How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides: Chapters 8-10
Chapter 8: How to Open a Door
When a car pulls onto the driveway and stops, approach the door. If the window is rolled down, verbally greet the driver/passenger. With your left hand, grab the door handle. Put your right hand behind your back. Open the door.
In the reverse situation, where the guest is receiving their vehicle after it has been brought back from the garage: same hands, same posture, open the door for them to get in.
If the entrance to the building is nearby, be sure to open that door for them too, in the same method, or else have one of your coworkers positioned there.
If the passenger or the driver you are opening the door for is a lady, do not look at her as she climbs out of the car, especially if she is wearing a dress. Turn your head far enough away that she can tell you are not looking. Cars and women’s fashion do not cross themselves gracefully. About half the time a woman gets out of a car her underwear flashes. About a hundred percent of the time a woman leaving or getting into a car seat is an indelicate fold, like a cat trying to slither into a fishbowl. While you want to avoid surreptitious panty flashings, you may offer a hand, alternatively, to a person who may have significant physical difficulty getting their ass out of a low sports car. You must judge the situation quickly, and by many different variables: the person’s demographic, their fashion choice that day, whether or not they have a romantic partner in the car, and whether or not that romantic partner might think its cheesy, pleasing, or skeezy to offer his partner a hand.
Completely disregard your bosses or your coworkers or anyone in this life who states that you ought to treat everyone the same. This is an absolute order of dimwit ethics that will cause you an extreme amount of grief in life. If I offered the average man my hand to get out of his Dodge Challenger, he might deck me. If you don’t offer an old lady the same hand, she might deck you. Do not overadjust the notion of relative hospitality such that you believe you know what’s best for every guest, either. In the hospitality business, you will be explicitly instructed to anticipate a client’s wants and needs. It is more appropriate than your bosses will admit: ask, when you’re unsure, how you can help somebody. I have seen the scripts the higher ups print for guest interactions. They usually proclaim that all drivers who land near a valet stand want to or intend to park valet. This is wildly inaccurate. A huge percentage of the population ambles around the world quite aimlessly. They may not know where they are entirely, and very few of them can articulate what they want. Greater still is the number of people who appear to know what they want, yet ask for the wrong thing, or have made a mistake in values. What I just stated applies as much to anyone as it does to valet customers. The average prayer is for validation of a parking ticket. If there’s a God, he does more than validate.
Chapter 9: The Interview
The hotel where I was interviewing for my first valet job was by the beach in an area I was familiar. My mom used to tell me to avoid the neighborhood when I was a teenager. I hadn’t noticed they built the hotel two years prior to the job opening. Undoubtedly there were city council meetings where proponents of the site declared, in squeamish and careful terms, that the name brand hotel would help “clean up” the district. Other souls in those meetings must’ve pushed back with the word “gentrification,” though here in California, I doubt many of us know the word “gentry” enough to understand the sentiment.
I parked several blocks away because I didn’t want my potential employer to see how many dents and scuffs I was carrying. I did the same with my body by dressing a certain way and shaving. Although I wanted the job, I certainly didn’t need it. I thought of myself as a student, first, even thinking terminally that I might take the job just for one summer, and that’d be the end of it.
I was greeted in the lobby by a man with an accent I couldn’t place. I would later learn it was Brazilian. He told me to have a seat with the other candidates in a sort of lounge off to the side of the front desk. My interview was scheduled at 1. After some waiting, in which I chatted some with the five other young men in the room, the Brazilian man returned, probably around 1:15. He clapped his hands together and said “well guys, welcome. There’s six of you, and we have spots for two, so I want you to do everything you can to make yourself stand out.”
I was repulsed. The first feeling I had during this interview, as the man gave a little recital about the operation, was to walk off as soon as I learned it would be a battle royal. It seemed a mighty indignity to pit me against my competition like this. The group-interview tactic, traditionally, is a sign of a company that alternates between teasing and battering their workforce, and turnover is high. But I didn’t leave. In fact, I may have had the perfect ego for this exact scenario. My esteem was low enough to make me stay, to think, “well, I’m not better than this, actually, I’m exactly the type of person who interviews with monstrous conglomerates.” In conjunction to this low-self image, my esteem was high enough to think I could beat everyone in that room. In ordinary life, this perverse combo of high and low self-respect is what makes a man generally unlikable. I wonder what Carnegie would’ve done. I like to imagine him as a telegraph boy, before he could grow a nice beard, red haired and twinkish, running just like me running for cars. What would he have sounded like in a valet interview? He would’ve stayed.
We all introduced ourselves, said a little fact about our lives, and answered some basic questions. It’s easy for me, even from a young age, to relay an interesting story about myself. Useful for interviews. If there is any difficulty, it’s merely locating one in memory rated PG. I knew before the thing was over I had the job. I also could guess the other person they were going to hire (I was right).
This is the part where, if I were working in the scrupulous valet advice half of this text, I might give you some numerals for a successful job interview.
But this is a manual for valets and unsuccessful suicides. I still can’t tell a decade later if I should’ve walked out of that interview. It’s hard to imagine any other outcome because the variables are so large and at the same time simple. I would’ve gone and worked some other average wage job. What I can say positively is that the unlovely spirit of high and low I mentioned—that’s a mode of living that barrels towards destruction. That’s a man who stoops from an already low position. What I didn’t learn until recently, even though I’d read about it before my suicide attempt, and even though people had taught me about it plenty enough: living high or low are both reasonable ways of being. And I mean that materially and figuratively (even emotionally). Trying to live high and low at the same time is disaster. You might not kill yourself, but bluffing with the best hand, even if you win, ruins the whole game.
A few days later, my training day, I stood on that driveway in the neighborhood my mom told me to avoid. They didn’t let me park any cars. I was just supposed to watch and learn. Sometimes they’d have me talk to guests when they arrived. I recall being very nervous doing so, my heart racing a little when cars pulled up. Near sundown, about 200 yards in front of us, there was a gunshot, and then people were running.
A man had been shot in the head. Police asked us for statements, although they seemed fairly disinterested in our testimonies as valets, since there were plenty of closer witnesses.
“Your first day on the job and someone died!” one of my co-workers teased. I responded with something like “I’ll try to do better tomorrow.”
I wasn’t worried about the shooting. That seemed normal. What made me anxious was the job. Would I make a good hotel employee? Would it be worth it, would I have to work it long? Would I have a career soon? A real life? A wife and kids and dental insurance?
I wasn’t worried about the right things, if there’s right things to worry about at all.
Chapter 10: “Mental Health” and Parking Cars
As you should assume, I was out of work for a long period of time after my suicide attempt. Trust that there wasn’t any consciousness for the first year or so where I was worried “will I ever park cars again?” No no. There were lots of doctor appointments, medications, wild and aimless therapy sessions. There was brutal poverty and subsistence on family members (thank God for them). My debts were unsolvable for over a year, credit penalties piled up and though I was recovering slowly, in the spiritual and mental capacities, my material life on paper was a nightmare. My family often encouraged me to file for disability, though I was prideful and refused. After searching for work for over a year (and I cannot overstate how challenging it is for any man to be dangerously unemployable, I was putting in applications at all venues, everything from McDonalds to Amazon to professional buttlicker, all rejecting me), I found that my longest tenured valet location was hiring again, though a change had been made. It was being run by a new company. This meant that none of my old co-workers were there.
I got an interview. I wore an old suit jacket and a plain t-shirt, and I had cut my own hair the night before, because I felt I couldn’t spare money to get a haircut professionally. Gratitude always has another voice arguing against it, at least for me. All the desperation I had beforehand in getting a job got talked down some by a dismal notion that wondered if I could really do it again, could I go back to the place which had slowly led up to an attempted self-murder? Don’t mistake that I think now the job contributed to the suicide, I don’t, but those thoughts went through my head that morning, and my appearance at the interview was very much half-hoping for another rejection. And what victim-fuel that would be! I could say “even the job I’m most suited for doesn’t want me!”
The interview itself was so incredibly short, I thought I had been rejected indeed. Since I had been flunking these things for over a year at that point, my strategy was shortening up my answers. I think I talk too much generally, but since my answers were short, and the questions so minimal, after five minutes they told me they’d call, and we shook hands, and I left. One curious moment: they saw in my resume that I had worked there for about 5 years, and they asked me what the most outstanding experiences I’d had were. Maybe it was the devil in that moment, but my mind reeled with all of the unethical behavior I had done over the years, the times I had skimmed daily tickets, the prostitutes I befriended, the drug deals I brokered with summertime party-guests, that one fourth of July full of manic traffic where I pocketed hundreds of dollars of cash to park cars in insane and illegal arrangements, the weed I had smoked in the garage, that odd year of 2020 when the cars were so seldom that I got drunk on some shifts. These are the experiences I thought of, but I deflected by saying something like “oh, I worked here so long, there’s far too much to say about it.”
I’ll never know if it mattered, but right after the interview, the general manager of the hotel crossed the floor of the lobby where my talk with the two valet guys was taking place, and where I was getting up from my chair. She had been the same GM during my last tenure, and she knew me well enough that she probably remembered a good deal of those sins I just listed. But she smiled that morning after the interview, she came right up to me and shook my hand in front of everyone, we traded small “how have you been? Oh good good” kind of niceties. And then she carried on towards whatever business she was going to. Just like that, I was forgiven.
I got hired. There was no vow about it, but I knew then, once I was back on that old driveway, I’d never skim a daily ever again, or do anything crooked about the business. It was easier still to maintain valet purity given that none of my old fiends were working there anymore. A fresh start. Forgiveness. What a thing.
Humility is not putting yourself below others, or acquiescing to their desires all the time. If a doctor is humble, he knows when to say to himself “I am the right doctor to treat this,” or the opposite, “I am not the right doctor to treat this.” A grotesque under or overvaluation damages individuals seeking their care. This is an easy example, but I mention it because my new beginning as a post-suicidal valet was difficult for me on the humility front.
My bosses were aware, or at least I had been perfectly transparent with them: they knew I had worked there for years prior, and yet, for some reason, they showed me around the property as if I was ignorant of everything. They walked the garage with me saying things like “this is where we park oversize cars…this is where we park luxury cars…look, this spot is for manager parking only,” and as they’re doing so, I’m looking at a structure that I helped create. I was the one who painted the yellow lines on the far wall. I was the one who put carpet around the pillars to ease possible collisions. I hauled all that unused hotel furniture to the back corner of the garage in order to free up four more spaces. I even recognized a few cars sitting in the garage, regulars of the hotel who apparently still lived there.
And if my bosses didn’t meet me quite where my experience rested, the valet peers I was soon to meet on this re-tread journey didn’t seem to understand for months that I knew the property backwards and forwards. They’d frequently give me erroneous advice or direction, be hostile towards my other, older ideas, and they’d be stunned when I knew details of hotel staff from past employment. Now on the one hand, I could concoct some axiom about wisdom here, play it up real monk, how my tactic in confrontation with my peers’ incredulity was to show them my experience through great work rather than tell them. However, when you’ve done a thing like attempt suicide, it seems a bit loony to claim any kind of wisdom about anything. And there’s a temptation to sink low in one’s soul, to believe in an essential, irreparable brokenness, and to apologize towards life and its better citizens for the rest my unplanned existence. My reservation in announcing myself verbally was probably a combination of good humility and bad humility. There were notable mistakes I made, however.
In the tip drawer, back at this location, I was astounded to see that the two dollar bill, which a coworker of mine probably more than 5 years prior had saved, was still taped to the bottom of the box. In his handwriting, the word “lucky” was painted in sharpie over the bill. The coworker who created this token was long gone from anything like valet work.
One night, working late and alone, I was cleaning the podium, and when I picked up the tip drawer, a disgusting layer of lint, dust, and hair was stuck under this “lucky” bill. An outbreak of miserable thoughts swept through me. “Lucky? Bullshit this bill is lucky!” I thought of my own miseries in the previous years, and I even went over the miseries of my old coworkers in my mind. There was Tommy, whose wife left him abruptly to be a lady libertine, how we all found out about it because she was posting softcore porn on Instagram every day with other men. They had two kids together.
There was Brian, who was in love with a woman three times his size, and we all thought that was so funny until he proudly announced she was pregnant, and we thought “oh, it’s really serious,” but when the baby came, his complexion was of another father obviously, and Brian had been obviously cuckolded, and crazy in love, Brian stayed with the big woman anyway to raise the child.
There was Victor, who kept getting into bizarre and expensive legal troubles—he got charged with vehicular assault for kicking a sedan while he was on his motorcycle. The way he told the story: a car was merging into him illegally. Whatever the truth, he did a night in jail for it, spent thousands on lawyers, and after two years of stress finally got it all dropped. I loved the arrest part of that story, I admit. The woman in the car filed the report with the police the day the kick occurred. They tracked Victor to a classroom a day later where he was taking a lecture at the local college, and the police, in their proud pursuit of justice interrupted the lecture. I imagine a stout liberal professor must’ve lost control of a whole lecture when the gun toting officers streaked through the door—that poor teacher must’ve panicked a little inside themselves. They must’ve thought “oh dear, this is the end, somehow, I don’t know how, but this is the end.” It seems to me the fantasy of many professors that one day the boots would crash in and haul them off to a gulag. But they were only there to pick up Victor. Getting arrested in front of a class of college students has to be one of the ugliest audiences for such a thing. They’d assume he did far worse than what was actually charged against him, and in fact his story is such a mild offense that probably none of his peers would believe him when he explains himself.
These and more recollections of my peer’s misfortunes welled up as a kind of anger in me. Not to mention, I had tried to kill myself. I ripped the two dollar bill from the tip drawer and threw it in the garbage can.
Days later, my boss brought it up. Some of the other new guys (well, they were new guys to me, and in turn, I was actually the new guy to them) were upset about it. I could reasonably see their side of the argument. It wasn’t about the two dollar bill, it was what it stood for. To them, it was offensive that a new-hire would be so bold to remove part of their domain. For me, I thought I was purging a remnant of my domain. I was quick to apologize, though without giving the whole history of the prior workforce, I did emphasize how dirty the dollar was. It was a good reminder that I am not the owner of any land or space. I’m just lucky to be here. Work cultures invariably suffer from certain employees delusional comfort that they are an intrinsic part of their job, that they own some of it, that their workplace is one of their natural habitats and it must be protected from foreigners same as a village, or like a family, you will hear employees of most workspaces employ the plural non-proper “we,” as in “we all take lunch at 4,” or “we don’t like it when you clock in early.” Be careful at the juncture between “we” and “I,” in all parts of life. Becoming a plural rids a man of many responsibilities, and what power it wields is, in the important moments of human relationships, more fickle, dishonest, and fragile than the individual. Every western movie used to be about this. We like the lone gunslinger who breaks up the city of evil. However, that the gunslinger always rides off alone at the end, while seemingly noble, is not a good myth for young men to emulate, either.
It’s better to be a “we” and an “I,” dumb as that is to utter—most people employ both automatically, so it’s not much for me to advise, but I suppose I mention all this to be a little more cognizant about it. In relation to anyone’s corporate profession, take seriously the admonitions and thoughts of new-hires. Their minds are the least tainted by whatever culture is already established. And to the newbies walking into these cultures, be brave, for your criticisms will almost always be met with gunfire.