Most large hotels have resident managers. The perks of such a position are many. A casual observer might consider the job as being the closest thing to royalty. Meals are provided by the hotel, along with daily maid service and laundry privileges. But the sword of Damocles also comes with the job. Am had lived at hotels before but had never much liked it, could never shake the feeling that he was on the job twenty-four hours a day and that doom was always hanging over his head. Whenever the phone rang, he anticipated it to be a problem, not a friend. And there was the fishbowl feeling, the staff monitoring the goings-on of his life as if it were spectator sport. But had he still been a resident manager, Am reflected, staff wouldn’t have had much to talk about lately. Nowadays he was having trouble getting a life separate from work. The antidote for many suffering job burnout is a change of scenery, an escape to some hotel where they can be pampered. But that didn’t work for Am. Whenever he visited other properties he felt like a magician analyzing another practitioner’s tricks. A getaway would be good, though, maybe a surfing trip down the Baja peninsula or a camping excursion to some secluded canyon in the Anza-Borrego Desert. The desert, located within the boundaries of San Diego County, was itself larger than some states, while the county as a whole could claim more square miles than half a dozen states. Within San Diego County were mountains, deserts, and the ocean. Anyone with time and money would be hard-pressed to ask for a more diverse and pleasant locale, but Am always seemed to be short either the hours or the cash.
Too tired to read, too numb to move, Am resorted to the intended soporific of television. His timing couldn’t have been worse. The lead story on the eleven o’clock news was the murders at the Hotel. According to the report, Jane Doe still hadn’t been identified, and neither had the murderer. There was a clip of McHugh responding to (or was that evading?) the reporter’s questions. Am thought there was more to be learned by the detective’s omissions than in what he said. On air, McHugh never mentioned the cleaning up of the crime scene or how the suspected murderer had gained access to the guest room in the first place.
For Am, the worst part of the news was having to watch himself being interviewed. He thought he had the presence of a cornered fox in a room of baying hounds. The only good thing about his segment was that it was short. Maybe his unintelligible mumbling had something to do with that. Am was glad he had listened to the housekeeper’s suggestion of filling the room with flowers. He had sarcastically asked if she wanted to make it look even more like a funeral parlor, but Barb had countered that the viewers might notice the pretty arrangements more than the story being presented. She had artfully positioned the flowers in front of the dais so as to obscure the Hotel California display (usually burnished to a high polish whenever the media was around). Barb’s flowers had shown up beautifully.
Murders and festive flowers made for conflicting signals. The day had been full of those. Things are not always as they seem, thought Am, words he associated with Conrad, an elderly bellman who had worked at his last hotel. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, Conrad said, he could gauge his tip to within a dollar of what he would ultimately receive, but every so often he encountered a guest who fooled him, who offered him a hauteur and a smile that all but guaranteed a substantial promissory note. “The kind of guest,” according to Conrad, “who passes along a folded bill into your palm as if deeding you the world.”
Bellmen know they’re supposed to offer a performance commensurate with their tip. The sure knowledge of a large gratuity makes them execute bows that come to within an inch of kowtowing. When receiving a palmed bill, bellmen must read the signals with which it is offered and then take a leap of faith. The etiquette of the situation requires the bellman to offer adequate pomp and circumstance even before knowing the denomination given to them. That moment of truth comes only after the bellman has exited the guest quarters and is out in the hallway.
“You open your hand,” said Conrad, “and you expect Jackson, but sweet Ben Franklin or handsome U. S. Grant aren’t unheard-of. You’ll settle for Hamilton, a fair trade for your performance, but you know that Lincoln sometimes comes up.
“But damn,” said the bellman, “if there aren’t times when you don’t find yourself looking eye to eye with solitary George Washington. Things are not always as they seem.”
Was this one of those times? thought Am. Had the police offered only a one-dollar explanation to a big-ticket crime?
As if listening for answers, Am heard a voice, then realized it was only the call of the stationmaster. Because his California bungalow was so close to Del Mar’s train station, Am heard the train announcements often enough to know all of Amtrak’s offerings. This would be the last commuter train of the night, the 11:05 P.M. run, heading south to downtown San Diego. Am had set his alarm early enough that he’d probably hear the 5:47 A.M. train going north.
With stops in Oceanside, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton, and Los Angeles, he thought, stops he had heard announced thousands of times.
One day I’m going to play hooky from work, Am vowed, and I’m going to take that train north, and get off at every one of those stops.
And then what? Author Paul Theroux had just kept traveling, finding more and more train lines, rails across continents. But there is a profound difference between being a traveler and a hotelier. Am had made his permanence out of transience. He had shared in enough stories and travels as to almost satiate his own wanderlust. Travelers need their ports. That’s what they talk about over the next horizon. And there were some things in his port he needed to make right—for the travelers, for himself.
There came a long train whistle, and then there came sleep.