Bad Boy (1953) by Jim Thompson

Author:Jim Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+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. It was his second holdover of the day, and he

had been on duty since seven in the morning. So,

after the business had been taken care of, he

claimed the “late” boy’s privilege of a room, and

fell exhausted into bed.

Unfortunately, he had not rid himself of his

cigarette before going to sleep.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.