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September 09, 2005

The Night Clerk - Chapter 1

Look on the Hotel's website, on the FAQ pages halfway between Lost and Found and the ID Card program, two rows of arial black, "evening" misspelled and responsible for the so-called "dining facility features", which ain't true. A copy from Delhi on big students discount did it. I'm here by chance and to pay for Health Insurance and food and housing.
It is a simple job.

On this job you normally have these responsibilities:

· Monitor the front desk of the hotel. (Hours 22:00 p.m. to 8 a.m.)
· Monitor hotel hall entrance security.
· Enforce hotel policies.
· Report incidents or concerns to Hotel Manager.
· Maintain neat appearance of lobby area.
· Report maintenance problems.
· Respond promptly to emergencies and phone calls.

but in some areas may also need to pass these qualifications:

· High School graduate or GED
· General clerical skills
· Good communications skills
· Computer knowledge
· Pass a background check

Between me and you, enough.
The place is the Ambrosia, a respectable second-rate on West Side street in Manhattan.

In the late hours when all returners have returned I like to dream. I have a good memory for dreams. And I dream of going back and forth and around thru these alleys and corridors where clients have established themselves with their habits and friends and furniture in their self-contained nanoverses barely sharing room-service hours, a list of credit cards, a pair of elevators and a brand of linens. I know all these guys as much as I know myself. Others I don’t know. Some live in the hotel, one is my girlfriend, another is a hooker that is now in catering services and wakes me up with a loud ringtone, another sells real estates around here and believes mustaches are a mandatory sales tool.

In these dreams I always wake up in a suite over a cliff on the ocean and go out roaming by myself in the crashing waves passing from a night blue to a pale cyan of clouds and shoes shine.

I love to entertain myself on a nightshift.

I know everybody who has a job says they hate their job, so let me put that in context. I work three nights a week for ten hours a night, I commute as many as five hours a day and make 450. Before that I was starving, broke and bleary-eyed but happy. That’s right, happy. Before you start thinking that this is a bitchy, that I’m going to start filling with complaints about customers or my boss and leave you wondering let me explain to you that I know what I’m doing and had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into when I moved here and when I took this job. The fact is, I didn’t have a choice. After failing out of a private college and then a public state university, I had to go to a community college. And my community college is one of the best in the country. Now I feel like I’m in the unusual position of being an articulate loser, uniquely capable of describing the colorful and seedy scenery that surrounds me inside and outside of the light-filled bubble that I inhabit ten hours a night.

I have no specific agenda, I’m not smart enough for that. Retrospectively, a lovely advantage.

Holding a pencil with two fingers and embracing a view from the dwarf-magnolia tree to the entry curtains, I can feel both the life and waves between my fingers bordering to abyss and the dying quakes of cars going by.

My girlfriend is not my girlfriend. She lives in 404 and does not drive. She is thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A rather small woman but resolute bearing, she came down in the July, and in the September expected her third baby. She loves to say she works as a manager for Burger King. Can not see anything worse than piling up grand-totals all day on a dying Dell and falling asleep on shift schedule drafts. Speaking to me from a rain-world with dropping tunes and creeping in the morning blues and disappearing in the city carpeted with cars. She leaves just when I’m getting ready but never at the same time and I bring her broken and watering voice with me and save it for the day next.

I like the view through the main gate, a nice framed and layered low angle view of the ground at the bottom. But I hate cars. In the morning, it's all people walking their dogs, homeless still hang out at Logan as they do in many other NYC plazas and cars and I feel like a plain fool with the sun trying to keep me from going to bed, twirling and jumping.

A fire broke out on the second floor at 251 at 6:15 a.m. while some guy who left a candle burning was taking a shower. The fire started when the candle, placed upon a 3-foot plastic stand, tipped over and nearby papers caught on fire. According to the police, he received second-degree burns on his hand while trying to put out the fire. There were no serious injuries but the fire and rescue squad expressed their disapproval at the fact that during the evacuation, nobody pulled the fire alarm.

Two hours before the heat I was quietly going thru thin blue corridors enjoying casual parties with this group or the other and I remember that we drove a boat with two blond haired Norwegians who do water processing in Amsterdam and a dark Chinese girl passing by and sketching each one of us in the fog towards the edge. We set up a fire under a tree and spent the night there breathing a mix of weed and red mangroves. Then one of the boys walked right into the water and disappeared and I don’t know why we did not care.

I went into the front garden, feeling too heavy to take myself out, yet unable to stay indoors. The heat was suffocating.

Looking ahead, the prospect of my life make me feel as if I am buried alive. But there are books, sleep, places to go and a deal I cut for at around four tonight and I’m going to look into it.

Relax. For awhile.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at September 9, 2005 07:12 PM