How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides: Chapters 5-7
Chapter 5: People
On my job I meet a lot of people. I told you I’ve parked in the neighborhood of 100000 cars, and this equates roughly to the same amount of human interactions before I take their car away. For the most part, the exchanges are small and polite. “Welcome, this is parking here, take this ticket.” I am Johnny on the spot assisting with luggage and opening doors. And for the average hotel guest, my desired imprint in their consciousness is “what a nice young man,” and then the memory of me fizzles into a blur as they reach a comely front desk agent who will glow with greater servile pomp. (Hotels, especially upscale ones, have the old world habit of hiring beautiful front desk agents, and I mean this in the way of surface beauty: straight good-looking people. Valets are rag tag, our defining features are generally odor and arrogance. I am frustrated at times with my valet coworker’s lack of grooming, they are apt to take the individuation allotted to them too far, and dress in embarrassing liberties that nearly void their uniforms. There is a definite point at which self-expression goes too far, when it becomes, well, selfish.
A small word to aspiring valets about appearance: I have done this job looking all sorts of ways. For the first many years I was quite disheveled. I had an against policy beard and a thick birds nest for top hairs. The uniform was a standard pants and polo, but my shoes, left to my own purchase, were always sorry looking, super worn sneakers, and I had the opinion of: “they don’t provide me shoes, so fuck them—I’ll let the sneakers fall off my feet before I buy new ones.” It has taken a long time for me to be convinced that grooming myself exceptionally conventional, and clothing myself without a single wrinkle, wearing basic sunglasses, and tending to my body hair like a metrosexual is the best course of presentation on this job. The most obvious action is the reality: people will respond to you more kindly if your outward appearance signals psychological health. And I do mean more kindly as in tips. I have a large enough sample size of work to relay the mathematical benefit of it. When I’m allowed to dress myself in whatever fashion for the job, I go suit and tie, for most days. The only downside to dressing too well is perhaps being too memorable to others. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, after all, and you can stick out appearing sloth or suave, but my confidence in my work at this point is such that I no longer fear comment or complaint from anyone. In a later chapter I will relay how many times I have tried to escape and be disqualified from this profession, more or less because I am a confused and confusing man, but I am simply too good at it to be dismissed, barring extreme misfortune. My exodus will be probably be elective, if ever.
I mean all this fashion advice as it applies to the job I’ve been discussing, but imagine how much more it extends to the rest of life. I’ll leave that writing to college folks.
As far as the people meeting goes, I am unsure if my volume of introductions is high or low compared to most human lives. Having lived in Manhattan for a couple years in my youth, it seems plausible that many different lives and professions meet the same number of relations as I have.
Thus I shall divide this chapter into certain generalizations of people I’ve encountered on this job, with some specific anecdotes, but all-in-all an overview of what you can expect from vehicle owners.
The Average Pleasure
Probably the biggest category of traveler—they’ve come to the valet stand to visit the area in the pursuit of happiness. They will usually dislike seeing the valets, often avoid eye contact with us, and think to themselves that parking should never cost money. About 10 percent of them will tip on arrival, although 80-90 percent will tip on departure. Note that valets almost always take home their tips day-to-day, and so having a shift with high arrivals is hard work and little money. Having a shift with high departures is easy work and lots of money. If you are the average pleasure, I encourage you to tip on arrival. This also incentivizes the valets to park your car in a prime spot.
The Average Pleasure has a silly habit when spelling their names for the ticket. I will ask “what’s your last name?” And they will respond “Schumacher,” though pronounced in the anglicized “shoe-maker,” and since I’m a terribly linguistic valet, I will insist they spell it for me (getting the correct reservation name is essential for billing at a hotel location).
This is not the silly part.
The silly part is when I then ask them for a first name, and they say “Tim.” And then they spell “Tim” for me: “T-i-m.”
And I say “gee thanks” and park their car in the dank garage and lock it and mark the spot and walk or jog back to the driveway where the sun is setting and when I undress at night back in my apartment I wonder how stupid I look to other people.
The Business Traveler
These are valet experts, usually driving rental cars. They have compact luggage and are efficient and speedy moving about and coming and going. They know as much about valet as I do, and usually navigate the driveways of valet stands with tact and skill.
The downside of the business traveler is the money. At worst, they are penny pinching misers who won’t spend a dime unless it’s covered by their employer. I don’t really know what a “write-off” is but these people murmur that phrase: Business travelers don’t tip at all sometimes, and when they do, it’s often single dollars. A five dollar bill from one of these customers should be cherished like manna: tastes lousy but hey—it’s divine, appreciate it.
Residents
Some of this category are literal residents. There are valet stands in some residential buildings, or they may be guests of a hotel for years at a time. I also include in this category guests who are so frequent at hotels or restaurants that you may get to know them distinctly. You will learn about these people, even if you don’t personally talk to them, because your coworkers are sure to gossip about them.
Their generosity is random. I parked a certain resident’s 250 Shelby Mustang over a thousand times, easily, and he almost never tipped me. This person’s valet and hotel bill were paid for, no less, by his employer!
You really can’t expect residents to tip constantly—their tip out would be a preposterous bill annually, but zero is pretty radical. Personally, I never expect a tip, from anybody. One thing about doing valet work that I never thought much about—we experience the tip exchange as a physical ritual: a person must physically hand us the money, there is the touch of fingertips or palms, the careful effort on my part to accept rather than snatch. It never occurred to me that this ritual was in any way special until a friend of mine, a server, told me that they’ve never once looked at the human being who tipped them, at least not at the moment the tip was administered—their guests just always cast their tip with the bill fold, privately. I prefer the hand to hand style, though I wonder if tips would increase or decrease or stay the same if it all got submitted impersonally.
Valets must uphold reasonable boundaries with residents. On the bright side of things—your connections with these people can expand your whole career. I’ve known many coworkers who leave the valet industry because one of the residents sets them up in another. On the other hand, I’ve known valets who got fired for doing drugs or sleeping with a resident.
This group is primarily where your fun tips are going to come from—tickets to events, rounds of golf, food, I even knew a valet who inherited a car from a resident.
There are some dark ones. When you’re stationed at a persons living quarters, you will see sad and ugly things from time to time, things you’d never ask to see. Infidelities galore, moral and legal crimes, boundless humanity. I’ve watched a man who, after a failed relationship, drank himself, slowly, into bitter impotence and misogyny, confiding during his liquid nights to me that he hates everyone, especially women. Then he would get another girlfriend, act cured, only to repeat the cycle all over again after another breakup.
Another resident I knew for several years spoke constantly of moving to a particular European country on the basis that white supremacy is more welcome there. He was a good tipper, and many nights I questioned my own ethics for entertaining him and smiling kindly during his racist remarks about America, and accepting his cash.
I tend to agree with whatever a guest serves towards me, conversationally. One time a hotel guest and I chatted long about an upcoming election. A younger coworker of mine stood by and listened. The guest tipped me and left our presence, and the young coworker said “wow, I didn’t know you were [a certain political party]. And I responded “what? Like hell. That was all lies. Never take what I say to a guest seriously.”
Finally, though more on this later, but an important note: a valet should never offer info about their guests to others, especially residents. I realize that what I am writing now somewhat breaks this rule, though I share my experiences without persona. Women are accused of being the gossipers among the two genders, but I am convinced, after years of employment with all men, this is false. Men say just as much about others that they shouldn’t.
Perverts
No figurative meaning behind this category of people. It applies primarily to those of us that work at hotels. Every time I’m in the hallway of a hotel, on my way to a room to deliver some luggage, or a bell cart, or some nonsense, there’s a little bit of fear in my heart the moment the door to the room clicks unlocked and swivels open. Every once in a long while it’s a naked man or woman standing behind there, a violent hard-on and a creepy smell in the background. Mostly that seems to be the whole ruse. The majority of the pervs, I gather, are just flashers, who like to be undressed and disturbing. It happened to me very early on in my employment. I had only been working valet for a few months, got sent upstairs to deliver a luggage cart, and when the door opened a very tall and buxom woman in lingerie stood before me with her penis out. However, some perverts do invite sex play. Some couples want you to watch. Some couples want you to participate.
Perverts may tip you enormously. They may not though, and your only gain is violation and shame. I must emphasize, in an effort to slow anxiety for readers, that the pervs are a small and infrequent category, and if appropriately ignored, can be evaded somewhat easily, save for the psychological torment of their very existence. A man grabbed my ass in a hotel stairwell several months ago, and that is the last recorded deviant I have encountered.
At some valet locations, it is common practice to guide a guest on foot to their vehicle in the garage, usually on the pretense of retrieving an item from the vehicle. As I’ve gained more experience, I seldom do this anymore, alternatively bringing their car onto the driveway. The guests will sometimes lament “oh, I don’t want to make you go through all that trouble.” No, no, there is far less trouble in the daylight, on the driveway, with witnesses.
For those of you who are religious, I recommend some prayers of general exorcism whenever you stay in a hotel room. I do not profess being above the perverts. Lord knows I’ve brought the rent down in neighborhood motels with my own behavior, but what seems outstanding about the hotel perverts is that they often crop up in swanky joints. Rich and poor both have the capacity for depravity. To be frank, I feel as though the upper classes are more likely to act the creeper, though this is a biased judgment of my limited experience. Sometimes though, I get a weird idea in my head that life must be pretty boring if you’re not worried about money, food, and shelter. It must be like being teenager forever.
Chapter 6: 2020
Most hotels stayed open during the Covid pandemic. The hotel where I worked closed only briefly, in the very beginning of the stay-at-home order. I was a journeyman valet at the time lockdown was declared in March 2020, having been on the job for about five years. My boss called and informed me that everyone was laid off immediately.
This news wasn’t much of a shock. At that point in time, my pants were already down, so-to-speak. A virus was spreading across America. My education had halted. The woman I was living with had wisely cut me loose, knowing she didn’t want to quarantine through our failing relationship. I had begun drinking and using drugs again after a years long period of sobriety, or as I like to think of it, a very long tolerance break. Gambling losses amounted to a slender bank account. Everything and everyone was moving in crazy directions and I was right there with them, pants down. Word that I was fired from my valet job was like a small weak person had given me a pathetic little spank.
A boring note about the money situation: I filed for unemployment in the beginning. The first check was less than 200 dollars and was a calculation of my income as a part-time valet and a part-time teacher. I was a grad student back then, designated a “teaching associate,” and lowballed what I consider basically rakeback of an academic variety—a small income to teach 3 units at the same school I was paying tuition.
Soberly, I can see that I should’ve resigned to the meager unemployment checks, plus whatever “stimulus checks” got doled out, and binged television like a good pandemic-er. However, at the time, I was troubled that my financial condolences could hardly even afford a modest marijuana habit. And I was bored.
So when I got the call the hotel was re-opening just a month after lockdown, I took up the position as pandemic valet. I could wax long about the strangeness and customs of this era of employment, and surely I have many opinions about the moves people were making in that time. My employer lied a great deal, guests of the hotel lied a great deal, and I felt so sorry for myself through the whole experience that a confession would be gratuitous.
From April 2020 until the summer of 21, the job wasn’t much more than wind blowing through pavement. There were shifts that went by, eight hours or more, where I only parked one or two vehicles. Tips were extinct. The boredom was so intense, and the façade of the hotel so eerie and surreal, that I sinned in all the ways I’ve judged others for over the years: I surfed my phone constantly, I took long on the clock “breaks” (but really, how can you take a break from a job without labor?), I smoked cigarettes right on the driveway, I got high, watched movies—even hooked up a Playstation to a hotel TV. I sat. I sat in a chair and I waited. I do not know if I was waiting for the pandemic to get worse or better, but a trend in either direction would’ve been preferable to the vacant-sunny Hotel Shining experience.
There were 144 rooms in that hotel. Sometimes less than ten of them would be occupied. I convinced the front desk agents to let me stay in one of our multitudinous vacants on many occasions, though my growing appetite for depravity kept me shy of conniving for residency. If I was forthright, and without a drug problem, I’m certain I could’ve lodged long term for about thirty dollars a night. While that providence would’ve been still creepy, I can’t help but concede in hindsight that alternatives to the sort of disintegration I chose were obviously there, and indeed, they were attractive, even obviously fortunate. I don’t care much for philosophy or philosophers. Most people who call themselves philosophers are just writers who aren’t creative enough to construct novels. And I do not know if people have the right to forgive themselves, but it’s easy for me to understand that when I’m unwell, I tend to view every option in life like it’s Sophie’s choice, when if I had the least bit of gratitude for my existence, I’d be wise enough to elect a clean hotel room over a dirty one.
Sure, I “lived” with my parents at the time, but I wanted to bombard my feelings as much as possible, so I needed a place suitable for pants-shitting alcoholism and paranoia crack smoking. There was a motel perfect for these pursuits at the halfway point between my job and my parent’s house. Yes, a real Sophie’s choice: 30 dollars a night at my luminous, generous job; no rent at the house I was raised in, free food and every streaming service; or the roach motel with a blind eye to drug abuse and people who walk around with their underwear visible.
Occupancy at the bad motel was higher than it was at my workplace. I guess in times of mass cultural stress, roaches proliferate. And of my options, the motel’s ultra-dinge accommodations were ironically the most expensive. I had a favorite room there which I always requested because it faced south, permitted smoking, and had fewer mystery stains than the others. I don’t need to be too poetic about this place for you to understand its ugliness. There was a sign posted on the inside of every door reminding you to lock it, and of the amenities in the place, the lock looked like the most reliable—hard steel that bars it from inside the door, rather than those flimsy screw-on jobs they put on bathroom stalls or apartment latches, plus a deadbolt high up. They certainly knew their customers. When you’re high, faith in a door is paramount to faith in anything else.
The shower looked like an improvised vestibule to slaughter people. This is mostly where I hit the pipe. I’m a decent man, after all—I wouldn’t light a crack pipe on a hotel bed, no, that’s not the sort of thing you do with the free HBO on the TV. Have shame. Be respectful.
At night, women sometimes knocked on the door asking if I was lonely. If I was more drunk than high, I might have the courage to peep through the curtains. I think most people experienced distortions of time during the pandemic. Some people joke that 2020 was the downward plunge into a grim alternative universe, a moment when the Great Programmer turned his simulation knobs to unseen levels of pain and strangeness. When those women were knocking, my burnt tongue could only utter bad translations, anachronisms and fear. I remember one of the nights furiously looking for answers in Genesis, finding my situation like Lot’s. But it wasn’t quite the same. Lot invited the angels in, and look what happened: the city was destroyed.
Maybe I can save the city if I just keep to myself, I thought. Yes. I am lonely. I will save us. I will stay alone and everything will be alright. So when the door knocked at night, I played dead. Might as well have been.
Chapter 7: People (Continued)
Cheapskates
I’ve told you: I never expect a tip, and that’s true, for the most part. I bring up this category of customers mostly to emphasize to aspiring valets how devastating and unhealthy expectations are going to be over the long term. With somewhat of a wide variation by locale, cheapskates make up a relatively large portion of the population, anywhere from 15-35 percent of cars, I’d estimate.
Let’s be clear about the definition: the cheapskate is someone who evades expenditure so extraordinarily that it often defies logic. There is usually something developmentally or psychologically wrong with this person, and they are, despite their title, still capable of tipping—so long as you play into their neurosis around money. For example: one time, on a slow night shift, I watched a man and his wife argue about the price of our valet parking. They got in their car and circled the block for about 30 minutes looking for better parking. Expert that I am, I knew exactly where they could find free parking, and in close proximity, as I had an employee spot on the side of the building occupied by my own car. In the whole of this particular downtown area, there were only a half dozen free parking spots for several miles—and I had one locked down.
So I offered it to him, after waving him down on his fifth trip around the block. He gets the spot, and he tips me 20 dollars. He says to me something like “I’m not cheap, but every dollar saved matters.” And I said “oh yes, sir, absolutely.”
The same 20 dollar tip he gave me could have just paid for his parking in the first place. Not much logic to this behavior, although, in a sick way, his gesture has its own logic—he appreciates me accommodating his lunatic worldview. I do not know how often, if ever, you should be applying this general concept of alternate realities to social situations. The college professors of this world should be emailed for that question, though I don’t know which department to start with.
It’s not always the tips the cheapskates clench their purses over—primarily they don’t want to spend money on the parking fee, though often they won’t tip either, especially if they bit the fee and reluctantly valeted. The worst of this brood is a guest who requires service beyond the usual and leaves you empty handed. I have soaked my entire body in sweat hauling hundreds of pounds of luggage a half mile down a long hotel hallway, unpacked all of it into a suite I can’t afford even with an employee discount, and been tipped with the good ‘ole “thank you,” no eye contact. I have parked a man’s car a dozen times in one shift with no gratuity, pulled it again for his checkout the next morning, and then, when he asks me for change for a hundred dollar bill and I give him 80 in 20 dollar bills, and 20 in five dollar bills, he simply pockets all the change I made for him and drives off, as if to intentionally tease me (some cheapskate right now, reading this, is thinking “well, ya, asshole, you should’ve given him some 1 dollar bills, what did you expect?”)
I am not some detached valet guru—these instances do infuriate me, but the anger I experience seldom goes home with me. Again, I mention this category specifically because certain valets I’ve worked with over the years grow longstanding resentments against the cheapskates. These piteous valets often develop arguments of victimhood: “they don’t tip me because I’m ______” and you can fill in the blank. They begin coming to work expecting prejudice and injustice.
Frankly, I think often that this profession is, at its most essential, fairly absurd, a bit antiquated, and moreover that I’m lucky to have such an obscure job which my culture at large deems something worthy of gratuities. There really aren’t many professions where tips are part of the income. Also, as a note to customers out there—in comparison to some other industries, tipping us will usually tangibly improve service. I don’t think your waiter is going to be much faster when you tip him on the way out.
People’s generosity constantly surprises me. At one location I used to work, a fire broke out in the surrounding area, and hundreds or thousands of people were evacuated from their homes. The beaches looked like every local monastery and God were on a fat smoke break. Many of the evacuees came in relief to our hotel. They call them “walk-ins” when people don’t have a reservation—very uncommon at upscale hotels, and hard to be staffed for if there’s a lot of them, so it was only me and one other valet servicing a hundred of these “walk-ins.” In short, our service was abominable, the driveway was overflowing all morning, people had long waits to both check in and check out. It was a hard day.
However, me and the other valet both left that shift with our highest tip-out of the year. The walk-ins, who had evacuated their homes in anxiety and peril, were generous. This almost seems backwards to me. I would’ve guessed that people in danger of losing all their possessions would cling to their remaining ones more severely. But the opposite was true, and in spite of what I consider bad valet service, they made sure to take care of the hapless hotel workers.
Reporters for that particular fire made a big stink about the racehorses killed in the fire. And I get it, imagining a horse burning to death is wild. Some ESPN guys later checked in to cover that story. Easy for me to recall because one of those dopes boasted about how valuable his camera was—six figures sitting in the back of a rented Nissan versa. Lord help us.
George
“George” is a casino term. It means someone who tips a lot, or even has a negative connotation of someone who foolishly tips too much. Presumably in the literal it refers to George Washington, face of currency, dead president, the cold green frown.
There is no standard demographic or car type for Georges. I suppose I’ll make mention at this juncture the uncomfortable expression that in general, there is no ethnic, political, or socio-economic background that has an essential generosity or miserliness. I know that, writing this, some of my valet peers plainly disagree with me. There are, in some cases, nationalities wary of valet parking because in their home-country, valet tends to be a protection scam. But this has to do with their lived experiences, not any essential “race.” Life is a lot easier in the circumstance of pain if you stop asking “what’s wrong with that person?” and instead wonder “what happened to that person?” You can ask that of yourself, too, if it helps.
If you’re the type of valet who wants to think long about your wages, average the generosity of big tippers with your worst nights. Frankly, most of the young men I work with have a passionate and short view of money. I worked with one young man for a number of years who had a habit of leaving every shift two hours early. When I pointed out to him that doing so added up to about a ten thousand dollar difference in his w-2, his eyes widened and I could see a crimson turd rolling over in his bowels. He never bothered to do the math.
The George tipper’s relative frequency will fluctuate, given your location. For instance: casino valets stand the greatest chance of a preposterous tip. Personally, my largest gratuity from one customer, at one time, I believe is 400 dollars, and being handed the blue one hundred dollar tip is actually relatively frequent (maybe one a month). I have heard stories of casino valets receiving hefty percentages of slot jackpots, numbering in the thousands.
There was once a man who checked into my hotel locale driving a lifted chevy truck with sedan crushing tires and loads of cosmetic damage. This man was overly talkative. He told of his recent separation from his wife and his extreme fear of being served divorce papers. He made assward requests about parking his truck, then bringing it on the driveway again, and then reparking it, over and over and over without him ever taking the infernal thing out on the road. He was drunk constantly, and also accompanied by an obvious dope man. In the course of three days, he tipped me and the other valets in excess of several thousand dollars, and in the mornings, when he would appear paranoid, remorseful, and full of sadness, I felt as though I could not accept another dollar from this man. I urged him to check out of the hotel, get into a rehab or something, get help.
This is really not too kindly of me, in the scheme of things, and trust I don’t share anything with you in search of nobility. My gesture was little more than the moment in a casino when a dealer urges you to leave the table. It’s not so much pity as it is intolerance, an inability to watch the sad show keep developing.
Much less dramatic characters will surprise you with big tips. Sometimes I give a guest the regular routine: door open, hello, ticket, park, and pull around on departure. No cool dialogue, no hustle, and they tip 300 percent with a simple “thank you.” One of the best myths for practical human behavior is the notion that God might show up in any body, at any time, in any place. I could tell you to be ready for Him, but nobody ever is.
Sometimes a big tip happens for a strange scenario—usually one in which you’ve made a terrible mistake. One time early in my career I left a guest’s keys on my belt and went home with them after my shift. This is about an 8 or 9/10 valet fuck up, and miserably stupid. I received a phone call from my boss at the time the guest requested their car, it took me 30 minutes to drive to the hotel, and then some minutes longer for the guys on staff to pull the car up. The woman whose car it was—she tipped fifty dollars, and told me specifically she forgave me. These scenarios usually occur in smaller griefs: pulling up cars in the wrong order, missing a guests request due to confusion, etc… but I find that often the people who are delayed and wronged will turn around to flex on our mistakes with extra gratuity. I find that interpersonally in these scenarios it’s best to be transparent with the wronged party, but still some of my peers are going to take these people’s forgiveness as a weakness to exploit. There was a sect of Christians in the first century that believed since Jesus delights in forgiving sins, sinning prodigiously actually praised him. The problem with exploiting forgiveness is not as much the intangible arguments of spirituality as it is the practical consequences of living on earth as a constant dimwit. So on your valet job, when you make a mistake, please, feel bad about it. And feel grateful if they forgive you. Spend the money on something nice, will you? There are going to be some ugly customers for you down the road…
Combatants
You never know where people are coming from, or what they’re dealing with. But there are, for instance, certain hazards about dealing with high public turnover. Some people will want to fight you. I once saw a man pull a truck into our driveway that would not fit into our parking garage, and I informed him of this right away. He became so angry that he cursed me viciously, got in the bed of his truck, and began violently throwing his own luggage about the driveway. This seemed just humorous, for after all, it was his own belongings he was damaging.
Another time, I was working alone and got so busy that the public street was backed up. Horns and jeers from all around. I got inside one of the cars that was blocking traffic, a miracle I even had the keys to it, but when I began shifting in to drive, the other door opened, and a man seated himself in the passenger. I vaguely recognized him as the owner of the car we were in, though my previous interaction with the man was merely to request his car keys in the midst of other chaos.
He proceeded to challenge me to a duel, (preposterously anachronistic), insisted that we fight, and accused me of being grossly incompetent on my job. When I fled his presence, he followed me, and began screaming within an inch of my face all sorts of nasty insults. Then he retrieved one of the hotel managers and repeated the whole barrage of condemnation with her as witness.
I did not respond in a groveling and servile manner, which is more or less the protocol in the hospitality industry. I am one who is equipped well for verbal combat, being small of stature and slight build, my weapon of choice in combat, for all my life, has been words, and upon this unusual duelist, and in front of my superior, I unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse such that I could have easily been terminated immediately. The hotel staff, however, in the aftermath of it all, sided with me and issued total empathy for the strange situation. Of note maybe, I still had to park dozens of cars that evening after the row, including the man’s who had picked the bone with me.
This was mercy, my continued employment after the incident, as I’ve heard a priest describe it: not receiving what is due to you for bad behavior. I make no apology for anyone who thinks tooth for tooth about the situation—that my curses for the man in the story are justified because of his. Make no mistake: I am most of the time living between a delusion that I am the hero of all my stories or else I am the villain. I can be both, but I’m also frequently the man who provokes others to gather stones, and it is because of this quality—the hard time I give cashiers, librarians, and nurses, that I find it easy to forgive the man who berates me on a valet driveway.
Anyone who lives long enough with their eyes open will witness mercy doled out to underserving, stupendous morons (also a breed I qualify for). It makes me quite alright with the alleged “angry Old Testament God,” a deity whose patience is long but not forever, because I have hundreds of occasions where I witnessed a young valet cause incredible damage to another’s property, or commit the most boneheaded and ridiculous grievances, sometimes out of malice or selfishness and our bosses, our gods, give us another chance. Often when a valet is reprimanded for for one of his misdeeds, he continues to commit the exact same sins in the future. This is actually more common than them correcting their behavior. The fool thinks his boss will never punish him.
If you can’t be grateful for mercy, you can’t be grateful for anything. Gratitude isn’t just an idea, either. It’s behavior.
I also must note that occasionally, less than ten percent of the time, a combative guest, someone who made me feel small and loathed and embarrassed to be a valet at all the day prior, returns and approaches me to apologize. Personally, this is better than a monetary tip to me, and strangely I respect these people more—the ones who apologize, more than a guest who simply treats me well in the first place and goes on their merry way.
Scammers
These are professionals. They scam for a living. You need to be aware they exist. Do not become paranoid, but be careful.
One man made it a habit to loiter around our hotel at breakfast time. He was not a guest of the hotel, though he didn’t disturb us much for several days. Then one morning he was asked to leave the hotel on the grounds of loitering, and stealing a cheap breakfast. He grumbled mildly, but left.
The same man books a night at the hotel about a week later. Now he appropriately dines for breakfast the following morning. A staff member, thinking he’s loitering again, asks him to leave. He rages and fumes at our mistreatment of him. He accused me specifically of calling him homeless, and it’s clear to me in this second confrontation he’s baiting me to say worse things about him. I don’t. He files a lawsuit against the hotel. This was clearly a scam through and through.
You need to know these people exist, and when your senses are telling you that something odd is occurring, it probably is. To protect yourself, you have to behave like the non-player characters in a video game. Only customer service lines. Inflect your voice one octave higher than normal for extra protection.
Criminals
These might be the best tippers, actually. When somebody is trying to get over a crime, the way to keep service staff mum is to feed them money. One time two supercars rolled onto my driveway late at night. They were rentals, I could tell, three women in them and one man, an obvious pimp. I was his first contact, and I smoothed him over with some chit-chat about it being a slow night, and rates being good. He tipped me fifteen dollars for this meager information, and then immediately bolted inside to warn the desk clerk not to give rooms to the guy, and he drove off looking for another pop-up brothel.
I’ve seen a few madams, drug dealers, and body traffickers succeed in setting shop in our hotels before. There was a notorious supercriminal woman who frequented an old Hotel I used to work at. Her tactics and cunning were sophisticated enough that wiseguys knew what she was doing, but police didn’t have the just cause to raid her, at least not yet.
Prostitutes can be endemic depending on where you work. It is rather amusing when they pull up to the driveway and don’t know how to appropriately bill their car for valet. “Oh, you want to bill it to the room? What’s the name?” She’ll usually say “John, or Chris,” or some fruitless name like that. Then she has to message the guy on Whatsapp or Tinder to figure it out.
One time my life spiraled into a scary sort of depravity when I began chatting with two of the regular prostitutes in the area. I got their phone numbers, and they told me to refer trustworthy clients to them, which I did sometimes, without any compensation other than the hopeful gratuity from the John’s. Subsequently my two prostitute contacts inserted me into a groupchat with a larger number of working girls in the area, and there began a possibility of larger enterprise between a valet and sex workers. I balked at building more industry, though forayed into buying sex myself for the first time.
That’s the thing when the criminals give you money. It’s not really a gratuity. It’s an invitation into their trouble. I have turned down very few tips in my career. I should’ve turned down more.
Celebrities
It may be that famous people come to your valet location. This needs mentioning because, whether gushing or mocking, these people indeed live in a separate strata than everyone else. I almost feel bad for some. A celebrity must get annoyed sometimes feeling the need to be pedantic and generous to hotel wage staff all the time, right?
And they make recurring stories in my life when they behave in any way untoward during their visit. A certain popular Christian band stayed at a place I worked for a couple days. Their behavior was dismissive in general, and they brought with them an old VW bus which they refused to valet, though they parked it for hours at a time on the driveway, and never tipped the entire time. Worse yet, they did the most awful swindle of a bad customer when they insisted at numerous points that they would tip at the end of their stay, and that it would be large and satisfactory. They did not tip at all. Either that, or one of the valets stole the whole group tip for himself (this is distinctly possible). In any event, whenever this band is brought up in conversation, anywhere I am, I repeat this story.
I couple this story often with another band who stayed at the same location a year later—a band with music and album covers that has relatively obvious satanic themes. The satanic band was kind in conversation, well behaved around the driveway/hotel, and tipped moderately to well.
I also tell everyone I can know, when it’s appropriate to mention, how generous a certain basketball player was to me one evening, how he had a whole posse of people with him who handed out hundred dollar bills to every staff member.
Somewhat of a strange era that I must clarify this: but influencers or social media celebs do not really count in this category, by my estimation. Those people I can summarily state are just the same as any other visitor, only less likely to tip and more likely to encroach on driveway space. When I say “celebrities” I mean people so famous that they are generally trying to avoid ending up on the internet, rather aggressively posting on it like the aforementioned “influencers.”
What I want to impart is that the principal applied to celebrities shakes out for regular folks too: tell others about someone’s generosity when they grant it to you, or if you’re slighted horribly by someone, confide in a friend about the grievance. You probably do this anyway.
I’ve seen a lot of my coworkers request autographs, or event tickets from athletes/musicians, or photographs and the like from celebrities. Personally I can’t bring myself to do this, even when I want to sometimes. It just seems to me that if I was famous, I’d be so damned annoyed by such requests. Shit, I get annoyed when strangers ask me for a cigarette. Celebrities are the never ending pack. Other coworkers will just try to schmooze them more than normal, which seems even weirder to me.
When I lived on the East Coast, one time I was standing outside of a theatre and a famous actor popped out the side of the venue. He asked me for a light, and I gave it to him. I knew who he was, though frankly I couldn’t think of anything natural to say to him other than “you’re ______,” and so I didn’t, but remained silent, and we quietly smoked cigarettes next to each other. I got done with my smoke before him, snuffed it, and said “have a good day.” And he said “thanks.” Pretty boring story. But the image of it amuses me, and it still makes as good an impression as some phony baloney chat about his acting.
Uber/Lyft Drivers
Utter scum, a valet’s natural enemy, like cats and dogs, shit and swimming pools, war and peace. I have concocted many psychological theories over the years as to why Uber and Lyft drivers have absolutely zero sense or empathy when occupying driveway space, and display no contrition for their intense avarice when performing the most base act imaginable in front of a hotel: picking up or dropping off paying customers. My finest estimation is that a fair percentage of people who drive uber/lyft are personally incapable of working with others, and have elected an income source in which they have practically have no superiors. They can’t stand taking directions. Their personality is such that when a silly little man such as myself does something as simple as ask them to pull forward on the driveway, they become incensed. If my beard is too long, perhaps I remind them of their evil father who always told them what to do in life.
What seems most offensive to me about such stubborn behavior, in which they’ll block entire streets of traffic just to sit in idiotic places as they please, is that there’s some underlying assumption on their part that I am against them, that I would direct them to a position unfavorable out of spite and my own selfishness. Even with my now present resentment against these drivers, this is wildly untrue. My goal is to get them on the driveway and provide maximum customer service to their passengers, with a compromise regarding general traffic flow at the moment they are making their pick up or drop off.
One time a Lyft driver was reminding me to fuck myself, cursing me viciously, and I gave it right back to him, and we huffed and puffed like damned souls. But his passenger still hadn’t come out after ten or fifteen minutes, and in a sheepish defeat the lyft driver agreed to pull to the side, finally, while he waited. I went up to him, and I plainly asked him, “why are you guys always like this? It’s so easy what we’re doing here. We’re trying to help you. I want your customer happy and then you make lots of money and I make lots of money and we all win. What the fuck.” I emphasized the stupidity of it all. A lot of times I get discouraged about my job in general. I wonder if the whole industry isn’t useless, if God never intended valets. I mean, how could he? I’m not really helping anything. It’s not important. Might not be as counter-human as dealing blackjack, but my job sure as shit can’t be in paradise. Hell, I don’t even think there’s cars in heaven. As for earth, it ain’t gonna say “Valet” on my tombstone. At least I hope not.
Little incidents like the one with this Lyft driver amplify these thoughts, and though it’s doubtless that reflection about one’s manner of living is healthy much of the time, when these reflections are rooted in a resentment for another person or thing, they are probably not at all fruitful. If it matters at all—the lyft driver in question, who I had posed these philosophical wonderings to, did not have any sort of answer. I do not know what any of his thoughts on the matter were, then or later.
My advice about Ubers/Lyft is to boycott the whole industry, treat the working class individuals who populate the real-world interface with forgiveness, and keep trying your best to direct others in kindly ways even when they’re your enemy. In fact, especially when they’re your enemy. As I am well experienced on this job now, truly, I get satisfaction and joy out of dealing with tough customers. Whether it’s a guest who is full of valet disdain, or the aforementioned Ubers of the world, when the advent of a difficult personality occurs, I intentionally seek them out. There may be some notion of pride in me after all, about this work, for I know in such moments that I am the right man for the occasion. I am older and wiser looking than my usually young co-workers, I am experienced, I will be here tomorrow, whatever happens, most likely.