How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides: Chapters 20-22
Chapter 20: If I Win the Lottery—
I’ve told you I don’t care much about cars, but I confess my first purchase would be a gaudy one—I’m thinking one of the new Rolls that’s got the suicide doors. I don’t know what colors are factory for a Rolls Royce as I’ve never browsed their dealerships before, but I’d have it match the suit I’m going to buy—probably church purple, a color Lenten and ostentatious at the same time. Plus it looks good on me.
I’d buy my girlfriend a dress and jewelry that would be so fine even an extra terrestrial would know she’s sexy, or at least, confuse her for queen of all humans.
If I won the lottery, we’d get ourselves in these Gala clothes, spritz our bodies in thousand dollar perfume, hop in the Rolls Royce and light cigarettes with Cruella Deville holders.
I would take the old commute, exactly as I’ve done it for months and years to my valet job. We would pull up to the valet stand and I would be blasting Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet over the stereo, windows down. One of my coworkers would approach my window. How is he going to act exactly? I don’t know, but I will pretend I’ve never met him before, admonish him and the other valets standing on the driveway for not getting the lady’s door quicker. If I won the lottery, I will say to my coworker: “ugh, dreadful hotel you’ve got here, modern architecture is so Protestant, even when it wishes to be atheist.” And my coworker will mutter some confusion. “The whole joint looks like one of those fancy prisons you see Norway bragging about. Look how well the inmates live!”
Here I will toss my keys at him. A Rolls Royce key fob is very heavy, which is perfect. I’ll also have my miniature library card attached, the key to my parents house where I’m likely still living (I told you this is my first purchase), and a tank of pepper spray, for good measure. It will not be a mean toss, however, I do hope he fumbles and drops them. If I won the lottery, I’d begin walking towards the hotel entrance, and I suspect my coworkers, still trying to talk to me like my old self, waiting for me to make a dick joke or the big Willy Wonka somersault, will forget to write me a ticket. I will affectionately palm the lower back of my girlfriend, and with a soft fingertip glide over her hip, pivot myself around to the valets before I go inside, and I will say “aren’t I supposed get a ticket?”
They will probably insist it’s not necessary. I’m famous. They’ll know me when I come out later for the car. And I will say “ah, yes, of course.” And at this moment I will snuff my cigarette on the ground, right before the entrance, and walk inside.
I do not know if this next part will work. What I want to do is go to the front desk and pay the bill for every room that’s currently occupied. There is no reason, in a sane capital world, this couldn’t be done. But hotels are uptight about reservations and names and people. If I can succeed in this charity, trust that I would do it with only a veil of anonymity. I should like that staff of the hotel alert every check out who paid their tab. I would relish it all the more if the front desk agents stated my station: “it was a valet—a valet paid for your room.”
If I won the lottery, then I would ask to see the valet manager. My boss. I would not quit. No. I would still keep up the ruse I’m just a fancy stranger. I would tell him I have a substantial tip for his team, and I would give him a thousand dollars. And he would say “gee whiz,” and I would say to him gravely, “be sure those young men get their fair share, no funny business.” If I could get away with it, I’d pat him on the top of the head.
My girlfriend and I would walk the stairs up to the restaurant. Funny thing here—these employees, the restaurant staff, probably wouldn’t recognize me, so I could either dine realistically, or alternatively, scoff at their establishment and walk away. Presumably there would be no ocean view seating available—that’d be a fun excuse to reject their dining.
Finally, I would go back to the driveway. I would tell my girlfriend to wait a moment while I get something from the car. I would drop the ruse, and I would tell the supervisor on duty to have every valet member on staff meet me in the garage. There are about ten staff members at my location. I’d give each one of them 100 thousand dollars, enough money to make quitting on the spot reasonable. Up to them, but I hope they do. My coworkers are not subtle in many parts of life, so I would have to act Jesus and urge them to tell no one of this donation.
I would drive off and return, as scheduled for my next shift, back in my humble valet uniform, again pretending to be unaware of what occurred. Hopefully very few other valets would be there for this next shift. The day should be utter pandemonium: guests have received a free stay from a valet staff member, all the valets are gone except for me and management.
It would be my last shift, too. I hope you didn’t think I would end this chapter with some dignified proclamation that I would keep the job. No. I am not so loyal. But I would run for those last cars with extra zeal. As in a dream I’ve had many times, I should hope the hotel guests are not a little peeved by their unusually long wait times, and I would wake up, covered in sweat.
Chapter 21: Work Politics
Yes, you’re going to play the social game at work. There’s no escaping it. I must warn that like all my other car parking advice, don’t extrapolate the following notes to the rest of life in grotesque ways. This chapter is about how to suit yourself socially with the best shifts, most money, and highest probability of future employment. It is not a vast statement about the socio-organizational behavior in human males.
Show up for every scheduled shift a half hour early. You will often start early, because the guys will want you to. However, do not start early if it’s unnecessary. It’s an asshole move to cut into the tip pool unduly.
Obey the directions of your boss almost 100 percent, without complaint. If he says off site parking today—park off site. If he says “this is the new uniform” you wear that new uniform. Some of you need to hear this especially: I am older and smarter than every manager I’ve ever had. I follow whatever orders they give me, and I don’t grumble about it except to friends off the job.
Your coworkers are going to want to give away/swap shifts often. Do this for them as much as you can, reasonably. Some shifts are of greater value than others (dollars, actual dollars). Protect the high value shifts, and give away the low, frequently. I don’t ruthlessly hog every high value shift (I have worked with valets who do), but I’m reticent to give many away. It’s important to note that most bosses copy and paste every week’s schedule. In fact it’s kind of a madman who would do anything else. So if your on-paper schedule suddenly omits a high tip weekend day you used to always have, but got changed through a switch you’ve made, it may be difficult to get it back in subsequent weeks. However, if you’re handing off the low shifts often, this principle will work in your favor.
For that matter: the schedule—this is where most of your political efforts are going towards. Your hourly wage is probably going to be the same for the next 50 years if you keep on this job. What to jockey for is a schedule that makes money for you to enjoy in relation to your personal life.
It’s probably your account manager who writes the thing, but once in a while a shift leader or an assistant manager takes the duty. I’ve done it before. It’s very easy to write a schedule. Takes about an hour, maybe two. Do not forgive any of your bosses who release it late in the week.
That said, your relationship with your boss, or the man in charge of the schedule, needs to be smooth. I hope it’s obvious that if you desire good shifts the best thing to do is be a killer worker—a trustworthy “fast mover” as I described in the employee chapter. But there are small things to attend to as well that influence your relationship with the boss. Timecards are a small but important one. Much of an account manager’s work is banal and irritating. Of their duties, most of them are sorting digitally the week to week numbers of business, labor, and loss. A particularly annoying computer duty they have is verifying all employee timecards. Typically, a boss receives an email and an app notification every time an employee has missed a punch on a timecard, or created what California calls a “meal penalty,” or otherwise had some timecard mishap. So this is something you must avoid: do not become a notification in your bosses’ email. If you’re constantly missing punches on the timeclock, or clocking in and out at inappropriate times, you are going to fast become a pest in the bosses’ mind. Get your punches right. For that matter, the principle of avoiding pesky notifications to your superiors is universal. Do not text them. Do not make unnecessary comments to them. Do not grieve location staff an amount that they will notify your manager about it. If you dislike your phone jangling with work issues, rest assured, your boss probably does too.
Of course, other than working well, you must ask for the schedule you want, directly. The conversation will be chaotic and variable based on what the boss is like. For example, I went to my current manager and asked him if I could have Mondays and Tuesdays off work, and be full time the rest of the week. His response was something like “it would be better if you had full availability.” The rest of the conversation was not graceful, or the kind of wit you see on television. I fuddled something about Monday and Tuesday being slow days, and I need days off anyway, and what’s the big deal with that, gosh, scoob I have a life, pouting. He just kind of guffawed and I left his office not really knowing if I would get my request. I’ll note here, one thing about working this job, or many other wage jobs, is that we don’t have cool settings to have these conversations. My boss has a shared office, and it puts him in an awkward place to be having these discussions in front of hotel staff members. We can alternatively walk into the car garage, but then other valets are likely to be scurrying about, plus having a business chat in a garage feels a tad murderous, like a wiseguy is gonna kneecap me at any moment.
I don’t recommend that you share much of your personal life in making time-off requests. In fact, you should be extremely minimal about offering reasons for days off you need. It may be quick to the point to tell your boss “I have school on these days and can’t work,” but once you mention a thing like that to him, his mind is going to be poisoned with all sorts of assumptions about your employment. If he’s smart, he’ll certainly assume that although your classes are only on certain days, you’ve also become even less available down the road because you’ll be crammed with homework. He may also think something dismissive like “oh, another college kid, he won’t last on this job,” and you become a kind of after-thought.
There are going to be days off you need for life events beyond your regular days off. Your site will undoubtedly have some system for these requests—usually over an app. I recommend you only use the app requests for days you really truly need covered, and in the instance that it’s not of paramount importance to get the day off, you should let the schedule come out as usual and then work out switching shifts with your other valets, on the low. This, again, is a tactic in not annoying your manager. You don’t want to have constant day off requests in his inbox. Many times, as well, your boss may ignore or forget to approve your requests anyway. In this circumstance, the same maneuver of going to your coworkers for coverage is preferable than going to your boss and demanding he fix his error. More or less, the last resort should be going to the manager and saying “hey, you didn’t give me this day off, and I must have it.”
When trading around shifts with your fellow valets, please refrain from pathos when you ask them to cover. It’s like taking an emotional hostage. Here’s what I mean—I receive this sort of text message at least several times a month:
“hey, it’s my sister’s wedding this Saturday and I need it off, can you cover?”
Or
“I’m super sick man can you take my shift tomorrow?”
Or
“I just got back from my trip overseas and I’m still recovering from all the herpes, work for me?”
Please. Do not tell me why you need coverage. I don’t need to know, and you’re only telling me because you feel it persuades more to state it. Just ask me if I’ll take the shift. Also of note, the number of young people who don’t seem to understand that sick days are ethical and legal sort of stuns me. If you are actually ill, you should never stress a moment about getting a shift covered. That’s something you directly state to the boss: “I’m sick and not coming in.”
I don’t care that I sound like an old man saying this, but your text message life should be short, terse, and infrequent with any job related number. Text messages are extremely low in function of communication. Their storage and record is the only significant upside. Phone calls are better. Talking in person is best. If you want to get a shift assuredly covered, the best thing to do is ask one of your co-workers in person, during a prior shift.
Some basics:
a) Don’t ever use a sick day if you’re not sick.
b) Don’t ever lie about why you need or want a day off.
c) If you’re late for a shift, call the supervisor on duty and tell them when to expect you. Don’t say why.
d) No call/no show is one of the fastest routes to termination. Don’t do it.
e) High attendance and timeliness results in trust with a greater and better schedule. The inverse is true as well.
f) Leaving shifts early frequently often results in receiving a lighter schedule. The boss sees your hours worked every
single pay period. He clicks a little button approving the hours. His brain will get accustomed seeing “25” hours next
your name, and expect no more, no less from you.
g) Don’t ever “steal time” as the corporate honchos call it. Don’t be on the clock if you’re not working.
Please, you must also avoid committing casual sins. Follow all the base protocols of your location, such as using employee entrances and exits, parking your personal car where instructed, etc… Do not make idiotic and childish presumptions that it’s ok to park your personal car on the driveway in order to punch in or out and then move it. People stun me at times with their shamelessness. It’s common for me to witness coworkers late for their shift, and they fly their car on to the driveway, rush to the back room to clock in, and then go park their car off site. So not only are they late, then they are stealing 20 minutes of clock to go park. I am unsure whether or not they understand how ass-backwards this is. If anyone reading what I just stated wants to mount some victim oriented argument about the big company versus the poor worker, please consider that twenty minutes of time stealing amounts to a whopping ten dollars for the highest paid coworker I have. Don’t be an asshole for 10 dollars. You social behavior is, in fact, capable of a lot more than that, and the decision to be honest in this exact scenario will, over time, net more money for you. Probably.
Socializing On the Driveway
I learned most of my valet skills at a hotel that was bipolar in business. Manic, outrageous rushes at certain hours, and complete doldrums at other hours. It’s during the doldrums you have a very large amount of time to talk to your coworkers. Sometimes you have more time to talk to them than you do with anyone else in your life—it’s really almost an overwhelming space and vastness. The people I’ve worked with in my life occupy a lot of my memory, and I’m not being too sentimental, I think, so say that I’ve gotten to know them a great deal. And they knew me, through the veil of our professional selves.
Earlier I stated that I haven’t calculated my social interactions all that much in this regard. And that’s true. As far as valets go, I lean towards the boisterous, talkative side. I worry I say too much, too often. And despite the content of the book I’m writing, I’m seldom talking about the job. It’s almost always nonsense I propose, or anecdotes I find funny—I like to try and make the guys laugh.
The pleasures of the young and poor are frequent topics, both the divine and the damned varieties: romantic endeavors, good meals, concerts to go to, drug or gambling experiences, who knows what its like to sleep with a hooker? and other perversions. My chatter, as well as most of my peers, is well below the standard of a safe work environment. That is to say, every year when I re-up on the sexual harassment training my workplace mandates, I’m acutely aware that a large portion of my lingual musings are considered by human resources hostile. I am not proud to confess this, nor to make the disclaimer that my lewd conversations are never in the nature of bullying or forthright harassment. After all, my job and any money I make are only temporary. The spirit, those words that stick on other people, the human influences of one person experiencing another person’s worldview—that matters more than the little materials a job offers us. I mean this platitude as much about specific diction and verbiage as I do subject matter.
For example, one of my coworkers once asked me what percocets are like. That was close to his precise phrasing: “what are percs like?” My thoughts divided several times before I answered, for I knew that what I said would influence his decision whether or not to indulge in the drug for himself. I could wax flowery on opiate warmth, a high like an angel holding you in a winged hug. Or I could admonish immediately, “don’t do that; drugs are bad.” In a rarer stroke of conversational acumen, I settled in a sentence riddled with ugly context, I said “Percocet? That’s just baby heroin.” My coworker knew, in a vague way, I have a history of substance abuse—I imagine a large reason why he asked me this question in the first place. I confess to you, reader, I haven’t done heroin, but I played on this context to offer him a scary association with his curiosity.
The things you say to people matter a great deal. It’s much more damning what comes out of your mouth than what goes in, so I say: don’t sweat a guilty blowjob, but always be prepared to swallow.
I’ve probably been too slutty, so far as my words are concerned. There is, however, something uplifting about the profane workplace—about the coworker who streaks so blue after a bad customer walks off that you’re simply impressed. Especially in my industry, I suppose, where the general idea is to be an outward dandy, to inflect your voice an octave on high when speaking to guests, and to be “hospitality.” It’s uplifting when this veneer drops rapidly, when the same iron-pressed bellhop expresses the infernal itchiness of their ballbag. I do not suggest that you close your lips tight like American Gothic, but can only recommend careful construction of any dirty words you do use. The easiest and most straightforward thing I can say about your language use regards the newcomer—the man learning a new job or task. Teach him what’s right. Instruct him in the highest standards of order. All color will develop from there, regardless of how you advise.
As for carnal participation with coworkers—I’ve never done it. It gives me great displeasure when someone of any particular sin or addiction expresses a proud remonstrance of a behavior they have previously over-indulged in, and conversely I’m at a loss to advise anyone against getting into a work relationship when I myself have never done so. I have seen, of course, over the years, dozens of valets hook-up with women from other hotel departments, usually the front desk or adjoining restaurant. I can only think of one example that remains happy. Personally, I find my time on the clock as gloriously singular from all my other social habitats. There are generally no people from off my job that crop up at work, and none of my coworkers seep into my life outside the building. I like it that way. It gives me anxiety just to think about having a wife or girlfriend who is stationed at my worksite.
Perhaps because I seldom hear people mentioning this sort of thing, I’m going to make some blunt remarks about relationships: If you’re a man, and you get married, and especially if you have kids, your career prospects improve exponentially. The workers beneath you in station, as well as those above you, will treat you with greater respect than your single-tax-filing counterparts, and you’re more likely to earn a higher wage and move up in the world materially. I doubt the same is true for women, but I am positive this is the case for men. The antithesis of this cultural condolence is to be a queer man with suspicious personal habits. This type of man will be uncomfortably slighted in many career avenues, though there are work-cultures that admire him as much as the married man—he has to seek those out diligently. Valet companies, in all ways, are culturally back in the 1950’s. I have known as few gay valets as I have female, though one of those has an easier time than the other at disguising the soft spot.
I am not recommending you get into a marriage to improve your valet career. That would be a truly hilarious person who calculates such a thing, and for such a silly career, too. However, there must be some animal part of the mind that creeps the little notion into men, for even the unloved valets I chat with—the lonely boys, they seem to comprehend that a lack of relationship is a grave social mistake. Again, I do not know how women feel about the unfucked life, but I am quite sure that young men fear it, on a massive scale. In one form another, this is one of the most common conversations I have with my fellow valets. A topic for another book, perhaps, by some other expert. But who could be an expert at that? I wish only to leave it at this: good luck with what you love. There’s divine and damned varieties.
Chapter 22: The Manic Lady
Day 1
Sometimes just one person can unravel everything you’re doing. I’d been on the job for a long time when she checked in, six or seven years. I was wearing my black suit and tie, white sneakers and all black sunglasses. I knew every destination within ten miles of where I was working. Need a plate of heavenly meatballs? V____’s. Two blocks north, one east. A bar where miss lonely hearts will be? One town over, take your car to C____. You want a younger crowd, gotta go further to E______. Trying to find coke? 10pm. Be at the beach about a hundred yards from the playground, look for Happy, short man never wears socks.
I was so entrenched in a method of valet, doing every dirty trick to pad my wallet, that local prostitutes were in my phone just for referrals. They never tipped me—but their John’s did. I worked Monday through Friday, then hit the road every weekend to stay at casinos, gamble, and live beyond anybody’s means. It felt like a great time of life. Stuff any loneliness with a long road and a blackjack table, pay a stranger to cuddle me if I have to, but for the most part the need was to keep moving.
Then came Miss Veronica on a Monday or Tuesday. She stunk, and her car stunk too. Six feet tall or more—she looked like the kind of young lady approached by creeps and fashion executives with fast propositions. Models, at least the ones from my generation, all have this androgynous appeal to them—it’s the ultra-slenderness combined with a sharp face, and that was Miss Veronica, probably 21 or 2.
She touched me a lot during the check in process, talked fast, and told me many many times how cute I was. I recall during that first ultra-bizarre interaction asking her where she was from, and I plainly did not understand her response. During the course of her three day stay, the valets and the hotel staff speculated her nationality a lot, for she had an undecipherable accent. Was it Spanish? Portuguese? Middle Eastern?
Manic. It was manic. Her thoughts were being launched from her mouth so fast that her lips couldn’t keep up.
Miss Veronica had no reservation, but got a room successfully. I could tell, after parking her ugly, smelly Prius, by watching her at the front desk, that it was a somewhat troubled check in process. I was also concerned by the fact that she had no luggage, though her car was filled with a life’s worth of clothes, crap, and various articles I couldn’t believe were hers—empty smoke packs of different brands, condoms (still sealed) right out in the open, what seemed to be journal entries torn out and scattered everywhere. I tried to read one of the scraps of paper. Like her accent, mostly unintelligible.
No sooner than she disappeared upstairs, my coworkers were giving me grief over how much she wanted me, how I was obviously heading up to her room later. I assured them, I was not. Something was wrong with her, I said, I just knew it. Something was terribly wrong. And not ten minutes later, she was back on the driveway, much to my coworkers amusement, flirting with me again. She at one point asked me for a cigarette, and I gave it to her. She lit the thing right in front of us, and kept on talking. She talked so fast, and sometimes in the heat of telling a story about something I could hardly make out, she would raise her voice to loud and high decibels. Screeches from a demented angel. I asked her, while she was smoking, if she could move off the driveway on the sidewalk, and she just ignored me. Soon I was overwhelmed. Never have I fantasized as much about slapping a woman with an open palm. Forgive me, she was just incredibly annoying. And beautiful. And smelly. It was body odor, plain and simple. She stunk like someone who hasn’t showered or deodorized in months.
Eventually she disappeared, or I disappeared, I don’t recall which. But I got off work without any further drama from Miss Veronica. However, when I came into work the next day…
Day 2
Another one of the valets had gone to Miss Veronica’s room the previous night. I talked to him about it, at length—I’m an accidental father to many of my younger coworkers, and the conversation was riddled with that strange context. He needed guidance.
He didn’t seem proud of it in the least. In fact, he seemed pretty shaken up as he was telling me about it. On the bright side, his sexual encounter with her necessitated that she bathe before consummation, so she no longer smelled so bad.
This valet emphasized again and again to me that she was not well. He used the word schizophrenic repeatedly, and there was a kind of intense shame in his eyes that a mental patient had just raped him, or the reverse probably, though it was her fast willingness to copulate that was so alarming. See, unlike TV and the movies, the average man is troubled by a woman who wants to get in bed ultra fast. Unfortunately, the world is also so homophobic that it’s gay to deny a willing woman. All that’s to say, my coworker had entered a deeply confusing situation.
I advised him to go home immediately, to just plain avoid being at the hotel as long as she was staying there. She moved about at frequency, any moment she might creep up behind you at the valet podium, or be singing in the lobby, annoying the desk agents. He followed my advice, and for a large portion of my shift I was lying to Miss Veronica about his whereabouts. She desperately wanted to see him, told me it was matter of life or death. And finally, when she gave up on finding him, she began inviting others to her room. First it was staff of the hotel, who all refused. And then it was randoms. Some of the men who went up to her room looked, to say it plainly, homeless. I am mortified to assume she was fucking these men. But it was probably about five or six men total she brought up, up to at least three at once. Maybe they were just reading the Book of Mormon.
I got off work in the afternoon, uneasy about Miss Veronica so much that I was alerting all staff of her strange behavior, albeit without telling them one of the valets made a conjugal visit. Generally speaking, hotel staff gossips a lot for fun about our guests. Occasionally a guest behaves in such a way that it makes a story long after they’ve departed, but for the most part, the chatter terminates as fast as their stay at the hotel, and frankly, most people depart without making much of an impression at all. Early reception of my warnings about her behavior were received as though I were only chatting for entertainment purposes. However, I was urging the front desk staff to keep an eye out for Miss Veronica in less a hospitality effort than downright hospice. My concerns, once processed as beyond idle gossip, began to be considered admistratively, and I was frustrated that something about my relay of this message wasn’t received the way I wanted it to be. When I meant to express “she’s not well, help her,” the front desk staff seemed to clutch their keyboards and think of ways to 86 her. And soberly, all this time later, I know well enough not to expect more from a name brand hotel. They don’t take care of unwell people. They remove them. Make space for the fit. Protect cleanliness for the next guest. The revolving fuck and suckhouse.
At the time, though, when I was driving home from Day 2, something extra sensitive in my suicide soul was agitated like that day I tried to kill myself. There was some underlying misery and sadness when I contemplated the person of Miss Veronica, a suspicion that this human cannot change and is created by God to be doomed, and doomed alone. Yet more powerful than the dread about her circumstances was the rage I felt towards my employer: the complete bumblefuckery of the institution—that they’re so ignorant of human suffering they would admit Miss Veronica and squeeze a profit out of her descent into madness. I did not sleep well that night. Nor did I know that when I was thinking of Miss Veronica and the hotel, when I was doing hate-filled soliloquies in the shower next morn, I wasn’t so noble to be her cosmologic defense. My prayer wasn’t for the victim or the offender. It was for me.
Day 3
Disaster. The world fucked off its axis. Miss Veronica’s credit card maxed, she was told to vacate her room by eleven. In the afternoon when I was absent, one of the valets gave away her car to the homeless guy she was (presumably) banging. Boss claims the wretch had the ticket. Not our fault. Miss Veronica too loony and stupid to do anything but cry and scream about the auto-theft. Outburst in the lobby about stolen car so ugly and confusing the police were called. Police experience the same overwhelming confusion we all have with Miss Veronica: they do nothing but take some notes and leave. She does however, in her interaction with authorities, produce a California I.D. I ask the officer what address is listed. It’s 500 miles away, in my long state.
By noon it begins to rain and she is still hiding in her room, avoiding phone calls from the front desk. At 1 she requests a bellman. I go. Sometime during her stay, in an interim I didn’t witness, she’s removed most of the contents of her car into the hotel room. She checked in with no luggage. Now she’s got a thousand pounds of it.
As I load her luggage onto a cart in the room, she’s sobbing athletically, but in frenzied gasps for air she laughs and fixes her face to look hard. Before I can do any therapizing or ask about where she’s headed with her things, she asks me for other hotels in the area. Dumbly I tell her some, but pivot to reminding her that her car was stolen. I mean to insist she file formal charges about the theft, but she has dismissed all memory of her junky vehicle—it’s not even a thought to her anymore. She wants to keep moving. I ask if she has an Uber coming, or a taxi. She says yes, and we go downstairs with her things.
The Uber never comes. She waits under the awning outside the hotel, waiting and waiting, next to the valet stand. I don’t know what to do. I just keep working. It’s a busy morning otherwise, dammitall. In the midst of working for other guests, she disappears. But I notice the bell cart is missing. I look down the street. She’s over a hundred yards away, pushing the clunky mess south. In pouring rain. I hate working valet in rain.
Why, God, was my first reaction to run inside the hotel and tell the lady at the desk “Miss Veronica is taking one of our bell carts down the street?”
And the young lady at the desk, she lipped “oh good. I’ll charge her for the cart. Those things are like 700 dollars, you know.”
That moment, I thought about jumping over the front desk and strangling my coworker. My compromise in lieu of murder was exclaiming a gendered derogatory term and fleeing back out the sliding door of the lobby. And so I ran after Miss Veronica, no longer able to see her from the driveway, I only had a direction to guess and no idea what I would do if I caught her.
She was a few blocks over loading her things into a man’s car. He looked like your average crystals, zodiac, and grass Californian. She didn’t seem to recognize me when I approached, but was nice enough to wave goodbye as the man drove off hastily.
I walked back soggy, nervous my next road trip, my next seat at the blackjack table, any venture, was going to be impossible to enjoy, win or lose. Now I was doubt behind the wheel of any car, my constant movement wasn’t liberty at all—it was fear. I was the moving animal, without predators and restless. I was wet, walking back to a hotel I loathed. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. No fixing it. I was Miss Veronica.