How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides: Chapters 17-19
Chapter 17: A Day in the Life
It is October, sometime in that long stretch between holidays when summer is certainly gone and fall teases cold times to come. In my region, this the off-season for hotels, and when I wake up around noon on a Wednesday, take my coffee, sit on the toilet and check the work schedule on my phone, I see that I’ll have Luke from 9-5 and the last 6 hours of my shift I’d be lone valet. Another slow afternoon, on paper.
I am renting a manufactured house near a university in San Diego at the time, and have been on the swing shift at work, 3-11, for several years. My roommate, a lady somewhere beyond the waves of feminism, is an artist who keeps similar hours. She usually stays up all night painting in the living room, I get home after midnight, catch her for the opening brushtrokes or tape laying before going to bed, and then wake up late the next day to vaginesque paintings all over the walls.
On this morning I have got up before her. There are some small 8 by 11 collage works on the floor which splice fashion models with poultry and slaughtered bovines. I stop to inspect and disgust a particular collage of an ultra-slender nude model, her mouth and eyes cut out, with a rope of raw beef either being projected from, or forced down her throat, and where her nipples are supposed to be, my roommate has pasted what seem to be eerie little crab eyeballs.
Pictured: some of her art from that time.
It is about two hours before I have to leave for the shift. As I caffeinate, I begin to think the swing shift isn’t for me. It’s a real cock block working the late hours, that’s when young folks get out and meet each other, after all. The internet, which I’m spending too much time on lately, pitches me a lot of dismal articles about why it’s hard to meet people, why my city, though lively and dense, is short on love. My algorithm is trying to depress me with this shit, and depression feeds on confirmation bias. That and screens in general.
So I finish the coffee and put down my phone. My roommate comes out, and I can tell she’d been crying for a while. Neither of us smoked pot and her eyes are red and sore as if she smoked half of California. It isn’t a thing I am going to bring up of course, I knew vaguely why, again, she was upset. Her boyfriend left her some months ago, and though she tried to date a lot in the post-show, none of it is working. I’ve heard women get over breakups faster than men, maybe true, but living with Sarah—I’ll never judge any woman as remotely unfeeling about loss.
We talk a little. She asks about my book. I was writing a book at the time. I guess I’m usually writing a book. Sometimes I finish, sometimes I don’t, but it’s nice to have something to work on. In between books is the worst. I’d like poems more if they lasted longer. Like a one night stand, there’s always something missing, something empty after a one-off bump. Nights can be long, but that sun comes up whether you’re ready or not, and it’s a dreadful feeling to be in retreat as the sun is coming up. I’ve seen a lot hotel guests over the years doing the “walk of shame,” I’ll be posted at the valet podium at some ungodly hour like 7am, and a woman comes clicking through the door in last night’s heels and a dress that wasn’t meant for sunlight. They always look supremely miserable, like soldiers who lost their whole battalion and walked miles back to base camp.
Books, long projects in prose, are like relationships. You think about them day to day. In the overstock of advice to young men, advice usually directed towards the hopelessly lonesome—advice for the guys who go to work, go home, go online, and go to sleep, not much else, well-meaning social humanitarian strangers will often recommend that these invisible young men pick up a hobby. I do not mean to come down too hard on this advice—after all, my books and poems are undoubtedly that hobby stripe—but there’s something about the “get a hobby,” or worse, “be passionate about something” lingo that feels like constructing a résumé for a romantic relationship that conflates precisely one of the areas of my life I’m trying to counter (my meaningless Palahniukian work life) with real, intimate human relationships. I am skeptical anyone on the internet who uses the word “passion” has any accurate notion of its slippery and wet meanings.
Long way of saying my thoughts are lot that morning “I’ve got to get off the swing shift,” and I whether I admitted it to myself any at all, I felt as confused as any internet drenched virgin about to how to get out of my situation.
The shift doesn’t start till 3pm, but for some reason, I leave home at about 1. There were a couple years of my life that I was so poor, food was difficult to afford. That time is long gone, materially I don’t lack much other than lustrous vacations or the top shelf, but one of my old strategies during the lean times was to just show up at work early and hope the boss let me clock in on account of surprise business, and I could profit a little extra. And if the boss doesn’t give the ok to clock in, I can always read or write in the meantime.
So I get to work at about 1:30. If you’re wondering, I drive an old Honda Civic with a front bumper that dangles suspiciously, almost never washed and it has enough scrapes and dings that when I interview for new valet sites I park it off site. At the time of this story, I think I was off cigarettes, so my interior would be like the ghost of cancer past. I wheel the thing around the side of the hotel and into the underground garage. I’m a supervisor, and therefore granted my own clicker to open the gate.
By the time I’ve arrived, the account manager—the boss of our valet operation at this hotel, has taken off for the day. It’s his habit. On the schedule he’s 9-5, but he usually only sticks around a few hours, feels the deadness of work inactivity, and collects his salary elsewhere. I did not expect him to be there, but for some reason I’m still peeved that he’s gone.
Luke, the valet on duty, has brought a chair up to the valet stand, one of the low ones from the breakfast area with a comfortable seat and back that hides him perfectly behind the podium so he can surf through his phone without being spied at all by pedestrians. He’s also angled correctly between the pillars and the front door of the hotel so that the camera facing the driveway cannot see him. Smart kid. Luke is all of 18 years old and looks very boyish even more so than others that age. He’s fun to work with because he’s so cantankerous, takes things personal from the guests like when a smart looking religious family checks in and doesn’t bother to thank him for unloading the luggage, he says devastating, hyperbolic things like “goddamn protestants!” to you. And Luke isn’t lecherous like a lot of my young co-workers. Maybe it’s a result of him having many sisters or something, you’ll never catch Luke murmuring a fiendish bonerism. I’ve worked with so many young men, and I’m probably above average at remembering people, but Luke, even though someone who only stuck on the job a few months, is still someone that strikes me as outstanding. I hope women don’t tear him down sooner or later. Not that I personally harbor many negative expectations of one gender over another, Luke just seems like the kind of guy who is going to vow celibacy in a sad way if he gets broken up in a bad way.
We chat. I haven’t clocked in, but I stand with him at the podium. He talks about quitting the job. Not enough money. See, he’s part time. I’m full time. In the off season, I can survive on the hourly, even if the shifts are dull and tipless. For him, there’s no such hours, and a paycheck of 150 dollars every two weeks has got to feel rather useless—he muses about getting a second job, but it’s stressful job searching, and employers always want that clean “I can work anytime, anyday” bullshit even without any intention of stacking your days with regular easy-to-plan-life-around shifts. Sometimes I think bosses write schedules like a child playing pin the work on a donkey. Blindfolded.
There’s a lull in our conversation, then he asks me the question I knew was coming: “can I leave when you start?” I sigh and say yes. It means no lunch break, but judging by the atmosphere, the whole shift is going to be like a lunch break anyway. He asks when I’m going to clock in, and I explain 2:30 is the earliest I could start, can’t get overtime because I don’t want to hear about it from the boss. He proposes a scenario where he tells the boss he was sick and had to leave, so I can get OT without remonstrance. I explain to him he’s going to have to do that anyway—the meal break penalty incites the boss’s fury just as much as the OT 1. “Then what’s the difference?” Luke asks me.
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I do not know how labor laws work across the country: in California, you get paid an hour of wages for the “meal penalty” (not taking an off the clock break for over 5 hours of work). You also get two ten minute breaks, by law, on the clock, and pretty much every company I’ve ever worked for in this state has been hit with lawsuits for violation of these laws. In the resultant payout of these lawsuits, I receive a small check in the mail, sometimes as ridiculous as less than ten dollars, though notably I once received upwards of two hundred from a valet company. I assume there are leagues of lawyers who pocket huge sums for these labor victories, as their cut is a percentage between a few firm employees that is in the millions, while the other millions are cut between thousands of the company employees. Strange world.
A view from the driveway, the boardwalk, and a seagull from the boardwalk
I’ve probably been down there thousands of times. I grew up in the area, and now I work here, but something about being dressed in my work clothes, being alone, I don’t know what it is, but I feel like a stranger, like the other people who might glance at me assume I’m from out of town. I feel goofy. It’s hot and I didn’t put on any sunscreen so I head back to the hotel after just fifteen or twenty minutes on the beach, and for the next thirty I just sit in the break room looking at my phone, saying “hullo” and “how are you doing?” to the hotel and restaurant workers that pass by. Eventually the time comes I can relieve Luke.
Crossing the lobby of the hotel towards the driveway, I see Melanie at the front desk, staring at her computer. The wheels in her head turn very slowly, so when I say hi to her, and she looks up, I don’t know if she’s actually surprised to see me, but her face animates like a robot just being turned on. I don’t like Melanie because she’s a type of front desk agent who views the valet team as a multilimbed parasite—by her reckoning we are an unclean hanger on in her pure hotel community, and our relationship is one she subtly seeks to purge, but at present she is stuck admitting us to the ghetto outside the front door. There are many hotel staff who grow this subconscious division in their minds, especially when the valets are contracted by a “third-party.”
So anyway, I ask Melanie who is working the desk tonight, who is going to be my only company for 8 or 9 hours. She says she doesn’t know and I should check the schedule in the back for myself. I wish I had a fart loaded in my bowels to launch at her.
I go to the back room without a peep of flatus. There’s some dried up donuts looking at me like sunburnt asscheeks on the desk, a little post-it note that reads “housekeeping” with a smiley face on the lid. Useless. Solzhenitsyn and Frankl said prisoners minds are occupied most by simplicities like food and cigarettes. Its downright insulting to utter their names by comparison with my job, though it’s the thought I get when I see those donuts, and my revulsion for them; how often myself and my co-workers chatter about food and what freebies might be in the break room, how even the free meals at hotels with full kitchens is about 50 percent of all our social conversations. What other bases do we talk about? Food, sex, and television. Also money. That has to be 90 percent of all our talking points, when there aren’t cars to park. When a more amiable front desk agent arrives I will bitch to her about the ugly donuts, surely, and my bad luck for not having an earlier shift when they were moist and voluptuous.1
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If you’ve ever wondered about non-monetary gratuities: yes, food is generally a happy tip to receive. I do think you’re a bit of a chaunce moron if you tip me beer, weed, or spirits, but food is delightful.
I log in to the computer and look at the daily numbers: 48 percent occupancy, 33 arrivals, no check outs.
This back room has a small storage space, a refrigerator in the corner, cabinets full of useful hotel miniature items like soap, nail kits, deodorant… I’ve gotten in the habit of using their disposal brushes and toothpaste before every shift, and hardly ever brush my teeth at home anymore. So as I’m giving my gums a lacquer in the back room, I pull open the drawer of tampons just for fun. I don’t know why really, but seeing a thousand tampons all in one drawer is just oddly satisfying to me.
Looking at the desk schedule on the wall, I see it’s only one desk agent coming in that evening—Melanie who is up there now is more sour than usual because she’s stuck another 3 hours till Vanessa comes in.
See, their schedule today was designed in a real awkward way—three 5 hour shifts, all three agents working them alone, real boring stuff, and another bad reminder that business is mega dead.
I pop out the back door of the office to the hallway and rinse in the employee bathrooms. One quirk of this hotel is that the lobby bathrooms for guests are small—only a couple toilets in each of them, so when a hotel guest really has to go or otherwise gets lost he’ll sometimes go in this back corridor and find the employee ones. One time I was showering in the employee bathroom, because they have showers, providently, and someone from outside began banging on the door violently. Assuming I had started a flood or something, I turned off the water immediately, still soapy, toweled myself indelicately, and answered the door. It was a hotel guest in a potty emergency. I was not nice to him. He complained to the hotel, and I had to sit through a round of HR meetings, and they toyed around with prohibiting showers anymore at all. Some months later, hotel management passively removed the shower curtains from those bathrooms without any formal announcement of whether or not we’re still allowed to use them, and now every time I see the curtainless shower with water all over the floor from someone who didn’t bother to clean up after themselves, I think of that crazed pooper yelling at me through a crack in the bathroom door, the bald top of his head with moles and freckles, and me half naked cursing and mumbling proud “employees only’s” at him. It’s like a bad dream or a sitcom sketch. One part miserable, one part hysterical, and the water all over now on the employee bathroom floor, maybe my fault.
I check my appearance in the bathroom mirror. Some bad skin I give a little tissue to, some defiant hair askance up top that I can’t keep ordered even with water. My beard is not company issue at this length. Oh well, not that many people are going to see it today. I don’t bother to think that I’m 28 years old, a recent college graduate living check to check with a whole lot of fear about the future. I couldn’t have known anyway that the actual future was going to be a lot harder than my imagination. On the other hand, I couldn’t have known I’d work be working the same job 6 years later—a fact that would’ve put the old me in someplace worse than the nuthouse, where I was fated for. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve changed. I’m quite happy with it now, but on this day I’m describing, well, I couldn’t think about these things. Easier to think about food, or sex, or television. Also money.
I go downstairs in the basement, where the garage is, and walk its distance towards the timeclock. There aren’t many cars, maybe a dozen. The way they’ve been parked irritates me a little. My coworkers, in this slow time of business, are lazily parking compacts in the oversize spaces because they’re nearer to the stairwell, and they’re also leaving vehicles in the forward “A” spots rather than backing them in to the wall so that the garage looks highly non-professional, like drunk ants got hit with a can of raid in the middle of an embarrassing work party. But I forgive it all quickly, remembering that there’s a season for everything. Now is the season of thoughtless wheels and metal and meaningless lines in the parking garage. My bank account is still flush with summer, though, and I guess I haven’t turned my brain over from the hot days where the driveway was flooded with so much activity I was leaving sweat stains of my ass and back on the seats of AMG’s, and gross cylinders of perspiration on the center console from where I rested my arm for just a moment, and when the garage was a puzzle of which cars to double park.
With satisfaction, a detail I can’t recall about this era is my timecard number. What I do remember is that the digital clock at that location was cracked from one of our employees punching it in frustration. The irony of this anger punch amused me every single time I saw it, like some cheese Orwellian poetic device from his socialist era of literature. Someone had literally punched the clock!
Luke leaps from his chair like Fred Flintstone when I get back upstairs, though I doubt he knows who Fred Flintstone is. He hands over the keys to the podium and says thanks and farewell. I don’t know why, but I like that Luke doesn’t do any fist bumping, high-fiving, or hand shaking when he leaves. Most of my coworkers over the years always want to perform one of these physical rituals, and then I feel pressure that if I don’t offer my knuckles or hand on a given shift, I’m slighting them socially. The older I get, the more ludicrous it becomes: often my managers are men 5 to 10 years my junior, and when one of them dressed in their suit and their FIFA style haircut goes for a fist bump with gray faced valet uniformed me—I feel like killing myself again, a little bit.
So I’m alone. It’s 2:30. At high end hotels, official “check-in” and “check-out” times mean very little. The rich move whenever and wherever they please. But this was a mid-grade establishment. That means the common people are going to abide seriously by the 4pm check in. Until then, I have little to do. I sweep the driveway, I pace around, I count the keys we have on the board. Back then we didn’t have an app for this stuff—no IPad for accounting of cars (or receiving texts from guests), so by a vague estimation of ticket accounting, I’ve calculated that there’s only 4 cars “out and returning.”
Four o’clock comes around and that’s my business for the day. By 5, I’m down to 16 check ins. There were a couple moments where I was precariously staging the new arrivals on the driveway, unable to park anything before a new one arrived. But it never got so bad I blocked the street. At this hotel, the driveway only fits about 6 cars total, at which point there would be zero space for anyone else trying to enter. Fairly standard for most hotels, though occasionally you may work at a place that has football field sized arena, and the only worry is losing keys or ignoring someone waiting.
I’ve forgot to bring a book with me, so I use my phone to read the public domain. Between 6-8 I get through most of King Lear. I also write a brief poem on the back of a company memo. It may have been this one:
In the hotel lobby
a sign by the front desk reads:
“there will be no waffles this morning”
and underneath this bad omen
the image of a half-man, half-waffle,
his shoulders roundly defeated,
hands in the air with fingers bent in anguish,
tired, surrendering. The waffle-man weeps.
There has been a waffle catastrophe,
some kind of massacre in the middle of the night
which the desk lady is hoping we don’t ask about,
perhaps a flapjack uprising
or a pogrom on checkered skillets.
They are hiding it from us, this genocide,
and all we know is that today
“there will be no waffles.”
Between 8-11 I’m feeling social and talk to some of the regulars. Mr. Jackson always has a cigar around sundown, so he’s easy to catch up with. His conversation is always frivolous—manly sorts of jokes with soft bite, sports talk, yuck yucking about the weather. He works for a defense contractor that develops everything from computer chips to heavy artillery. Their stock has doubled since I met him.
Vanessa at the front desk and I watch various youtube clips together. She likes the ones where news anchors make embarrassing gaffes, usually of a sexual nature. She seldom shares details about her personal life, either. I’d bet she’s read up on the internet about keeping coworkers at a long distance, or maybe she’s just naturally a private sort of woman. She’s married to a guy who used to work at the hotel, but got fired for being stoned on the job. He still comes around to see her, every now and again, often toting their two kids. The both of them drive AMG’s and have a habit of parking them on the driveway while they pick up random things here and there, or drop each other off, quick stops, sure, but it’s generally frowned upon for any hotel employee to ever cross the driveway, but certain employees, like Vanessa and her husband, don’t even seem to have it on their radar to adhere to high-end standards like an employee entrance or valet service. I have no comprehension how they afford those cars on what they’re making.
Between 9-11 at least there’s some fun running items up for guests—these are the hours they want extra blankets or toothpaste or the TV is broken help, help. One man, who I deliver some food to, is upset that the bathroom door doesn’t lock. I’m standing in the hotel room with him when he expresses this, and as far as I can tell, there is nobody else in the unit. Also, under what circumstances would you be sharing a hotel room with anybody you have to be worried about locking the bathroom door?
Khris comes in at 11, my relief. He smells like marijuana but I don’t think it’s from smoking it—it’s from the actual flower being on his person. His habit is to light up in the garage after I leave. Sometimes he invites me to join him. He’s 45 years old and talks ceaselessly about the terrible woman he lives with. Tonight it’s the story about the time she got him arrested. The way he tells it is pretty straightforward: she cheats on him, presumably in the weeks prior to the arrest night, he gets mad (but doesn’t hurt her), she calls the cops, he gets arrested. In certain iterations of the story, he wishes he had hurt her, at least got his money’s worth since after all, he got arrested anyway. I stay till about 11:30 talking to Khris. I don’t care much to hear about his lady problems, but if you get him going about other subjects, he’s delightful, and underneath anything I could say about the man, this is the only valet I’ve ever known who gives away probably 100 percent of his tips, usually to homeless folks who sleep nearby. He’s a rare type of person who is empathetic, or interested in others to a degree that makes him very likable. He’s one of maybe ten people who have ever read my college thesis. He even wrote down his thoughts about it and gave me notes. I hang out nowadays with a fairly high number of writers, poets, aspiring artbags, and I don’t think any of them ever read my stuff with as much attention as Khris the valet.
I also spend a little time chatting with the night auditor at the front desk (that’s what they call graveyard front desk agents, auditor), Thomas. He wants me to come out golfing with him. He always wants me to come out golfing, but dammit that game costs sixty dollars every round. I joke with him we could go disc golfing, for free. Ha. Ha. Ha.
By 11:45 I’m on the freeway headed home, blasting music with a parental advisory, lots of profanity, and horny overtones. It’s been 9 hours of lobby friendly pop and I need to scratch the vulgar itch in my gut. Then it occurs to me that I haven’t eaten all day. I just sort of forgot, so I pull off at a familiar exit and stuff myself with greasy midnight burgers. Eating with company is divine. Eating alone at a restaurant is maybe intellectual. Eating alone in a car is bordering on heresy.
However, any self-reflection I was morbidly suffering about the car-burgers is nullified when I get back to the house and see my roommate eating a vegan burrito standing over the kitchen sink. Wet slices of tomato and chopped iceburg squirt with an avocado lubrication at every bite. Messy, beefless oral pleasure, and we both have a little laugh about it. “It,” I suppose, is our respective solo meals, but perhaps “it” is also a little bit our lives.
I can’t fall asleep for another two hours. I try to though. What I want, for whatever silly reason, is to get up earlier the next day, and have something of a morning to myself before the next shift. But until about 2am I just lay in bed, waiting.
One thing I like about this job, and something I can recognize having wrapped up this chapter, is that I can say assuredly there are no “typical days,” and that if I were trying to poetically offer you an average glimpse of the profession like one of those training day tutorials mocked up by the company PR team, I should be very well perplexed to present anything confidently in the way of “normal.” Valet work changes like seasons—it is somewhat predictable, gets hot and cold as expected, suffers some storms, and never exactly repeats itself.
The Moonset From Where I Worked
Chapter 18: Common to Not-So-Common Mistakes
Here are some of the most regular mistakes that get made on the valet job. Where I can offer advice how to remedy them, I will. Some, I cannot.
The number one mistake valets make is on the driveway. They fail to adequately direct traffic. Your typical driveway can maintain about 6 vehicles on it. Any more than that and you’ll back up the street, people will be stuck waiting, perhaps people not even coming to your location will be delayed. I am quite sure I could consult any valet location on the best practices for their site. Each drive I’ve seen is, in point of fact, remarkably quirky, and for this reason perhaps, the general public has little to no clue how to approach them with any regard for other traffic. At least that’s what I tell myself to keep from feeling at times that the whole human race is impossibly self-centered. Everyone is the main character in car culture. California, I’d rate, is the most spiritually desolate territory in America, mostly because we’re car-centric.
Cars normally take the most selfish route towards the front entrance of the valet venue. This is rule, not the exception. Your job, as a valet, is to direct them in a compromising position that helps you keep the driveway moving as well as serving them. So, some generalities:
a) Make big goofy hand movements to wave them in. Quit trying to look cool in this life, if you suffer from
that sort of stupidity. Face it, you already have a job that doesn’t get women excited. Suck it up and
direct traffic. Yell, kindly, if the windows of the approaching car are rolled down. Right this way. As a
generality, most driveways make it desirous to have incoming cars pull as far forward as possible. You
should be directing traffic this way (far up past the entrance) even when there’s no other incoming traffic
present. You never know quite how long it’s going to take a new arrival to unload.
b) Always leave a lane open for cars to flow in and out of the driveway, if you can.
c) Don’t be shy asking a driver to reposition their car if they’ve done a poor job on first approach.
d) Only an extreme minority of people will question you about where you direct them. It’s important with
this particular customer to be level: simply state that you have other traffic in mind, that it’s not about
them. Emphasize, if you need to, that you see hundreds of cars come through per day. But be warned,
the kind of guest who argues about this has a deeply confrontational personality. They want trouble
sometimes. Don’t let an argument ensue. In the same accord, a very rare visitor will intentionally mess
up your flow of traffic (probably an Uber driver). This is a bad situation, but you do have a few options.
You can try to be civil, and repeatedly ask them to move. Alternatively you can let a mess of traffic build
up and alert everybody you can whose fault it is until the public shame becomes enough to move them. I
do not often advise this last tactic. People are generally so deluded into thinking they are the main
character that devastating an entire ecosystem doesn’t bother them.
e) Finally, and the paramount note about cars on the driveway: always get car keys for any vehicle left in
front of your valet stand. I don’t care what anybody says: if they intend to leave the car on the driveway
and move their bodies anywhere else in the world, I need the keys. I’ve worked with valets who don’t
accomplish this standard. They’ll believe somebody who says they’ll just be a minute going to the
bathroom. Look, you’re not asking a lot when you ask for someone’s keys. We’re in the business of moving
cars for money. Free driveway time is favor. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve interrupted people’s dinner dates
before, right in the restaurant over all the romance and candlelight money can buy to ask a man for the
keys to his Mustang, which he left on the driveway, duping one of the younger valets into believing he’d
leave a fat tip for the privilege of watching his paperweight Ford. Always get the keys.
2. Lost car keys. Yes, we do lose keys quite often. “Lost” is a relative term. The situation will usually arise like this:
guest requests their car. You go to the key vault/podium. You don’t see the keys there.
The first thing to do is to scour that key vault brutally. If you know what make the car you’re looking for is, one method may be ignoring the keytags altogether and only looking for the correct key type. Nine times out of ten, the lost keys are in their somewhere, but misplaced on the wrong hook or lying around errantly. Once in a while someone has fashioned the wrong identifying keytag on the keys. This is hilariously bad, but you don’t have time to find it funny.
If the keys are not in that storage area, you need to run the length of the garage to find the car itself. They may be in there. That’s the second most common place they’ll be—in the car. However, even if they’re not in the car, it will be one more mystery solved to know that the car is indeed there at all.
If you still can’t find the keys, it’s time to start radioing/calling the other valets, and asking if they have them on their body. In the most desperate of situations, you need to call off-duty valets as well.
You have about 15 minutes before you need to come clean with the guest, typically. Maybe more if they called ahead of time, or it looks like you’re busy on the drive. Eventually though, you’ll need to be tell the guest exactly what’s happening, and start negotiating. You can explain the situation to them honestly, see if they’re willing to wait longer while you keep looking, or you may need to order them a ride. Rarely, although on occasion, keys go really truly missing, and you’ve got to call the locksmith. Depending on the car type this can be expensive. You company will pay it, of course. If you don’t have the local locksmith in your phone, fix that. As with all semi-serious fuck ups, don’t forget to comp the guest’s parking.
If, say, the guest has taken the uber you offered to their destination, and you have more time to keep searching, the ugly task of looking through every single car you currently keep is in order. It’s fairly common a valet drops them in someone else’s car.
3. Losing your personal items in a car.
I recommend you don’t carry anything in your pockets you’re not willing to lose on the job. If your phone falls out of your pocket in a guest car, you can hope they notice and bring it back. I’ve seen this happen several times, and in fact once I lost my phone in a car and tracked them down the street because they had mentioned which restaurant they were going to.
Say you drop a thing like a vape or a pack of cigarettes in their car. Take the L and admit it’s yours if they bring it back. Last note about this: be patient. People are fairly kind in most regards, and certainly in this context. One time a young valet asked me what to do when he lost his phone in a car. I told him very specifically, “wait about 48 hours.” He didn’t listen. He bought a brand new phone the same night he lost the old one, and then the next day the old one was returned by the rental company of the car he had dropped it in.
4. Leaving doors unlocked/windows rolled down.
Tangentially, some readers of this book, whether they’re valets or not, simply cannot imagine how insanely busy certain valet locations are. Some sites routinely manage a thousand cars every weekend. With a staff of ten to fifteen guys. I preface this mistake this way because personally, when I see a window left down on a car in the morning, I’m very quick to forgive whomever might’ve done it. The job gets nuts sometimes. Same goes for the dope who fails to label the parking spot (another small, common mistake). And while I’m still in disclaimers, I encourage anybody to seldom hold others accountable for honest mistakes of minor inconvenience. What I mean is, when managers come to me personally and say things like “hey, write the spot down after you park,” I feel sort of insane. It’s like telling me to zip my fly up after using the bathroom. He’s correcting something that there’s no disagreement over. Arguably, the reminder may be helpful, though now I’m wasting mental energy feeling insane about it all.
Anyway.
Some valet’s genuinely don’t realize how bad it is to leave windows down or cars unlocked. Usually the awakening is harsh and rude. People rarely steal items from inside these vulnerable vehicles. The homeless, though, have a habit of doing far worse. Sometimes they pee or defecate in them, use drugs in them, sleep in them, or all of the above. I have seen many occasions where a vagrant simply vandalized an unlocked car in hideous and strange manners—took all the contents inside the car and scattered them around like a diabolic trash puzzle. The extent to which a valet is familiar with these vandals is entirely related to location. A valet in a downtown city environment is sure to witness, repetitively, the insane and baffling extremes of vagrant body violations. I have told many homeless to leave a parking garage over the years. In fact, authoring that tiny sentence opens my memory to dozens of depraved and terrible displays I’d rather forget.1
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See chapter 23 on Homeless
On this particular mistake, I advise reminding any valet staff to correct the error immediately. Like all problems on the job or perhaps in life, take measurement of the risk versus effort and calculate any rewards or consequences.
Uncommon Mistakes
Once in a while, you may give away the wrong car to a customer. This usually happens with rentals.
I browsed YouTube for videos related to valet parking one time, and I came across a newstation that decided to set up a sting operation where they duped valets into giving them a car without being the rightful owners of it. This amused me a great deal. It’s not impossible, but I’ve never heard a real story of this happening, nor does the human species operate on the basis of evil very often. More than 99 percent of the time, if someone insists that a vehicle is theirs, or if a wife tells you her husband has the ticket upstairs, they’re being honest. The scenario created by the news team preys on a common valet occurrence—someone not having the ticket—and the good will humanity.
All that said, what does happen, albeit infrequently, in good faith, a patron thinks a certain rental car on the driveway is theirs because it matches the vague memory of they had from the night before a the airport. However, rental cars lack any personality, and are easily confused. The person will tell you assuredly a certain car is theirs. It isn’t. If you don’t double-check the keys, you’ve got a real problem leaving the driveway.
And yet, it’s not actually an incredible mistake to amend. You have to contend with the rightful renter when they come out later, who you can call a cab or fix up with a ride somewhere somehow. Or. WITH THE CONSENT OF ALL PARTIES, you can give away the other rental to this person. I’ve seen this done especially when both renters used the same airport lot, and are headed there to return the cars on the same day. It’s bad. But not that bad. But like I said, most of humanity is operating on good faith, and since you haven’t actually lost anything, but rather, mixed it up, all the pieces are still accounted for, and easy to return.
But to avoid any trouble like this, you need to be uptight about checking names and tickets mostly with rental cars.
The closest scenario I’ve seen to that newscast was when a middle aged woman drove a Porsche GT3 RS onto the driveway and valeted not unusually. However, my prejudices as a man did think it was unusual that a woman of her style would operate such a vehicle (for those of you unfamiliar, the RS is, without hyperbole, a barely street legal racecar), but I dismissed my suspicions as exactly that—prejudice. Unfortunately, prior to her arrival, she was in a domestic row with her husband. He appeared later, claiming she stole his car, and thus we were embroiled in a wealthy couple’s soapish affair. And like something out of a soap opera, she had been up at the bar in the interim getting saucy and sloshy. Ultimately the husband “stole” the car back right from our garage, and police were summoned later.
Like the first time I read the Great Gatsby, what a disaster—I was presented with the mean idea that rich people suffer dumb and passionate lives too.
Stolen Cars (?) and General Theft
In a decade on the job, I’ve never seen a car stolen, outright. I do know of two instances that occurred while I was away from the site. This is the first, and the other I will tell later. It was at an upscale location I worked seasonally. That particular driveway was enormous and glorious—you could stage up to 40 or 50 cars on it. It took minutes just to walk from one end of the driveway to the other.
Perhaps owing to this large driveway, valets at that location had a habit of leaving keys on the dashboard, windows rolled down, while a car was staged.
The unusual part of the theft, or at least what we all mentioned as unusual in hindsight, was that the property was well off the beaten path. You had to drive a car significantly uphill, and almost a whole mile before reaching the driveway and the front desk. Any pedestrians making the journey up this hill would look out of place immediately, and they’d even walk awkwardly through security gates designed for vehicles—the resort was so swanky that when politicians or ultra wealthy citizens held events, these security gates would monitor traffic like the ones at military bases. Granted, they’re not staffed for that during normal business days. All that’s to say, it felt like a base, like nobody vagrant would ever just wander in and steal a car, which is precisely what happened.
It was a rental car, fortunately I guess, nothing flashy at all. A Chevy Malibu. There is someone in this world who knows what happens to stolen cars in detail, the same way I know how to park the daylights out of anything, so forgive me if I sound ignorant when stating my incredulity about how the car was recovered only a week later, in another country, and ultimately my valet company was not brought to a settlement over the missing vehicle. Two valets, however, got canned.
It’s probably not much of a loss, really, to be fired from this sort of job. However, if you want to maintain and protect yours, keep this in mind about the stolen car story: everybody—every valet at that location was leaving keys in cars, at some time or another. The supervisors even advised it during rush business. The two that got fired were no more guilty than the other two dozen valets on staff. Sometimes you’ve got to be more careful than everybody else. When someone presents you with a risky behavior on the pretense that “everybody does it,” well, sometimes everybody is wrong, or mad, or they don’t spare the time to do things right.
Chapter 19: Losing the Valet Ticket (And Being on the Other Side)
It was a dark and stormy night and I was on the trail for rapture. Like so many Americans, I had mixed up notions of the word, not sure whether it was apocalypse or infinite jizz. I mistook pleasure as a destination rather than a road, and would not see the root common to hapless and happiness until much later, obvious as it was.
I’d been driving for all the daylight hours and traveled, lord, a lot more than 500 miles from my home. There was no plan, no reservation as dead Bourdain liked to edgelord his way around television. I went over a bridge, into a tall city, and wheeled my car to the valet stand of a hotel with enough floors to BASE jump from and windows that reflect sky so finely you can prance naked in the suite without a care in your loins.
Fashion companies, when they make their clothes, have some type of customer or muse in mind that walks in their store, buys their clothes, and prances around life, a slinky advertisement in flesh. Hotels do this too. There’s an ideal customer for them, an imagination of a travel ad you see on the in/flight magazines. The hotel I was at imagines a man supposed to sit in those suite windows sipping champagne and trading stocks while his wife unzips her little black dress from a night out at a gaudy restuarant called “Vaginosis” or some risqué euro-crap.
But a guy like me can bring a rather confused American reality to the scene—a man with style like rocks in the desert, who drives a car that wears every mile of the 200 thousand on the odometer in a wounded, yet prideful clanging ugliness, reeks of cigarettes and carries luggage that ain’t vintage, just old. I’m an embarrassment to the brand, like a fat mobster in Versace tights. My car, my clothes, my whole being did not match the intended “muse” of the hotel I was checking into, that much was obvious when I rolled into the valet stand, an operation run by a company I was familiar with, as a rival. I love dealing with other valets, seeing how they treat me. At this hotel a red-haired, pimple faced, 20 year old wrote me the ticket. I sensed that their driveway was discombobulated, he was alone at the moment and holding down a difficult interim while his coworkers ran other cars, and for this reason I played everything perfectly straight: yes I will valet my car, my name is ______, here’s five dollars and my keys. I checked in with the speed and grace of a suit and tie business traveler, without the suit and tie.
I went to the room. I find a kind of incredible peace, blended with shame and regret at the moment a hotel door closes behind me, when the room seals with this ironic silence, because I have loud memories in such places. A lot of wickedness happens in hotel rooms. I’ve done a lot of wickedness in hotel rooms. The Bibles they put in there not intended to proselytize. They’re a quiet suicide prevention.
As I began undressing, I realized I forgot something in the car. Worse yet, I did not know where the item would be in the car precisely, my vehicle was a road trip catastrophe interior—I could not rightly ask a valet to root around its crannies, lest he palm or finger a rotten Danish, or stick his hand in an improvised ashtray. Immediately I thought of all the times I’ve been on the other side of this happenstance: hotel guest walks back out right after I’ve parked their car and needs it again. It’s annoying, even if I’m in the best of moods. And now, as the guest, I find it annoying too, the fact I have to deal with young humans just to reach my vehicle, that I’m without liberty to search my property in private.
But it gets worse. On my way back downstairs, I realize I’ve lost my valet ticket. My pockets yield nothing but the usual junk. I’m mortified. How many times have I judged this sort of carelessness? How many times have I sighed at the hotel guest who lost his ticket, dodged eye contact with them and scrambled my fingers over our electronic database to look up their loser-ticket-name? It’s another part of the job I know is unjust to be peeved about, but a lost ticket grates on me like a classmate always missing their pencil, begging for my extra.
And so, walking down those stairs, despite my expertise at the profession, I am a ticket loser. I am a troublesome customer. The only sure way to get forgiveness from a valet is a tip,1 though I don’t want to tip simply because I’ve made a faux pas towards a service I didn’t exactly ask for in the first place. The mentality of so many valet haters is that they could do the job themselves, why let another man park his car? And if there is anyone on this planet who is rightly entitled to thinking “I could park my own car here,” it is me. I had these thoughts. So I suppose, whenever anyone stiffs a valet, there is always justification behind the empty hand. Whatever the situation, some mental energy is expended by the stiffer, they have reason to withhold: they think rightly of themselves. And I also wonder, how many tips come from guilt? The “sorry to bother” kind of fiver. I seldom feel this sort of thing, to be honest. But the closer I got to the valet stand, the worse I felt about myself. I lost the ticket. Career valet couldn’t even hold on to his own ticket for 5 minutes. How could I be trusted with anything?
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I must qualify this statement, because there are a few very rare occasions where an unruly guest apologized to me, and they meant it. They acknowledged that their interaction was rude, are sorry, and talked it out a little. These people are destined for heaven, I suspect. Again, I emphasize, this is incredibly rare. Less than 1 in a 1000 out of many rude encounters over the years, and to clarify, their rudeness was on a scale far greater than my small piss in this example of losing the ticket.
How could this have happened? I check my pockets again. I lost the ticket. Sometimes, I think about my friends and family, or loose acquaintances I know away from my job. I think about how they would behave at the valet stand, if they’d tip, if they’d be the sort confused by the whole process, if they’d have an ugly amount of luggage. I often think I can spot the character who tips two dollar bills on first meeting. I’m probably wrong about a lot of my imaginations, because I never thought I’d be the type to lose the ticket. And so quickly.
But perhaps there is a special gap in our imaginations when they’re about ourselves. Even when able to imagine our shortcomings, we don’t picture them in small or humble varieties. We think grand of ourselves in strength as well as weaknesses, harder to imagine our little grievances; harder to imagine how we might be something ordinary, the bad customer.
Saint Peter was a fisherman before he started hanging out with Jesus. Legend has it he was a good one, too, not just someone scraping by in the fish industry, but a man with wide distribution and enterprise across his whole region. I wonder what he was like, when he gave it up and started walking around with Christ, when his God walked through the very cities he used to do business in, while Jesus was busy healing the lame and sick, did Peter ever cock his head towards the fish competition, their stinking product on crooked wooden tables, did he ever think, “what fools, that’s a bad fish market right there?” Did Peter’s mind feel pleased about the word, “he who can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things?” Peter, did you think one bad fish on the table was a rotten soul at work?
Now I am become a little distrustful. I’ve lost my ticket. I approached the valets and sheepishly explained myself. I emphasize I can walk to the car, or they can bring it out again, whatever’s easier. I walk to the car with one of them. We chat a little bit. I tell where I’m from, where I work. I really yuck it up that I know all about the valet world, I try to drop esoteric references like “flash valet” and “drive-in rate” to flex my knowledge. He does not seem the slightest impressed. He seems as annoyed as I am when I walk any guest to the garage. When I get my shit, and we get back to the driveway, the valet asks me if I’d like a new ticket. I swear to him I’ll find the one they gave me, no, no, don’t worry. It has got to be somewhere. “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!”