Hotel Story, Chapter Part One

You won’t believe the things you see as a hotel concierge. Granted, you probably see the same amount of crazy stuff, or even more if you have a job like being a taxi driver or a motel owner or diner waitress or 24 hour convenience store clerk. Any job where you have to see a lot of different people means you’re going to get exposed to the wacky and weird side of humanity. The creepy side too. I once had to greet a delegation of vampires at three in the morning. No joke. They arrived all in black, and pale and kept sniffing me and looking pointedly at my neck. Apparently they were there for a convention. I didn’t see them before sunset once, and they left at three am too. The kitchen staff tells me all the ordered was champagne and raw meat. To my credit, they kept coming tour hotel every time the convention was located here. Of course, to truly be exposed to the full spectrum of the incredible condition it is to be human you have to live-in a big city. The kind that gets tons of people moving through it on a daily basis. I’ve been at this business for fifteen years, and I feel I’ve become a connoisseur of sorts. A connoisseur of the magical thing it is to be human, Homo sapiens, to be us. The best place to really see people is the graveyard shift. Sure the day shift is good too, man I’ve seen things there, things like wedding proposals, an orangutan escape his cage and be chased by the magician employing it, heart attacks, breakups, makeups, I even helped a woman deliver her baby on the lobby floor. The baby, a boy called Paul Gilbert Ollivander, was born healthy and strong. He’s fifteen now by my count. His dad was so grateful he sent me an ice sculpture of my face. Life sized. Mine’s a weird town folks. The day shift is nice, but it’s too…normal. After years of that I really wanted to see the dark, grimy, hidden side of society. So I took the graveyard shift. A boy did find what I was looking for and more. I’ve seen strange. A transsexual prostitute who asked a fellow concierge for some lip gloss before heading out on the town searching for her next trick. Suburban housewives having a night on the town with the husband, getting stone drunk and telling me their life stories. An off duty cop smoking weed in the hotel lobby with college kids half his age. They were promptly joined by a young couple in their midtwenties and a seventy year old lounge singer. He worked for the hotel though his act had been over for awhile. He’d been at the bar, drinking, when he smelled the tell tale scent of weed. Chaz, a twenty seven year old valet with dreadlocks and a nose ring confided me that he had been their dealer. I’ve seen rich hotel heiresses, all tipsy and wobbly from a night of partying hit on a Catholic priest (also attending a convention) because they believed he was Robert Redford. Funny part is, he really did look like Robert Redford. His friends even called him Bobby. Another celebrity look-a-like story, which is particularly memorable, is this. It was a hot, November night, slow, and boring. The only people that night in the lobby were me, Mindy (another concierge), a young college girl crying into her drink in one of the armchairs near the door, and Chaz, the drug dealing valet. Weird? Hardly. Welcome to my world. So anyway, there we are, sweating, staring, a quiet all over the place. It was 2:45 am. The outside, coming out of nowhere, is this blue, 1950s Cadillac, a beautiful machine, rolling smooth, engine purring. It pulls in front of the hotel, like a dream. A guy steps out. The guy, all smooth, dressed all in black, guitar strap slung over one shoulder, cutting across his abdomen. Mr. Cool. Looked just like Johnny Cash, and if I’m lying, I’m dying. So anyway, the guy walks in, with that effortless way you always wanted, all of him the guy you always wanted to be, like he owned the room. He was smoking, I remember. So he walks in, stands in the middle of the lobby and pulls of his sunglasses. All of it was something worthy of a Tarantino movie, and it was about to get better. He walks over to the girl, the one sitting forlornly in the armchair in the corner, and tucked his hand under her chin and pulled it up. “Why you crying baby? Pretty girl like you got nothing to cry about.” She stared up at him for a moment, kind of shocked and embarrassed, her big blue eyes framed by black lashes all clumped together by tears. She let her head drop gain and mumbled “My boyfriend.” Mystery guy looked at my as if to say can you believe that, or typical, or puh-lease, or told you so. Something like that. It was weird, the sudden jolt of camaraderie. Little did I know what was coming. Weird didn't even begin to cover it. Our lives were about to change because of a smooth talking stranger in a 1950s caddy.