Concierge Confidential

by Fazio, Michael

  The Muppets never really “took” Manhattan, either.

  It’s not a question of “asking the right way.” I’m a concierge, not some freemason who could only grant access if presented with a certain keyword and a rare feather. To be sure, there are hidden gems in major cities of the world. At the D’Orsay in Paris, there’s a wonderful little restaurant up on the top that many people would overlook. But I guarantee the French concierges do know about it, and they will tell you about it without any secret handshakes.

  The one request that happened constantly—daily—was to have breakfast at Tiffany’s. Even the people that know it’s a very upscale jewelry store believe that there must be some VIP café where they serve tea and croissants. There isn’t. Technically speaking, there must be some room in the back where you can bring in some food and eat in a windowless office. But that’s as close as you’re going to get.

  Late one evening a man came to the desk with his coat on, ready to go out on the town. “How far is Atlantic City?” he asked me, with a thick Eastern European accent.

  “It’s about a hundred and twenty miles,” I told him.

  “So how long will it take me to get there?”

  “Three hours, roughly.”

  He was distraught. In his mind, Atlantic City was another borough of New York. “That’s impossible,” he said, kindly but firmly.

  Now I knew I was in for an argument. “It’s not impossible,” I said.

  “Isn’t there a subway I can take? Maybe something at Grand Central?”

  Oh, of course! The Grand Central Atlantic City Express! “No,” I insisted. “There really isn’t.”

  “Isn’t there some way to go faster?”

  “You’d have to charter a helicopter!” I said, trying to show him how impossible it was.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He was one of those. After you got past the arguing, they’d pretend to be interested in some extravagant adventure. Then, after I did all the research to find out what it entailed, they’d change their mind (but never admit how ridiculous they were being in the first place). Just from the way he was postured I could see that he thought he was a big shot. “I mean, it’s probably going to be about three or four thousand dollars,” I said, trying to nip this in the bud as fast as possible.

  “Each way or round trip?”

  “Probably round trip.”

  “How fast can you arrange it?”

  Crap. It wasn’t like I could call my friendly neighborhood helicopter pilot. The only helicopter companies I was aware of were the tourist ones, and I knew that they were closed. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had to start brainstorming about aviation. Teterboro was a private airport; maybe there were helicopters there. Now that I had a minute to think, I realized that the price I quoted him was quite high. I was looking to pocket a clean $1,000, easy—if I could pull this off.

  I called Teterboro but got a recording. “… If this is an emergency,” it concluded, “press zero.”

  Oh yeah, I decided, it’s an emergency. I got connected directly to somebody who was in the air traffic control tower. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I know I did this wrong. It’s not like life or death, but I have a dilemma and I’m just desperate.”

  “Did you call Liberty Helicopter?” he said, after I explained the situation.

  “They’re closed.”

  “Hold on a second.” I heard him rifling through some papers. “Call this number. It’s the cell phone of the guy who owns Liberty.”

  “Thanks!” I called the guy—and got his voicemail. I told him what I needed as succinctly as I could. “If you get this within the next ten minutes, please call me back.” I hung up the phone and started to think of where else to call. I got the idea to contact charter companies in Los Angeles, where it was three hours earlier.

  It was a bit of a challenge and kind of fun, but what made it even more of a challenge is that other guests started to come up to the desk. Nine o’clock was always a very busy hour for us, and now I had the annoying people coming up and asking for a table for six, at Babbo, in fifteen minutes. I was juggling the phones and the wheels were clicking, but nobody else mattered except for the Russian helicopter man.

  The guy from Liberty soon called me back. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What do you need?”

  I had a good relationship with his company, because helicopter tours were a very premium attraction. “I need someone to fly a guest to Atlantic City. Like, now.”

  “Let me see if I can get one of my pilots. They might still be around.” He called me back in seconds. “All right. I have someone. Is this guy for real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it would be his own helicopter. Your guy has got to pay for the whole thing himself. It’ll be twenty-seven hundred.”

  My rule of thumb for pricing things was to take the expectation, then take the reality, and meet in the middle. “All right,” I told the guest. “I’ve gotten a private helicopter ride to Atlantic City, round-trip for $3,500 if you’re still interested.” It was less than he had been expecting to pay, so I’d procured him an apparent bargain.

  “Fine,” he told me. “No problem. Do it.”

  Now I had to process the paid-out. Thirty-five hundred dollars was exorbitant, even by our usual high-ticket standard. I’d require manager approval, and there would be some questions. “How do you want to pay?” I asked the guest. “Do you want to put this to your room? Do you want to put just part of it now, and then part of it tomorrow?”

  “Can I pay cash?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I knew that the pilot would have no issue with that, but I called anyway to make sure they knew what was coming. The owner was also more than fine with that.

  “How do I get to the heliport?” the guest asked me.

  “I’ll get you a car,” I said. I was terrified he was going to change his mind, and I’d be out a huge commission. It would be worth palming twenty dollars to one of the drivers out front to do me a little favor.

  While I got on the phone with the car company, the guest took his valise and put it on my desk. It was like I was watching a James Bond movie through the corner of my eye. He popped open the valise—click, click—and I saw that the entire briefcase was full of stacks of bills. The stacks even had the little bank wrappers around them.

  He started counting it out while I grew instantly aware of the cameras that hung over my desk. Oh my God, I thought, don’t let anybody see this. This is so great … but I’m so scared! He handed me the cash for the full amount, and then he handed me a couple of hundred dollars extra. “Thank you so much for your time,” he said.

  A few minutes later, the driver came in from outside. “Is this the gentleman going to the heliport?”

  “Yes!” I told him, sending them off on their way.

  Now Murphy’s Law kicked in, and I got extremely busy. It was even harder to focus on minutiae than usual, because my brain was still processing everything that just happened. In a few minutes, he’d be in Atlantic City after all.

  Then, all of a sudden, I could feel the blood drain out of me. What is he going to do when he gets to the heliport on the other side? I realized. I didn’t make any arrangements for him! Urgently I called Caesars. “I need to talk to the pit boss,” I told them.

  It was kind of like calling the White House and saying that you have to talk to the president. Maybe not the president, but at least like the secretary of state. “Sure you do,” they said. “What is this call regarding?”

  “A man with a suitcase full of cash,” I blurted out, “from Russia, is on a helicopter that I just charted for him for thousands of dollars. If you don’t want him to come to Caesars, just tell me that you’re not interested.”

  They paused. “… Hold on.”

  The pit boss got on the line, more than a little skeptical. “What’s this regarding? Some man from Russia…?”

  “Here’s the deal,” I told him. “I’m the concierge at the InterC
ontinental Hotel. The man’s on his way. He’s got—I saw it with my own eyes—a ton of cash, and he’s a really good guy. You’re going to love him. Somebody needs to take him by the hand from the heliport and treat him like a star, because this is a very good thing.”

  I kept following up the entire night with Caesars, and I found that they really did treat him like a star. They dispatched a car for him, and the pit boss himself came with the car to welcome him to the casino. Everything was going off without a hitch. Now I got nervous again. What if the guy is just going there to hire a hooker? I wondered. I’ve got this pit boss joined to him at the hip. It’s like some really tacky buddy comedy. I didn’t know the guy; I was simply trusting my instincts. He had seemed no-nonsense; he wanted to go to Atlantic City, and he got what he wanted. He wasn’t mean or demanding or insulting. But maybe he was horny—and not just horny, but tactfully horny.

  The next day I followed up. God only knows how much he spent at the casino, but the helicopter waited and he came back in the wee hours of the morning. It was all done and it was all good, and everyone was happy. “Any time you want to come to Atlantic City,” the pit boss said to me, “just call. Your rooms are taken care of.”

  When I needed concert tickets for somebody performing in Atlantic City, the pit boss was my contact—and he always came through. And I like to think that the next time someone asked me what seemed like a stupid question, I hedged a bit before giving them a sarcastic answer. I always wondered if they had a valise full of cash, sitting there just outside of view.

  * * *

  HOW TO WORK CASINOS

  Every casino has a host. Sometimes they’re called guest services, but they’re never referred to as “VIP” or anything. The host is provided a list of the high rollers at the hotel. What most people don’t realize is that you can establish yourself as a high roller proactively. You can literally go to a casino host and ask what their policy and parameters are for being a high roller—and they’ll very candidly tell you. It’s usually a minimum commitment to gamble a certain amount of money. No, you can’t commit to that amount, then cash out immediately and cheat the system. They’re watching, and you’d be off that list in no time.

  The casino host has the power to comp dinners, to comp shows, to comp anything that’s within the confines of that casino. Even if you don’t want something comped, they have an allotment of tickets to distribute. When Cirque du Soleil first came out, it was the hottest thing in town. Theoretically, the host was supposed to give his tickets to the high rollers. But the high rollers are notorious for no-showing. They get taken up at a table while the show comes and goes. They know they’ve been invited, but they never pick up the tickets. It’s a crap shoot (ha ha) but it’s a good last-minute place to check for tickets to a popular event. You don’t have to pretend to be a guest; you just need to offer to buy the unspoken-for tickets.

  * * *

  11.

  The Best Seat in the House

  Like many other fancy customers, the man on the phone was very businessy and matter-of-fact. “I am staying at the hotel next week,” he told me. “I need to get a car service. I would like to go to the theater at some point. I have meetings in Connecticut and New Jersey, but the location I’ll be at most is 1180 6th Avenue.”

  “That’s five blocks away,” I told him. “You don’t really need a car.”

  “Well, I’m in a wheelchair.”

  “Okay, that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll figure this out and I’ll get back to you.” He was so gruff and logistical-minded, that he sounded like he was a world champion skier who fell and now had his leg up. He was going to go to scores of fancy dinners, fold up his chair, and throw it in the trunk.

  I’d never had to make accommodations for someone who was disabled. But I just went and hit the phones to call the car services. How hard could it be?

  Well, it’s pretty hard when you don’t have any information.

  “Is the wheelchair electric, or is it foldable?” the dispatcher asked me.

  “Huh. I’m not sure.”

  “How much does it weigh? Is he absolutely wheelchair-bound, or does he have some mobility?”

  I sat there with the receiver in my hand, trying to see if there was any way to guess—or if there was any way for me to find out without calling the man back and making things awkward.

  There wasn’t.

  I got off the phone with the dispatcher and thought about how best to approach the situation. I knew the worst thing that I could do: use the overly fake tone that guests always used with me. “Hello, little crippled man! My grandmother’s in a wheelchair; we have so much in common.”

  Instead I just took his cue. It was a nonissue to him, and therefore it would be a nonissue to me. “Everything’s going to be fine,” I said to him in my most businesslike voice, when I called back. “I just have a couple of questions to ask you. First of all, can you move your legs?”

  “No, I’m a paraplegic. I have no use of the lower half of my body. I would need to be lifted out of the chair, but I prefer a car that could take me in the wheelchair.”

  For me, to hear “prefer” meant that I had to find it.

  I got it. I wasn’t thinking any longer of requesting a very strong driver to lift him. Now I started thinking of dignity, of Donald Trump as a paraplegic. I had this fantasy of hiring a totally shiny black van with blacked-out windows. It had a wheelchair lift and everything, and was exactly what he wanted. I really wanted to make this happen for the guy.

  My fantasy was perfect except for one thing: It doesn’t exist.

  My research expanded to a day’s worth of work. I called whomever could conceivably have a connection that could help me. I called the Disabled American Vets. I called hospitals. I called every possible provider—and I couldn’t find a van that would accommodate a wheelchair.

  After I exhausted every number in New York City, I started expanding my calling circle. Lo and behold, there was one company in New Jersey. They had a black wedding limo van—and it had a wheelchair lift. Bingo!

  “We’re one hundred miles outside of the city,” they told me. “We charge a dollar a mile just to get it there, as well as the hiring fee.”

  The guest’s handicap wasn’t interfering with his financial success. I doubted it would be a problem, so I just called him.

  He was fine with the expense, and wanted to plan out his restaurant- and his theater-going. “Let me put together some choices for you,” I said. “I’ll do some research and call you back as soon as possible.” I got the limo secured for him all day, and was already spending a fortune. Then something clicked inside my head. I realized that if the fancy limo companies weren’t as accommodating to his needs as they could have been, it was possible that the restaurants wouldn’t be, either. There was no way I was going to have this man compromise his dignity.

  Restaurants are to code; technically, they need to be wheelchair-accessible. But my job meant never assuming anything and always confirming everything. I called Chanterelle. “Hi,” I said. “It’s Michael from the InterContinental Hotel. I have a guest staying at the hotel who is in a wheelchair. I just wanted to confirm if you have a ramp?”

  “Of course we have a handicapped ramp. But we do have stairs up to the dining level.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s only two stairs,” the hostess said.

  “Only” two stairs? Having him be lifted up two stairs was about as plausible to me as having him walk up them. “So he has to eat at the bar?” I sputtered.

  “Gee, I’m afraid so. But we do serve the full dining menu in the bar area.”

  That crossed them off my list. It’s not like I began to pity the guest. But I realized that to be wealthy, fancy, and handicapped was kind of a contradiction. It was just obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, and in counterintuitive ways. I hit the phone for hours to be sure to secure a first-class experience for him.

  At eleven o’clock one night, I was finishing my shift. The doo
rs opened, and in came a man in a wheelchair. It was obvious who it was, but I had brainwashed myself into thinking of him as just any other guest. I don’t know if it’s him! I chided myself. He’s like anyone else! He’s just sitting down, is all!

  He wheeled up to my desk while I was on the phone. I motioned that I’d be right with him—he’s like anyone else!—and he nodded in acknowledgment.

  That’s when Glen happened to walk past.

  Glen was the general manager of the hotel. Glen was also a frat boy who grew up and happened to get a job. He was the kind of person who incessantly hung out at the hotel bar, making sure that everyone knew that he was the general manager.

  Glen came in between us and squatted down in front of the guest. “Well, hi there!” he said. “Is Michael taking good care of you?” In a tiny way, I understood where Glen was coming from. His intentions were somewhat good, but he was completely not clued in to the guy’s stature. It wasn’t as if this were a pitiful-looking person. The man had a fancy wheelchair and was dressed impeccably. He was probably the owner of a Fortune 500 company. But Glen was talking to him like he was a kid, or someone’s elderly mom.

  The guest was totally dismissive of him, barely turning his head. “Yes, he is. He’s fine.”

  Glen did not take the cue. Glen wouldn’t normally take a cue anyway, but Glen also happened to be drunk. “Are you having a good stay? We want to make sure that you’re comfortable!”

  I wanted to die, but even if I died that wouldn’t have stopped Glen. I could only pray that he wouldn’t start asking about the wheelchair. After a bit more stilted dialogue, Glen must have spotted a skirt to chase. He got up and walked away.

  Over the next few days, the guest took the opportunity of being in New York by the horns. He did everything that everybody else did, and was able to afford to do it in the way that made him feel comfortable. “Loved the restaurant,” he said simply. “Great call.” He didn’t gush when he left, even though he must have known how much work I put in to accommodate him. The hundred-dollar bills he tipped me said it all.