Yusuf = Larry Birkhead

I hesitate to pass this along, as at this point we may as well just rename this blog Sexual Hijinks of A Zealous African Man (SHAZAM!), but there have been startling, if by startling you mean utterly predictable, developments in the relationship between Yusuf and the mysterious African-Norwegian woman known only as dioubate2005.

When I first heard of dioubate2005, I assumed she was merely the latest, and certainly not the last, in a long line of pseudo-mistresses (conveniently for both parties, they're separated by an ocean). All I knew about dioubate2005 was that she lives in Norway and she really wanted him to send her some pictures of himself and his family. This didn't seem like a big deal to me because I had previously seen Yusuf keep in close contact on the phone with a number of women he had met in the hotel. But as we pieced together her email address over the past four weeks (Yusuf isn't terribly familiar with the internet, which probably explains his vitality), the tale of dioubate2005 grew much more intriguing.

Dioubate2005 has never stayed at the Hotel Idiotica. She has never met Yusuf. She has never seen a picture of Yusuf. Dioubate2005 is a friend of the wife of one of Yusuf's "20" brothers. Dioubate2005 has fallen in love with Yusuf, based solely on his sister-in-law's descriptions of him. Such is the power of Yu's mojo. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised; I suspect a few of you have fallen for the Brack Panther in spite of my caricaturing him. But let me ask you, have you fallen hard enough to send him checks for several hundred dollars every month?

Yes, apparently dioubate2005 has access to quite a bit of money. From what I can tell, she was a live-in nurse for a very old, very rich man, a widower perhaps, who has since fallen madly in love with her. He's opened the spigot, and the cheese is flowing pretty smooth, but, well, he "canno jugujugu," and so part of the flow is being directed my buddy's way, because, I mean, well Yusuf sounds pretty awesome.

"Have you send her my peeture?" Yusuf would always ask, and then we'd go through the photos on the computer. He'd always say we should just send one or two and then inevitably end up selecting nineteen or twenty, mostly of him lying on his elbow across some flat surface or delivering a jubilant high-kick, or close-ups of his face in some artificial fram, like teacher's bulletin board or a lavender, lacy heart shape. There were several shots of his kids and, sweetly counterproductively, one of his wife. he nixed the ones of him with other girls, GWNTSLACD, a pretty laundry woman named Tina. These finals would never go through, so finally I spent one night that Yusuf wasn't there painstakingly sending the pictures one at a time to dioubate2005.

The next time I saw him, I asked him how she liked the photos. His eyes got really wide, and he exclaimed, "Ohhhh, Sparkleeman! [he's started to call me Sparklyman occasionally. I have no idea why] She love it, Sparklyman, when she see my peeture, she scream [here Yusuf really does scream], 'Yuuuusuf, Ohmigod, you are so handsome, I see the peeture, I almost die!' [He tells me that now they are talking on the phone almost every night. I ask him what they talk about, and he indicates, rather unsubtly, that its more than just the weather.] Pretty soon I send her anudda peeture,"he says, miming a snapshot of his disk.

"You are a whore," says GWNTSLACD flatly.

I ask Yusuf what he likes about dioubate2005. "She's a very nice girl," he says emphatically. "Very nice. Also [this is from my notes], big everywhere, I like the big girls. [He jiggles his mouth and waves his hands rapidly back and forth] Bwwwwww, breasts. [he turns his hands up and jiggles them again] Buttocks, bwwwww. Bottom-big!"

So who does that make me? Bobby Trendy?

Hoop

The Hotel Idiotica was proud to play host a few weeks ago to the Lady Gators of Pine Manor College. A relatively obscure women's college outside Boston (obscure enough that all of my extra-Bostonian friends have never heard of it), PMC prides itself on being the most diverse liberal arts college in the country.

After reading reports of last year's games that spoke of sixty turnovers between the two teams as a source of pride, I didn't have much hope for the Lady Gators. Also, I thought the first two members of their team that I met were in middle school.

Herewith, a scouting report, based solely on my impressions and recollections from the front desk:

---Their uniforms, judging from their warmups, are green. Does anyone remember a successful team with green uniforms, besides the Boston Celtics, who once won 11 championships in 13 years and currently have the best record in the league?

---I first came upon the team as I entered the hotel for an afternoon shift and a few of their players were walking away towards the elevator. They had large asses, big booties. Large asses are good for getting rebounds.

---Their point guard, who looked like her name was Tasha, seemed a little wispy and indecisive, and also she looked younger than my little sister looked when she was twelve. I just can't imagine she's that strong with the ball. On the other hand, she did seem to have a good rapport with the girl I marked as their star player, who just seemed like she knew her way around a defense, when to take it to the hole and when to find holes in the defense for a mid-range game. Its always important for the star to have a good relationship with the girl who gets her the ball.

---One girl with a milky complexion had some type of piercing hanging from her lip, like a wishbone or something, and generally wants it to be known that she doesn't need nothing and she knows where the baggage room is, thank you. It's very likely that she does not possess any basketball skills, but she probably tries really hard to set a lot of picks and gets fired up too often.

Obviously the parts are all there, but you never know how its gonna translate onto the court until the ball is tipped. Well, I'm happy to report that the Lady Gators trounced the Brooklyn College Women (that's the actual name of their team) 68-57.

They got lots of rebounds!

Postcards

Going to try to make this into a regular feature, mostly because it doesn't take any effort.

2 postcards addressed to Austria. They're pictures of the Empire State Building at sunset that say 'Sunset from the Empire State Building Observatory.' So they're pictures of the Empire State Building at sunset from the Empire State Building Observatory, which is a neat trick.

On each of the postcards, which appear to have been written by different people, the authors have drawn little stick figures sitting on the ledges on opposite sides of the building and staring out into the distance. On one of the postcards, a figure seems to be pointing and says "Here is California" The other faces the opposite direction and says "I wu coteola hom" (? German?)

On the other postcard, one of the figures exclaims (the speech bubble has sparkles around it) with a flourish of his arm "Austria ist diese Richtung" while his doppelganger sits on the other side and warns with a measure of caution, "Nein--Austria ist diese Richtung"

So the captions say something like "Austria is a red balloon," "No--Austria is a red balloon"

Is the state religion of Austria dada or something?

Online Translation Super Happy Fun Time Update: Apparently its, "Austria is this direction," "No, Austria is this direction" Ohhhhhhhh.

p.s. One of the cards is signed with two smiley-faces and one of them has glasses. Sprecken se cute!

Like a baby's buttered bottom

Had a little filly in here from West Virginia over the past few weeks. More of a thoroughbred, actually. Full-figured, but not overweight, with a really sweet personality and a beautiful voice not overwhelmed by a pretty thick accent. I guess normally I would have found it obnoxious, but she was really nice and pretty so I liked her.

She came in followed by a kind of creepy, older black man, who had a very round head and a deeply faded, multi-colored jacket. They sort of awkwardly said goodbye and then he left.

She was staying for two weeks, some kind of business thing, so we talked about that a little, flirted, made a little small talk, I said I was glad she was staying for a while and I'd definitely be seeing her a lot.

She pauses before she heads upstairs. "Is that normal?" she asks confusedly.
"What?" I ask.
"Y,know, fer them to meet ya at the train station and then take ya all the way back to the hotel?"
"Do you know that guy?"
"No"
"Then, uh, no, that's not normal"
"Hmm." she shrugs, and skips up off to bed.

~~~~~

Over the next few weeks she comes in and out and we greet each other warmly every time.
She's there when I come in with my new haircut, and I think even she's a little proud of me.
I smile wryly and she smiles broadly every time we see one another, and we've got a nice little rapport

~~~~~

Fast-forward to the night before she's leaving. She's heading out the door, and I don't remember how I found out, but she's about to go to meet the sketchy man who followed her here on the very first night! I casually ask her if she thinks this is a good idea, with an expression that said, 'I'm concerned about you but I think you're an idiot'

"It's alraht!," she protests theatrically, in a manner peculiar to Southern girls. "My freeiend tawlked to 'im, n' turns out he's a playwraht! And she's a New Yorker," implying that her friend would be able to see right through some flimsy scheme.,

"Oh yeah?" I ask curiously, "How long she lived here?"
She scuffs the floor. "Three months," she says begrudgingly.
"And where's she froooom?" I ask teasingly.
"Texas," she admits with a laugh.
"Alright then," I nod.

"So.... you don't think its a good idea?"
II make a face like I'm weighing her decision gravely, but don't respond.

"Awww...yer alwaays lookin out for me. Ev'rbody else's just makin' fun o' mah acceeent"

Now if there's one surprise benefit I've gotten from this job, it's the authoritative ease you get just from standing behind a desk. This quality is completely lacking in every other aspect of my life, but somehow, when I'm behind that desk, I turn into a smooth motherfucker. Unfortunately, when this quality deserts me, it does so spectacularly, and before I know it I've run off the cliff without noticing and now I'm blinking twice and looking down into a canyon. This was one of those times.

"But I love your accent," I say with genuine sympathy. Uh-oh. What to follow up with?
How about, "It's like honey in my ears"

Saturday Night Fever

I got a haircut last week. This was a pretty momentous in all circles of my life (one of my friends said the reaction was "like you just came home from the war"), and things were no different here at the hotel. The powers that be had been dropping hints for weeks--The White Bitch always witching (whoops), The Owner kvetching silently and raising his eyebrows--but I'd just whistle and shake my sexy hair out of my face and randomly stab at my beard with scissors every coupl'a days.
But then one day I had half an hour to kill before a lunch date with some British floozy, and since I only keep my hair like that because I'm afraid of rejection, I took the plunge and chopped it all off.

There was much celebration when I came into the hotel that day. GWNTSLACD's eyes widened and she covered her mouth with her hand. There was a lot of pointing and whispering in foreign languages from the maid staff. The Boss Lady's eyes got wet, and she said, "I'm so proud of you!"
It was all a bit much.

Since, I've gotten my haircut, two people have independently told me that I looked like Harry Potter. I used to get that all the time the last time I had short hair, to the point that I was pretty fixated on having a Halloween costume of "Harry Potter, if he let himself go" (Most of my Halloween costumes follow the formula "_________, if he let himself go"

The other person that people used to tell me I resembled back when I had short hair was Tobey Maguire. So it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise when Yusuf walked through the door that evening, took one look at me, and proclaimed, "Spidaman!"

This is now pretty much the only thing he calls me. I'm honestly not sure if he remembers my name. It took me about ten seconds before I came up with a matching nickname for him. In keeping with his sworn duty to protect the guests and staff of the hotel, and also because some Japanese lady is fascinated by his skin, Yusuf is now known as The Brack Panther.

I am Spidaman. He is the Brack Panther. Together we are Saturday Night Fever.

Keep reading this post to the end, its really worth it (Update: money line added)

January and February are the slowest months of the year for hotels in New York, and the Hotel Idiotica is no exception. It's crazy, sometimes we only see one or two posts a night here, and sometimes it is completely empty! We all think the proprietor has no idea what he's doing.

Anyway, much of the downtime that hasn't gone over to breathlessly filing or eagerly entering data--have you ever done clerical work to Bruce Springsteen?--has been spent discussing the sexual habits of a certain Yusuf.

This isn't anything new, of course. Yusuf has been humbly informing me of his carnal proclivities for months now. The difference is, now that I'm working some evenings towards the end of the week (Yusuf comes in at about 7 o'clock), GWNTSLACD is here to balance his accounts.

After a careful vetting of all rumor, hearsay, and innuendo, it's been determined that Yusuf has bedded between four and forty women in the three to ten years he's worked here at the Hotel Idiotica.

Adorably enough, when you ask him directly, Yusuf seems to take the low end. This could just be because he's embarrassed in mixed company, but I actually think I can tell he's being honest here, if typically evasive.

My hot-blooded Spanish colleague's estimate seems to depend in part on her extremely dilated definition of "girlfriend" (I have had three friends come visit me [you should too! it's all you've imagined!] at the hotel during the day; they are all my "girlfriends"), but it rests mostly on the fact that a small plurality of the women who come into the hotel are obviously quite taken by the Big Guinean

I'm not talking about Yu's seductive psychological battering of twenty-somethings ("You want you' key? Only 500 dollars, my baby") or his genially egregious harassment of his coworkers. No, what's surprising, or not surprising if you've been around him as much as I have, seen him dote on the Boss Lady, seen him gather clothing and blankets and all kinds of random shit for dozens of family and friends in Africa, and, yes, seen him hurt and weary, what's surprising is just how quiet and tender he can be with the single, lonesome women just on either side of forty.

A lot of the time, these are transplanted Africans themselves, usually living somewhere in Europe like Holland or Belgium. Yusuf nearly always has their phone number within about four hours. Lately he's been trying to email pictures to a woman living in Norway, which we're finding a little difficult since he doesn't understand what goes into an email address (send suggestions to www.diaboute2005.com)

So I'm sure you're all asking, do they jugujugu or not? Jugujugu is Mandingo (Yusuf's first language, and, according to him, also the world's) for "boinga boinga" or "choo-choo, here comes the meat train, next stop: tuna station" (thanks,Wikipedia!). Pronounced jugujugu, Alexander Kimenyi considers it to be an ideophone of the Kinyarwanda language that indicates "rapid repetitive movement."

Yusuf is always on the lookout for potential jugujugu; I chronicled the first time I heard him use the phrase, but I wrote it like a week later, so I couldn't remember exactly what he said. This is WJCITH's Jayson Blair moment, but let's just move on.

So to get to the point, and the payoff to this is huge, I promise, I thought for a while that Yu was jugujuguing whole bevies for the duration of his tenure here at the Idiotica. He's often mimed for me how the whores of Times Square would come around the desk to give the clerks handjobs back in the hotel's glory days.

But lately I've come to think of him as more faithful. I've realized that even though he's fifty, he's only been married less than a decade, and the legends of his promiscuity seem to disperse at just about the time of his marriage.

But, oh, what legends they were. The Israeli girl. The two young African women who showed up at every day at the hotel for months. And the his delicate chrysanthemum, the pure white, crimson solar glory of his Japanese consort. Yusuf recalls her so fondly. "'Oh you so very strong,'" he says, imitating her high, clear whisper. He strokes his own hand. "'And your skin so soft,'" he breathes.

"Hoooo," he sighs. "I love brack men"

Ol' Lang Signs

So the New Year came and went here at the Hotel Idiotica, somewhat quietly according to Yusuf. That assuages my conscience a bit, because to be honest I was feeling a little bit guilty about skipping out on NYE here at the hotel, theoretically the most critical blogging night of the year. I wasn't scheduled to work that night, but for a second I thought about scrapping my boozin' and whorin' for a night of sober correspondence. And although that second passed quickly, it did lead to some very quiet reflection as to just what the hell kind of a place this web-hotel (bhotel?) was occupying in my life, and how was it relating to the actual, physical hotel that I work in, which really does exist (some readers have vastly overestimated my imagination by assuming I was just making the whole thing up).

My relationship to this hotel, and this bhotel, has deepened and become considerably more complicated over the past few months. In a way that doesn't exactly translate well into a series of vignettes about Who Just Came into the Hotel, batshit crazy as some of those may be. And if you, cherished (seriously) bhotel guests, are to understand what goes on behind and before the front desk of an utterly average Manhattan hotel, these are things you need to know. So, in lieu of resolutions, I want to address some behind-the-scenes developments that are driving the unconscious remodeling of this bhotel, and what these trends hold for our beloved Hotel Idiotica in the new year, which will be glorious.

First, the hours of this job are a tad disruptive to my sleeping habits, sort of like how Genghis Khan was a tad disruptive to the peoples of Central Asia. I'm not sure if I've ever explicitly spelled out when I'm clocked in at this job; I work Saturday and Sunday nights from 10 at night until 8 in the morning, and then around 8 hours a day in the afternoon on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons, usually until 10 pm. Staying up all night twice in a row, and then trying to adjust back to a normal snoozing schedule for five days before doing it all over again, is, according to mental health professionals, "unsound sleep hygiene."

And, I'll be honest, its starting to make me tweak out a little bit. For the first few months, I thought I had a pretty good grip on it, but slowly and surely--insidiously is really the only word for it--I'm losing that grip. Who can say where the uncertainty and anxiety of growing up end and the ill-effects of sleep deprivation begin? All I can say is that I think I have a better idea of what women go through with PMS, except I'm not just talking about a few days out of the month (menstruating insomniacs have my deepest sympathies).

So there's that. And this apnea (I dunno what apnea is, but I'm gonna assume I have it) isn't doing any favors to my posting regimen. My "writing" style is probably best described as...finicky. I pretty much just stare at the screen and chew gum or something until God himself tells me what to write. Well, God only speaks to receptive vessels. He doesn't talk to oatmeal. So I haven't really been posting. And then, even though I know this isn't supposed to be much more than a whim, I feel some guilt about not posting, to You and to Qwertye, Muse of Blogs. And no one likes to feel guilty, so I end up playing online Boggle (171 wins, 224 losses), and you end up wondering what happened at the hotel this weekend, and we both end up less happy than we could be. This is the seedy underbelly of graveyard shift hotel blogging. It ain't all like they make it out to be in the pictures.

So I'm hoping that by turning this blog/bhotel into my online diary just this once, I'll evict these here lil' demons that have been refusing to leave the Hotel Idiotica for some months now. To that effect, I'm going to be trying to put up shorter, this-shit-just-happened posts at the expense of turning that shit into gothic comedies worthy of O'Connor or Waugh. If He speaks, He speaks, but otherwise I'll be saving longer pieces for Meet The Idiots features or more abstract posts like this one, god forbid. And yes, sweetheart, I know that's all you ever wanted.

Stick with me baby

Going through a bit of blogging fatigue at the moment. You all should be thankful, really. If I didn't have creative demons that I fold before like a cheap suit, then I would be already be at the Times or the Post or something, and this blog wouldn't exist. In fact, now that I think about it, that's what this whole 2008 vanishing act has been about: trying to dampen the buzz around WJCITH a little bit (thanks Two Zoos!), so that the editors of national magazines will quit calling me.

I'll have a LOT more to post about all this later, but for now i just wanted to reassure all of you that we're still in this thing. It ain't over. I'm sitting here at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, my eyes look like bizarro solar eclipses, but I'm still here. The BOV just sort of sitting in the corner near the door, clutching his bag of trash to his chest; he's still in it. We both think that these next two weeks are gonna be the best ever here at the Hotel Idiotica. So keep tuning in!