hotel diaries... c/o : anon...

Hotel Diaries… or the chameleons on a mirrored back-drop.

The music in the hotel lounge is an endless loop of pan-pipe classics from Bridge over Toubled Waters to the unforgettable theme tune from the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic. It is enough to make me want to drink down a boiling hot starbucks coffee so as to scald and burn the entire mouth and throat, then choke the blood mixed with froth over the other bewildered listeners, yes, one day these pan-pipe classics may tip me over the edge, one day fair trade free trade, no, just free the pan-pipes from the endless loop reel…

***

Meanwhile the hotel finance manager is a golden toad type figure. Pale yellowing hair crown his beaming pink pock marked face; he wears think gold/diamond studded rings on his fingers, he reads the Sun and the Daily Express, his beady eyes gleam intensely, he is jovial and kindly in his way, giving off the rare sense that he is genuinely happy to be in the hotel…rare for employees…

Momento mori… at the back of the hotel the kitchen porters/plongeurs sit smoking on the steps, the ground is wet, littered evenly but thickly with food waste, paper and other waste…
“biscuit tin…” one said.
“who..?” said the other.
“biscuit tin…” said the first more heavily, “biscuit tin” heavy emphasis on tin…and an air of authority swells in his blue eyes, looking round the small but nevertheless gathered audience,
“who..?” the other said again.
“how long you been working here and you don’t know who biscuit tin is..?”
the other looks at his feet, concentrates on smoking,
then the first utters some inaudible clue and both laugh hard and loud, but only for a second then the other said “biscuit tin, yea…”
I had to return to my duties.

One of the essential aspects of the hotel industry – with respect to understanding the psyche of the worker there – is that one begins each work day shattered, splintered glass, and slowly, as the hours pass the person comes together – invisibly to anyone who has never made this type of daily metamorphosis. And a peak emerges from the clouds, strong and insurmountable for a time, and so this time is perhaps a half to two thirds of the 12/16 hour shift, forgotten hours of work, the travel seamlessly by with the work, rushed cigarettes, tit-bits of stolen and concealed/hidden food from the many halls of the kitchens, the endless exchanges in the long dirty corridors that run above, below and all around the hotel’s guests without their ever knowing it…

In short, the peculiar phantasmagoria of the hotel – the ‘hotel’ that is that the guest sees – is also the phantasmagoria of the worker there, a sore eyed fantasy that they become through the delirium of their own sheer toil; strange chameleons on a mirrored back drop.

And to the reader who has never worked in this environment, ‘sheer toil’ may seem an overly indulgent term to use, merely a writer’s lazy turn of pen, but in fact, when one sees the work, hours and conditions endured, combined with the complete lack of thanks – I’m speaking now of the unseen staff, the plongeurs (k.p.’s), the laundry staff wearing masks to keep out the fumes and dust while sweating in the cellars, the cleaners on hands and knees scrubbing the floors and stairs of the place – all working 12 hour shifts at a minimum – the total endurance is considerable, and even, I would suggest, unimaginable for most of those who dine on the very tables held up by their labour; for within the belly of the hotel is an engine that powers the whole machine, and it is toil, thankless and consciously hidden from sight…

One of the receptionists walked across, then looking up at the chandeliers said, I really want to hang myself, what? I said, oh, just this letter here to be posted, thanks, and she returned to her desk…

In the hostel the showers were a row of shower heads, with a drain running down the middle. When this blocked the floor would be inches deep in icy, filthy water.
The rooms were large, high ceiled and unheated, even in the northern winter.
A Sri Lankan in the bed next to me would shiver all night and this could be seen even at a distance in the half dark of the early morning as I got up. In the morning I gave him my blanket, but at night it was sad to fall asleep like that.
The hostel was a friendly place to stay. It was run by staff who worked there to live rent free. Guyllimero was an Italian native, though he had not been to Italy for nearly 20 years. He had a strong dark complexion, almost severe but for his two front teeth with a child like gap in them. He was always laughing, a huge booming laugh slapping shoulders. He had been travelling for those 20 years or more, having worked illegally in the U.S. for a decade, worked in the Caribbean, criss-crossed Europe innumerably, and was, when I met him, on his way to Poland to get some dentistry done there where it was cheap and high quality he assured me.
In his late 40s perhaps, weather beaten, his hair was periodically shaved to the skull, though normally his crew cut accentuated his Mediterranean features. He had lived on the road and he seemed to shimmer with untold stories.

Portering affords one a great insight into the hotel. Not only does one meet/greet every soul that enters and leaves the building, giving one a constant sense of the hotel’s population, an ever changing sea of faces, words and individual gestures, but also, during the course of one’s day, one is continually on the move about the great battleship, a messenger of a thousand tasks. All of the crew of the battleship become known, their toiling, cursing, sweating, the dizzy euphoria of days off, the moments of reflection while smoking, the conversations, the singing of the Spanish waitresses as they polish the silver river of cutlery, the deeply knotted sweat covered brows of the red faced plongeurs, left deep in the cellars endlessly making clean what the guests soil, the child like expectancy of the maintenance staff always on the search for something to fix or repair, the eager friendliness of new staff that so quickly recedes into the exhaustion if the shift worker…

Standing in a heavy coat, I shave. Having left the hostel I had found a room in a tenement block near the docks of the Stone City. It was cheap but I was broke, and would have to be packing again before the end of the week. This was it I thought, a temporary refuge from the storm, and it would serve, but I, the silent calm eye of the hurricane would survive…walking through the docks I was excited by the macabre scenes. One night returning late we saw a man run out of a bar on fire, his coat burning in large flames…

to be continued in another life...

anon/.