Potpourri

An assortment of thoughts and events that haven't merited their very own posts over the past few weeks:

~~~Woman with electric sky blue Metropolitan Museum of Art bag strides across the lobby to the front desk.
Me: "Did you enjoy the Met?"
Her, in a New York accent: "Oh, well I went to the Macy's one, but yeah, I enjoyed it"

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~~~One question that obviously doesn't trouble me, but might be worth thinking about if I get really bored, is to what extent I'm manufacturing blog material by giving my guests all the rope they could possibly need and deliberately putting myself into ridiculous situations. Well I found out last weekend that there are things I won't do for the sake of this cyber-guesthouse.

Very late Saturday night, two young Irish girls stagger past me and up the stairs to their room. About 25 minutes elapse before they trudge back down to tell me that their friend, who has the key to their room, has passed out inside, and no amount of pounding or shouting will rouse her. After fifteen rings to the room at least circumstantially corroborates their story, I try, and fail, to find the spare key in the drawer where such backups are kept. I tell them to go wait outside their door while I get a key from the maids' lounge in the basement (calling it a lounge is kind).

I stop before the door to the stairs and turn back toward them. I recycle a line I came up with earlier that night: I sternly and emphatically whisper, "Don't. Touch. Anything." They dissolve into a fit of giggling and hiccups.

Ten minutes late I meet them outside their door with the key. They are sitting slumped against opposite walls of the hall, their legs and practically their torsos entwined. The one across from the door, one of her boobs is hanging out. Their tongues are lolling and their eyes are rolling up at me, and in general they are struggling to muster up the energy to make it a few more feet to the door. But one of them perks up when she she sees that I'm about to open their room.

"Oh, you should sneak into the room and scare our friend," she blurts out.
"Ooh, yeah, go on! We're gonna wake her up anyway, tha bitch, so you should just go in there and stand over 'er and scream real loud!"
"I don't think that's a good idea," I intone, like I'm a babysitter answering a child's request to play kickball in the dining room.

"I'll give you ten dollahs," says the first one conspiratorially.

I shook my head ruefully and turned the key. The gambler barged in, got very close to her sleeping friend's face, and yelled, "wwwwAKEUP!"

It did get me thinking about how much I would have done it for. I'd say 50$. And 100 page-views.

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~~~2 young ladies, wearing traditional black pea-coats, which is something of a rarity here at the hotel, drunkenly saunter into the hotel a few weeks back. There was an arrogant one who was sorta pretty, with dirty-blonde hair and sharp features, but the other one was vaguer, both in my memory and in the face, like Renee Zellwegger or Joey Lauren Adams.

They prattled on about stupid things that I don't care about until the blurry one became transfixed by the metal Christmas tree decoration that sits at the end of the front desk. It's basically the tree Charlie Brown would have picked out, only if Charlie Brown had also been cursed with the Golden Touch, thus completely negating the tree's message. There are also a bunch of miniature, metallic-colored ornamental balls hanging from its gilded branches. It's really quite hideous.

Anyway, the one with the pixelated face though it would hilarious to play at stealing one of the ornaments off the tree. I suppose this could have been endearing if she had vamped it up a little, or if she had just picked up the thing and bludgeoned herself with it, but instead she just stood there dully and occasionally moved her hand closer to the ball.

Eventually, though not as quickly as she should have, she got bored of this, and they headed toward the elevator. They started singing a song: 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas." They were trying to be sassy. On the third refrain, they stuck their hips out and snapped their fingers across their faces in the style of 'Oh no, you di'int!"

It baffles me, what's going through people's heads with these last minute displays of bravado. Is it possible that they're sort of making fun of themselves a little bit? What do they think, that I'm going to spend the rest of my night shaking my head in wonder at their performance? Oh, wait...

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I did have one lady come in last weekend who was one of my favorite guests ever. She was from Texas, and she came in with her husband, of whom I have zero recollection, and her just preteen son, who had brown hair and was dopey but sweet. This woman was of medium height, and she had a tall, rectangular face with a dark gray, boxy haircut and thick glasses.

It was pretty cute how chastely excited the whole family was to be in New York, but the mother was just overcome with wonder. And then, in probably the most egregious example of NYC living down to stereotype that I've ever encountered, they came back in, not thirty minutes later, and the kid's jacket, which I can't imagine was that expensive, had been stolen.

They seemed a bit startled, but they were plucky about the whole thing, and when I grandly offered the kid my own coat, which is about as big as his entire body, the mom sort of jutted her jaw out and swiveled her head around, as if to say, 'Can you believe this guy? How funny he is?" except she obviously wasn't being sarcastic.

Later that night, she came down and she wanted to know if there's any place she can get some organic food for her husband to eat. First I made some sort of joke that implied I was fat, and then I explained that, in this neighborhood, the most organic place to eat was probably Starbucks (I was somewhat proud of that joke).

But then I offered to look it up on Google Maps for her, and once again she looked at me like she had just touched Christ's wounds for herself. Of course there's nothing healthy in Times Square, but I told her she might be able to V8 juice or something at Duane Reade. She seemed eternally grateful.

And then when she came back, with a can of beans somehow, more utter jubilation when we actually did have a can opener she could use.

What started to happen is that I enjoyed her devout appreciation so much that I started upping the ante as far as ways that I could help her, and she came right back with correspondingly gushing gratitude, and it sort of snowballed from there, until I was telling her about different neighborhoods ("Well, Williamsburg isn't the cool neighborhood anymore") and things they could see that aren't just tall buildings or campy musicals. Then I offered to buy organic food for her, because, well, they have lots of places like that in my neighborhood.

The only thing that seemed to deflate her the tiniest bit, and only for a moment, was when, while describing how to get to a famous church in Brooklyn, and suggesting a walk back across the the Brooklyn Bridge as a fun activity, I happened to mention that I myself was not at this time a churchgoing man. It made her eyes lose their spark for a second. But she quickly recovered and launched a full-scale thankfulness offensive.

And then, later that week, what should she have for me as they're checking out? A cd of last Sunday's sermon at the Brooklyn Tabernacle! It made me a little uncomfortable, even though it shouldn't have, but its certainly the most thoughtful thing a guest has ever done for me. I'm definitely going to listen to it.