“Flowers,” I interrupted.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. Flowers. Works every time. They’re fantastic and the women love it. We’ll get tulip petals shipped from the Netherlands. We’ll fly them in overnight.” Or pull them out of the trash in the Biltmore Room. There’s a wedding there this afternoon.
8.
Loose Lips
The concierge desk always had a dubious relationship to the rest of the hotel, and room service was no exception. If a guest called down and asked for, say, a bottle of scotch, technically the concierge should call room service and have them send it up. But what kind of service is that? The guest could have called them himself (and dropped ninety dollars for a bottle).
But why pay outrageous hotel minibar prices? What I would often do was give the bellman a ten-dollar tip and send him over to the liquor store to buy a nice bottle of scotch for thirty dollars—and since the liquor store guy knew the drill, “nice” meant different things for different kinds of guests. Then I’d add thirty dollars for myself and charge the room seventy. The guest saved twenty dollars, I got thirty dollars, and the bellman made ten. As long as the guest was happy, then the hotel was happy. No one bothered anyone.
Now I had to get reimbursed. We had a booklet of forms, like withdrawal slips, called “paid-outs.” On each paid-out we wrote the date, the room number, the guest’s name, and a description of the transaction. We were smart enough to know that if we wrote “bottle of scotch” in the description, it would be like rubbing the hotel’s face in our business. The solution was to be vague. “Miscellaneous sundries” was never questioned or challenged—even though it describes nothing whatsoever. It could have been seventy dollars’ worth of condoms for all they knew. The beauty of being a concierge was that nobody would ever ask us to give deeper details; that would be breaching the guest’s confidence.
The only important thing was that the guest not contest anything. If I were a room service waiter and didn’t get the guest to sign their check, then I’d be in trouble. But the concierge is slightly above the law. We rarely bothered to get signatures or give explanations; it was like “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If the guest ever complained that we charged him seventy dollars for a thirty-dollar bottle of scotch, we’d just apologize and refund the difference.
It was very known that the concierge really was a confidant to the guests. One day I was approached at the desk by a Latin man. He was about forty-five years old, dark, and really handsome. “My friend,” he said, pulling me over to the side, “I think I have a little bit of a problem.”
Oh my God, I thought. He can’t get it up! The foreign guests were notorious for asking the concierge to get them Viagra without a prescription.
* * *
WHO ASKS FOR WHAT
Los Angelinos: They love underground and edgy, thinking that something is “undiscovered.” It probably comes from living in an environment that’s so clean and “safe” behind tinted windows or inside gated homes.
Western Europeans: They love production values. Think big rooms, clean and shiny, and women dripping in diamonds. If they ask where the shopping district is, they’re seeking the fantasy of a woman in a Chanel suit and gloves walking a white standard poodle on Fifth Avenue. She’s going from Bendel’s to Bergdorf’s while negotiating a big business deal on her cell phone.
Scandinavians: They want Weber barbecues and lawn mowers. I’m not kidding and I still don’t know why, but I made damn sure to point them to Home Depot.
American Tourists: P. T. Barnum, eat your heart out. They want the “World’s Biggest,” “New York’s Finest,” or “The World’s Best” Anything. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, so I occasionally steered them to “New York’s Best T.G.I. Friday’s.” With the chain’s world-class standards, every one of their dining establishments is the “best.”
Gay Men: Even when talking to a gay concierge, my people are always too shy to ask for the gay area—and resort to euphemisms like “the fashion district.” No one is judging you for wanting to go on a cruise (try 8th Avenue, the Townhouse, or the Gramercy Park Hotel roof).
* * *
He never really came out and said what the issue was, though I could totally feel his shame. “I … um … I was in Bangkok and I was with a woman. And my wife is coming tomorrow for the weekend.”
I wanted to drop my professionalism and interrogate the man. “You certainly went to town, didn’t you? Could you have been any more stupid? It’s not like you met a girl in a bar, and then today you’ve got dickburn. You were in Bangkok. What were you thinking? Of course you got sick, moron!” But I keep it formal and instead started asking questions as if I were a doctor. “Do you have a sore? Do you have discharge? Does your penis itch?” Do you want to show it to me?
“So can you help me?” he asked.
“There’s a house doctor,” I told him. “I can get them to come and take a look at it, and see what’s wrong.”
“No, no, no! I just need to get medication. I can’t have a doctor come see me. Absolutely not.” He acted as if a doctor would have to register his illness with the government. “There must be something that can be done.”
“No problem, sir. I don’t know what can be done, exactly. Let me think about this. I want to help you. Just relax. We’ll figure something out.”
He tipped me like crazy, and then he gave me his room number. “Please, do not leave me a voicemail,” he whispered. “This is confidential.”
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” I waited until he was out of earshot. “Hey, Abbie! Do you see that really cute guy?”
“Yeah, what about him?” she said.
“He’s got VD!”
He came back to the concierge desk three times within the next twenty minutes, checking to see if I had made any progress. He was sure that we were going to call the embassy and get his passport stamped, as if he was the first Latin guy to get a venereal disease. It would have been easy for me to shrug my shoulders and send him on his way. But I could tell that he was a good guy who had done something naughty, and he was owning it—and terrified. “Let me see what I can do,” I told him.
I had a connection at a pharmacy nearby. Dashiell would always help me out when I needed something discreet. I called the pharmacy and relayed to him the whole story.
“He needs spectinomycin,” Dash told me. “But that won’t work overnight.”
“Well, isn’t there something? Can he take an overdose of however much you normally would take in the pill form?”
“He needs an injection,” Dash said. “If you want it to zap, you can’t take pills. You have to get a megadose. I can give you the drugs, that’s fine. I can do you this favor, but he really needs a shot if that’s what you want.”
“Okay,” I said.
Now I needed the doctor to inject him without there being any sort of paper trail. This was a bit trickier, but I thought of a way.
I called the house doctor and told him what was up. “I got the guest five hundred milligrams of spectinomycin and I’m going to give it to him. But he doesn’t want to see a doctor. Can we do this with no trace?”
“Sure,” the doctor said. “I can see him off premises. You don’t even have to tell me his name.”
Minutes later, the guest circled back to my desk. I told him what the situation was. “A shot is the only answer if you want it taken care of before your wife arrives.”
He looked down at his pants. “It’s going to hurt, but if that’s my only choice, then that’s my only choice.”
I snickered at his naïveté. “You don’t get an injection there. It’s in your arm.”
“Oh! Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” He handed me a couple more hundred-dollar bills. It was so much money that I genuinely didn’t want to take it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, you take this.”
I sent him to the pharmacist to get the medicine and I arranged the meetin
g with the doctor. He wouldn’t get the shot in the hotel and he couldn’t be seen going into a doctor’s office. He was so guilt-ridden that on some level he honestly felt “they” were watching him, and karma was going to come around and expose him—as if the burning in his groin wasn’t karma enough.
The doctor’s bill was a few hundred dollars, so I started doing algebra with the paid-outs until the combination of charges to his room bill added up to the exact amount I’d spent. An imaginary breakfast delivery: thirty-five dollars. Nonexistent flowers sent to the room: seventy dollars. Making sure your wife doesn’t find out that you got gonorrhea from a Thai hooker: maybe not priceless, but damn near close to it.
The doctor called me after it was all done, so that I’d be sure everything was taken care of. “It’s fine,” he told me. “And he’s a really nice guy. He was petrified, but he’s going to be all right.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for doing that, really. I felt so bad for him because his wife was coming tomorrow.”
Then there was a pause, and it was the kind of pause that never leads to good news. “Oh. Well, you didn’t tell me that.”
“Sorry,” I said, a little bit confused.
“You’re still a carrier for up to seven days after the injection. It clears up the symptoms, but you’re still carrying the virus.”
“… Oh.” I got off the phone with the doctor, and now I had no idea what to do. Should I tell him and risk him getting upset with me, as if I should have known and told him earlier? Even barring that, somebody else was at stake here, too. My hands weren’t clean in this whole mess. I could have walked away from the situation at the very start—and I hadn’t.
I agonized over what to do until the next time he passed the desk. I decided that the moral thing to do in this immoral situation was, at the very least, to inform him. It was his karma what he did with the information; it’s not like the disease was somehow life threatening anyway. When I told him what the doctor had told me, he was absolutely horrified. I could see the blood drain from his face. The really sad thing is that, in my gut, I knew that he wasn’t going to tell her.
The guilt bothered me for a very long time. But on some level, a large part of my job is to help stupid and/or awful people with too much money continue to be stupid and/or awful. As bad as he was, at least he had a conscience about the whole thing. That, in and of itself, put him ahead of many of my other clients.
To be fair, using the paid-outs to cover an STD treatment was an isolated case. What we mostly used them for was the constant demands for theater tickets that all concierges live and die by. At the end of my shift, I would take all my paid-outs to the hotel cashier. They’d go through them and make sure that the rooms matched the names. Five hundred dollars was the absolute bare minimum amount that I would be cashing in. But four tickets to see La bohème at $400 a pop meant $1,600 for just one transaction—and the hotel never had big bills to reimburse me. It was crazy. On a typical night, I got $4,000 to $5,000 in twenties. I had to go to the back where, down to the Plexiglas, it was like a safety deposit box area, and separate out this wad of money for me, for Abbie, and for the house. Every night I’d be there for about an hour, divvying up the profits. It was like playing a poker game—and always winning. Sometimes it would get really bad and the cashier would only have fives and singles. There were times when I literally had hundreds of one-dollar bills. Hey, I didn’t care. It all spent the same, and it made for a little fun at the grocery store. If anyone commented on my giant wad of one-dollar bills, I’d tell them I was a dancer.
The usual way we got theater tickets was to make a run to the box office. But we often received requests for really crazy, hard-to-get things like the Met Opera Gala or opening night at some hot show. Sometimes we’d have to just bite the bullet and deal with a broker. They’d then send somebody from their company to pick up payment—which was always cash and almost never in large bills.
The runners would sort of whisper where they were from so as not to attract attention. I would always have cash ready to give them in these big, overstuffed and worn-out envelopes covered with rubber bands. The fancy hotel guests with their fur coats and custom suits got to watch this not-so-refined guy in a trench coat and sunglasses count out the stacks of money that he pulled from my beat-up, rubber band–laden envelopes.
Yes, it often got a bit awkward.
One of the brokers had a runner named Alphonse, who was very, very old. He was into the semi-illicit nature of his job, and had a twinkle in his eye whenever he told me he was there to “pick up the money.” He always made a show of looking around before tucking the money into his jacket.
One day, a police detective came up to the desk about an hour after Alphonse left. “Do you do business with Starbright brokers?” he asked me.
“Yeah…”
“And do you know Alphonse?”
“Yeah…” My heart started pounding. If it was bad for a guest to complain, a police complaint would be infinitely worse.
“Did you hand him money?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is there a problem?”
“We’re investigating something,” he told me.
Oh my God, I thought. The jig is up! There’s counterfeit money in there. If you deal with thousands of dollars in cash every day, it was probably only a matter of time. “Is everything all right?”
“I need your contact info. If we need to question you, do we have to go through your boss?”
I gave him my information. “No, I’ll be glad to assist in any way.”
“Alphonse got mugged.”
Hearing that made me so sad. He had such bravado. “Is he okay?”
“They tackled him and knocked him to the ground. But he’s fine.”
The next day the detective came back and went to the manager’s office. The next thing I knew, they brought the bellman into the manager’s office. I was relieved. He must have seen Alphonse leave and witnessed the whole thing. The bellman had worked at the hotel for fifteen years, and had emigrated from the Caribbean to make a better life for his family. A little while later, he and the detective left together—no doubt to identify the assailant.
Except, it turned out, that he was the assailant himself. I hadn’t even put two and two together. They had identified him from the surveillance tape at the Fitzpatrick Hotel, three or four blocks away. In hindsight it was obvious. There was no Plexiglas screen. There was no lock on my desk. I would open my drawer and there would be $10,000 sitting there. I’d go to the bathroom and leave my station completely unlocked. Who would ever think that there was a drawer full of cash? Clearly, over time, the bellman saw the pattern. He wasn’t working that day, and he knew how much cash was floating around. He was probably just waiting for anybody to come to the desk to pick up money. He couldn’t do something at the hotel itself, because we had cameras over the desk. But that didn’t help Alphonse.
Despite the incident, I still always used cash to buy theater tickets—which induced some paranoia. (During the winter I was constantly convinced that bills were dropping through my cold-numbed fingers.) Every day, I would write down what tickets we needed for the next couple of days, and I would try and fish for them. The ticket brokers hung out at McHale’s, and often they’d off-load inventory because they were getting scared that they had too many. As showtime approached, they’d start to get desperate. Those tickets were like bombs in their pocket.
* * *
SCALPERS
There’s a myth that the people that stand in front of theaters offering tickets to passersby are scammers. They almost never are. Illegitimate tickets are quite rare. For some reason, they’re more common at sporting events. But if they’re selling tickets for a show, it’s usually legit. What happens is that the brokers, who have a license to resell (though not on the street) might have one hundred seats to Billy Elliot that nobody bought. Even though they’re not allowed to sell on the street, they still hire barkers to move as much inventory as possible.
<
br /> * * *
One whirlwind day, I ran out of cash and had to use my credit card with the broker. The Phantom seats cost me $75, and the guests were willing to pay $200—each. But what I didn’t realize was that when you buy a ticket with a credit card, they print your name on them. Abbie and I stood there staring at the tickets, wondering what we should do.
In our paranoid wisdom, we decided we were going to strike through my name with black marker. Somehow we thought they wouldn’t notice a thick black line on the face of the ticket. Since the printing was glossy, we had to take the marker and dab it over and over until it took. It was so glaring that it had practically the same effect as using highlighter.
Tickets were pretty much the only time we had guests sign the paid-outs. We usually gave a little speech about how the face value was, say, seventy-five dollars, but it was hard to find seats so we used other sources. Most affluent people could not care less and were bored by what we were telling them. But then there were some people who really did listen to the whole spiel. Them, we got to sign off.
When the people came to get their Phantom tickets that night, I was so worried that I oversold the whole exchange. It practically became a show in and of itself, on the house. “Wow! Row D! You’re going to have such a great time! That’s just wonderful! Have a wonderful night!”
Not even an hour later, the phone rang at the desk. “Yeah, this is John from the Majestic Theatre box office. Is Michael Fazio there?”
I heard him talking to somebody and the sounds of a crowd in the background. “I’m Michael Fazio.”
“I have people who I assume are guests of yours. Where did you get these tickets?”
“I gave my credit card to someone who bought them for me.”
“Okay,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure these were good.”
I was horrified. I wanted to crawl under the desk and disappear under a trapdoor. I knew there would be drama when the guests returned. Sure enough, they came waltzing back from the theater—and they weren’t happy.
Concierge Confidential Page 12
