Heads In Beds Part 9

Guest gossip is also open for discussion and can be some of the juiciest stories. I, personally, never minded pleasantly diverting myself with gossip, so they started calling me Tom Jennings.

"Dante, you hear about Mr. Hockstein?"

"Do dah do do do dah do do do. Tom Jennings reporting to you live from the helm of the Bellevue. I swear, my man, you are always talking s.h.i.+t."

"I am the editor in chief of the Bellevue Observer Bellevue Observer, am I not? This just in from our man covering the bar scene: Front Office Manager Kelly Madison; another mouth herpes outbreak? Details at lunch."

Mr. Hockstein, as I mentioned before, had been a guest at the Bellevue since before I could have o.r.g.a.s.ms. About as tall as a trash can with meticulously parted, heavily pomaded black hair, he spoke to no one, not even the bellmen, who were masters at breaking down walls, since once the wall is down, it's easier to hand over a tip. Hockstein usually checked in on a Monday with little or no luggage and checked out sometime on Friday, often without even stopping at the desk, in which case we would auto-check him out to the card on file, and then the following Monday his secretary would call to have his bill faxed. After a year or two I started to recognize him and decided to treat him as I felt he should be treated: preferentially. Guys like that use the same business CC every week, and so, if there was a line at the desk and he was at the back of it, I would pull up his reservation, telling the family in front of me to give me a moment, explaining I was trying to find them the best possible suite (LIE), which bought me enough time to copy and paste Hockstein's CC info, check him into a nice room, and burn the keys.

"Excuse me one moment, Mr. Whateverthef.u.c.k, let me just confer with the bellman about the room I have for you and your family. Let me make certain it's the biggest room possible." Mr. Whateverthef.u.c.k was impressed, even though I was doing exactly zero work for him, but not as impressed as I figure Hockstein's going to be when I slide up to him at the end of the long check-in line and slip him his keys.

"I just ran your card from last week, sir. You're too loyal to wait in line with all these tourists. Enjoy your stay."

Did I get a smile? No. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the keys, grabbed the stapled-closed shopping bag at his feet, turned his back to me, and headed to the elevator. What was that about? That's the kind of service you read read about. That would make some old ladies have a huge, wet service-gasm. But he, apparently, couldn't give a s.h.i.+t. about. That would make some old ladies have a huge, wet service-gasm. But he, apparently, couldn't give a s.h.i.+t.

"I was correct, Mr. Whateverthef.u.c.k! Your family is going to love this room." I screamed across the lobby to Ben, who was scratching at a new Yankees tattoo he got on his wrist. "Ben, thank you for the invaluable advice!" Ben looked up, completely unaware of what the h.e.l.l I was on about. "Mr. Whateverthef.u.c.k, Ben is the bellman who told me about your suite here! Give him a wave, Whateverthef.u.c.k family!" The whole family turned and waved. Once they were focused back on the desk, Ben gave me the finger, but he couldn't help but laugh. Plus, he's up for the front, and though I have done exactly NOTHING for Mr. Whateverthef.u.c.k, he already feels grateful to Ben, which should translate to an increase in tip.

But what about Hockstein? Ice-cold! I decided at that moment I was going to continue to give him super service, start upgrading him, pre-reg him every time, and keep his keys in my suit coat pocket so that when I saw him spurt through the lobby door, I could pa.s.s the keys off like some clairvoyant key-genie. Who wouldn't like that? He didn't seem to want to make any connection with people, so you'd think he'd appreciate how I'd whisk him through the lobby faster than a j.a.panese businessman late for a meeting.

Soon enough, regarding his att.i.tude, I found out the why-for. The next Thursday, Terrell, the Bell's laundry guy, came into the lobby to pick up some dry cleaning and leaned over my desk with a wide smile.

"What up, pimpin'? How you live? Dig this, Tommy, guest in 3215 left a bag in the room, right? Shopping bag was the only thing in there, and when the housekeeper threw it in the trash, guess what was in there? s.e.x toys. d.i.l.d.os d.i.l.d.os, dog. Even one of them blow-up dolls! Whoo! Whoo! You white people crazy! Nothing but supa freaks in this building." You white people crazy! Nothing but supa freaks in this building."

Before he was halfway through his story, I was already pulling up room 3215.

Oh, dear. Hockstein, Hockstein, Hockstein. c.o.c.k c.o.c.kstein. See: it had already begun.

"Yo, Terrell, I know know that dude. He never talks to anyone. Next time I see him...d.a.m.n." that dude. He never talks to anyone. Next time I see him...d.a.m.n."

Then, like hotel magic, Hockstein shoved through the revolving door, not using the push bar, just putting his hand flat on the gla.s.s, which annoys me because now my boy Tanglet has to clean it again. Plus, there's no telling what's on that man's hand. (See? It's begun, and now it's getting worse.) He kept his face pointed down at the floor, tearing toward the elevator.

"Oh no," I said.

"What up?"

"There he goes now."

"d.i.l.d.o man? He going back to his room? Oh no Oh no. h.e.l.l with this. I am out of here. I gotta go iron me a s.h.i.+rt or something."

Five minutes later Hockstein was at the back of the line, his face on fire, veins pulsing, hands clenching, lips mashed so tight he looked like a fish in the wind.

"What can I do for you, sir?" I instinctively knew it was not a good time to use his name.

"WHERE ARE MY PERSONAL ITEMS? WHY HAVE THEY BEEN REMOVED FROM MY ROOM?" he said in a psychotic explosion. I thought his head was going to blast off. he said in a psychotic explosion. I thought his head was going to blast off.

"Sorry, sir?"

"I LEFT A SHOPPING BAG IN MY ROOM, JUST ONE BAG, AND SOMEONE HAS BEEN IN MY ROOM AND REMOVED AND SOMEONE HAS BEEN IN MY ROOM AND REMOVED MY BAG. I DO NOT CHECK OUT UNTIL TOMORROW." MY BAG. I DO NOT CHECK OUT UNTIL TOMORROW."

This was a perfect opportunity for him to throw some four-letter words at me. Somehow, it was even more terrifying that he didn't. This guy was going to lose it, big-time. I could hear his teeth grinding.

"Well, sir, perhaps if there was just one shopping bag in the room, the housekeeper a.s.sumed you had departed and was attempting to save you from accruing tonight's unneeded room and tax."

"I stay every week until Friday, and I keep my suits at my office. Where," he hissed, and I thought I heard a tooth snap, he hissed, and I thought I heard a tooth snap, "are the items I left in my room?" "are the items I left in my room?"

"Most likely they tossed the shopping bag directly in the trash, sir."

Looking me right in the eyes, he was starting to calm down now. He began taking deep breaths, rea.s.suring himself that perhaps they had not looked in the bag and, even if they did, no one would connect the contents to him, at least visually. Meanwhile, the story was already public domain. Across the lobby, I could see Dante telling it to Trey. Dante bent over one of those hard-sh.e.l.l Euro suitcases in profile, and Trey began to mime a hotel umbrella in and out of Dante's a.s.s.

Jesus Christ. I never broke into laughter anymore, though. Now I was a pro: all day long I could laugh on the inside, even if guests were SCREAMING at me, showing their a.s.s, and saying ludicrously funny s.h.i.+t, I could hold it all in. I was always always laughing on the inside these days. (When I wasn't crying in long-term storage, I guess.) laughing on the inside these days. (When I wasn't crying in long-term storage, I guess.) Dante walked back behind the desk, sort of saddle-walking as if he had a.s.s trauma.

"I apologize again, sir," I said loud enough for Dante to hear. Then I really took it to the next level of brilliance. I picked up a notepad and poised my pen for action: "If you'll provide me with a detailed list of the bag's contents, sir, we will replace the items within the hour." This was some cla.s.sic s.h.i.+t.

Hockstein was now eyeing Dante, aware the conversation had gained a new member. "No, fine. Don't do anything. Just put a note to never check me out early ever again. Perhaps I'll find a new hotel Perhaps I'll find a new hotel," he said and walked off.

He never did. He continued to stay at the Bellevue. And no one ever made him feel uncomfortable again. We never thought less of him. But that's the point about hotels. Everyone knows everything. He a.s.sumed we never found out, and meanwhile people started calling him c.o.c.kstein or a.n.a.l-Block-Stein, which everyone generally thought was funnier (you win, Jay). Later that day Terrell returned to the desk to inform us that the blow-up doll had been sanitized, dressed in a housekeeper's uniform, and was now located in the tenth-floor storage closet, available for viewing. Or use.

So, still holding the napkin pillow in my hand, I knew I wasn't the first person to hear about a private equity firm buying the Bellevue, and best believe, within five minutes everyone knew. We just didn't know what any of it meant for us.

Three weeks later we began to grasp the full extent of the change this would bring.

Just for Men looked heartbroken. Reed would walk into the lobby, nowhere near the same energy, nowhere near as drunk as he should have been. It was as if he were too sad to be an alcoholic anymore. I could have hugged the guy.

They shut down the lobby on a Monday afternoon. Now, normally, if a hotel goes through renovations, it's done a few floors at a time. Perhaps the hotel shuts down 20 to 22 for remodeling, along with 19 and 23 for a sound buffer. Impossible in this case because the private equity firm was planning a full-scale gutting: with the exception of the name, everything was to be ripped up and thrown out on the street (some said perhaps the employees as well). A normal move might have been to put us all on unemployment, board up the doors, renovate, and reopen as fast as possible. Not this company. These motherf.u.c.kers (excuse me, these a.s.shole motherf.u.c.kers) were about one thing: the bottom line. That was it for them. This company was a machine that ran on money and did not consider the people affected as human, be they employees or or, and here's when it gets absurd, even the guests.

They shut down the restaurant. They shut down the bar. They shut down room service. They shut down internal laundry service. They shut down the G.o.dd.a.m.n lobby.

What is a hotel without the above really? Just the room. Which is why you'd think they'd have closed the doors, but they had a better idea for the bottom line.

Eventually, I figured it out. They knew one fact: once the doors reopened, the rate was going to double. What once cost $299 was now going to cost $599. Planning on such a dramatic rate hike, they a.s.sumed, correctly, it would come with a new clientele. All those businessmen and family travelers who'd been supporting the Bell for twenty years would find themselves priced out and searching for another property in their fiscal range. When calling for a reservation in the future and handed a double rate, they would say, "Excuse me? But I always pay half that. That rate is higher than my company allows for business travel. I simply cannot stay at the Bellevue for that rate. Can you help me?"

No.

Fine. That's fair enough. The world moves on, hotels renovate, rates skyrocket, and people change properties. However, prior to relaunching the hotel, when the staff was crippled with layoffs and you couldn't even order fries in the building, the private equity firm, working on the knowledge that soon enough the clientele would change, did not feel it was necessary to inform guests making reservations what state the hotel would be in.

"Yes, we have your usual rate available, sir. See you next week."

The guests pushed through the revolving door into a construction hallway, plywood ceiling and everything, like a fun-house tunnel through the lobby, the surrounding sound of hacksaws and drilling adding to the fun-house vibe. Then they took the elevators to the second-floor meeting s.p.a.ces, and there in the back was our makes.h.i.+ft front desk, a tiny desk in the middle of nowhere. No couches, no music, no art, nothing. A conference room with a lone desk agent staring out the window onto Ninth Avenue. It was sad as h.e.l.l. And it got worse from there.

"This is the lobby?"

"Yes, sir."

"So you have no lobby."

"No, sir."

"No restaurant or bar?"

"No, sir."

"I a.s.sume the fitness center is still open."

"Oh...yeah. No, sir."

Now the guests would start to take it personally. "Why was I not informed of this? Why is my rate still the same? Nothing was mentioned when I booked my reservation. Who is going to answer for this? I would like to make management aware that I will never stay here again in my life."

Oh, they were aware. That was the point. They a.s.sumed the guests would be priced out anyway, so why not suck out that very last room and tax from them. Then they can feel free to, you know, f.u.c.k off f.u.c.k off.

It was not easy to man the desk during that time. I had grown familiar and friendly with many of the repeat guests, and it hurt me to see them screwed over, hustled, and treated so poorly. It wasn't fair. And then it got unfairer.

At 6:00 a.m.

When the G.o.dd.a.m.n drilling started.

It sounded like Beirut.

In truth, conversely, I dealt with fewer complaints. This was due solely to the fact that our guests didn't pa.s.s by the front desk when exiting the building, just straight from the elevators into the fun-house tunnel. I would estimate that 90 percent of all complaints are "Oh, well, I might as well b.i.t.c.h in person" decisions made while pa.s.sing the front desk. You can see them throw a look at the desk, and then their walk will sort of run out of batteries before they whip a 180, put a finger in the air, and say, "You know, I wasn't going to mention it, but..."

We stood in our conference room lobby, free from what are commonly called lobby lizards, guests who seem to spend all day sitting in the lobby, ostensibly waiting for someone who never shows, just rattling a newspaper, listening to our private discussions, and occasionally talking a bellman's ear off about some New York topic they actually know nothing about.

"It's the most famous pizza place in Brooklyn, called Grimomo's. It's, if I remember, on Madison and Thirty-First Street. Oh, I know Brooklyn."

Now, since we were in a converted conference room, we had a huge wall of a window overlooking the street, and I would spend whole hours staring down into the pa.s.sing madness. I started to notice the same homeless man, sporting the cla.s.sic fat-dirty-Jesus look, dragging a black trash bag westward around noon and back east after 2:00 p.m. Across the street was a parking garage, and an old Hispanic man inched his feet out into traffic every day for hours on end and waved an orange flag at approaching vehicles, trying to shoo them into spending twenty dollars an hour for parking. At the end of a long day you could see his lack of enthusiasm translated directly into his flag waving, no longer whipping it around, just sort of lifting it up and down. Watching that used to really give me the sadness for some reason.

So I continued to forge ahead on my Office Supply Art projects and even developed a bowling game, using upended matchbooks for bowling pins and arranging them at the end of the window's long marble sill. If you took a room key card and polished it enough on your suit coat, it would do that wonderful air hockey type of float, with zero resistance over the marble. So a polished key card was the bowling ball, and we took turns sliding it down the long sill, hopefully straight enough so it would slice right into the arranged matchbooks, causing screams of joy. Match bowling became popular with the bellmen, and of course they started to put money on the games.

Bellmen certainly had time to kill. They had time to murder slowly, in fact. What with the extremely limited number of rooms available for occupancy, arrivals on any given day could be fewer than fifty. And forty of those would refuse help. And five of the remaining ten would refuse to tip just based on being misinformed about the hotel's current condition.

But every day the bellmen were told to stop looking at their empty wallets and start looking toward the future. Soon the hotel would reopen, rates would skyrocket, and the clientele would be the type who couldn't distinguish a twenty from a hundred: they didn't need to.

Months later new management brought all the employees back down to the first floor and unveiled the lobby. Cool trance music seeped from recessed speakers, and we all ate cold cuts, drank nonalcoholic punch, and looked around at our new home.

Jay, who'd been at the property since it opened, who helped "lay the f.u.c.kin' bricks," as he put it, wandered up slow-sipping his punch as if he poured a little something manlier in it. He picked up a cold cut and then threw it back on the pile.

"Well, boys, it looks like they took a ten-million-dollar s.h.i.+t in our lobby."

It was all dark marble with red lounge lighting, slick and s.e.xy but almost claustrophobic. A single painting, a huge abstract monster of an image, provided the only focal point in the lobby, and though it looked like a ma.s.s of soft golden clouds, the first thing I saw was an image of a death skull in the dead center. A gold skull of death and it reminded me of money. Private equity money that cares for no one and operates on its own, for its own sake. Not money that one spends on groceries or tickets to Disneyland but Satanic Money that is never spent and just collects and collects like a yellow cloud of poison until it forms a super-scary skull and starts burning out people's eyes and starving children.

The next day the firings began. The next day the children began to starve.

The new GM arrived. Barry Tremblay came from the bowels of nowhere. Well, he must have sp.a.w.ned from some origin, but he was just an overweight, money-loving private equity puppet. Apparently, he had some experience in food and beverage, but that was it. We were all expecting someone slick, a smooth operator all lounge lighting and leather just like the lobby. Tremblay looked like the fat kid from middle school who spent years getting spit on and has now attained a position of power for no other reason than to put him in a situation where he can now do the spitting. He walked with his legs in front, his back curved and hanging behind as if he were being pulled forward by the knees. His suits were expensive, but I suppose there was no way to cut anything to look sharp on an eggplant. When he spoke, it sounded as if his tongue were too swollen for his mouth, the words wet like a flopping fish.

First thing he said, apparently, was: "Fire everyone we can."

That little yellow union card, signed reluctantly next to a urinal, saved my job. All non-union positions were cleaned out immediately. The first Friday following the lobby opening, once we all moved back to the first floor, Tremblay called the entire security staff into a meeting room at 3:00 p.m. The security staff all a.s.sumed it was a meet and greet, perhaps the GM was going to introduce himself personally and make it clear how important their positions were in the property.

He fired them all, told them to get the f.u.c.k out, and handed them a check for two weeks' pay. Thank you for your twenty years of service. Here is half of next month's rent. Find a new life.

Many of them cried. Leonard, who'd shown me the tape of Julio all those years ago, had just put a down payment on a house in the Poconos. He cried. Rafael, always strong and full of pride, walked up to the new GM, shook his hand, and said, "f.u.c.k your mother, you sad piece of s.h.i.+t," then escorted himself out of the building. They all followed, and there outside, since due to fire codes a property can never be without a security department, stood their replacements, lined up along the perimeter of the building: a security company consisting of untrained eighteen-year-olds willing to do the job for eight dollars less an hour. I guess no one was tearing tickets at the Forty-Second Street movie theaters anymore; they were now loitering in our lobby, wearing oversized suits, praying for a fire-free, bomb-free life at the Bellevue.

Service-wise this made no sense. Rafael could tell you the best restaurants in a twenty-block radius, including information about each head chef, as well as interesting facts about the history of midtown. Leonard could tell the best way to get to Yankee Stadium and what view you'd have just by looking at your ticket. All that knowledge and professional service walked right out the door and was replaced by a rotating clan of frighteningly ignorant kids, a staff who'd answer any guest question with the useless and unsatisfying reply of "Wha? Oh, huh? Nah, I don't know."

No one saw any sense in this. The new managers had severed us from our security friends before we could even say good-bye, twenty years of friends.h.i.+p instantly washed away into Manhattan, and beyond saving money, it didn't make business sense. In the hotel game if you up the rate, you up the service. A restaurant doesn't spend thousands of dollars buying new crystal wine aerators and then fill them with grape soda. You don't build a beautiful concert hall and then fill it with stools from Walmart.

It was clear that even if they couldn't fire us, they wanted us gone. Especially the front desk. There was palpable disgust in Tremblay's black eyes. An immediate dislike for every single one of us. So we s.h.i.+ned that light directly back in his face.

You ever met someone who makes rude jokes about your personal life the first time you meet him? You ever met a person who demands respect instead of trying to earn it?

Nothing was the same after that. It was the union versus the new management. It was a war full of hate. The new managers installed security cameras everywhere, started counting our hotel-issued banks every week. They randomly searched our lockers.

Since the only way to remove a union department was to buy out the entire staff, which involved huge severance packages based on years of service, our new management's main directive became discipline at any cost, for anything, build up records on all the workers and pin them against the wall. Make them unhappy and they will leave. They sure as h.e.l.l had that wrong.

But something else changed too: our clientele. The renovated rooms had flat screens everywhere, iPod docks, double showers, plush couches, and twice the s.p.a.ce of an average Manhattan hotel. CEOs started walking in. Celebrities started booking the penthouse. Paparazzi began to loiter outside the lobby. We often had to sign release forms because reality TV shows were blowing by the front desk, and we'd all be on next season's premiere of Who Wants To Be the Next Whatever the f.u.c.k Who Wants To Be the Next Whatever the f.u.c.k.

Behind this external success, though, morale was shattered. Managers followed you to the bathroom and stood outside in the hallway like prison guards. They timed all your breaks to the second and began taking the guests' word over the employees', breaking an unspoken commandment of the hotel business. The rule (an ancient and holy one) is this: It is us us versus versus them them. The hotel hotel versus the versus the guests guests. Not to say that providing service isn't the main focus, but a hotel is a business, and businesses must be protected. Some of these guests are here to break, devour, lie, steal, and get over in every way, and we we are here to battle back against the ma.s.ses, politely insinuate, refuse to reduce the rate, and deny all the bulls.h.i.+t lies some of these guests push over the desk at us. Managers know this. It is their job to back us up, apologize, hand over a business card, and get the lying ma.s.ses out of the lobby. This no longer happened at the Bellevue. These managers crossed over to the other side of the desk, stood behind the guests, and ma.s.saged their shoulders while they screamed at us, whispering apologies regarding the terrible staff. are here to battle back against the ma.s.ses, politely insinuate, refuse to reduce the rate, and deny all the bulls.h.i.+t lies some of these guests push over the desk at us. Managers know this. It is their job to back us up, apologize, hand over a business card, and get the lying ma.s.ses out of the lobby. This no longer happened at the Bellevue. These managers crossed over to the other side of the desk, stood behind the guests, and ma.s.saged their shoulders while they screamed at us, whispering apologies regarding the terrible staff.

As far as the renovations, everything was a facade. The rooms were built cheaply; mirrors fell and shattered on the thin carpeting, shower handles detached themselves from the bathroom tile and smashed on guests' feet. The couches were beautiful but as stiff as a park bench. Our new uniforms frayed after a month, and we sewed them up ourselves.

No more Christmas parties, no more Employee of the Month. We were all lucky to have jobs, and if we didn't like it, we could clear the f.u.c.k out, and they would be more than happy to replace us with cheaper labor.

Dark days were upon us. Basically, all pride in our property was gone. They'd taken our hotel right out from under us. The job became solely about the paycheck, and when that happens, service is the first sacrifice.

G.o.d bless the New York Hotel Workers' Union. AFL-CIO, b.i.t.c.h b.i.t.c.h.

We dug in, because, well...why should they win?

And that is how I got my doctorate in hustling.

The Bellevue Hotel became like Rikers Island, and since no one was getting longer walks in the yard for good behavior, we figured we might as well make booze in the toilet.

There was zero reason to go "above and beyond," that sparkling ideal of customer service. Above and beyond? Never again. Management wrote me up the first week. (Definition of the term "write-up": Noun as in "I'm not signing that d.a.m.n write-up"; or verb as in "You're going to write me up for that that?" For example, to get "written up": to receive official doc.u.mentation effectively increasing a first verbal to a first written, from a first written to a second written, from a second written to a final written, from a final written to suspension pending termination. Then termination. Game over to receive official doc.u.mentation effectively increasing a first verbal to a first written, from a first written to a second written, from a second written to a final written, from a final written to suspension pending termination. Then termination. Game over.) The first write-up new management laid on me was because I took an extra ten minutes on my break, a ten minutes I actually spent talking to a guest who cornered me by the elevators (as guests do) while I was on my way to the employee cafeteria, complaining that she couldn't operate the iDock in the room. Someone had set an alarm for 5:00 a.m., and it went off every single morning. (How many guests prior to her had silently suffered through that? I wondered. Heroes.) I took the elevator with her to 47, navigated around her Fifth Avenue shopping bags, and after she, "on second thought," removed the diamond bracelet on the night table just in case it was "in my way," I proceeded to figure out how to operate the dock and turn off the alarm. We hadn't even been trained on the new technology. The new owners had installed touch phones as well, and we would receive calls because guests couldn't figure out how to dim the background light at night. No one at the desk had even seen seen the phone to begin with. So we said crazy s.h.i.+t like, "Is there maybe a b.u.t.ton for brightness? Maybe it has a symbol of a sun on it? What happens when you press options? What does it say?" Oh YEAH! Excellent service! If you took a bit of time to enter a vacant suite and familiarize yourself with the phone, it needed to be done on your own break. I took an extra ten minutes on my break to help a guest, and my new front office manager, hired by the private equity firm, had no interest in hearing my "elaborate excuse." How kind of him. I even fought back and requested he review the security tapes, have him follow my progress from the lobby to room 4715 with a guest in tow. the phone to begin with. So we said crazy s.h.i.+t like, "Is there maybe a b.u.t.ton for brightness? Maybe it has a symbol of a sun on it? What happens when you press options? What does it say?" Oh YEAH! Excellent service! If you took a bit of time to enter a vacant suite and familiarize yourself with the phone, it needed to be done on your own break. I took an extra ten minutes on my break to help a guest, and my new front office manager, hired by the private equity firm, had no interest in hearing my "elaborate excuse." How kind of him. I even fought back and requested he review the security tapes, have him follow my progress from the lobby to room 4715 with a guest in tow.

"Not going to happen, Tom. Those tapes are not for your personal use. Sign here please."

I refused to sign. That was my right as a union member: a refusal to sign. The union mantra was don't sign anything but your paycheck, but it didn't matter either way. It was still going in my file, which was swelling up like a sponge, soaking up every little wrong step I took. Management filed it under work performance. To fire a union member, managers had to stack write-ups on a series of topics, and if you accrued enough in one category (is this sounding like a sick game show?), they could effectively terminate your employment. So they started calling everything "work performance." Before, if my bank was three dollars short, it would have been overlooked in the form of the auditor "going to go get a quick sip of water" before he or she counted it again, giving me enough time to settle out of pocket. If the discrepancy was too large and the auditor simply had to file a report, it would go under banking procedures, since there were a million ways to screw up your bank with over a hundred transactions a day. Not anymore. It was all "work performance," and everyone was getting buried under write-ups.

Keeping your bank tight is no easy process. You've got Germans signing over $1,000 in $25 traveler's checks, cash payouts for in-room services such as doctor visits and professional makeup sessions that last twenty minutes and cost $250, cash coming in for movies and minibar, return deposits, and maybe some criminal pays his $4,000 bill in cash. (Did you know if anyone pays more than $10,000 in cash, it must be reported to the U.S. government? I know that.) Also, you can pay your bill in euros. Or you can pay your bill in yen, in which case your total comes to 5 billion yen. So there is money coming in and money going out, and then everybody wants to break a d.a.m.n $20. (There is a term that never caught on, and I want it to catch on now: "a flat." That's a super-easy way to request a ten, a five, and five ones. Give me a flat. If we can start implementing this, we will save so much breath it might positively affect climate change.) Things started to get very dirty, very quickly. Our new clientele seemed to be in on the whole hustle. They knew a twenty at the desk could get them hundreds of dollars in upgrades and comps.

It was a guest who first showed me how easy it could be for both of us. A well-traveled businessman in an olive-green suit, without a word, handed over his platinum AmEx card to begin the check-in process. Veteran hotel guests know it's faster for both of us if I get the card right up front and simply pull the last name off the CC instead of mishearing and misspelling our whole day away.

But when the businessman in the olive-green suit handed me his card without a word, there was something wrapped around it, something covering up his name: a fifty-dollar bill. There was no mistaking this bill was for me. Some guests will put a twenty on the desk, but that could mean they were after some change. A bill around a credit card meant he was after an upgrade.

Oh, G.o.d, does this work. Let's talk about ways to get upgraded. People will do do almost anything and almost anything and say say almost anything to get an upgrade. But words rarely work. In a hotel, money talks and bulls.h.i.+t gets walked (to Hotel B). almost anything to get an upgrade. But words rarely work. In a hotel, money talks and bulls.h.i.+t gets walked (to Hotel B).