers. “Hello,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Silvio. Welcome to the neighborhood!”

  I felt the money cross from his palm to mine, and I put it away discreetly. I didn’t know if it was wrong or not, so I felt kind of dirty for even taking it. “Thank you very much,” I told him.

  “I’m the owner of Cinquanta, two blocks away on Fiftieth. Everybody loves my restaurant, and I want you to know that I will always have a table for you. If you’re ever in a bind with getting people seated somewhere, don’t worry. Just ask for me.”

  “Thanks so much!” I said. Wow, I thought to myself. So this is how it works. I never would have guessed that the owners would be making the rounds of new concierges.

  “All kinds of celebrities come to the restaurant,” Silvio went on. “We’re right across the street from the Palace Hotel.”

  As new to New York as I was, even I was aware that the Palace was first class. This Cinquanta restaurant must have been the same. And if the owner was telling me to ask for him personally, then it must also be really busy. As Silvio walked away, I looked at how much money he had actually given me. It was several hundred dollars; it was so much money that I didn’t feel comfortable accepting it—but I couldn’t exactly return it to him, either. I felt suddenly beholden to him.

  Which, I guessed, was the point.

  I had my short list of places where I would send guests of the hotel—and now I had one more name to add. I didn’t even tell Abbie; Silvio was my first big city contact, and I was going to keep him my little secret. Every night, his hostess would call the desk when I was alone and ask for me by name. “Ciao, Michael!” she said, in her charming Italian accent. “How are you tonight? Come for a drink after work! Anything you need, call me.”

  They’re so nice, I thought. It’s a really hot Midtown restaurant, yet they’re trying to help me. And I was worried about leaving Los Angeles.

  I kept sending guests of the hotel to Cinquanta. “Ask for Silvio,” I told them. “He’ll take care of you.”

  And he did. Whenever the guests came back from dining there, they would always tell me how charming Silvio was and how special he made them feel. Finally, one night after work, I decided to go there myself and check out where I’d been referring everyone.

  Walking toward Cinquanta, I could easily spot the restaurant from far away. It had an ultra-modern façade and visually stood out on the old-school block. The exterior of brushed stainless steel matched the décor of the restaurant inside. The cold metal was juxtaposed with bright colors, which brought to mind Miami. In fact, as I looked around the room and the diners, the place reminded too much of Miami. True, the place was full of people who had money, wore nice clothes, and enjoyed quality things. But it lacked a vibe, an atmosphere; the kind of thing that might attract a more exclusive, celebrity clientele.

  I sat down at the bar and it wasn’t long before Silvio appeared. He started offering plate after plate of food for me to sample. The whole staff came by and said hello, as if they knew
me. I thought the place was pretty great—until I started eating.

  The food was beautifully displayed, but horrible. It was like they got it at a deli and put it on a plate, the culinary proof that you can’t put lipstick on a pig. When I saw the prices (thirty-five dollars for pasta!), I realized why it was possible for Silvio to be handing out hundred-dollar bills in exchange for recommending guests.

  I was crestfallen. How am I going to get out of this? I can’t send people here. That’s when what Silvio was doing clicked. He wasn’t being nice. He was being a businessman—and a good one. It was time for me to start doing the same.

  The calls from Silvio didn’t stop coming at the hotel. “No one’s asking for Italian,” I constantly had to tell him.

  “We do steak!” he insisted. I couldn’t tell him no. I knew he was a good guy, just trying to make a living. I’d try to throw Silvio a bone whenever I could. After all, a good restaurant experience isn’t always predicated on the quality of the food. Some people want to be fawned over. Some people want to brag that they went to New York, and dropped thirty-five dollars for spaghetti; those people I’d send to Cinquanta. If they hated the food, at least they were never disappointed by the experience.

  Now I was back to having just four restaurants that I could recommend to guests. Even if someone wanted to go to a different place every night, I was prepared.

  Unless, of course, someone happened to be staying for five nights.

  The guest was a middle-aged man, very well dressed, with brown hair in a conservative cut. “That restaurant was so great last time,” he said. “Where would you suggest just like that?”

  “Right.” I had no idea what “last time” was, since I’d been making reservations all week. “Have you been to Le Cirque, and to Patroon?”

  “You sent us there after Smith & Wollensky and Hatsuhana. We were thinking something along those lines, but downtown.”

  I had no idea that I’d be asked for reservations in other neighborhoods. I blinked at the guest. He blinked back at me. I smiled at the guest. He smiled back at me. Just go back to your room for a minute and let me look through the Yellow Pages, I thought at him, but he wasn’t telepathic at all.