Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,9
and out, light the pilot lights for the gas heaters in the rooms, change the sheets in the shack-up fuck rooms, put towels in the bathrooms, and run the vacuum in the lobby when Phil told me to. I knew just enough about the motel business to apply for the East End Hotel’s Night Manager job.
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