Concierge Confidential (15 page)

One night I was approached by one of the generic InterContinental hotel guests. “I want to do something that's really special and really romantic,” he said.

“Of course,” I said, mirroring his energy.

“First I want to go to a great dinner with my wife, but I want a surprise when I come back.”

“Do you have anything particular in mind?” I asked, bracing myself.

“I was thinking maybe if you just put, like, rose petals on the floor. Can you do that?”

He was a nice enough guy and he caught me in the right way, so I felt comfortable being honest with him. “Well, you know that's
okay
. People do that.”

“Oh, really?” he said, deflated at the realization that he wasn't first to patent it.

Now the mercenary side of me kicked in, and I started seeing dollar signs. I started brainstorming with him like I did with Julian. “You know what could be really fun? Why don't you just fill the whole bed with flowers? Like the whole thing. Just buy two hundred roses—not the petals, the entire flowers—and cover the bed in them.”

“Wow, that's pretty interesting,” he nodded. “That's a good idea. What else?”

“What else?”

“Yeah, what else should I do?”

The thing with a brainstorming session is that you throw out many, many ludicrous ideas in the hopes of stumbling upon one or two fairly good ones. At least, that's how it's supposed to function. I started thinking of all the varied Valentine's Day clichés. “Well, does she like chocolate?”

“Absolutely.”

“What about if you let me know before you come back from your dinner? I can fill the tub with chocolate and the two of you can take a chocolate bath.” I don't know where the hell I came up with that one. Even as I said it, it sounded absurd.

He stood there quietly for a second, speechless. “You're
brilliant
. That's it! That's what we're going do. I love that. I absolutely love that. So it's tomorrow night that I want go to dinner at eight. Will you be working then?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll be here until midnight or so.”

“Here's the plan. I'll call you when we're forty-five minutes away, to let you know that we're coming. And it's got to be Godiva. That's my wife's favorite.”

“No problem,” I told him. “I'll take care of everything for tomorrow.”

“Thank you very much,” he said, handing me a a hundred-dollar tip.

This can't be so difficult,
I thought. Godiva had these little hot chocolate kits. I could buy twenty of them and it would only cost around a hundred dollars.
I wonder if that'll be enough. How many gallons should I buy?
There was no point in me trying to figure it out on my own. I'd never had an aquarium, so water volume was lost on me. I picked up the phone and called Kraft Hardware.

“Hello,” I said. “Can you tell me what the capacity of a standard-sized bathtub is, in volume?”

“Sure,” the hardware guy said. “You're looking at just over eighty gallons of water before it reaches the overflow.”

“Eighty gallons? Okay, thank you very much.” I hung up the phone. Eighty gallons was a lot of chocolate. The Godiva came in eight-ounce packets. I'd need boxes and boxes and boxes of the stuff; if I got twenty, it would have just looked like frosting. We were already talking thousands of dollars.

When the guest came through the lobby not too long after, I called him over. “Is everything okay?” he wanted to know.

“There's an issue. The Godiva would be exorbitant.”

“How exorbitant?”

“Thousands of dollars,” I told him.

He didn't blink. “Well, what's the alternative?”

“We're going to need gallons of chocolate. I was going to start calling restaurant suppliers,” I told him. The service bug had bitten me, and I was going to make this happen for him no matter what.

“Well, whatever works. That's fine with me.” He handed me another hundred-dollar bill.

Now I realized that it couldn't even be chocolate at all—chocolate would harden. I needed to get chocolate
fudge.
There was nothing for me to do that night, since everything was closed. But the first thing I did when I came in the next day was to call around until I found a restaurant supply company.

“Yeah, we have Hershey's fudge,” they told me. “It comes in big plastic jugs, and there are six jugs per box.”

“I'm going to need about eighty gallons' worth.”

“Eighty gallons? Well, each jug is a gallon so you're going to need at least a dozen boxes in total.”

“Perfect!” I gave him the shipping information and took care of payment.

Later that evening, they delivered all the boxes to the hotel.
Oh my God,
I thought to myself.
This is actually happening now. I'm really going to be filling up a bathtub with fudge.
As the delivery guys unloaded box after box, I realized that it wasn't like somebody was delivering flowers. I couldn't just put all the chocolate in some corner and not draw attention to it.

I ran to the security office in the bowels of the hotel. “I've got a ton of chocolate because some guest wants to fill his bathtub with the stuff. I need you to cover for me while I get it upstairs.”

“I'll help you,” one of the guys said.

“Terrific.” We went back to the lobby. I started opening up the boxes and pulling out all the jugs. I called to make sure the guest's room was empty, and then we started to bring the chocolate upstairs. Thankfully the staff ignored what I was doing. They figured I was up to something marvelous—not, say, turning a human being into a living sundae.

Finally, I got it all up there and stood for a second looking at this room full of bottles of fudge.
Well, it's too late now!
I thought.
It's got to happen.
I went back downstairs and waited for my signal.

As planned, the guest eventually called me from the restaurant. “We're going to be there in about an hour. Will everything be ready?”

“Absolutely!” I told him.

“Thanks again. You're the best.”

I went back upstairs.
Oh, crap,
I thought.
What a goddamn hassle this is going to be.
I stood there opening bottle after bottle and—
glug, glug, glug
—pouring it in. Forty-five minutes later, I was finished. It turned out that I didn't buy nearly enough; it must have settled, or maybe the tub was bigger than standard sized. But it
did
make a big impact. It was a
lot
of fudge—and it was a
big
mess.

I was a little disappointed because my fantasy was that it was going to be grander than it was.
This isn't that great,
I realized.
It's actually pretty gross. And it's not hot, either. It's tepid. I should have done a bubble bath and been done with it.

Now I had dozens of empty, unwieldy jugs to dispose of. I got some commercial-sized garbage bags and schlepped the bottles out of the room. I took them through the back hallways where the housekeepers were so that no one would ask any questions. I didn't want to leave them in the hotel at all, so I just went out the back and took them out to the street on my way home.

I knew that I had to follow up the next morning. I wasn't working, so I called the guy in his room. “So?” I said. “How did it go?”

“Brilliant, fantastic,” he told me, tickled out of his mind. “Thank you so much. You're absolutely great. I left a tip for you at the desk.”

“I'm glad I could help.”

“I've just got one question.”

“Yes?”

“What am I supposed to do with all the chocolate?” he asked me.

“Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it.”

“Okay, perfect.”

We weren't really supposed to be at the hotel when we weren't working, but I couldn't have him call up housekeeping and explain that the concierge desk had filled his bathtub with gallons of chocolate fudge. I snuck into the room, and there I saw the tub again. It was just this smooth placid pool of velvety, dark liquid. In fact, it looked pretty much like I had left it.

Then I remembered that still waters run deep. And deep under these still waters was the drain, and I had to put my hand in through the muck and who-knows-what-else to pull the stopper.
Did they even step foot into it?
I wondered.
Did they fool around in the chocolate?
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a towel bunched up on the floor. If I didn't know that the stain was fudge, I would have been very much disturbed. As it was, I was indifferent. I just wanted to get it cleaned up and get the hell out of there.

I rolled up my sleeve and dove my hand into the fudge, feeling around for the drain. I pulled out the stopper and waited for the chocolate to pour down the pipes. I could see it start to drain—
barely
. There was a vague ripple on the surface. I waited, and I waited, and I waited.

It was very, very slow going. Now I started to get a little scared. It was possible that it would clog a pipe or something. Maybe it would take forever to drain and I'd get busted. I knew I needed some help, but I wasn't sure who to call. It wasn't like I could've dialed up Willy Wonka and asked for his advice on what to do.

Rupert,
I thought.
Rupert will help me.
Rupert was the engineer in the hotel, which effectively meant that he was like the handyman for the entire building. He was an old guy I got along very well with. He also—like everyone else—loved to be in on anything scandalous. I tracked him down in the smoking lounge. There was only one thing for me to do: fess up and ask for his mercy. “Rupert,” I told him. “I think I did something wrong.”

“What? What did you do?”

“Can you come upstairs?” I whispered. “I need to show you something.”

Now he knew something good was happening. I took him up to the room and showed him the pool. From the sides of the tub I could tell that it had barely drained at all while I had gone to get Rupert.

“What
is
this?” he said.

“A couple wanted to do something romantic, and I decided it would be a good idea to fill the bathtub with chocolate.”

Rupert got a twinkle in his eye. Even though he was an old man, he still liked being witness to a room where naughtiness probably happened. “So now what?” he said.

“Now it's not draining.”

“Did you open it?”

“Yes,” I said.

Just to make sure, he stuck his hand in and felt around. I couldn't blame him, as I would have done the same. He thought for a second about what to do. “I'll get a plunger and some Drano,” he shrugged.

It was an obvious solution, but I'd tried to think of something else and had come up short myself. “Thanks,” I said, passing him a fifty. “And let's just keep this between us.”

Later, I watched as he ran the water forever, and plunged the mess, and poured in the Drano—over and over and over. At the end of the day, I kind of thought,
Well, that was stupid.
I worked hard for that moment, and it totally wasn't worth it. Why did I have to do that? Flowers would have been fine.

And from then on out, I decided that flowers
were
fine.

Whenever one of the generic businessmen came up with that look on their face, I was standing there like a loaded gun. “Hi,” they said. “I wanna do something romant—”

“Flowers,” I interrupted.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Flowers. Works every time. They're fantastic and the women love it. We'll get tulip petals shipped from the Netherlands. We'll fly them in overnight.”
Or pull them out of the trash in the Biltmore Room. There's a wedding there this afternoon.

8.

Loose Lips

The concierge desk always had a dubious relationship to the rest of the hotel, and room service was no exception. If a guest called down and asked for, say, a bottle of scotch, technically the concierge should call room service and have them send it up. But what kind of service is that? The guest could have called them himself (and dropped ninety dollars for a bottle).

But why pay
outrageous
hotel minibar prices? What I would often do was give the bellman a ten-dollar tip and send him over to the liquor store to buy a nice bottle of scotch for thirty dollars—and since the liquor store guy knew the drill, “nice” meant different things for different kinds of guests. Then I'd add thirty dollars for myself and charge the room seventy. The guest saved twenty dollars, I got thirty dollars, and the bellman made ten. As long as the guest was happy, then the hotel was happy. No one bothered anyone.

Now I had to get reimbursed. We had a booklet of forms, like withdrawal slips, called “paid-outs.” On each paid-out we wrote the date, the room number, the guest's name, and a description of the transaction. We were smart enough to know that if we wrote “bottle of scotch” in the description, it would be like rubbing the hotel's face in our business. The solution was to be vague. “Miscellaneous sundries” was never questioned or challenged—even though it describes nothing whatsoever. It could have been seventy dollars' worth of condoms for all they knew. The beauty of being a concierge was that nobody would ever ask us to give deeper details; that would be breaching the guest's confidence.

The only important thing was that the guest not contest anything. If I were a room service waiter and didn't get the guest to sign their check, then I'd be in trouble. But the concierge is slightly above the law. We rarely bothered to get signatures or give explanations; it was like “don't ask, don't tell.” If the guest ever complained that we charged him seventy dollars for a thirty-dollar bottle of scotch, we'd just apologize and refund the difference.