Bad Boy: Autobiography by Jim Thompson

Author:Jim Thompson
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9788806158651
Publisher: Einaudi
Published: 2001-08-15T05:00:00+00:00

18

It was a weird, wild and wonderful world that I had walked into, the luxury hotel life of the Roaring Twenties. It was a world which typified rugged individualism at its best—or worst, a world whose urbane countenance revealed nothing of the seething and sinister turmoil of its innards, a world whose one rule.was that you did nothing you could not get away with.

There was no pity in that world. The usual laws governing rewards and punishments did not obtain. It was not what you did that mattered, but how you did it.

Nominally, there were strictly enforced rules against such things as getting drunk on duty, intimacy with lady guests and forcing tips from the stingy. But the management could have knowledge that you were guilty of all those crimes, and as long as you did them in such a way as not to give rise to complaints or disturb the routine of the hotel, nothing would be done. Rather, you would be regarded as a boy who knew his way around and was on his toes.

And this attitude, I suppose, was not nearly so strange as it seems.

It was the bellboy who was always in the closest contact with this hurly-burly world, a world always populated by strangers of unknown background and unpredictable behavior. Alone and on his own, with no one to turn to for advice or help, he had to please and appease those strangers: the eccentric, the belligerent, the morbidly depressed. He had to spot the potential suicide and soothe the fighting drunk and satisfy the whims of those who were determined not to be satisfied. And always, no matter how he felt, he had to do those things swiftly and unobtrusively.

Briefly, he had to be nervy and quick-thinking. He had to be adequate to any emergency. And a boy who was inadequate in his own emergencies was also apt to be so in those concerning the hotel. In a word, he wasn't "sharp." He didn't "know his way around," and thus, axiomatically, did not belong around.

In the indictments lodged against bellboys in the hotel "growler," the rough equivalent of a ship's log, one word appeared over and over—caught. A boy was fired or fined or turned over to the police because he had been caught in an offense, not merely because he had committed one.

There was no day off in the hotel world. The night shift worked seven days a week, from eleven at night until seven in the morning. The day shifts were also on the job seven days, but their hours were adjusted to the then universal long-day, short-day of the hotel world. One of the two shifts came on at seven in the morning, quit at noon, returned at six and worked until eleven at night. The following day it came to work at noon and quit at six P.M., the other shift working the double-watch long-day.

One night, when there was an unexpected flurry of business, a day boy was held over onto the night shift.

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