Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

I got lucky.

I typed up a quick résumé but instead of mailing it like the ad required, because I was broke, I decided to take it over in person. I had nothing to lose.

That Monday morning at eight-thirty I wore a tie and boarded the cross-town bus from Fiftieth Street on the West Side. My head was clear and I’d been on beer only for the previous two days.

Half an hour later, getting off at Second Avenue, I walked south until I found the street number of the office building mentioned in the ad. Then I took the elevator to the eleventh floor.

On the door to Suite #1121 were written the words ‘Arena Corporation.’ Beneath that was Jeffrey M. Mistofsky’s name. I showed Mistofsky’s receptionist the ad and was told to wait. I assumed that he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not he wanted to talk to any unscheduled, spontaneous applicants. Half an hour later he buzzed and the receptionist walked me in.

Jeffrey M. was not a hotel man. I knew almost as much as him. He was a real estate speculator who’d picked up the property by default in a foreclosure. He had a guy named Shi (short for Chicago) who’d managed other hotels running the place for him. When Jeffrey M. read my résumé and saw that I’d listed ‘Playwright’ as a hobby, he stopped. He’d been reading up in trade magazines about increasing hotel bookings through marketing and networking to travel agencies and he’d been trying to find a Night Manager but he was also looking for someone who was good at writing letters and could do marketing too. My mouth mentioned some ass-kissing crap lie about always having an interest in marketing. My next lie was that I was also good at typing.

Jeffrey M. appeared interested. He shook my hand and sent me over to the hotel to meet Shi, the General Manager.

I walked to save the carfare.

The hotel had a big lion-faced knocker on the door and thick, dark ivy creeping up the block-brick façade. Shi let me in after I buzzed. While I was introducing myself, he slid the metal cage grating on the front desk closed, fastened a lock on it, and sat with me in the lobby on an old flower-patterned couch near the vending machines. We drank the hotel’s free guest coffee out of foam cups and had an interview.

Shi was hip and cool and well-mannered. He never talked above a whisper. He was a light-skinned Afro-American with straight, processed hair. After important sentences, Shi would pause, nod his head up and down, then smile. I assumed this affectation was the kind of shit that they teach in hotel college somewhere.

Our interview went good. The Night Manager requirements were simple, Shi said; be on duty at the front desk five hours a day, from four to nine, then ‘on call’ the rest of the night. After the desk closed the Night Manager was essentially off but was required to stay in the building for emergencies and to answer the phone. The Manager’s apartment was downstairs. The Manager could go to sleep or read or watch TV, but he had to be around in case the phone rang or to check in the occasional shack-up couple or accommodate late stragglers arriving from the airports. Shi’s shift came on at 8 a.m. which is when the Night Manager’s shift officially ended.

He got up and I followed him to the entrance door to the Night Manager’s quarters. It was next to the lobby entrance behind the front desk.

Shi flipped on an uncovered bulb and we descended the half-dozen steps to the basement apartment.

The place was clean and looked okay. Two good-sized furnished rooms with a crapper. The crapper had new plumbing fixtures and a yellowing plastic shower curtain depicting frolicking mermaids in some form of dyke embrace. He said that a color TV, a front desk phone extension for local calls only, and gas and electricity were all free and came with the apartment.

The only natural light in the place came from four narrow, opaque, chicken-wired windows located high up on one wall.

The kitchen had a stove and refrigerator and a heavy old dinette table with chairs.

We sat down in the kitchen and Shi talked some more, always remembering to nod and smile at the end of each barely audible sentence.

He himself did not live at the hotel. He lived in an apartment in the Bronx with his wife and kid. Shi’s main complaint about being the General Manager/Day Manager for Jeffrey M. at the hotel was the turnover in the job I was interviewing for. He had fired the last night guy three days before, a person named Bill. A sixty-year-old retired post office clerk on a 3/4 pension. Bill had seemed responsible. Well-spoken. A non-drug-user. He’d looked okay too. The hidden deal about Bill was that he was divorced from a crazy twat who, when she located him at his new gig, began arriving in the middle of the night, banging on the front door with the hotel’s heavy lion iron knocker and screaming deranged shit about Bill for the world to hear. Shi had been forced to give the guy the bag because of his ‘X.’ Shi went on to say that he had stayed late for two weeks of evening shifts to train Bill and firing him had been Mistofsky’s idea, not his.

The man before the last guy had lasted only two months. His name was Isaac. Isaac was okay too, Shi said, except Mistofsky began noticing that receipts were down on the night shift. One night, worried that Isaac was running a game, stealing, Jeffrey M. sent a ringer in as bait. A fake guest. The ringer watched Isaac slip the cash into his pants’ pocket instead of the receipt drawer. Next morning, ba-boom, Isaac is history.

Shi paused for effect, looked me up and down, then bent across the table. ‘I’ll be direct,’ he said, always remembering to whisper. ‘I want to fill this position. I’m looking for the right man. Are you that man?’

I felt the question was stupid so I didn’t answer.

Shi took out an expensive-looking gold pen from the inside pocket of his suit coat, then pushed it and a piece of paper across the table to me. He told me to give myself a grade from one to ten as an employee on my hospitality industry job in California. Then, he said, he wanted me to write that grade down on the paper and pass it back to him. Another jelly-dick management maneuver acquired at hotel college.

I looked Shi in the eye, nodded up and down for effect the way he did, then gave him a big grin, the biggest grin my face would make. ‘I’m a goddam ten,’ I said. Then I wrote the number ten down on his paper in big numerals, circling it a few times in a flurry, then pushing it back. ‘I’m your guy, sir! Hands down! I’m ready to begin work immediately! Today, if you want me to.’

I was pretty sure that I had the gig. That afternoon in a pre-celebration mood, on the way back to my room, I purchased a jug of Mad Dog and nipped at it from the bag while riding back cross-town on the Forty-ninth Street bus.

My first day of on-the-job training began the next afternoon at shift-change time. Four p.m.

I was at the desk with my new boss. We’d been going over the check-in and housekeeping forms when a good-looking woman walked up the front steps to the hotel entrance. She was pulling a yellow dog which Shi informed me was a pedigreed Lhasa Apso dog.

The woman began searching in her handbag. Seeing this, Shi abruptly stopped what we were doing, left the desk and ran around to open the entrance door for the woman.

Her name was Tonya and her dog was named Bobo.

Tonya was in her late thirties. Tall, with long legs and flowing red hair. Fifteen or twenty pounds too heavy but very classy; wearing a sexy, outstanding, green dress.

For the first time Shi’s fake composure disappeared. He introduced us, beaming like he’d just won the lotto, talking in a real voice instead of his regular dufus management whisper: ‘Tonya,’ he said, ‘this is Bruno, our new Night Manager. Bruno this is Miss Von Hachten. She’s a resident of number three-sixteen.’