Concierge Confidential

by Fazio, Michael

  In essence, that’s kind of what we did. Abbie and I bailed on our whole in-house concierge concept, and instead set up a centralized virtual presence. We still offered services, but now people would call us from their building and would never really get to see us. That’s how it worked in a hotel, after all. Half the time the concierge there is just a voice on the phone.

  Because we didn’t have an on-site office in most places, Abbie and I threw meet-and-greets in building lobbies. We wanted the residents to put a face to our virtual service. I was mingling with the tenants at one of these events when I couldn’t help but hear a woman with a Fran Drescher voice. Even though she seemed young, she was already Botoxed and collagened to death. Her hair was platinum blond and her eyebrows were tattooed. Well, I thought, she’s either in fashion, or she’s an entrepreneur of some sort.

  “That must be Michael!” she said. “Oh, they’re so fabulous. I have to introduce myself. Hi! I’m Michelle from apartment 15F.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. “We see your name a lot. Thanks for using the service.” She was always going out to restaurants and calling car service, and spending a lot of money in the process.

  “Well, my assistant loves you.”

  “That’s great. We’re an assistant’s best friend.”

  “Yeah, I’m between L.A. and New York. It’s really such a luxury to have you.”

  “What do you do?” I asked her.

  “I’m a student.”

  How could she have an assistant, be bicoastal, and go to school? I wondered. She must be an heiress of some kind. “Well, where’s your family from?”

  “They’re from Midland, Texas.”

  Hmm, oil. “What do you study?”

  “I go to New York Film Academy. I decided that I want to be behind the camera instead of in front of the camera.”

  “Oh! You’re an actress.”

  “Yeah, I do adult movies. You probably don’t know me because I don’t think you like my ‘type,’ but I’m pretty famous.” She pulled out her phone and started to show me extremely explicit pictures of herself. “Yeah, this is me. And that’s me. I’m really big into medical fetish.” I thought that meant she dressed like a nurse and played doctor. But no. She showed me the medical fetish picture next: there were about fifty of those vein clamps that doctors use during surgery—all attached to her genitals. She was photographed sitting in a chair, and with all of the clamps hanging down it looked like Edward Scissorhands.

  Thanks to her Fran Drescher voice, everyone in the lobby couldn’t help but listen to her. Michelle helpfully started showing her phone around, explaining to everyone what the medical fetish was and letting them know about her AVN award. Then she explained to everyone what the AVN award was. It was one big community.

  Besides not meeting the residents, we also had a legal issue by being off-site. When we were hiring housekeepers or ordering items for people, we were acting as their agent in a legal sense. Since we didn’t see the tenants in person anymore, we made them sign a contract acknowledging that they were asking us to do these things for them. They also agreed, in writing, to reimburse us for anything they requested—and they had to send us a copy of their credit card. I learned that the hard way after people got Belinda Carlisle tickets without giving us anything in writing; we never saw that money again. But once you signed the forms, you were on file and everything was done. It was a formality that took two seconds, and nobody really had a problem with it—until the one guy who did have a problem with it.

  Katie, one of my newer hires, called me with the problem. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “This guy Abe has his apartment cleaned four or five times a week, sometimes twice in a day. He’s a good customer and he sounds important, but at the same time he’s got a very aggressive attitude. I’ve tried to get him to sign the credit card forms, but he hasn’t. He’s been too busy traveling all over the world.”

  She had totally bought into his air of entitlement—but I’d been there, so I knew where she was coming from. When someone acts high and mighty, most people in service naturally buy into their persona and kiss their ass. It’s not like he didn’t have the money to pay for housekeeping. The building he was living in was really expensive.

  Ostensibly, the housekeepers are supposed to come in and clean. But I assumed that Abe was using the service more like his personal housekeepers, having them running errands and get groceries. If he wanted to spend a thousand bucks a week on that, it was fine with me. It would be easier on the housekeepers, too, and they’d be getting paid just the same.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I told Katie.

  “Well, he’s really rude,” Katie told me.

  “How rude is really rude?”

  “He’s constantly changing the schedule. He’s had a housekeeper show up, and he’s kept her waiting in the lobby for two hours. When I called to say that she was just sitting there, he told me he didn’t care and that he wasn’t ready for her. And, like, why was I bothering him with this nonsense.”

  Now I got a chip on my shoulder. True, he was spending a lot of money every week. Big deal! He shouldn’t be mean to people. All he had to do was let the woman know how long she should wait. Yes, she was getting paid for her time, but we had to have some protocol. But we needed his charge forms signed or no one was getting paid. I called him up, not to scold or bother him, but just to get him to try and understand my position.

  He never called back.

  I called him again.

  He never called back. He never called back four or five times.

  I got a tiny bit pissed. I left him a message, very professional but still a bit sterner than usual. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but we just have a little matter that we’d just like to tidy up. If you don’t mind, it’ll take two seconds. I’m sure we can remedy this easily. It’ll make me so happy, and then you’ll be happy, and we’ll stop calling you.”

  A few hours later, Abe called me back. He was very young, and very pretentious, and those two elements always combine to create the most charming person imaginable. He was in his early twenties, and proceeded to tell me how he was much too busy to speak with me. “This is becoming such a bother! I don’t understand why you people have to constantly harass me for some form. Of course I’m good for the housekeeping bills. Have I done anything counter?” To be fair, he did have a valid point. We’d been processing charges on his credit card with no problem. It’s just that we had no contract. “Yes, I understand. I don’t have time for this frivolousness, but I’ll send over the charge authorization. Email it to me again.”

  I emailed him the charge authorization. But the form never came back, and he still kept hiring housekeeping to his apartment.

  This was the uncomfortable thing about dealing with people who are affluent. At that level of wealth, things like several thousand dollars for housekeeping are really not substantial. These are people who don’t pay their own bills, because they have business managers. It’s often the case that the more money you have, the more aversion you have to handling it. There are people in the world who haven’t been to a grocery store, and couldn’t tell you how much a pint of milk is. It doesn’t make them bad; it just makes them annoyingly clueless.

  I figured Abe was that kind of person. If he valued money at all, he could have hired a domestic for the amount he was spending. He seemed like the type of guy who eats snacks out of the minibar at a hotel. It didn’t matter that the pretzels were seven dollars; what mattered is that they were convenient.

  I decided to call him one last time, and once again I left him a message. “I hate to do this,” I told him, “but I just really need this form. Let’s say that I need it by next Monday, or we’re going to have to discontinue the housekeepers.”

  He didn’t call back even after that. On Monday, I phoned the housekeeping company. “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I know he’s a great customer to you guys. But this is it. You can’t go to there because we don’t have any writte
n commitment from him to guarantee that he will pay.”

  Now Abe called me back, on my cell to boot. “How dare you? Are you implying that I’m a thief? I am very busy. You probably don’t understand, but I’m traveling all over the world, and I have commitments. I can’t afford to come home to find out that I don’t have access to this service!”

  “I’m really sorry,” I told him, “but we tried it the other way, and it wasn’t working. I’m just really not willing to take a risk.” I tried to placate him by playing into his ego. “You might not understand because you’re a very affluent man, but if something happened and I lost this money, it would be devastating.”

  “Well, I don’t need you people. I’ll find other services.” Then he hung up on me.

  A month went by, and I didn’t hear a peep out of him. To no surprise, I then got a letter from American Express. Abe claimed he did not authorize any of the charges. I knew the procedure, and I knew you can’t break the rules for people; this is the inevitable result. But it was still hard to believe that someone with all that financial substance was going to screw me over what was, to him, nothing. For someone like Abe, $3,000 is the equivalent of dropping twenty dollars on the street. Yes, you’d notice it—but you’d just go to the ATM and get more.

  I spent time getting all of the entry records from the doorman; every time the housekeeper came, they’d had to sign in. I was able to prove that housekeeping had been there dozens of times—but it didn’t matter at all. Abe didn’t sign his consent, and he had only verbally given us his American Express number. I wasn’t going to see a red cent—and I was fuming.

  I called Abe and got his voicemail—again!—and left him message after message. “Look, you know what you did, and I know what you did. Let’s just be real about this. This is not a nice game to play.”

  No response.

  A couple of months later, Katie and I were talking and Abe’s name came up for some reason. “What an asshole,” she said. “He was so horrible. I wonder what he does. Where does he make his money?” She got on her computer and started searching around the Web for him. “Oh, look! I think I found him. He owns a graphics company. He must be extremely successful.”

  She showed me his website. He had billed himself as a graphic artist, but there was an awful lot of photography and a lack of any actual graphics on the site. The way he’d laid it out reminded me of looking through dirty magazines to find escorts. Graphics, shmaphics, I thought. He’s probably some spoiled kid who designs dirty DVD boxes for his father’s porn company and calls himself an “artist.”

  I went on my computer and started searching for him online as well—except I added the word “porn” after his name to my search. Pay dirt. There were pages and pages of results, all of him starring in different movies. Back in my hotel days, I’d been tipped off by somebody who worked in porn that adult stars earned a lot of their money for hire. They usually do strip shows or escorting on the side. Knowing that, and learning that he’s a gay porn star, I knew for sure that he was a hustler—a hustler whose cell phone number I had.

  “How much for a party?” I texted him from my friend’s phone.

  I hadn’t even put down the phone before he responded. “Three seventy-five for an hour; fifteen hundred for overnight; five thousand for a week.”

  I started getting a little more graphic, trying to see where his boundaries were. He was “cool with a group,” as well as spitting and verbal abuse. Frankly it got difficult to think of something he wouldn’t be open to doing (“Choking?”). And yes, Abe assured me, all those amenities were included in his fee.

  The next day I emailed him so that he’d know that it had been me. “This is one final attempt to give you the opportunity to correct what you’ve done,” I wrote. “I understand the hectic schedule that you must have—and not to mention how difficult it must be to coordinate an entire group in your apartment. Looking at your housekeeping schedule, you apparently haven’t been successful enough to book many full weeks. So if you are able to book one overnight this week, and you give just half of the money to me, then I’ll forgive the balance of your debt.”

  Sadly, I never really got vindicated. But we did have fun in the office circulating pictures of his underwhelming anatomy. The thing was, it was very easy for difficult or wacky clients to earn a reputation in the office. People are more open with concierges—and we are very open with one another.

  Affluent, wealthy, established people assign concierges some sort of intellectual credibility that they don’t assign to servants. It’s kind of like we’re their confidant. It often becomes us versus them, me and the rich guy against other service people. It’s kind of awkward because they confide their own prejudices. They’re often predisposed to judge the intelligence of other people in service, especially when it comes to jobs like dog walking, housekeeping, or limo driving—in other words, the people they would never be bothered to speak with directly.

  Todd Nybakken was that type of guy. He lived in a very fancy building on Central Park South, where the apartments started at $4 million. He also had a complete hang-up when it came to hiring a housekeeper, to the point where I felt like a hostage negotiator trying to send someone in. “They’re not going to break anything, are they?” he demanded. “Do they steal?”

  Obviously he would never ask a maid to her face if she stole. But the concierge is so blessed that we are permitted to interact with the masters directly. “We only work with professionals,” I replied, trying to elevate his understanding. It wouldn’t dawn on him that being a housekeeper can be a great job: It’s not an enormous time commitment and if you took pride in your work you could do really well. You have a flexible schedule and you don’t have to wake up that early. The pay is pretty good—good enough that you don’t have to supplement it by stealing from rich people’s drawers.

  “Well, where are you finding these maids?” he said, as if we were throwing up random ads on Craigslist.

  “They all come from reputable agencies, who often work with the same people for years. If there was ever any problem, we’d be sure to know about it.” I wished I was a doctor. No one went to their doctor and challenged them on their way to a cure. But in service, every conversation is one question away from an interrogation.

  Todd’s housekeeping calls—plural—went on for forty-five minutes at a time. “Do they have insurance? How long do they take? Do they bring their own supplies? Do they do other people in your building? I don’t want anybody who does anybody else in the building!”

  Because you don’t want them to tell your neighbors that you have body parts in your freezer, I thought.

  “I really would feel comfortable with an in-writing breakdown of what they do,” he insisted.

  After a week of back-and-forth, he was finally comfortable enough to trust our recommendation for a housekeeper. But before we could make that call, he made very, very, very specific instructions regarding his place. Some people just close one bedroom and tell the maid not to bother. For Todd, it reached a whole other level: “There are two stacks of papers on the brown desk with the white chair. The right-hand stack must not be touched, and by ‘right-handed’ I mean from the perspective of the chair.” Todd also had a wet bar in his living room and, apparently, there was an Emmy award displayed on its shelves. “Under no circumstances are they to touch the Emmy!!!! Under no circumstances are they to move the Emmy!!!! Do not even clean that shelf.”

  The day that the housekeeper was supposed to come, he called me in the morning to confirm that I got his instructions. “Did you tell her not to touch the Emmy?” he asked me.

  “She knows not to touch the Emmy,” I told him. Everyone knew: the owner of the company knew, I knew, Abbie knew, Daria knew, the maid knew. We all got the memo—literally.

  “Are you sure that the same maid who you told about not touching the Emmy is the same one who’s coming to my house? Maybe one of them got sick.”

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  “Well,
all right,” he said. “Just so long as you’re sure.”

  That afternoon, I got a call from Daria. “You’re not going to believe what happened,” she told me. “Remember the Emmy guy?”

  “Of course I remember the Emmy guy!”

  “The maid got caught with the Emmy.”

  “What?” I said, starting to laugh. It was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course she forgot. He was so uncomfortable with the maid that he felt he had to spy on her. She was probably just trying to help him by finally cleaning his dusty Emmy.

  “He’d come back to the apartment,” Daria went on, “and the housekeeper was standing on a chair, at the wet bar, holding the Emmy and dusting the shelf. He walked in on her red-handed. He probably thought she was giving some imaginary acceptance speech.” Now Daria started to laugh as well, but we were also a little scared.

  “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”

  “It’s going to be fine? This is his worst fear, realized.”

  “Wait, so what happened? Did he tell her to leave?”

  “Oh, no! He told me to call the maid service company. They paged the housekeeper and told her to get her out of the apartment immediately.”

  Alarms were going off in the city: The maid had touched the Emmy. Mayor Bloomberg has been called, and Commissioner Gordon has lit the Bat-Signal. The Emmy has been touched. This is not a drill.

  “Let him know that we won’t charge him,” I told Daria. “I’ll eat the two hundred dollars or whatever it costs to clean his huge apartment. He’s probably one of those people where you can just void the fee and he’ll be fine … I hope he’s one of those people.”

  “That’s not going to work,” she said. “He says that she damaged the statue.” He probably thought the maid germs were eating away at the area of rubbing.

  “Well, what is he saying happened to it?” I asked her. “Is it chipped? Is it rotting?”

  “It’s scratched. He believes that she had jewelry on, and her ring left marks.”