The New Year, Stories from a Hotel Security Guard: Introduction

Hi, it's me again.  I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and rang in the new year with style.  My Christmas and New Year's were most excellent, thanks for asking.  Still, every holiday season I think of my childhood orthodontist, a short, bald, mustached man (picture if Cheech was Armenian, not Mexican) who never used gloves when working on my braces and whose office was decorated with pictures of professional boxers.  One time around the holidays I was waiting in my chair and upon entering the room, he mutters to himself, "Fucking fucking Christmas."

Anyway, today I was furiously digging around my desk drawers for a gluestick and I came across the journal I kept while I worked overnight security at the piece of shit DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Boston, on the edge of Chinatown.  I worked there from May to October of 2009, and this journal covers July through August.  I'd bring it with me and write down thoughts I had or crazy stuff that happened.  And there was a lot of it (much of which fell outside the timeframe of the journal, but that I remember well).

Doubletree Downtown Boston.  This is a recent picture.  The outside was much crummier looking.  Since I quit in October 2009, the hotel's undergone renovations but there are some things you can't renovate....

What I intend to do for these "Stories from a Hotel Security Guard" posts is to transcribe a few journal entries at a time, depending on their length.  I'd scan the pages but the journal is totally beat to hell, not to mention my handwriting is virtually unreadable.  Consider this an introductory post to provide a little background information, and share a few stories that I didn't write down.

Let me set the stage a little bit.  The Doubletree Downtown Boston, as its called, likes to advertise its closeness to city attractions, transportation, etc.  What they don't tell you is the hotel is located on the edge of Chinatown, across from a hospital filled with homeless people and other undesireables, and quite frankly is in a shitty area that at the time was (and probably still is) full of all sorts of street riff raff, from drug dealers to addicts to prostitutes.  I couldn't tell you how many times I would have to "escort" some crackhead, hooker or thug from the lobby in the middle of the night.  There was one black girl who I would see walk up the stairs with some dopey looking guy trailing ten feet behind her, then ten minutes later they'd return from her room in the very same fashion.  A minute later she'd be back with another putz trying to act like he didn't just solicit a hooker.  And so on.

At one point there were two high-class escorts staying at the hotel for over two weeks (paying over $300 in cash every night), until Boston police and detectives arrived one night (I will write more about this in another post).  Throughout all this, the front desk proudly displayed this bullshit plaque from the Community of Chinatown commending the Doubletree for providing "excellent service to the community."  Excellent oral service would be more accurate.

When I sin, I sin real good
Aside from removing "non-guests" from the hotel, you could hardly call me a security guard.  Mostly I was a glorified bellboy.  Since the only employees at the hotel from 11pm-7am were me and the night manager, I had to do all the crap that would've normally been taken care of by room service and other hired help.  "Room so and so needs towels."  "Could you deliver a fridge to room whatever?" Oh yeah, and I handled valet duties, which was really fun when the lot was completely packed and I had to move 20 cars to retrieve one way in the back, or when I had to try to drive a manual transmission I had no idea how to operate.  One night, backing into a space in the garage, I heard the awful sound of metal scraping against concrete.  I managed to get away with that one, although karma came back to bite me in the ass a few months ago when I did the same thing with my own car.

Since my journal doesn't cover all of my time working there, I'm gonna list a few memories off the top of my head that aren't in the journal:

- One day the day manager tells me that homeless people must be sleeping at the top of the dimly lit, Nightmare On Elm Street-esque emergecy stairway, because hotel staff found blankets and syringes there, and that I need to check the top of the stairway a couple times a night.  I told him I would, like a good employee should.  Do you think I did?

-For a couple weeks this young black dude used to enter the hotel earlier in the evening and try to sleep in the halls once the night shift began at 11.  The first time I found him I asked him if he had his room key (a polite "Are you supposed to be here, because I know you're not") and he said no.  I'd run into him a few more times and I never had to ask again, and he would accept his removal with grace and dignity.

-During some gay pride celebration earlier in the summer, the hotel was packed with gay and lesbian people.  I was sitting outside on the bench when this twinkly David Spade looking guy starts chatting me up and eventually propositions me.  I let him be and don't see him for the rest of the night.  The next night the front desk gets a call about a passed out guest on the third floor.  I go to check it out, who is it but David Spade, his pants around his ankles, passed out in his own piss.

I love this song and video.  Wait for the moustached guy with the hat and bandana.
-Another weekend night, I saw this big guido looking guy taking a piss in the parking lot.  I go up to him and tell him he has to leave, and he starts getting irate.  He grabs me by the neck and walks me over to the hotel and keeps telling me how he's going to smash my face into the concrete.  I managed to slip away and quietly call the police on this lunatic.

-One weekend night a taxi driver gave me a cell phone he found in his cab after dropping someone at the hotel.  The phone rang and it was the owner of the phone calling from a friend's phone.  He was thrilled it wasn't lost and we arranged for him to pick it up at the concierge desk which I commandered at night.  A little while later, a muscular guy with one arm comes up to me and asks for his phone.  He said he didn't have any money but he would give me $20 later.  An hour or so later, that black hooker I mentioned above entered the hotel, with the one armed guy trailing 10 feet behind her.  There goes my $20.


-One night someone called in a noise complaint about their neighbors.  I go up to the room and once they let me in, first I see that the window was broken.  Then I notice the toilet tank cover on the floor.  The guests were a couple who looked to be in their early 30s, and they were acting extremely nervous and sheepish.  The guy starts telling me that they heard a beeping noise and thought it was a CO2 detector, and they panicked and broke the window so they wouldn't die from CO2.  He is overly apologetic, they clearly got into a fight and someone was compelled to smash the window with part of the toilet. I just tell them I will let the front desk know and they will make sure everything is straightened out.  I get back to the front desk and tell them what happened, and the night manager tells me, "We don't have CO2 detectors."

So ends this introduction to the life of a one-time overnight hotel security guard.  Thanks for reading, and I promise to be posting on a regular schedule again.  Got some fun ideas in the works as well as continued tales from the Doubltree Downtown Boston.  Take it easy.