How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides

Chapter 1: Spots and Approach

Approach an open parking space. Drive past it about a half car length. Steer your vehicle about 45 degrees away from the desired spot. Put the car in reverse. Back into the space. Turn your head all the way around before or during backward motion to ensure no pedestrians are around. Use mirrors to calculate the proximity to other vehicles or lines.

I have parked something in the neighborhood of 100,000 cars over the last ten years. This excludes parking my personal vehicle, or as the well-to-do call it, my daily driver.

My employment all this time is valet, which in this country means a (usually) young man who parks cars for other people. My youth is now suspect. I am the ancient valet age of 34, which in this industry signifies someone who has landed a career tip locale through luck and driveway politics, or a dunce and lazy servant, likely addicted to a vice like weed or drink or self-pity. It is always easier to settle down in this life, even to settle into a dismal situation. Most people labor in search of comfort. I encourage you to make like St. Francis, labor for something else. 

I have been inside most vehicles. Think of a car. I have probably parked it. Yes, even the “supercars.” There are exceptions. The rich folks won’t bother to import a foreign economy car, and for this reason, Renaults, Peugeots, whatever the Chinese drive…these I haven’t experienced.

My opinions about cars primarily concern the interior, gearbox, and ignition, sometimes door handles too. Tesla door handles took a long time for me to warm up to. It’s difficult to know where to grab when the passenger beats you just slightly in cracking the door. I have decided on the small gap between window and frame. Mercedes, truly magnificent gadgets in general, have gearboxes that are pathetic little levers that would snap with the same ease as a geezers finger, and reduce the whole machine in my mind to frail junk. Volvo has the best interiors of any car on the market, but they decide to ruin things with queer ignitions and clitoral sorts of shifters. The Scandinavians are an odd lot. When I started out on the job, we used to get a chuckle giving Saab keys to green valets and watching them fail to find keyhole (it’s on the center console). Saabs aren’t really around anymore, and I’ll confess also to a very small number of “classic” cars caressing my ass over the years, and the classics I have parked are generally speaking some of the more stressful endeavors. They’re heavy, quirky, and usually have clutches worn out by generations of dead feet.

All that said, I am not, despite my profession, a “car guy.” I don’t care much about automobiles and I have no pride in my own. I will say I have a certain sadness and disdain regarding trucks, mostly because of their size and danger, though the sadness comes from realizing, after I moved locales to valet at a property with exceedingly wealthy clientele, that the rich more or less don’t drive trucks, and that if there is a car of the poor man, it is the ford F-150, Chevy Silverado, and Dodge Ram. I doubt the owners of these vehicles will be mad that I have called them out this way. And that is what makes me sad. These poor folks will often disclaim the truck purchase that it’s valid so long as the owner intends to use it as a work vehicle. But then again, the wealthy do not work in the kinds of labor that require a truck. Usury, land leasing, and fame mongering are their preferred labor, and the world has not changed so much that manual exertion doesn’t relate to the lower classes anymore.

I do not actually know much about cars, either, when it comes down to it. How they function under the hood, all those wild pieces and dirty components, they are a nest of snakes to me. But there is something I know more than most about them—I know how they feel, and how to touch them.

There was once a man, a burly United States marine, who summoned me to retrieve his car in the early morning. It so happened that about 70 marines, all lodging at this hotel, were asking for their cars at the same time. It’s not quite a misconception, rather something the general public doesn’t bother imagining—but hotels are seldom lodged by disparate and random bookers. They have sales departments that seek lodgers of corporate and organized scales during off-season, particularly.

So all these marines are on their way to work at the local base, ignorant of any concept of carpooling, and I’m running to get their rental cars one after another. The particular marine of this story was stuck with an embarrassing vehicle, a Kia Soul, truly a beautiful car for a valet—very small and girlish, but for the six-foot-three hulking soldier, obviously not his elected rental.

I brought his car from the garage and onto the driveway, and I handed him the keys. Before he even steps towards the vehicle I’m taking the ticket for another car, running for the next. When I get back on the driveway again, I can see the Kia is still where I left it. The marine is inside struggling.

You don’t treat everybody the same on this kind of job. If it were a skinny civilian, I probably would’ve gone up to them immediately and helped. But I let him struggle for a minute, just side eyeing the situation while I got a couple more cars. Finally, in raw frustration, he comes up to me and asks if I’ve done something to the car.

I get inside and turn the key over without much trouble—it only took a kind of touch, a combination of foot-on-brake, one hand on wheel, slight grip and tilt to start the ignition. The marine, not a terribly prideful man as the image of him might suggest, remarks that he knew it was a matter of turning the steering wheel a bit, but couldn’t, despite all his strength, get it to budge. He thanks me.

I do not really know much about cars. But I know very much how to touch them. I can locate a kill switch without being told about it, I can often guess your valet pin if you have a security box, I shift smoother than you do in your own car.

And so I’m sure that sometimes another knows more about my body than me. They may not know every detail, they may not know my creator from a doorknob, but still, through a kind of work, they can better operate my motions than I can. And just because I might have this touch with anyone or anything else, doesn’t mean I’m anywhere close to knowing the whole thing.

Chapter 2: Unsuccess

I attempted suicide in March of 2022. It is not a tremendous or harrowing story. In a fit of mania, I left my parents house after packing a small bag, cursing them unintelligibly, and taking as much cash as I could. I was 32 years old. Of relevance: in the bag I packed some medication. This was not, at the time, a plan for the inferno, I simply thought I would need it for my impromptu travels, to stay healthy.

I boarded a train for San Diego. In that town, there is a short bus ride between the train and the airport. I got in a fight with the bus driver over something I can’t remember, and instead of letting me on the bus, he pushed me backwards and I fell hard back on the concrete. Embarrassed and angry, I attacked him, though he dispatched me again easily. So I determined to walk to the airport, thinking I’d buy a plane ticket for whatever was departing soon.

During the walk, I had the Mersault experience, a La Entranger. Something about it all got to me: the beautiful sunny day, the cool breeze off the ocean, but most of all, the other people walking around, the ease at which they went about, couples so carelessly with one another, strollers wheeled with purpose. I felt so very far away from them, that I could never have what they have. What was simple for these other figures, to love one another, to procreate, to dress in light clothes and to enjoy a little life on earth, it seemed unobtainable to me. I hated them. I hated everything. I hated the sun and the sky and the shine off the nice buildings and clean fronts. My God, some of these assholes going by me were jogging for exercise of all things, right past deranged bus stop deviants, no less. I did not know how to become a jogging asshole, nor did I have the courage debase myself as the street deviants. There seemed no place for me, and a ticket to anywhere was futile.

I took a fast handful of the pills I had, and continued walking. Then another handful. Since one of the prescriptions was a typical downer, I had not reached the airport before an immense calm took over me, and laid me down on a grass clearing off the harbor. I realized that prior to this overdose of calm that my thoughts had been abnormally chaotic and fast all morning, and that now I was more sensible, but probably dying.

At this drugged point of reasonableness, I was physically incapacitated, lying fetal on the cool green grass, only able to take some shallow breaths. A kind of regret shot through me that I was unfamiliar with. I did not regret my life—that sort of thinking I knew quite well, but instead I regretted my overdose, my death and my hasty decision with the pills. I wanted to live. For some time I lay there. People even passed by, and I felt too weak to cry out for help.

Through sheer providence, the dose I consumed was simply not enough to kill me, and after a couple hours I was merely very ill and able to call my mother, who picked me up.

I was not grateful for life the day after, or the day after that. Or for many days, to tell you the whole truth. The burden of being alive still weighed on me like a postal amount of problems, a lot to sort through and very many things I felt could never be sorted at all. Oh my ingratitude! I had survived the mildest of attempted suicides with all my physical health intact! When I was in high school I recall a legless motivational speaker who had jumped in front of the same train line I took earlier that ugly day!

But thinking that things could always be worse is never fruitful, somehow. Nor do I fear that any of you lack motivation (other than the potheads among you, you do lack motivation).

And when, like today, I feel so much gratitude for life, it does haunt me a little bit that such lows seem an inevitable part of the cycle, that I might one day again curse God in the confines of a psych ward, that in spite of any of the accoutrements of civility I’ve acquired in recent years, there lurks a lunatic underneath them. 

It is vain to construct a sharp lesson out of this experience. But I am convinced of appreciating good times. Life will get bad, and good, and bad, and good, and so on. You are the sorriest man alive if you don’t know the difference. I don’t endorse or oppose anything in the way of mindfulness, religion, or psychiatry, as some readers might lurch to advise me of. These might help. Ingratitude comes for the god believers just as well as the atheists.

And there are some readers who can’t even imagine trying to end their own lives. I only mention this last bit to the others, who know in their statistically impractical make-up they are at risk for such nightmares:

I had previously believed my danger for self-harm was during low depressions, when in fact it was the reverse—a day of high energy and rage, wherein an impulse overwhelmed me. There was no plan, no pre meditation.

Just a bad run.

Chapter 3: Details of Backing Up

It’s all in the mirrors. The only bit of headturning you should do is to survey the surroundings generally, as stated in chapter 1: to peep any pedestrians behind you, or other cars, surprise obstacles, etc… I assume you are going to park any car at a reasonable and safe speed. This may be a dubious assumption. Valet companies make a dim mistake in often hiring the aforementioned subculture of “car guys,” and, ironically, car guys are fairly bad at driving. They move too fast. It’s called a “claim” in the valet industry when one of our employees damages a guest vehicle. After ten years of experience on this job, an objective platitude I wager nothing but gray haired coolness on—valets who drive too fast through the lot always end up crashing disastrously. Once in a while they make the local news flying a fancy vehicle off a second story garage.

So you’re in the car, you’ve looked backwards once and there’s no outstanding obstacles between you and the parking space. Now your head should be forward, and you’re going to entirely rely on the mirrors. The two side mirrors in particular. As you crank the wheel to come into the spot, reversing smoothly, look into the mirror on the same side as you are cranking the steering wheel. That is to say, if cranking left, the left mirror, if right, the right mirror. This vision will show you the approach best. As the car ellipses into the space, you may find yourself incredibly close to the line or car parked next to you. You’re doing it right if you are.

You can wiggle into a central parking position once you’ve cleared the obstacle/line. Like managing a clutch, there is an angle where it is impossible for you to collide with the car next to you, and there are other angles where you assuredly will hit it, but like finding that catch point of a clutch, you can be perfectly confident when you’re in the safe zone.

There is no shame in re-positioning if you’ve missed a tad. A parked car sits for days or hours. The act of parking is only moments. Get it right.

A note about backup cameras: these are nice inventions, but, in terms of parking, they are really only good for one thing: seeing the last moment of your parking endeavor—the area behind the car at the final stopping point. If it’s a wall behind you, fantastic, use the camera to stop short of the wall. Beware that certain vehicles, Jeeps and Range Rovers namely, also G-Wagons, have a spare tire on the back that are not visible on your back up cam, and these will strike a wall if you live by the camera overzealously.

Be sure the wheels are straight before you leave the car. I have yet to apologize for a ruthless insistence that cars ought to be backed into spaces. Allow me to innumerate:

1. Leaving swiftly is more important than arriving.

2. You will aid the traffic flow of the worldwide and cosmic parking lot by being able to depart faster, especially if someone waits on your space. It is conscientious of other people to park this way.

3. In the event your car dies, it will be easiest to get under the hood if you’ve backed in.

Of note, don’t back into a parking space if the lot has one way streets and angled spots. Trust and believe in the architects of this world, and what lines they’ve painted. I cannot preach with practical and specific instructions much to this point, except to say that for most places, someone has thought hard about how things ought to operate, and you should do your best to follow instructions. Very rarely is a novel approach advised: keep in mind that even an unaffected passer by will scoff and curse the moron who makes an out of line (parking) decision. To the man or woman who intentionally blocks multiple spaces, there is little mercy.

Chapter 4: Useless Theories

Probably there is such a thing as useless information. When I crane for examples of this, my formal education comes to mind. I did well and spent a great sum in college, but my training academically does nothing to aid my prosperous abilities as a valet. Sure, I could wax long and tediously about why there are no lady valets, how the systems of my era produce gendered customs to the disadvantage of womankind who wish to valet, and that my participation in the field upholds the established values, or antithetically it must be considered that women and parking garages are natural adversaries sexually.

I should’ve known college was mostly grift based on the parking situation. Where I attended, they had huge plentiful lots, no shortage at all for parking, and yet they charged through the nose for the privilege to rest a vehicle on their lots. The savage institution that is my alma mater even charged faculty for parking. And again, I swear to you, there was not a shortage of space, but like most universities it was constructed somewhat away from any alternative culture, and the protestants like me who parked off-site and hoofed it had to do so from about a mile away.

These days I am wary of any locale that extorts you for parking. Some may find this a contradiction coming from a professional valet. However, I have on several occasions turned down working at valet locations on the basis of ethics. If I believe the valet is more nuisance than service at a particular site, I won’t work there. Some valet stands are completely unethical, and their staff is lying right to your face, or omitting how easy it is to park elsewhere. I once worked a location where the lot next door was a tad cheaper than our rate, and not too far. I never hesitated to elucidate this fact to guests. The regional vice president of the hotel spied me telling an arriving guest about this information. After my interaction with the guest, the vice president came up to me and directed me to state valet was the only option to future guests. Were it not for the many workers I knew over the years at this location, I should wish the whole company goes belly up and its founders damned to park roachmobiles in hell for eternity.

Most people don’t want to valet their car, when it comes down to it. I am a service worker that people don’t want to see, and a very peevish and small one at that. I assure you, there are many parking garages where my service is necessary, or immensely helpful. I have not had to personally exercise for a decade because I get plenty of running and stairwells on my job, and my broad analysis of the American physique leaves me skeptical the average hotel guest would be unwilling to pay for my speed.

Chapter 5: People

On my job I meet a lot of people. I told you I’ve parked in the neighborhood of 100000 cars, and this equates roughly to the same amount of human interactions before I take their car away. For the most part, the exchanges are small and polite. “Welcome, this is parking here, take this ticket.” I am Johnny on the spot assisting with luggage and opening doors. And for the average hotel guest, my desired imprint in their consciousness is “what a nice young man,” and then the memory of me fizzles into a blur as they reach a comely front desk agent who will glow with greater servile pomp. (Hotels, especially upscale ones, have the old world habit of hiring beautiful front desk agents, and I mean this in the way of surface beauty: straight good-looking people. Valets are rag tag, our defining features are generally odor and arrogance. I am frustrated at times with my valet coworker’s lack of grooming, they are apt to take the individuation allotted to them too far, and dress in embarrassing liberties that nearly void their uniforms. There is a definite point at which self-expression goes too far, when it becomes, well, selfish.

A small word to aspiring valets about appearance: I have done this job looking all sorts of ways. For the first many years I was quite disheveled. I had an against policy beard and a thick birds nest for top hairs. The uniform was a standard pants and polo, but my shoes, left to my own purchase, were always sorry looking, super worn sneakers, and I had the opinion of: “they don’t provide me shoes, so fuck them—I’ll let the sneakers fall off my feet before I buy new ones.” It has taken a long time for me to be convinced that grooming myself exceptionally conventional, and clothing myself without a single wrinkle, wearing basic sunglasses, and tending to my body hair like a metrosexual is the best course of presentation on this job. The most obvious action is the reality: people will respond to you more kindly if your outward appearance signals psychological health. And I do mean more kindly as in tips. I have a large enough sample size of work to relay the mathematical benefit of it. When I’m allowed to dress myself in whatever fashion for the job, I go suit and tie, for most days. The only downside to dressing too well is perhaps being too memorable to others. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, after all, and you can stick out appearing sloth or suave, but my confidence in my work at this point is such that I no longer fear comment or complaint from anyone. In a later chapter I will relay how many times I have tried to escape and be disqualified from this profession, more or less because I am a confused and confusing man, but I am simply too good at it to be dismissed, barring extreme misfortune. My exodus will be probably be elective, if ever. 

I mean all this fashion advice as it applies to the job I’ve been discussing, but imagine how much more it extends to the rest of life. I’ll leave that writing to college folks.

As far as the people meeting goes, I am unsure if my volume of introductions is high or low compared to most human lives. Having lived in Manhattan for a couple years in my youth, it seems plausible that many different lives and professions meet the same number of relations as I have.

Thus I shall divide this chapter into certain generalizations of people I’ve encountered on this job, with some specific anecdotes, but all-in-all an overview of what you can expect from vehicle owners.

The Average Pleasure

Probably the biggest category of traveler—they’ve come to the valet stand to visit the area in the pursuit of happiness. They will usually dislike seeing the valets, often avoid eye contact with us, and think to themselves that parking should never cost money. About 10 percent of them will tip on arrival, although 80-90 percent will tip on departure. Note that valets almost always take home their tips day-to-day, and so having a shift with high arrivals is hard work and little money. Having a shift with high departures is easy work and lots of money. If you are the average pleasure, I encourage you to tip on arrival. This also incentivizes the valets to park your car in a prime spot.

The Average Pleasure has a silly habit when spelling their names for the ticket. I will ask “what’s your last name?” And they will respond “Schumacher,” though pronounced in the anglicized “shoe-maker,” and since I’m a terribly linguistic valet, I will insist they spell it for me (getting the correct reservation name is essential for billing at a hotel location).

This is not the silly part.

The silly part is when I then ask them for a first name, and they say “Tim.” And then they spell “Tim” for me: “T-i-m.”

And I say “gee thanks” and park their car in the dank garage and lock it and mark the spot and walk or jog back to the driveway where the sun is setting and when I undress at night back in my apartment I wonder how stupid I look to other people.

The Business Traveler

These are valet experts, usually driving rental cars. They have compact luggage and are efficient and speedy moving about and coming and going. They know as much about valet as I do, and usually navigate the driveways of valet stands with tact and skill.

The downside of the business traveler is the money. At worst, they are penny pinching misers who won’t spend a dime unless it’s covered by their employer. I don’t really know what a “write-off” is but these people murmur that phrase: Business travelers don’t tip at all sometimes, and when they do, it’s often single dollars. A five dollar bill from one of these customers should be cherished like manna: tastes lousy but hey—it’s divine, appreciate it.

Residents

Some of this category are literal residents. There are valet stands in some residential buildings, or they may be guests of a hotel for years at a time. I also include in this category guests who are so frequent at hotels or restaurants that you may get to know them distinctly. You will learn about these people, even if you don’t personally talk to them, because your coworkers are sure to gossip about them.

Their generosity is random. I parked a certain resident’s 250 Shelby Mustang over a thousand times, easily, and he almost never tipped me. This person’s valet and hotel bill were paid for, no less, by his employer!

You really can’t expect residents to tip constantly—their tip out would be a preposterous bill annually, but zero is pretty radical. Personally, I never expect a tip, from anybody. One thing about doing valet work that I never thought much about—we experience the tip exchange as a physical ritual: a person must physically hand us the money, there is the touch of fingertips or palms, the careful effort on my part to accept rather than snatch. It never occurred to me that this ritual was in any way special until a friend of mine, a server, told me that they’ve never once looked at the human being who tipped them, at least not at the moment the tip was administered—their guests just always cast their tip with the bill fold, privately. I prefer the hand to hand style, though I wonder if tips would increase or decrease or stay the same if it all got submitted impersonally. 

Valets must uphold reasonable boundaries with residents. On the bright side of things—your connections with these people can expand your whole career. I’ve known many coworkers who leave the valet industry because one of the residents sets them up in another. On the other hand, I’ve known valets who got fired for doing drugs or sleeping with a resident.

This group is primarily where your fun tips are going to come from—tickets to events, rounds of golf, food, I even knew a valet who inherited a car from a resident.

There are some dark ones. When you’re stationed at a persons living quarters, you will see sad and ugly things from time to time, things you’d never ask to see. Infidelities galore, moral and legal crimes, boundless humanity. I’ve watched a man who, after a failed relationship, drank himself, slowly, into bitter impotence and misogyny, confiding during his liquid nights to me that he hates everyone, especially women. Then he would get another girlfriend, act cured, only to repeat the cycle all over again after another breakup. 

Another resident I knew for several years spoke constantly of moving to a particular European country on the basis that white supremacy is more welcome there. He was a good tipper, and many nights I questioned my own ethics for entertaining him and smiling kindly during his racist remarks about America, and accepting his cash.

I tend to agree with whatever a guest serves towards me, conversationally. One time a hotel guest and I chatted long about an upcoming election. A younger coworker of mine stood by and listened. The guest tipped me and left our presence, and the young coworker said “wow, I didn’t know you were [a certain political party]. And I responded “what? Like hell. That was all lies. Never take what I say to a guest seriously.”

Finally, though more on this later, but an important note: a valet should never offer info about their guests to others, especially residents. I realize that what I am writing now somewhat breaks this rule, though I share my experiences without persona. Women are accused of being the gossipers among the two genders, but I am convinced, after years of employment with all men, this is false. Men say just as much about others that they shouldn’t.

Perverts

No figurative meaning behind this category of people. It applies primarily to those of us that work at hotels. Every time I’m in the hallway of a hotel, on my way to a room to deliver some luggage, or a bell cart, or some nonsense, there’s a little bit of fear in my heart the moment the door to the room clicks unlocked and swivels open. Every once in a long while it’s a naked man or woman standing behind there, a violent hard-on and a creepy smell in the background. Mostly that seems to be the whole ruse. The majority of the pervs, I gather, are just flashers, who like to be undressed and disturbing. It happened to me very early on in my employment. I had only been working valet for a few months, got sent upstairs to deliver a luggage cart, and when the door opened a very tall and buxom woman in lingerie stood before me with her penis out. However, some perverts do invite sex play. Some couples want you to watch. Some couples want you to participate. 

Perverts may tip you enormously. They may not though, and your only gain is violation and shame. I must emphasize, in an effort to slow anxiety for readers, that the pervs are a small and infrequent category, and if appropriately ignored, can be evaded somewhat easily, save for the psychological torment of their very existence. A man grabbed my ass in a hotel stairwell several months ago, and that is the last recorded deviant I have encountered. 

At some valet locations, it is common practice to guide a guest on foot to their vehicle in the garage, usually on the pretense of retrieving an item from the vehicle. As I’ve gained more experience, I seldom do this anymore, alternatively bringing their car onto the driveway. The guests will sometimes lament “oh, I don’t want to make you go through all that trouble.” No, no, there is far less trouble in the daylight, on the driveway, with witnesses. 

For those of you who are religious, I recommend some prayers of general exorcism whenever you stay in a hotel room. I do not profess being above the perverts. Lord knows I’ve brought the rent down in neighborhood motels with my own behavior, but what seems outstanding about the hotel perverts is that they often crop up in swanky joints. Rich and poor both have the capacity for depravity. To be frank, I feel as though the upper classes are more likely to act the creeper, though this is a biased judgment of my limited experience. Sometimes though, I get a weird idea in my head that life must be pretty boring if you’re not worried about money, food, and shelter. It must be like being teenager forever. 

Chapter 6: 2020

Most hotels stayed open during the Covid pandemic. The hotel where I worked closed only briefly, in the very beginning of the stay-at-home order. I was a journeyman valet at the time lockdown was declared in March 2020, having been on the job for about five years. My boss called and informed me that everyone was laid off immediately. 

This news wasn’t much of a shock. At that point in time, my pants were already down, so-to-speak. A virus was spreading across America. My education had halted. The woman I was living with had wisely cut me loose, knowing she didn’t want to quarantine through our failing relationship. I had begun drinking and using drugs again after a years long period of sobriety, or as I like to think of it, a very long tolerance break. Gambling losses amounted to a slender bank account. Everything and everyone was moving in crazy directions and I was right there with them, pants down. Word that I was fired from my valet job was like a small weak person had given me a pathetic little spank.  

A boring note about the money situation: I filed for unemployment in the beginning. The first check was less than 200 dollars and was a calculation of my income as a part-time valet and a part-time teacher. I was a grad student back then, designated a “teaching associate,” and lowballed what I consider basically rakeback of an academic variety—a small income to teach 3 units at the same school I was paying tuition.

Soberly, I can see that I should’ve resigned to the meager unemployment checks, plus whatever “stimulus checks” got doled out, and binged television like a good pandemic-er. However, at the time, I was troubled that my financial condolences could hardly even afford a modest marijuana habit. And I was bored. 

So when I got the call the hotel was re-opening just a month after lockdown, I took up the position as pandemic valet. I could wax long about the strangeness and customs of this era of employment, and surely I have many opinions about the moves people were making in that time. My employer lied a great deal, guests of the hotel lied a great deal, and I felt so sorry for myself through the whole experience that a confession would be gratuitous. 

From April 2020 until the summer of 21, the job wasn’t much more than wind blowing through pavement. There were shifts that went by, eight hours or more, where I only parked one or two vehicles. Tips were extinct. The boredom was so intense, and the façade of the hotel so eerie and surreal, that I sinned in all the ways I’ve judged others for over the years: I surfed my phone constantly, I took long on the clock “breaks” (but really, how can you take a break from a job without labor?), I smoked cigarettes right on the driveway, I got high, watched movies—even hooked up a Playstation to a hotel TV. I sat. I sat in a chair and I waited. I do not know if I was waiting for the pandemic to get worse or better, but a trend in either direction would’ve been preferable to the vacant-sunny Hotel Shining experience.

There were 144 rooms in that hotel. Sometimes less than ten of them would be occupied. I convinced the front desk agents to let me stay in one of our multitudinous vacants on many occasions, though my growing appetite for depravity kept me shy of conniving for residency. If I was forthright, and without a drug problem, I’m certain I could’ve lodged long term for about thirty dollars a night. While that providence would’ve been still creepy, I can’t help but concede in hindsight that alternatives to the sort of disintegration I chose were obviously there, and indeed, they were attractive, even obviously fortunate. I don’t care much for philosophy or philosophers. Most people who call themselves philosophers are just writers who aren’t creative enough to construct novels. And I do not know if people have the right to forgive themselves, but it’s easy for me to understand that when I’m unwell, I tend to view every option in life like it’s Sophie’s choice, when if I had the least bit of gratitude for my existence, I’d be wise enough to elect a clean hotel room over a dirty one. 

Sure, I “lived” with my parents at the time, but I wanted to bombard my feelings as much as possible, so I needed a place suitable for pants-shitting alcoholism and paranoia crack smoking. There was a motel perfect for these pursuits at the halfway point between my job and my parent’s house. Yes, a real Sophie’s choice: 30 dollars a night at my luminous, generous job; no rent at the house I was raised in, free food and every streaming service; or the roach motel with a blind eye to drug abuse and people who walk around with their underwear visible. 

Occupancy at the bad motel was higher than it was at my workplace. I guess in times of mass cultural stress, roaches proliferate. And of my options, the motel’s ultra-dinge accommodations were ironically the most expensive. I had a favorite room there which I always requested because it faced south, permitted smoking, and had fewer mystery stains than the others. I don’t need to be too poetic about this place for you to understand its ugliness. There was a sign posted on the inside of every door reminding you to lock it, and of the amenities in the place, the lock looked like the most reliable—hard steel that bars it from inside the door, rather than those flimsy screw-on jobs they put on bathroom stalls or apartment latches, plus a deadbolt high up. They certainly knew their customers. When you’re high, faith in a door is paramount to faith in anything else.

The shower looked like an improvised vestibule to slaughter people. This is mostly where I hit the pipe. I’m a decent man, after all—I wouldn’t light a crack pipe on a hotel bed, no, that’s not the sort of thing you do with the free HBO on the TV. Have shame. Be respectful. 

At night, women sometimes knocked on the door asking if I was lonely. If I was more drunk than high, I might have the courage to peep through the curtains. I think most people experienced distortions of time during the pandemic. Some people joke that 2020 was the downward plunge into a grim alternative universe, a moment when the Great Programmer turned his simulation knobs to unseen levels of pain and strangeness. When those women were knocking, my burnt tongue could only utter bad translations, anachronisms and fear. I remember one of the nights furiously looking for answers in Genesis, finding my situation like Lot’s. But it wasn’t quite the same. Lot invited the angels in, and look what happened: the city was destroyed. 

Maybe I can save the city if I just keep to myself, I thought. Yes. I am lonely. I will save us. I will stay alone and everything will be alright. So when the door knocked at night, I played dead. Might as well have been. 

Chapter 7: People (Continued)

Cheapskates

I’ve told you: I never expect a tip, and that’s true, for the most part. I bring up this category of customers mostly to emphasize to aspiring valets how devastating and unhealthy expectations are going to be over the long term. With somewhat of a wide variation by locale, cheapskates make up a relatively large portion of the population, anywhere from 15-35 percent of cars, I’d estimate. 

Let’s be clear about the definition: the cheapskate is someone who evades expenditure so extraordinarily that it often defies logic. There is usually something developmentally or psychologically wrong with this person, and they are, despite their title, still capable of tipping—so long as you play into their neurosis around money. For example: one time, on a slow night shift, I watched a man and his wife argue about the price of our valet parking. They got in their car and circled the block for about 30 minutes looking for better parking. Expert that I am, I knew exactly where they could find free parking, and in close proximity, as I had an employee spot on the side of the building occupied by my own car. In the whole of this particular downtown area, there were only a half dozen free parking spots for several miles—and I had one locked down. 

So I offered it to him, after waving him down on his fifth trip around the block. He gets the spot, and he tips me 20 dollars. He says to me something like “I’m not cheap, but every dollar saved matters.” And I said “oh yes, sir, absolutely.” 

The same 20 dollar tip he gave me could have just paid for his parking in the first place. Not much logic to this behavior, although, in a sick way, his gesture has its own logic—he appreciates me accommodating his lunatic worldview. I do not know how often, if ever, you should be applying this general concept of alternate realities to social situations. The college professors of this world should be emailed for that question, though I don’t know which department to start with. 

It’s not always the tips the cheapskates clench their purses over—primarily they don’t want to spend money on the parking fee, though often they won’t tip either, especially if they bit the fee and reluctantly valeted. The worst of this brood is a guest who requires service beyond the usual and leaves you empty handed. I have soaked my entire body in sweat hauling hundreds of pounds of luggage a half mile down a long hotel hallway, unpacked all of it into a suite I can’t afford even with an employee discount, and been tipped with the good ‘ole “thank you,” no eye contact. I have parked a man’s car a dozen times in one shift with no gratuity, pulled it again for his checkout the next morning, and then, when he asks me for change for a hundred dollar bill and I give him 80 in 20 dollar bills, and 20 in five dollar bills, he simply pockets all the change I made for him and drives off, as if to intentionally tease me (some cheapskate right now, reading this, is thinking “well, ya, asshole, you should’ve given him some 1 dollar bills, what did you expect?”)

I am not some detached valet guru—these instances do infuriate me, but the anger I experience seldom goes home with me. Again, I mention this category specifically because certain valets I’ve worked with over the years grow longstanding resentments against the cheapskates. These piteous valets often develop arguments of victimhood: “they don’t tip me because I’m ______” and you can fill in the blank. They begin coming to work expecting prejudice and injustice. 

Frankly, I think often that this profession is, at its most essential, fairly absurd, a bit antiquated, and moreover that I’m lucky to have such an obscure job which my culture at large deems something worthy of gratuities. There really aren’t many professions where tips are part of the income. Also, as a note to customers out there—in comparison to some other industries, tipping us will usually tangibly improve service. I don’t think your waiter is going to be much faster when you tip him on the way out. 

People’s generosity constantly surprises me. At one location I used to work, a fire broke out in the surrounding area, and hundreds or thousands of people were evacuated from their homes. The beaches looked like every local monastery and God were on a fat smoke break. Many of the evacuees came in relief to our hotel. They call them “walk-ins” when people don’t have a reservation—very uncommon at upscale hotels, and hard to be staffed for if there’s a lot of them, so it was only me and one other valet servicing a hundred of these “walk-ins.” In short, our service was abominable, the driveway was overflowing all morning, people had long waits to both check in and check out. It was a hard day.

However, me and the other valet both left that shift with our highest tip-out of the year. The walk-ins, who had evacuated their homes in anxiety and peril, were generous. This almost seems backwards to me. I would’ve guessed that people in danger of losing all their possessions would cling to their remaining ones more severely. But the opposite was true, and in spite of what I consider bad valet service, they made sure to take care of the hapless hotel workers. 

Reporters for that particular fire made a big stink about the racehorses killed in the fire. And I get it, imagining a horse burning to death is wild. Some ESPN guys later checked in to cover that story. Easy for me to recall because one of those dopes boasted about how valuable his camera was—six figures sitting in the back of a rented Nissan versa. Lord help us. 

George

“George” is a casino term. It means someone who tips a lot, or even has a negative connotation of someone who foolishly tips too much. Presumably in the literal it refers to George Washington, face of currency, dead president, the cold green frown.

There is no standard demographic or car type for Georges. I suppose I’ll make mention at this juncture the uncomfortable expression that in general, there is no ethnic, political, or socio-economic background that has an essential generosity or miserliness. I know that, writing this, some of my valet peers plainly disagree with me. There are, in some cases, nationalities wary of valet parking because in their home-country, valet tends to be a protection scam. But this has to do with their lived experiences, not any essential “race.” Life is a lot easier in the circumstance of pain if you stop asking “what’s wrong with that person?” and instead wonder “what happened to that person?” You can ask that of yourself, too, if it helps. 

If you’re the type of valet who wants to think long about your wages, average the generosity of big tippers with your worst nights. Frankly, most of the young men I work with have a passionate and short view of money. I worked with one young man for a number of years who had a habit of leaving every shift two hours early. When I pointed out to him that doing so added up to about a ten thousand dollar difference in his w-2, his eyes widened and I could see a crimson turd rolling over in his bowels. He never bothered to do the math. 

The George tipper’s relative frequency will fluctuate, given your location. For instance: casino valets stand the greatest chance of a preposterous tip. Personally, my largest gratuity from one customer, at one time, I believe is 400 dollars, and being handed the blue one hundred dollar tip is actually relatively frequent (maybe one a month). I have heard stories of casino valets receiving hefty percentages of slot jackpots, numbering in the thousands. 

There was once a man who checked into my hotel locale driving a lifted chevy truck with sedan crushing tires and loads of cosmetic damage. This man was overly talkative. He told of his recent separation from his wife and his extreme fear of being served divorce papers. He made assward requests about parking his truck, then bringing it on the driveway again, and then reparking it, over and over and over without him ever taking the infernal thing out on the road. He was drunk constantly, and also accompanied by an obvious dope man. In the course of three days, he tipped me and the other valets in excess of several thousand dollars, and in the mornings, when he would appear paranoid, remorseful, and full of sadness, I felt as though I could not accept another dollar from this man. I urged him to check out of the hotel, get into a rehab or something, get help. 

This is really not too kindly of me, in the scheme of things, and trust I don’t share anything with you in  search of nobility. My gesture was little more than the moment in a casino when a dealer urges you to leave the table. It’s not so much pity as it is intolerance, an inability to watch the sad show keep developing. 

Much less dramatic characters will surprise you with big tips. Sometimes I give a guest the regular routine: door open, hello, ticket, park, and pull around on departure. No cool dialogue, no hustle, and they tip 300 percent with a simple “thank you.” One of the best myths for practical human behavior is the notion that God might show up in any body, at any time, in any place. I could tell you to be ready for Him, but nobody ever is. 

Sometimes a big tip happens for a strange scenario—usually one in which you’ve made a terrible mistake. One time early in my career I left a guest’s keys on my belt and went home with them after my shift. This is about an 8 or 9/10 valet fuck up, and miserably stupid. I received a phone call from my boss at the time the guest requested their car, it took me 30 minutes to drive to the hotel, and then some minutes longer for the guys on staff to pull the car up. The woman whose car it was—she tipped fifty dollars, and told me specifically she forgave me. These scenarios usually occur in smaller griefs: pulling up cars in the wrong order, missing a guests request due to confusion, etc… but I find that often the people who are delayed and wronged will turn around to flex on our mistakes with extra gratuity. I find that interpersonally in these scenarios it’s best to be transparent with the wronged party, but still some of my peers are going to take these people’s forgiveness as a weakness to exploit. There was a sect of Christians in the first century that believed since Jesus delights in forgiving sins, sinning prodigiously actually praised him. The problem with exploiting forgiveness is not as much the intangible arguments of spirituality as it is the practical consequences of living on earth as a constant dimwit. So on your valet job, when you make a mistake, please, feel bad about it. And feel grateful if they forgive you. Spend the money on something nice, will you? There are going to be some ugly customers for you down the road…

Combatants 

You never know where people are coming from, or what they’re dealing with. But there are, for instance, certain hazards about dealing with high public turnover. Some people will want to fight you. I once saw a man pull a truck into our driveway that would not fit into our parking garage, and I informed him of this right away. He became so angry that he cursed me viciously, got in the bed of his truck, and began violently throwing his own luggage about the driveway. This seemed just humorous, for after all, it was his own belongings he was damaging.

Another time, I was working alone and got so busy that the public street was backed up. Horns and jeers from all around. I got inside one of the cars that was blocking traffic, a miracle I even had the keys to it, but when I began shifting in to drive, the other door opened, and a man seated himself in the passenger. I vaguely recognized him as the owner of the car we were in, though my previous interaction with the man was merely to request his car keys in the midst of other chaos. 

He proceeded to challenge me to a duel, (preposterously anachronistic), insisted that we fight, and accused me of being grossly incompetent on my job. When I fled his presence, he followed me, and began screaming within an inch of my face all sorts of nasty insults. Then he retrieved one of the hotel managers and repeated the whole barrage of condemnation with her as witness.

I did not respond in a groveling and servile manner, which is more or less the protocol in the hospitality industry. I am one who is equipped well for verbal combat, being small of stature and slight build, my weapon of choice in combat, for all my life, has been words, and upon this unusual duelist, and in front of my superior, I unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse such that I could have easily been terminated immediately. The hotel staff, however, in the aftermath of it all, sided with me and issued total empathy for the strange situation. Of note maybe, I still had to park dozens of cars that evening after the row, including the man’s who had picked the bone with me.

This was mercy, my continued employment after the incident, as I’ve heard a priest describe it: not receiving what is due to you for bad behavior. I make no apology for anyone who thinks tooth for tooth about the situation—that my curses for the man in the story are justified because of his. Make no mistake: I am most of the time living between a delusion that I am the hero of all my stories or else I am the villain. I can be both, but I’m also frequently the man who provokes others to gather stones, and it is because of this quality—the hard time I give cashiers, librarians, and nurses, that I find it easy to forgive the man who berates me on a valet driveway.

Anyone who lives long enough with their eyes open will witness mercy doled out to underserving, stupendous morons (also a breed I qualify for). It makes me quite alright with the alleged “angry Old Testament God,” a deity whose patience is long but not forever, because I have hundreds of occasions where I witnessed a young valet cause incredible damage to another’s property, or commit the most boneheaded and ridiculous grievances, sometimes out of malice or selfishness and our bosses, our gods, give us another chance. Often when a valet is reprimanded for for one of his misdeeds, he continues to commit the exact same sins in the future. This is actually more common than them correcting their behavior. The fool thinks his boss will never punish him.

If you can’t be grateful for mercy, you can’t be grateful for anything. Gratitude isn’t just an idea, either. It’s behavior. 

I also must note that occasionally, less than ten percent of the time, a combative guest, someone who made me feel small and loathed and embarrassed to be a valet at all the day prior, returns and approaches me to apologize. Personally, this is better than a monetary tip to me, and strangely I respect these people more—the ones who apologize, more than a guest who simply treats me well in the first place and goes on their merry way. 

Scammers

These are professionals. They scam for a living. You need to be aware they exist. Do not become paranoid, but be careful. 

One man made it a habit to loiter around our hotel at breakfast time. He was not a guest of the hotel, though he didn’t disturb us much for several days. Then one morning he was asked to leave the hotel on the grounds of loitering, and stealing a cheap breakfast. He grumbled mildly, but left. 

The same man books a night at the hotel about a week later. Now he appropriately dines for breakfast the following morning. A staff member, thinking he’s loitering again, asks him to leave. He rages and fumes at our mistreatment of him. He accused me specifically of calling him homeless, and it’s clear to me in this second confrontation he’s baiting me to say worse things about him. I don’t. He files a lawsuit against the hotel. This was clearly a scam through and through. 

You need to know these people exist, and when your senses are telling you that something odd is occurring, it probably is. To protect yourself, you have to behave like the non-player characters in a video game. Only customer service lines. Inflect your voice one octave higher than normal for extra protection. 

Criminals

These might be the best tippers, actually. When somebody is trying to get over a crime, the way to keep service staff mum is to feed them money. One time two supercars rolled onto my driveway late at night. They were rentals, I could tell, three women in them and one man, an obvious pimp. I was his first contact, and I smoothed him over with some chit-chat about it being a slow night, and rates being good. He tipped me fifteen dollars for this meager information, and then immediately bolted inside to warn the desk clerk not to give rooms to the guy, and he drove off looking for another pop-up brothel. 

I’ve seen a few madams, drug dealers, and body traffickers succeed in setting shop in our hotels before. There was a notorious supercriminal woman who frequented an old Hotel I used to work at. Her tactics and cunning were sophisticated enough that wiseguys knew what she was doing, but police didn’t have the just cause to raid her, at least not yet. 

Prostitutes can be endemic depending on where you work. It is rather amusing when they pull up to the driveway and don’t know how to appropriately bill their car for valet. “Oh, you want to bill it to the room? What’s the name?” She’ll usually say “John, or Chris,” or some fruitless name like that. Then she has to message the guy on Whatsapp or Tinder to figure it out. 

One time my life spiraled into a scary sort of depravity when I began chatting with two of the regular prostitutes in the area. I got their phone numbers, and they told me to refer trustworthy clients to them, which I did sometimes, without any compensation other than the hopeful gratuity from the John’s. Subsequently my two prostitute contacts inserted me into a groupchat with a larger number of working girls in the area, and there began a possibility of larger enterprise between a valet and sex workers. I balked at building more industry, though forayed into buying sex myself for the first time. 

That’s the thing when the criminals give you money. It’s not really a gratuity. It’s an invitation into their trouble. I have turned down very few tips in my career. I should’ve turned down more. 

Celebrities

It may be that famous people come to your valet location. This needs mentioning because, whether gushing or mocking, these people indeed live in a separate strata than everyone else. I almost feel bad for some. A celebrity must get annoyed sometimes feeling the need to be pedantic and generous to hotel wage staff all the time, right? 

And they make recurring stories in my life when they behave in any way untoward during their visit. A certain popular Christian band stayed at a place I worked for a couple days. Their behavior was dismissive in general, and they brought with them an old VW bus which they refused to valet, though they parked it for hours at a time on the driveway, and never tipped the entire time. Worse yet, they did the most awful swindle of a bad customer when they insisted at numerous points that they would tip at the end of their stay, and that it would be large and satisfactory. They did not tip at all. Either that, or one of the valets stole the whole group tip for himself (this is distinctly possible). In any event, whenever this band is brought up in conversation, anywhere I am, I repeat this story. 

I couple this story often with another band who stayed at the same location a year later—a band with music and album covers that has relatively obvious satanic themes. The satanic band was kind in conversation, well behaved around the driveway/hotel, and tipped moderately to well. 

I also tell everyone I can know, when it’s appropriate to mention, how generous a certain basketball player was to me one evening, how he had a whole posse of people with him who handed out hundred dollar bills to every staff member. 

Somewhat of a strange era that I must clarify this: but influencers or social media celebs do not really count in this category, by my estimation. Those people I can summarily state are just the same as any other visitor, only less likely to tip and more likely to encroach on driveway space. When I say “celebrities” I mean people so famous that they are generally trying to avoid ending up on the internet, rather aggressively posting on it like the aforementioned “influencers.” 

What I want to impart is that the principal applied to celebrities shakes out for regular folks too: tell others about someone’s generosity when they grant it to you, or if you’re slighted horribly by someone, confide in a friend about the grievance. You probably do this anyway. 

I’ve seen a lot of my coworkers request autographs, or event tickets from athletes/musicians, or photographs and the like from celebrities. Personally I can’t bring myself to do this, even when I want to sometimes. It just seems to me that if I was famous, I’d be so damned annoyed by such requests. Shit, I get annoyed when strangers ask me for a cigarette. Celebrities are the never ending pack. Other coworkers will just try to schmooze them more than normal, which seems even weirder to me. 

When I lived on the East Coast, one time I was standing outside of a theatre and a famous actor popped out the side of the venue. He asked me for a light, and I gave it to him. I knew who he was, though frankly I couldn’t think of anything natural to say to him other than “you’re ______,” and so I didn’t, but remained silent, and we quietly smoked cigarettes next to each other. I got done with my smoke before him, snuffed it, and said “have a good day.” And he said “thanks.” Pretty boring story. But the image of it amuses me, and it still makes as good an impression as some phony baloney chat about his acting. 

Uber/Lyft Drivers

Utter scum, a valet’s natural enemy, like cats and dogs, shit and swimming pools, war and peace. I have concocted many psychological theories over the years as to why Uber and Lyft drivers have absolutely zero sense or empathy when occupying driveway space, and display no contrition for their intense avarice when performing the most base act imaginable in front of a hotel: picking up or dropping off paying customers. My finest estimation is that a fair percentage of people who drive uber/lyft are personally incapable of working with others, and have elected an income source in which they have practically have no superiors. They can’t stand taking directions. Their personality is such that when a silly little man such as myself does something as simple as ask them to pull forward on the driveway, they become incensed. If my beard is too long, perhaps I remind them of their evil father who always told them what to do in life. 

What seems most offensive to me about such stubborn behavior, in which they’ll block entire streets of traffic just to sit in idiotic places as they please, is that there’s some underlying assumption on their part that I am against them, that I would direct them to a position unfavorable out of spite and my own selfishness. Even with my now present resentment against these drivers, this is wildly untrue. My goal is to get them on the driveway and provide maximum customer service to their passengers, with a compromise regarding general traffic flow at the moment they are making their pick up or drop off. 

One time a Lyft driver was reminding me to fuck myself, cursing me viciously, and I gave it right back to him, and we huffed and puffed like damned souls. But his passenger still hadn’t come out after ten or fifteen minutes, and in a sheepish defeat the lyft driver agreed to pull to the side, finally, while he waited. I went up to him, and I plainly asked him, “why are you guys always like this? It’s so easy what we’re doing here. We’re trying to help you. I want your customer happy and then you make lots of money and I make lots of money and we all win. What the fuck.” I emphasized the stupidity of it all. A lot of times I get discouraged about my job in general. I wonder if the whole industry isn’t useless, if God never intended valets. I mean, how could he? I’m not really helping anything. It’s not important. Might not be as counter-human as dealing blackjack, but my job sure as shit can’t be in paradise. Hell, I don’t even think there’s cars in heaven. As for earth, it ain’t gonna say “Valet” on my tombstone. At least I hope not. 

Little incidents like the one with this Lyft driver amplify these thoughts, and though it’s doubtless that reflection about one’s manner of living is healthy much of the time, when these reflections are rooted in a resentment for another person or thing, they are probably not at all fruitful. If it matters at all—the lyft driver in question, who I had posed these philosophical wonderings to, did not have any sort of answer. I do not know what any of his thoughts on the matter were, then or later.  

My advice about Ubers/Lyft is to boycott the whole industry, treat the working class individuals who populate the real-world interface with forgiveness, and keep trying your best to direct others in kindly ways even when they’re your enemy. In fact, especially when they’re your enemy. As I am well experienced on this job now, truly, I get satisfaction and joy out of dealing with tough customers. Whether it’s a guest who is full of valet disdain, or the aforementioned Ubers of the world, when the advent of a difficult personality occurs, I intentionally seek them out. There may be some notion of pride in me after all, about this work, for I know in such moments that I am the right man for the occasion. I am older and wiser looking than my usually young co-workers, I am experienced, I will be here tomorrow, whatever happens, most likely. 

Chapter 9: The Interview

I was 25. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.¹

1. ↩ Adjusted for inflation.

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.  

Chapter 11: Your Fellow Valets

Without intention, I have been working this profession for a decade. I have described to you some of the base technicalities of the job, as well as the customer base. Whether you’re going to be a part time weekend warrior, a hapless veteran like myself, or a calculated career man, your coworkers may be the most important relationships you have in this job. In the immediate sense, your workload will probably necessitate many legs, and you must rely on others for surviving the rush of traffic coming for you. In the long term, relationships you have with fellow valets will set the stage for your entire employment.

Valet companies are flimsy. The young and dumb business major thinks that valet is pure profit—a service wherein all the overhead is provided for by customers and clients, margins are 100 percent, and the only expense is labor. It seems to be that way when you just imagine a pimple faced teen on a stool, under an umbrella, in a tacky red vest outside the local shopping mall.

In reality, the industry is viciously competitive between a few major companies, new parties rise up and take certain locations for short periods before being bought by the majors, and often properties create bidding wars between all these factions. Some properties create “in-house” valet staffs, accepting liability but pocketing all profit, minus labor.

The workers, those of us doing this job long term, tend to get around all the different corporate labels. I have worked for 3 valet companies now. The base—the labor—we are the same across every valet company. Often literally, the same people. When I lost a job through closure of a property once, I was hired immediately, with no lost time, by another company at another location because of my contacts. Many of the valets I started out with, guys who were just 20 years old in the mid 2010’s are now managers across my region. They have good salaries, families, and have adjusted to office and meeting life.

I never purposely “networked” with these guys. I was just myself, and fortunately I’m an innocent enough soul that they have commended me to others over the years.

I remember my first valet company brought up the book “how to win friends and influence people” in one of its training videos. So I read it. And I asked my boss if he read it, and he said “oh yes, it’s a way of life.” The conversation is memorable because I took such an antagonistic view of the book, decrying it as devoid of human soul, more aptly it should be titled “how to be a psychopath and drink the brain fluid of your inferiors.” He laughed, without eye contact, and forgot to repeat my name in order to stir my subconscious affection.

I’ve stated already that ethically I have been a crooked employee in many ways over the years. It should go without saying that I make mistakes practically on the job with some frequency as well. Whatever ugly parts of my personality have rubbed others the wrong way must also be considered on the whole of how I’ve “influenced people.” But I think the most outstanding reason that I’ve been a desired valet across the board with all these silly companies is that when I’m on the clock, my goal is simply to do good work. I’m quite sure of this, in fact. I cannot locate for you, unfortunately, where this spirit comes from in me. It is not mine alone, of course, as all of my best coworkers have this notion at the root of their hourly duties. We are pleased when a day on the job goes well, when clients and customers are served to their contentment, when order reigns supreme in the garage and on the driveway, and the next shift comes on to an easy and prosperous transition. 

In more formal ethical definitions, this is something of the vulgar notion to Kant’s categorical imperative. “I do good work because I like doing good work.” There are, of course, many other motives to work a job, and while disclaiming that your coworkers, and mine, are all full and complex people, I will endeavor to describe some of their general types in this chapter. 

One note beforehand: 

—99 percent of all valets are male, and about 90 percent of those are below the age of 30. There are three basic positions on all valet staffs: 

a. Valet. The base start pointing, and generally the most common station of employment for these company’s workers. Note that all valet companies use an obscure title on our tax forms such as “Guest service associate.” I assume this is to aid us in tax evasion. Most of these workers are relegated to part time hours ever since the Obamacare mandate of health benefits, though companies will sometimes wiggle a full time Valet in, particularly those who work the overnight shift.  

b. Shift leader/supervisor. These guys get full time hours—that’s the major benefit of it, though there are a multitude of workers who much prefer part-time hours and usually they see supervisors as borderline idiotic. Their hourly pay is slightly more than the valets, usually, but it’s so marginal that a part-timer working hotter shifts might make more than them annually. They work the identical tasks and errands of the valets, though they are supposed to be somewhat managerial and run operations with moderate to severe delegation. Sometimes their bosses put superfluous responsibilities on them. Note that usually the dress code for both the aforementioned classes is identical, though some spots allow their supervisors to dress themselves freely. 

c. Account managers/assistant managers. They write the schedule, they do the paperwork, revenue calculations, and all major points of communication with the client (meaning the hotel, restaurant, casino, etc…). Seldom are these guys parking cars, though it’s not outrageous for them to work the driveway in certain moments, or if the location only necessitates a barebone staff anyway. They do not collect tips. I don’t even think it’s legal for them to collect tips in my state. I’ve never been one of these guys, and I may be missing some of their duties in my description, though I have been chummy and friendly with many of my old account managers. Strangely, the prior position, supervisors, sometimes make a lot more money than these guys, especially if the hourly worker isn’t declaring his tips. This is not uncommon at all. The manager position, from a close distance, seems to me, usually, one of those jobs which is stupendously easy, but disproportionately stressful. Especially when considering the workforce they’re in charge of. I have several times come close to pursuing this career, but given that it pays worse than the hourly plus tips of being a supervisor, and that because of the industry there are fewer job openings for managers, I do not see much advantage to this career other than social status and sedentary day-to-days. 

There are, of course, a few more pieces to a valet company. Regional managers, Vice Presidents, Presidents, HR departments, claims departments, etc… Interactions with these folks is going to be rare and dull for the bulk of the workforce. I do not know the long history of valet companies in America, nor am I sure I care at all, though at a glance, a disproportionate number of them come out of Connecticut, and have spread to become large corporations across the country. I think for my next book, I will write a drama about the seedy valet wars in Connecticut, circa 1985, in the tone of The Wire with lots of wiseguys and red tape. 

Valet type #1: Fast Movers

A fair percentage of valets are going to run for almost every car requested, and alternatively they will run back from their quick route when parking a car. They may or may not be particularly personable with the human elements that arrive with each vehicle, but they do the base part of the job exceptionally. They’re fast. And when it gets busy they’ll move even faster. 

During a rush of business on this job, there is no polite queue of customers waiting for their turn in line. No. People just congregate the driveway in a mess and often aggressively try to shoulder out their neighbors in order to be served first. This applies to both incoming cars and pedestrians who approach the valet podium. The fast movers of the highest ability flourish in this chaotic environment. Their attention gets pulled in twelve directions at the same time, and by an enviable cunning they sort through it with fast decisions and fast body movements. During slow periods, a lot of these guys continue to work at a fast pace, and do not dally getting cars off the driveway or when retrieving a guests car even when they’ve been told “take your time.” For some of us, the compulsion to work quickly and cleanly is almost born from an anxiety, having witnessed apocalyptic street backups enough times in our past. 

Valet type #2: The Romero’s

I have called them Romero’s because they are like the director’s zombies. Slow. They walk for cars. They walk after they’ve parked a car. Often they’re on their phone while walking around the garage, or hitting their vape, or they’ve forgot what they’re doing entirely because they are stoned. 

Valet type #3: Stoners 

The most impossible characters in all labor experimentation. They cannot be convinced that it’s a malfeasance to be stoned on the job. They see it as a “hack” to enjoy wage employment, or they think that they are a better man while stoned, a better employee medicated. I have lately tried to convince these soft-brains that marijuana is a psy-op, that its legality has been awarded because government whip crackers saw the younger generation as a threat to their longstanding capital stranglehold. I recommend they read Brave New World, but, most of the young men I work with scoff and tell me they read that in high school (and then they clarify that, well, it was assigned, anyway). 

There is a type of straight-toothed, clean cut wealthy Mormon hotel guest or general do-gooder who will always flatly refuse valet services across the board, anywhere in the world. They hate valets because our basic trustworthiness is nil—from scuttlebutt or web searching they know that we are not honest folks with their cars. This antipathy is at its worst when the clean living do-gooder encounters a stoner, the glossy eyed valet with an overload of self-righteousness vindicates the do-gooder’s worldview that pagans and poor people are through and through stupid offspring of the father of lies. 

Valet type #4: The Talk 

Certain individuals are gifted at talking to others. In my experience, I would say there is no training whatsoever that can mold a gauche or average conversationalist into an advanced one. Companies always have scripts for guest interactions, but frankly, the people who are good at talking to others employ verbal maneuvers far outside the realms of these scripts, and the formulas for guest communication drawn up are rendered pitifully robotic. 

The valets who are high in this skill may or may not have much else to offer on the job, but because this talent is so valuable, and equates to so many extra gratuities, positive guest experiences, and problems solved, a wider amount of careers are available to the talkers. They often do valet for a time before moving on to better paying social environs—I’ve seen several of these types switch over to hotel management.

One thing to note, and applicable to all the generalities I’m making in this list: ethics do not correlate at all to this personality type. Someone gifted with communication may be ruthlessly selfish and exploitative. They may also be genuinely humane and empathetic. I tend to lean into the assessment that most people gifted in communication are the latter. But keep your guard up. This kind of person, in dark varieties, is very dangerous. They crop up as regional managers or vice presidents of valet companies with some regularity. 

Valet Type #5: The Tip-Mooch 

In brief—the tip structure of most valet sites is that all the guys on shift at one time pool their tips. Generally this is a clean and uncontested operation. However, there is a type of valet who seemingly avoids doing work. They step backwards a little when cars approach, they disappear in moments of high activity, by all witnesses it would seem they are trying to make others do all the running, parking, talking. The practical communist problem arises in the opinions of the other valets: why am I sharing my tips with this guy? 

The most forgivable kind of tip-mooch is simply nervous. Maybe it’s his first job. He’s a little scared, timid. This type has a good chance to turn things around. I was very timid when I first began. 

Sometimes a bad supervisor arises who takes his powers of delegation too far. He sits on his phone at the podium, a car gets requested, and with one hand he holds out the keys to you, telling you to go get it, and with the other hand he scrolls the idiotic nerf of Instagram, Tinder, or YouTube. 

Very often the tip-mooch goes into higher management. The kind of people who act too good for work get rewarded with more pay and an Ikea rolling chair. 

Valet Type #6: Overnight Valets

Despite this being the most straightforward category I’ve yet to mention, denoting valets who work the graveyard shift, I feel the most pressure to be accurate and fair with this demographic. I’ll start by saying that I’ve put in about a year total of overnight valet myself, shifts from 11pm to 7am. My doctor has since told me to never do so again. 

At most locations, the workload for these hours is close to nil. When I used to do them, my paperwork and ostensible responsibilities would be done by midnight, and then I had 6 hours of waiting until anything like work would happen next. Often I tried to sleep, sitting in a chair. I knew of one night valet who spread out like a king on hotel furniture, even using a blanket and eye mask for his comfort. 

Most of us would agree only begrudgingly to work these hours, with conditions of high compensation or regular time off. However, there is a certain percentage of people who dream of this shift. The point for them, in large part, is being paid not to interact with other people. They enjoy the solitude, lack of supervision, and freedom. Thus they can be difficult to interact with, sometimes. I got in a terrible feud with a night valet one time—to be frank I don’t recall the details of what started it. But he took a course of shunning me, refusing to acknowledge me at all, much less talk to me, and this was ugly not just socially but also in relation to work, as my feelings being hurt was a little matter, but it sucked that I couldn’t get any help from this guy when work things popped up (i.e. doing the actual job). I realized after a time this man was deeply afraid of me. When he screamed at me “I don’t have to talk to you!” it came from fear, it made him anxious to be in confrontation. And once the feud had begun, every sight of me was a confrontation. 

On the other hand, one of my friends from work is a man who is a night auditor, a man who has worked the graveyard for the past two decades. I don’t want to poison your mind into thinking people must be this way or that because of the hours they work, and that’s why I feel some trepidation with the category, but night workers are a different sort, by-and-large. Don’t try to judge them, but understand them. For the valet ones, they’re working a completely different job for the most part, almost no tips, and none of the same obstacles. 

When I was on night shifts, I wrote some poetry, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and wondered if the moon was enough to keep me alive until I could make a real friend. 

Valet type #7: The Old Man

I’m 34. And I tell you: I look like it. I look worse, maybe. This is above average for the age of valets. Occasionally, when I’m out in the world and I meet people, and they ask me that measuring stick of a question: what do you do? And I say “valet,” sometimes if it’s an old guy I’m talking to he gets excited and cries out: “I did valet when I was a kid!” And they fondly recall old memories of parking cars in their twenties before moving into big enterprises in their formal adult life. And sure, I sometimes get a little embarrassed, feeling like an undeveloped adult. Though usually I wipe this fear away with a mental note that back in this guy’s day you could probably buy a house with a fox pelt and some beads. 

However, in the “old man” category, I’m not among the laborers I’m talking about. My age is enough for the young guys on my job to occasionally chide or respect, but there are some fellows you’ll find at valet stands who are fifty years or older. 

Certain locations almost prohibit this category entirely: a fact of some valet stands is that you must be a fit and fast man, such as my current location. I run about 7 to 10 miles per day when on the clock. So the older guys usually find a place at the less physically intense locales. Sure, there a few who are in it for the money, I knew one man in his late forties, unmarried, not particularly stellar at the job, who more or less just needed income to eat and drink and live on his boat. He gambled a lot and was a somewhat lecherous creep in conversation. However, a lot of the older crew members are married, their wives make most of the income, and they like to do it for a few extra bucks and a way to get out of the house. These men are often the happiest, most genial valet staff you’ll ever meet. Some of the old guys are nearly doing the job for fun alone. The money is nothing. Their depth of conversation can far surpass the young guys, and the guests will enjoy having long talks with them. As a result, the old guys have a much higher probability of being rewarded with huge gratuities. What they lack in speed and parking ability is easily made up for by their social habits. I am not trying mount a defense of these workers, per se, but I wholeheartedly encourage any recruiter to hire people that may on the surface seem “too old” to do the job. 

Conversely, there is something ugly that happens when an entire staff is youthful and male, and I suppose I could elaborate as to why at some length, but summarily, from a guest or customer perspective, handing the keys of your Aston Martin to a 20 year old, looking around and seeing a bunch of other vape addicted 20 year olds with their noses buried in their phones—the customer must feel at least a little bit that the staff is a lot like a bunch of babes in search of a tit. The customer feels as though he is doing us a favor, rather than the other way around, and tips become thin. 

Valet Type #8: The Thief

So most of our tips are handed to us in cash. Typically we split the cash tips at the end of a shift between all valets on duty at the time. Some valets will pocket cash tips, thus avoiding the “cut” at the end of a shift. This increases your profit, if you are the thief, sometimes up to ten fold, as it’s not uncommon to have ten members on staff on a given day, depending on where you work. 

It is extremely difficult to catch thieves. Say the hotel you work at employs you to do bell service as well as park cars, that is—taking luggage to people’s rooms. As a bellman, you go up to the room alone, offload the luggage, and the hotel guest hands you a twenty dollar bill. You finish up and land back in the hallway. There is nobody around. It’s just you and God and the fancy carpet. The valets down on the driveway, back where you’re headed, they’ll easily believe you if you bitch that the customer stiffed you. Getting stiffed is common. Or they’re so busy with their own work you won’t even need to make a show of it. 

Making an accusation that someone is pocketing tips without proof is not an option. In fact, proof is so important to such an accusation that I’ve never seen it work without multiple witnesses accusing and convicting the thief—for if only one valet accuses another, a defense of personal vendetta often gets raised, and the whole social scenario becomes a disaster. 

Some employees are so paranoid about their coworker’s fingers and pockets that they make strict rules about the money. They won’t allow anyone but themselves around the tip cache, or they only send certain people they deem trustworthy to do certain tasks. I’ve been that sort of employee before. Nowadays, I’m a little more fun and fancy free, I think as a result of being a valet reincarnation, I have an underlying trust, not in humanity, but in the bigger picture to shake out alright, even if a thief takes from me. 

Trustworthiness may be the highest quality of any servant. I don’t suspect thieves really appear in high numbers anywhere, but it’s not an intrinsic personal trait. That is to say, most employees are part-time thieves, if at all. They just steal in certain moments and opportunities. One time, a valet gave me a little monologue about how he was stuck on a shift with a terrible and useless coworker, and the story-teller summed up by proudly declaring that he pocketed some of the more substantial tips. I suppose that I, the receiver of this story, was meant to applaud him, or condone the thievery because it was so obvious that this other valet doesn’t deserve the wages. I thoroughly condemned him though, knowing it would make the monologue man unhappy. I told him something like, “eventually, if you think that way, I’m sure you’re going to steal from me. You’re going to tell yourself one day that you deserve to steal from me as well. Maybe I’ve pissed you off, or you think I’m wealthy enough anyway, or you’re in a tight spot financially in your own life. But you’re still just a little satanic man making dumb arguments as to why doing wrong could be right.” (Yes, in my personal life I do enjoy employing the word Satan in conversation). 

Trustworthiness. I toyed with using the word “faithfulness,” but it sounds too intangible, Godly, and the word “honesty” doesn’t quite locate the quality from the empathetic perspective—from the view of a co-worker or employer. To be trustworthy—others can trust you—that’s really paramount. Although I don’t think that many of the people I’ve worked with over the years are thieves, an astonishing low percentage exhibits much in the way of trustworthiness. Not even my bosses. 

I have only a small occupation. Lives are not at stake parking cars, at least probably not. But when someone’s crooked in a little thing, they’re likely to be crooked in big things also. 

As for the types I’ve just gone over, remember that any particular person can be a blend of multiple or all the types, in fact seldom is a person just one thing or another, and only hilarious grotesques fit into one category. Also keep in my mind that people are not static. They do change over time, but it’s like the stock market, the graph goes up and down every moment, and trends are usually only evident in hindsight.

Chapter 12: Ethics

I do not want to speculate about any intangibles or lofty ideas. One time I was speaking with a younger valet and he proposed a multitude of ethical hypotheticals in the context of skimming dailies, which I’ll describe in detail a little later, and I was confounded by his dumb and repetitive words in the face of my clean argument that it’s wrong to steal money. Period. Dull and selfish ideas are like that—they require a lot of explaining. But see, I’m already getting off the track. Let’s begin with the unethical behavior that most disturbs me about working in this industry, which nearly drives me off of being in it at all, and which I feel a great deal of shame when its circumstances arise: damage done to customer vehicles, or as they are called in the industry, “claims,” and how valet companies respond to them. 

The Claim

Here’s a real story: three old ladies pull up to the valet driveway in a Cadillac Escalade. This was once a premier luxury vehicle, though it is now becoming dated and a little bit tacky. The ladies are splendid though, they even joke about the ostentatious nature of the car with the valet who issues their ticket. The trio laughs and saunters to the front door of the hotel as he gets in the car to park it. The valet circles the driveway, headed for the garage. Almost at the exact moment the ladies are entering the building, there’s a terrible squeal of metal grinding against a concrete pillar. The valet has misjudged the curve into the garage, mashed the side panel of the passenger door into gates’ barrier, and in panic, stopped the car in this defiled place. 

I look over at the hotel door. The ladies have missed it. They somehow didn’t see or hear. I look all around at the driveway, there are plenty of other customers standing around, but nobody is taking notice, so I skip over to the valet who has crashed. His window is still down as he was preparing to punch the code into the valet gate, and he’s sitting in the passenger seat with a look on his face like his whole life is a mistake. “Hop out,” I tell him. He starts to try and tell me what happened. “Not right now,” I say, “just hop out.” We trade places. I back the car off the pillar in reverse, then I pop into drive and park the car in the garage. 

I get out and I inspect the damage. It’s significant. A dent that needs a whole new door panel. And a closer look reveals it’s even dented inward a little on a second panel. That means about twice the amount of money to fix it, probably in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. 

I get a rag. I look for any kind of moisture nearby. There’s a bottle of hand sanitizer on an old, out-of-use valet podium in the garage. That’ll do—actually it’s pretty good even, hand sanitizer might even be the preferred buffer. 

Some other employees come and skulk around while I’m trying to buff out the damage. My boss approaches. He’s been informed of the situation. I ask him how he wants to play it. “The car’s black,” he says. “That’s good. Get it out as much as possible and we’ll try to distract them as their leaving.” He laments something like “God, fuck, we’ve had 3 claimsvthis year and it’s only January” as he’s walking away. 

The ladies come out from their lunch at the hotel after about two hours. When they hand the shift lead their ticket at the podium, there’s some slight head nods amongst the staff. We radio the boss, who’s been chewing his fingernails in the office. He gets the car personally, and pulls it onto the driveway in such a way that it’s difficult to notice the dent. 

They’re so damn kind. They’re in a good mood. They’ve had a few drinks and gaily tip us as they drive away unwitting. The Cadillac turns out of our driveway, down the street and out of view. I feel like every meter it takes all I can see is the horrible dent. My boss takes a deep breath. He fist bumps me. Tells me “well done” and thanks for thinking fast. He knows that once the car is off the property, no matter what, we have won the battle. A valet claims department always denies claims when a car leaves the property. 

This is the process that occurs, at greater and lesser faults, for any time a car is damaged by a valet. It is a wickedness which every company I have worked for commits regularly. Not once in a while, but often many times per year. 

I once had a boss who, when I asked him how much he tips valets when he goes to a valet location, responded quickly “oh, I would never valet my car,” on the basis of its insecurity in another company’s hands. 

I have not yet resolved my employment with these companies alongside my disdain for this unethical behavior. When I’ve asked mentors about the situation, sometimes I get the response of “well, most enterprises aren’t 100 percent clean, either. Hell, even churches have blind spots.” 

There are “claims” that get paid out, damage we cause that is so obvious we can’t get away with it, or else maybe the offense was committed in view of the public. For several years I was the leader responsible for addressing these claims with the guests we had offended. When I began that assignment, it terrified me to approach the customers with the bad news, but as time went on, I grew excited. People show some fun colors when you present them with bad news, a lot of times their mercy is uplifting. Of course, my old trick with that task was to explain to people that we were going to pay them out in cash for the damage. Several claims I filed with people who were driving shit cars in the first place became wide eyed with joy when they realized they could profit by putting up with a dented fender, or missing sideview. 

Probably not the best time to mention this, but I was surprised in the early years on this job how resilient car paneling is. You can back up any modern vehicle at pretty swift speed right into an object, and there’s going to be zero cosmetic damage, so long as you don’t scrape anything—the collision must be flat and single pointed. It’s not reasonable to expect a valet to never cause vehicle damage, or bump something every once in a while. The number of cars we go through is enormous, and sometimes acts of God happen that aren’t even your mistake: I remember one time a beach umbrella flew into the windshield of a dodge Ram I was parking. The thing had hovered like invisible Mary Poppins for several hundred yards before torpedoing into the car. I’ve estimated that I’ve parked and moved cars numbering in the hundreds of thousands. As a confession of highly commendable transparency, I’d also estimate that I have bumped, damaged, or had minor collisions in somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cars. There are valets with better or worse rates of accuracy—as a supervisor, I’ve made decisions countless times to keep the guys I consider more dangerous drivers out of certain situations, usually in respect to the value or hazardous nature of particular vehicles. 

I will repeat that I am troubled and offended by valet company’s treatment of vehicle damage, the way they hide and avoid alerting the owners, such as in my opening anecdote to this chapter. This is wrong behavior. However. I am also positive that no matter how manly, obstinate, or professional a particular driver is, the average visitor to a valet garage has a lower chance of successful, undamaged parking than the valets on staff do. We have home field advantage. We know the garage, and, if we’re long on the job, we’ve done this far more times than any random guest. 

It’s an unusual situation. What I’m saying is, on the one hand, you really can’t trust valet companies. On the other hand, we are safer and more responsible than the public when parking their cars. It’s not terribly uncommon for a guest to roll up, usually in a low Asian car, or a big truck, or a high end sports car, and demand that they be allowed to park themselves in our garage. Sometimes I let them do it, while supervising them either in the passenger seat or walking next to them. 

Situations where you’re directly or vaguely dependent on an unscrupulous entity are hideous, and the level of your dependence on them will exacerbate anxiety, bitterness, and a kind of resentment that can shorten your life-span. This more applies to employees of the valet companies than it does to customers. To those hotel or restaurant guests reticent to park valet based on the information I’ve stated, it’s understandable, but to be frank, rarely, if ever, should you worry about your car, especially when you’re not in it, in motion. The danger to your vehicle in parking valet is not high, and as I’ve stated, I think it’s lower than if you, say, parked your own car at a Costco or a bank. However I do not ask that you roll over and go easy on a valet company in the event they damage your car. They’ll probably try to lie to you.

So every valet company I’ve worked for, and every manager I’ve had in ten years who is dishonest with their customers. Whether or not the 18 year old kids that I often work with think about this, undoubtedly when you have a manager that is dishonest, it makes for an entire work culture that is dishonest. If God can’t be trusted, don’t expect people to exhibit anything close to grace. 

And so it goes with these valet companies. As long as they continue to be led by selfish, deceitful managers, I expect the labor at the bottom of the pyramid to scheme viciously on the driveway as well. 

Customers, I hope it goes without saying, can be ugly liars as well. Out of anxiety, confusion, or sometimes malice, they do make false claims from time to time, citing damage on their cars that we clearly did not do. Most of the time, people start lying when they feel afraid. I remember an international traveler pointing out to me some damage on his rental car. I explained to him that the sticker over the spot he was looking at meant the rental company had marked it, and knew about it before he received the car. He didn’t believe me and yelled at me for refusing to take responsibility, and he was yelling and accusing me in front of a large number of people, a moderately embarrassing scene. I also informed him that, having worked in the region for a long time, I knew which rental company he had used, and I knew well enough that even if that particular mark was new (which it wasn’t), they weren’t going to charge him for it. He asked me if I wanted to bet. I smiled, and he didn’t like this, but I explained to him I can’t make a bet with a man I can’t trust. He could go to the rental lot and strangely demand they charge him for it. He yelled at me some more. I don’t think he was trying to get one over, I think he was just afraid of the money and feelings. 

Cleary we hadn’t damaged this guy’s car. We comped his parking due to his meltdown. He’s one example of hundreds of these instances, but it’s a real problem when the habit of your company is to lie, and suddenly you’re in a moment of telling the truth. There’s some old fable about that, I’m sure. 

Let’s look at the bottom of the pyramid, and the primary unethical behavior of the valets: 

Skimming 

Endemic—every location I’ve worked as a valet skims the transient tickets, often prodigiously. I’ve done it. I’ve also been complicit where it’s being done by others. Basically and usually it works like this: 

Daily parking at your location costs ten dollars. This money is supposed to be charged to the visitor, and accepted as payment, received by your valet company. The valet on duty, instead of giving the ten dollars to his company puts it in the tip pool, thus keeping the money (albeit sharing with the other valets). I’ve often been amused when I begin work at a new location and the valets show me their method as if I’ve never heard of this scam before. The way to escape any audit is to re-use old tickets, though even this isn’t foolproof, any manager with eyeballs can generally tell when a ticket has been doubled. Another way a valet might accomplish this theft covertly is to improperly validate a used ticket at an adjoining restaurant. So they collect ten dollars from the customer, put the money in the tip pool, then walk over to the restaurant and have a hostess stamp it, thus recording the parking as “free” on the books. If you’re really lazy, you can scribble “void” on the ticket and pretend that the car was never parked in the first place, that for some reason a ticket was issued, but then the guest changed their mind and drove away at the last minute. 

The popularity of this scam is in large part due to its ease. But culture is huge too. As I’ve stated, having bosses that are constant liars does a lot. Also, working on a staff of many people who all hover around a driveway freely also makes for more theft. A gas station attendant is not as likely, I don’t think, to reach into a till, pull out a hundred dollars, and pocket it. On a given night, at my current location, the valets are easily skimming over a hundred dollars. But the gas station attendant feels more alone, creeped on by the solitude of his store, and the static attendant can’t mentally evade the irrefutable wrong of taking money from a till as much. 

The bosses usually know that skimming occurs. In the industry, it’s calculated like shrink or waste in a retail store. Some of the young guys I’ve worked with think they’re slick, and they’re getting away with it. On the other hand, some guys admit the boss knows, but since he doesn’t do anything about it—it must be ok. Green light to steal. I once had a manager who was a prodigious skimmer back when he was a valet, and then he got promoted—what a hot spot for him! He couldn’t say anything to the staff regarding theft, as he was company enemy number 1 beforehand. 

There’s only so many ways to view your boss, just like opinions of God: 

1. God doesn’t care what we do. 

2. God is an asshole. Fuck him. 

3. God ain’t looking. 

4. God won’t punish us for wrongdoing. He’s a homie. 

There may be many and more nuanced versions of these Boss-views, but I wish to emphasize and re-emphasize that the earlier mentioned unethical behavior of valet companies stokes the negative perspectives and consequent behaviors of staff. I take the view ethics are generally inflexible across all life circumstances, and whatever ostensible situation arises, there’s no wiggle in right and wrong. That’s not to say people can’t feel confusion and anxiety about their decisions. There are times in life much more troubling than dealing with cars or money. The older I get, the more I realize that material problems are the best kind of problems to have. One time a man approached me at the valet stand in the early morning and handed me the ticket to his car, and in doing so, says to me “You’re going to pull my car up?” emphasizing the “you’re.” So I said, “yes, sir, is that alright?” A touch of return condescension in my voice. He kind of bitched at me, and I was quite confused about this, as everything about the interaction is old standard to me: ticket, car, guest, ta-da. I’m a professional, why is this such a weird deal to him? I even said to him at one point, flexing my credentials “It’s not a big deal, sir, I’ll take care of your car,” before running towards the garage to retrieve it. He yelled at me: “IT IS A BIG DEAL.” When I got to the garage and saw the car he requested, then it made sense. It was a BMW M3 CSL E46 with a big spoiler on it and sluttish little skirt on the sides. When I saw the Instagram sticker on the rear window I knew there wasn’t any hope for a tip. The interaction impressed me with our high separation of values, and what I want to tell valets is that even if you’re a guy like me, who thinks this particular car is absolute cringe, and the man driving it probably a merciless lover, make no mistake that he deserves your finest care regardless. Whether or not the car and the job is a “big deal,” do it right. But who am I kidding? Any valet reading this is probably a 20 year old kid who thinks that car is tits. 

There are, of course, outside of the standard procedures of this job, moments of ethical trouble that arise with people. I’ve mentioned the occasional pervert, the drug habits which come by valet stands, and in short, the sizable percentage of people who come to hotels to do very unethical or creepy things. But life gets on top of you fast in a way that I’m quite sure, whatever advice I might spell out in this book, all my readers are going to be hit with moments of decision that put the “ick” in ethics.

One time I was having a typical day on the job. It was sunny. It was busy. And pedestrian traffic equaled that of the cars coming by. I was standing at the highest reach of the valet driveway talking to a customer—simple chatter in the order of a check-in to the hotel, at this point in my career the information out of my lips a perfect script about parking and the property, sincere enough to relay the relevant information to the guest, banal enough to buzz them off quickly so I can help the next car coming in. 

On the sidewalk, I noticed a very tall man with a mullet. I thought “golly, nice mullet, dude.” He had a family with him, a wife and several kids—one of the children was a boy of about eight years old, and this boy had a matching mullet. And I thought “oh, how terrible, kids think too much of their parents.” This mullet whipping father and son were horsing around a bit as they passed by—the kid was smacking on his fathers legs, or jumping in efforts to climb his very tall body. 

Then the father picked up the boy by the shoulders. I looked the other direction—I couldn’t have expected what was about to occur, I don’t know whether I excused the visual because I was distracted by my own work or if I casually assumed the father was just picking up his son for a piggy back ride, or something harmless. As I was looking at the face of the hotel guest I was serving, I saw his eyes widen—the guest saw it in full view. The father, as I turned back to look myself, had evidently body slammed his child into a bush just off the sidewalk, and the child was immediately in tears and writhing. 

Now I was giving this mullet duo my full attention. I stood about ten feet away from them. I do not have children, though many nieces and nephews, and at first, I let what was occurring between this strange family continue without terrible guilt or action based on the knowledge that sometimes kids overreact to things. I didn’t see the body slam after all. Maybe it was a highly skilled, fatherly plop in a fluffy bush, and the kid is truly just angry for attention, or upset he didn’t get to Disneyland or some nonsense. 

Unfortunately, what occurred next ruined my self-justifications of innocence. The father proceeded to curse in the face of his son with such hatred and abuse that it made me shrink up into the long gone child I once was myself. I felt scared. He was using language that nobody on this planet would like to hear directed at them, much less children. I’m sure there’s a way in therapy to process “shut the fuck up,” and “stop being a little bitch!” shouted at you inches from your face, but for most of us, what doesn’t kill you makes life harder. 

I am still very ashamed of the things that went through my mind during this moment. They were all based in fear, excuses for inaction. I considered assaulting the man, but thought “he is big, I would be trounced.” I considered saying anything, sternly in condemnation, but thought “I have no children, who am I to criticize a father?”  I wondered about calling for more attention from others to the scene, as there were many people about, but thought “this is just city life, look, nobody else cares, why should I? Not my problem.” 

But out of all my shameful reasons for ignoring the situation, what stuck in my little brain the most was the most dreadful selfishness. I thought, “I’m on the clock. I could lose my job if I do anything. I’m just a valet. I just park cars, dammit. Leave me alone.” 

Readers—whatever occupation you find yourself in, whatever clubs or parties or factions you join, beware that your identity among them is always a risk for excusing liberty and justice for all. How silly and evil that a man can become fearful about his income, or his career, or status, just as I was. “Valet” is not the kind of job title that’s going to get me dates from women and respect from men. And yet I was willing to cling to it like an anxious lover when confronted with a situation that threatened my valet title. 

And so I did nothing. But continued to park cars. God, forgive me. That family disappeared forever from my view, and all I have is the worst memory of them. My coworkers at the scene were little in the way of therapy, though they claimed, as men often do, that if I had attacked, they would’ve rolled with me. 

Ethics. They are the geometry of a body slam. 

Chapter 13: Inside of People’s Cars

There is a certain type of valet guest, usually a woman, who will say, “I’m so sorry—my car’s a mess” when they hand over their keys. The people who say this usually have cars that are far cleaner than my personal vehicle. That is to say, this warning is typically more anxiety than it is actual filth.

Alternatively, the truly messy interior, insides of cars that evoke high amounts of disgust, those owners generally say nothing beforehand. Sometimes, as in an episode of Seinfeld, a car interior may be spotless, but an odor of intense human organs or some other mysterious evil pervades the cabin. I have myself, on a few occasions, laid a battle fart inside the car of an unruly customer, or else had a flatus escape me untimely during the brief parking journey. I assume many of the foul odors to smack me when parking a car are from guests returning the cheek in kind. At the risk of sounding paranoid and victim oriented, I’m certain that some people going about this world are downright sadists, and get a real kick out of demeaning others. Service workers in the path of these pissers have little recourse. One time a man gave me a hefty tip, grinning as he handed over the keys to me, and like a peep show attendant told me to “have a good night!” His car smelled like a fungal butthole that he attempted to remedy by lighting his ass pubes on fire and expelling the proliferous wind of Satan. There’s no way to know, but by the way he said goodnight, I think it was on purpose.

In the early part of my career, Teslas and dashcams were rare. When I got inside a vehicle, there was nobody but God watching. Nowadays, it’s very hard to guess when you might be recorded. Presently, when I see the valet mode or the red dot of an interior camera, I begin reciting poetry, or singing a song, or I say something bizarre and biting about the guest or my life. I guess I like to reinforce constantly that I have a little personality, despite my repetitive baseline of service commands. Entering another persons car can tell you a lot and fast about other people’s personalities. This chapter is about the experience of entering other people’s cars, on a visceral level, experiences and gleanings from the way others organize their vehicles, with some advice and warnings to valets, as per usual.

Let’s get the most obvious advice out of the way first: if a vehicle arrives with intense hygienic issues, deny them service. Don’t get in it. Needles lying around, rats, cockroaches, lice—I’ve seen all these things, do not park these cars. The surliest I’ve ever been with coworkers was when someone parked a car with rats, and I found it in the morning, when the owner requested it. “I’d wish plague upon you,” I told the other valets, “but you’ve already brought it.”

My tolerance for disgust, however, is markedly higher than most other peoples. I will not speculate or elaborate why, about that. But there is not an odor on the planet, save for one in memory, that I would turn down parking a car for, that is, if I thought that I was going to be the only valet to drive it, and the interior is otherwise sanitary. (The one odor that defeated me was a painter’s car, which kept gallons of toxic chemicals in its back seat. It was a gas chamber).

Vomit and excrement, additionally milk, don’t ever seem to leave as odors, after they’ve been cleaned. I can tell immediately when a rental car has had one of these mishaps in the past. Air fresheners, especially when I see a lot of them in one dashboard, signify that some loose human liquids once caught floorboards, or maybe even the seat I’m occupying. If there’s a child seat or two or three in the back, you can be sure the ghosts of many bowel movements will hang in the air. I assume any minivan that pulls up is going to smell like baby excretions.

These would be the perfumes I would pitch, if Calvin Klein asked me to encapsulate the aromatic wonders of valet parking:

1. Eau de Baby Seat. She has 4 kids, a minivan, and her husband is upset about the Steelers game. They drove from Boise to San Francisco non-stop. Is that milk and Cheerios on the floor? Or is there something more? Who knows, it was wailing and gnashing of teeth all through Nevada.

2. Fleurs de Drogue. Marijuana actually improves his driving, otherwise he’s too distracted by his cell phone. Skunk and shake are all a police officer might whiff from the window of his Honda civic, but there’s an eighth he forgot about in the center console, along with an ashy pipe that hasn’t been washed in fifteen years.

3. Le Poo Poo Residue. That one time he got road head from his high school sweetheart, but he was questionably digesting some curry from dinner, hoped she and his father wouldn’t notice the chunky skid mark he left in his BMW. He scrubbed as best he could, but the little dots in the leather seats may have eaten what he tried to wipe.

4. Bentley de Carl’s Junior. New money, classic American. It’s a 300,000 dollar car. It’s a cheese stuccoed bag of trash on the floorboards. Five different bags in fact, from five fast food restaurants, all consumed in the past 3 days for about 20 dollars. Is it Paris Hiltons car? No. But it could be. Cheese and sophistication, all at once.

5. L’odeur Corporelle. It’s a rental ford F-150. A fishing pole in the back. But that’s not fish. That’s body sweat. My god, with the windows down you can’t escape it. You are in the armpit of Baal, the never bathing Satan. Dead bodies can’t smell as bad, surely. The living somehow outfunk them. 

6. New Car Smell. It’s a trick, right? Why is this scent limited to factory pressed vehicles? The air is purgatory. The knobs are cherub nipples. Everything is fresher than newborns. Nissan or Rolls Royce, doesn’t make a difference, it’s the aroma of a sealed machine, more complex and mysterious than birth itself.

All these smells and more will hit the nostrils of any journeyman valet. As I mentioned, I have a high tolerance for disgust, so for me, I must compensate by refusing a greater number of the odorous guests than my personal inclination, for the sake of my coworkers. As to what words you use in explaining a refusal of service to an overly funky patron, I advise you only mention sanitary conditions if hard pressed, and otherwise divert language towards “I apologize, but I don’t feel comfortable parking your vehicle.” Some of the most funky and disgusting car owners are going to act nonplussed about being rejected no matter what you do. Strangely, I advise no mercy to them. Remain calm and express to them the car is unbearable. These savages need the doctor’s opinion you can provide.

Please, if you lean the opposite direction of me in the disgust department—if you’re squeamish or easily choked by cigarette smell or the average minivan, buckle up and deal with it more often than not. Remember what mothers put up with on the daily. If they can survive birth, afterbirth, and years of diaper changing, you can park a bad smelling car once in a while. Don’t use anything I’ve said to become a germ opposed valet tsar. Remember always that your shit stink, too.

Beyond smells, car interiors are riddled with tokens and possessions of their owners. Most of the nooks and compartments are predictable, so far as what they’ll usually contain. The glove compartment will have boring paperwork, registration, insurance and the like. These are useful if you’ve for any reason missed getting the owners name before issuing them the ticket.

Most cars have a deepish open compartment directly beneath at the split between seats. There’s usually junk here—loose change, maybe trash, work badges, etc… I do not recommend putting your hand in this nook unless necessary. It’s sometimes sticky.

Venture into center consoles only when guests request something from them, for the most part, tho if you’re missing keys sometimes it’s an odd but important place to look. Some people, a very rare class, keep their key fob in the center console all the time, and presumably never remove it.

Push start cars are one of those backwards and unhelpful advancements in technology, as there is very little upside to not having a standard key ignition. I will not labor to describe all the variants, but advanced valets can find the overriding key-hole to start in fob technology vehicles (sometimes it’s under the “start” button, sometimes it’s in weird reaches the the console or glove box) for when the fob battery is dead.

Common accoutrements of a vehicle interior are religious icons, idols, or family Polaroids. A stunning number of people hang stuff from their rear view, a practice that seems moderately dangerous. 

Chapter 14: Beyond Ethics

I did not know any of my grandparents particularly well.

Sometimes a friend or acquaintance relays to me that their grandfather or mother makes the best casserole in the world, or they’re going through some issues, or they vote for the wrong candidates, or whatever, and I’m slightly reminded that this is a familial relationship I never really had. My father was estranged from his old man, more or less, who retired two states away (literally and figuratively), and the rest of my grands died when I was just a boy.

The closest I had was my mom’s dad, who, in failing health and after the death of his wife, lived with my family briefly before a speedy demise when I was aged 12. I do not think he liked me, though, it was a bad year for him in many ways that I could not then, nor perhaps now, fully appreciate or empathize with. In better health, he was a friendly man, somewhat to a fault, often talking to strangers at the dinner table adjacent in a restaurant, veteran of the last noble war, and a crotchety objector to things like freemasonry and other bygone boys clubs, steadfast to creaky church pews in denominations with dwindling membership. He had an awful hunch, and I wonder if those wooden pews made it worse, or if, just as when I kneel during the same services, I feel an ungodly amount of guilt just for the way it makes my body feel, let alone all the sinning I’ve done, my knees like knives are stuck in them, and my spine, as I try to posture with shoulders back, screams “curve! Curve!” And so we hunch.

When he died, after the funeral and all the family redheads cried their eyes out, my mother gave me a blanket of his. It said “navy” on it, and I had no clue whether it was issued to him in the actual navy, though it smelled as if it could’ve been 4 or 5 decades old indeed.

I cleaned it. And I kept it in my car for park outings or the beach. I read not a few books on that blanket. It wasn’t terribly sacred to me, although, if, for instance, I was with a lady on one of these park or beach outings, I should certainly avoid letting her use the blanket. It would’ve been too disrespectful to that old Protestant navy man to have even the thought of copping a feel on his property. I don’t think the bikini was even invented in the culture he came from. I wasn’t going to introduce it to him in the afterlife. Or afterblanket. Whatever.

Some people think it doesn’t get cold where I live. I guess if you’re a goddamned Canadian or something, sure. But I recall a gusty night in December when I was on the job, and it felt like 40 degrees out with a that frigid Pacific Ocean spitting mist our way. I moved the valet podium inside the lobby of the hotel a little earlier than usual, just to keep warm.

A man walked in the doors of the hotel. It must’ve been around 10pm at that point—I remember being itchy to get off work. The last hour on the clock is very hard to stay mindful about, to be present.

The man had snot caked all under his nose, an unshaven face, socks with flip flops. By the way he spoke, whether fantastic acting or actual sobriety, he seemed well mannered, and less homeless than his appearance. However, what he was asking for was a blanket. So he was homeless, though he insisted it was for a friend, for some other tragic case on the street that night.

The front desk agent immediately replied that we have no such blankets to give it out.

I looked at the homeless man. Then I swiveled and looked at the front desk, the young lady in her company issued blazer, the neatly ironed black skirt and tights. I knew that right behind her desk, right behind it, there was pile of blankets. They always keep them there for ease of access, as it’s common for hotel guests to come request them at night. There must be 500 of these blankets lying around.

What would J.W. Marriott do in this situation?

Now I don’t mean to be too harsh on that desk agent. Lord knows, where I come from and where I work, I’ve stepped over a lot of miserable homeless people, and I’ve had little feuds with some on my job, and witnessed certain daily loiterers act with extreme violence, perversion, and malice towards God and property.

In this case, the man’s request was perfectly reasonable though his lie about the blanket being for a “friend” broke my heart a little. I could relate to that: needing help, but asking in a screwed up way because I’m sometimes too hurt and scared of everything to admit how bad I’ve got it.

What would J.W. Marriott do? I said this to the lady at the desk, after the guy went out the door, cold. She had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. Often I say these sorts of socially inept platitudes, so she dismissed it as my usual strangeness.

I chased down the man and gave him my grandfathers blanket. He came back, a couple days later, to thank me, and I asked how his friend was doing, he said oh good good he’s trying to get in to a shelter. And he had cleaned his nose. I’ve heard the words “thank you” from a million hotel guests over the years, but that’s the only one I really think about as meaning much. He came back just to say it. I hope the grandfather of which I only have vague impressions would approve of what I did, same goes for J.W.

On this job, or, not to be too cute, in this life: I’m somewhere between the street and the cozy hotel. Try not to forget, always, that it’s a very short distance between the two. The gap is not as wide as people would have you believe. It’s hard to be in between, but not as brutal as being at either extreme.

Chapter 15: Advice from the Psychiatric Ward

If you ever find yourself in a place like a psych ward, or a rehab of any stripe—if you’re unfortunate enough to reside in a gloomy building labeled vaguely “treatment centre” outside, usually as a course of your institutionalization, the authorities in these places will give you a job.

It is not a real job. It will be something pathetic and easy like emptying the ashtrays, raking the horseshoe pit, or picking up lunch from the cafeteria (all assignments I’ve had).

More or less, the jobs they give you are a test. They want to see if you have the social fitness to contribute, or any self respect to be remotely prideful.

What type of inpatient would you be? I think a large percentage of the population is the “fuck it, I’m in the clutches of disorder and disease, I’m not doing shit” variety. Over 50 percent. It’s probably something like that in the real world too. Or they do the job, but hardly; half assed, as they please.

Because these half asses are a majority, those few who take their jobs very seriously will invariably be ridiculed. But what is an insult, really, in the sort of wellness dungeon that makes a psych ward? One man in hell can’t preach much to another. It gets tougher back on the surface—on your valet job.

If you can withstand the ridicule which applies to wage work and psych ward follies equally, a silver lining is that it’s quite easy to be, in a basic sense, better than all your co-workers. To quote a brilliant woman: a good man is hard to find. For most wage jobs, showing up on time will make you the best employee. I’m not exaggerating. The level of social business awareness on a typical wage workforce is next to nil. Very few workers want their employment. I don’t stress without pity: most of them just don’t know how to get out of it. I want my job, sure, but if I’m being honest, I don’t know how to get out of it either.

There are practical dangers of being a great worker in the eyes of your boss, but, if you honestly want the job, which I hope you do, the benefits are clear: more work, better shifts, and better leverage for other career opportunities. You may, also, receive an easier time requesting desired days off. I hope you are not the type who overworks yourself, because if you are, reading my prior statements may be dreadfully unhealthy. Please take vacations, weekends, and find time to make love or fornicate off the clock.

That said, it’s precisely because of my lowest experiences, my extremities in living, that I can easily work the sort of job that I do without being an ingrate or having shame. It’s a real mensch who works diligently without any sordid mystical rearrangement of cognition such as I’ve had, to some extent.

There is another type of mind, growing in numbers among young people, who delight in having task work of any kind, while despairing and misbehaving wildly when there is no labor available. They were problem students in public schools, but make the best workers—so long as there is work to do. I say they make the best workers, and I mean it, though these nervous hearts can easily fall into drug habits, phone addictions, or antisocial customer service behavior. They just get bored. Fast. So they’re a confusing lot, and as well can be confused with those who work hard for, let’s say, less pathological reasons.

I am going to back down from making further delicate analogies about the fictitious hospital “jobs” and the “real-world” wages, except to say I’m certain that doing a “good job” of anything is seldom a process of doing one thing very well—though that may guarantee fame or employment forever—the man who attends to all small things with care is like God. Perhaps what the psych ward tests get at the quickest is the relation between your personal life and your responsibility towards work. The two are inextricable, when it comes down to it. And so in this “real world,” the things you do and feel off the clock are directly relational to what you do on it, or if you have a clock at all. Long way of saying a simple thing we all know, that your personal life, the wages paid in the experience only, are more important than the job, but I lean in to thinking that your job, whatever it may be, and how you behave at it, is a decent measure of the rest of your spirit.

When I get that dreadful question during a new social encounter, the “what do you do?” I am firstly defensive, probably because my answer is not going to impress the way I hoped it would 20 years ago, when I was young and the whole world was an open ocean and I thought I’d make a daring sailor. It seems like I’ve spent the last twenty years trying swim across the Atlantic, with detentions on some unfriendly islands not far from where I started.

I do not say “I’m a valet” or “valet parking,” as these nouns are almost out of date at this point, and always have been, frankly, confusing, as in centuries past a “valet” is some kind of French butler.

I always like to respond with the most absurdly reductive mode of “living” I can think to describe: “I park cars,” is what I say. I almost always want to insist on the askers imagination: “can you believe it? I get paid to park other people’s cars. Isn’t life strange?” If I’m afforded elaborating further, I will tell stories, the way a lawyer might boast in sneak about the magnitude of his trials, and speak with confidence about his work in such a way that the listener must think “he’s either a great lawyer, or he certainly thinks himself one.” In the same way, as I talk about my strange living, I come to inflate the subject with preposterous importance, and my knowledge of all things car parking is issued with esoteric bravura for I think I cannot impress anyone with the job I have, but I could impress anybody with the job I do.

There is a perfectly literary insanity to being an excelsior car parker—and a trove of authors from the 20th century made it their whole shtick to mock the little sincerities of people without real wars to fight. My father used to joke, when someone on the TV had a badge of inane professionalism, “just as well as being the world’s greatest ping pong player!” 

Yes, there is probably a more terrible fate for someone who takes their job too seriously rather than the one who takes a pimp and prostitute angle on employment. But on that scale, I’ve worked with a lot more whores than I have professionals, and the ones who balance it—who work somewhere in the middle—it’s damned hard to notice them, same way it’s damned hard to even notice a genuinely humble person. Me, I slide here and there, though this book worries me a little as a heavy stone on the serious end. 

Chapter 16: Advanced Valets

a) When I enter a vehicle, my right foot hits the brake pedal before my ass hits the seat. This allows for a
slightly quicker ignition and shift. 
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b) If I’ve parked a car earlier in the day, and worked until the moment the same vehicle is requested to
be brought out later, I emphatically take the lead and retrieve the vehicle myself, rather than issuing
the job to one of my coworkers. This heightens the probability of a tip. Repeating service—using the
same valet multiple times to treat the same guest, is what you want to aim for with all actions,
barring the improbability that a particular guest doesn’t like a particular valet. 

c) When you enter a vehicle, visually scan the cabin for any items the driver may have left behind. Mostly
you’re looking for cell phones. If you see it, and you’re sure they’ll want it, hop out of the car and take
the item to them. This kills two birds: you won’t have to run back to the garage later to retrieve the
item for them, and they’ll be impressed by your conscientiousness. 

d) A word about communication. A large majority of errors occur because the way in which a task is
communicated is unclear. I ain’t Marshall Mcluhan, but the mode of communication is as important or
more than the verbiage. Strive to speak in person as often as possible when relaying task details. And
try to receive information through the fewest channels—the fewest people. Radios, text messages,
and all the apps in all the world are helpful in many ways, but when it comes down to it, our species
still gets shit done best when you’re within smelling distance of the person communicating. 

In a strange way, I fear the militaries of the world a whole lot more after a decade on my valet job, because the number of times I’ve witnessed errors occur due to communication mishaps is so high. And often when these mistakes occur and you try to assess the situation for future prevention, and/or an explanation to any relevant authorities, you’re left scratching your head and figuring nobody was really at fault, it’s just hard to get a message across through a lot of people. So I’m quite sure many bombs have been dropped on the wrong village, and a league of G.I. Joe’s were only doing what seemed right at the time. 

e) Use people’s names. It’s going to be written on the keytag, if you don’t already know it. Do not feel
self-conscious about the obviousness of collecting someone’s name in this manner. There was a
study done once, probably by some college graduates with too much time and money, that states
people act generously even when they’re conscious of casual bribery (in the experiment I believe
they had a teacher give candy to subjects who were about to review the teacher’s performance for
the semester, the reviews were significantly improved by the candy subjects, and what’s more, if the
teacher said out loud “this is to bribe you,” they’d still receive higher marks on the review). 

If you don’t know their name, or can’t pronounce it and are unwilling to ask for some reason, (I could not for the life of me muster the courage to call a certain Mr. Butts by his name, nor, even knowing it was pronounced “Nuh-zee,” find myself straight faced enough to issue Mr. Nazi’s car to him by uttering the two syllables out loud), these are the correct nouns to use: 

• Sir

• Miss

This may change in time and though this does not seem to be an advanced move, I mention this technique in the category largely because my coworkers make the terrible “ma’am” mistake. “Ma’am” is the dreadful consequence of an American south that tried to stuff French into a cotton gin. A contemporary utterance of the formal “Madam” here in the states is going to be connected mostly to a connotation of brothels. And though the term “miss” has its own sordid connotations, and even though you will be plainly mislabeling a huge number of women visiting your locale, the error in marriage appointment you risk will probably be taken as a compliment. If you call a 60 year old lady “miss,” she’ll have a fun time correcting you, at worst. 

On the flip side, as a note to any readers who are on the other side of the valet stand, there are some definite pronouns which you ought to avoid referring to valets as. Do not call me: 

• Buddy or bud (I feel like blaspheming for how offensive this title is to me. When a man calls me this, I instantly feel the need to uppercut him sucker style). 

• Champ

• Boss

• Kid

Kudos to the general public who bothers to learn a service staff members name. Even if you ask me my name, then forget it later, I respect and admire you in a way that is almost higher than money in my hand.  

f) A common question you’re going to receive from guests is where to eat around your location. Your
answer should be in two parts: the first, you name the outright most popular dining destination in the
area. The second, you emphasize how everybody thinks highly of destination one, but destination two
is where locals, and or you, prefer. Be careful not to give them an outright local dive, someplace a
vacationer will feel menaced. This social maneuver can be accomplished even if you don’t know the
area, just google dining near you, pick the two highly rated restaurants. If you know an honest answer,
or course, go with that. Few of us work long enough in a given locale, or actually live where we work to
know the area expertly. 

g) If it’s good weather out and the slow season, and your driveway has enough space to stage cars,
consider this scenario: say a man comes into your driveway with a fancy car, something very
bourgeois like a base 911 or a Maserati, and he’s making a big stink about not wanting to valet his car
on the basis of protecting his valuable running metal. As you’re politely explaining to the man your
appreciation for his carefulness, and your understanding of his valuable property, have one of your
coworkers pull from the garage a high-end vehicle, especially one that surpasses his in clout and
status. Ideally you want the car pulled to be a “daily” ticket, something that’s going out soon. Do not
make any sort of verbal mention about the scene. The careful man may or may not be persuaded. 

A base objective of any valet’s job is to collect keys from every single person who brings a car on the driveway, no matter what. However, the advanced valet knows that there are going to be customers who aggressively want to defy this job function, and they will use child-like social tactics to retain their car keys. The customer will say, “oh I’m just going inside for two minutes,” or they’ll pout, insult you, demean you, etc… I had one man, an elderly gentleman, park his car all wonky on the driveway, refuse to relinquish his keys to me, and begin walking to the hotel entrance. In a last-ditch effort to persuade him, I tried to play the situation pathetically, saying something like “please, it would really help me out if I could have your keys, just in case anything happens.” 

“Anything happens!” he yelled at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?” The driveway at the time was swarmed with cars and people. I was short staffed, supervisor on duty, just trying to float through the check-in rush and get out of dodge, so my reply was less than smooth:

“Like, if you disappear, if anything happens…so I can move the car,” is something like what I said. 

The man then threatened to make me disappear, as in, murder me. I kept calm, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and went to the front desk to inform them that this man was banned from parking with us, that he threatened my life, and I can direct him to street parking nearby, if need be. His wife was mortified. This last bit is the advanced tactic, and you only want to use it in extreme circumstances, but you can leverage a man’s marriage or relationship against him in certain situations. On the other hand, sometimes the wife is as much a problem as the man, but generally speaking women are the more reasonable and friendly gender, when it comes to patronage. Also in the other extreme, fights between couples sometimes boil over onto their driveway behavior, and these you more or less have to let run their course, or accept being a neutral emotional punching bag. 

h) Finally, for those of you working at busy locations, places where you’re going to have dozens of
pedestrians asking for your attention at one time, while also new cars are bounding into the driveway
non-stop, you must understand that for the most part, “multitasking” is not a real thing. It is not
possible, over ninety percent of the time, to do multiple things at once. Get that idea out of your
mind entirely. In point of fact, it’s typically a disaster to even attempt to do multiple things at one
time. You’ll end up doing both poorly, or one of them out of order and the other not at all. The
advanced maneuver is an ability to receive many tasks individually, prioritize them by importance,
order of the request, expectation of timeliness, and expected value (how much you think they’ll tip).
Then you complete one task at a time, and of course, you delegate as many tasks as possible to your
coworkers—presumably they do this mostly without you even asking, if you’re working with some
real valets. It is important however, on this job more than some others, that you childishly announce
to your coworkers the little things you are doing. For example, if Mr. Lingenfelder requests his car in
person, ticket in hand, and there’s 5 cars already on the driveway ready to be parked, I might
announce to my coworkers: “I’m going to park this Toyota and come back with Mr. Lingenfelders car.”
It’s very simple, but it saves any of my fellow valets from mistakenly running for Lingenfelders car
themselves. 

If you watched me work for a shift, you might be tempted to accuse me of hypocrisy about this multitasking advice. I do many things at a time with one physical trip of my body, and I’m quite sure that my organization in doing so is what lands me so many shifts doing bellman duty. What I mean is: if I’ve got a luggage delivery to room 205, and another luggage delivery to room 237, I’m absolutely going to take both loads of luggage to the second floor at the same time. There might be some intelligent people reading this who think what I just said is hilariously condescending or plain dumb. But I swear to you, I’m the minority of bellman who would do this, in practicality. Some of my coworkers are indeed too dull to comprehend such service, however most of them simply find it beneficial to eat up more clock doing the deliveries separate. 

There are times I really stretch the imagination in executing multiple tasks in one body movement: 

• I am on the driveway

• Driveway is packed with cars

• Lady asks for a sweater from her car

• There are several requests for cars in the garage to be pulled out on the drive

• A man asks me to plug in his electric vehicle

1. I take one of the cars off the driveway into the garage
2. I drive it to the lady’s sweater, and grab that, parking the car I’m in nearby
3. I retrieve one of the requested vehicles, and drive it back up top with the sweater, giving it to the lady,
and the car to its owner. 
4. As for the electric vehicle, I wrote down what car it is, and I’ll get to that later, when I have more time. 

(Note that studious valets will understand there are small pieces of this scenario left unmentioned, namely the retrieval of everyone’s car keys, which in various locations occurs at different spots, but requires specific precision in organizing cleanly). 

I do not consider these actions multitasking at all. I am moving my body in an organized flow of tasks to work fluidly. Maybe it’s semantic to some, but I wish to emphasize to my valet readers that in the vulgar sense of the word: don’t multitask. Don’t try to do multiple things at once. However, mentally speaking, a high level of fitness is structuring how to move yourself with grace and tact. I’m quite sure that if I could apply my skill for this sort of valet organization to my personal affairs, I’d be a billionaire. But something happens when I get off the clock, I feel confused and hazy, sometimes hungry, or horny, or nothing at all, and I mostly occupy my time consuming, rather than producing. 

As a general concept for green workers, and for those of you that may work at monstrously busy locations: do something. It gets overwhelming at times when there are many tasks requested all at once. I’ve had many terrible rushes of business that feel as though they are unsolvable, a driveway overflowing with cars, and guests coming up and demanding all sorts of big and little services, that everything boils down to immediate motion. Just go. Do one thing. Park a car. It’s critical to just do something. Chip away at the mess when things are out of control. Keep moving. If I could do this in my personal life, I don’t think I’d be a billionaire, but it’d keep my bedroom clean, surely. 

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.

Written by R.H. Forsyth

Written by R.H. Forsyth

Written by R.H. Forsyth