Need a Room? Be Careful How You Ask

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/books/heads-in-beds-a-memoir-by-jacob-tomsky.html

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If you ever find yourself staying in Room 1212 of a New York City hotel, Jacob Tomsky’s “Heads in Beds” suggests that you think back to the way you behaved while checking in. Were you rude to the front desk? Cheap to the bellman? Yammering nonstop on your cellphone? Asking irritating questions about the gym and the ice machines?

Mr. Tomsky, a self-taught expert in the passive-aggressive tricks of hotel workers, says that a Room 1212 may not happen by accident. It may be assigned spitefully, because it is a torture chamber where the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. It is well known to hotel management that guests dialing the New York area code 212 often hit 1-212, not knowing they must first dial 9 to get a local outside line.

“Heads in Beds” is Mr. Tomsky’s highly amusing guidebook to the dirty little secrets of the hospitality trade. But it is neither a meanspirited book nor a one-sided one. It tells the tale of how and why Mr. Tomsky worked his way up the industry ladder, beginning as a rubber-burning parking garage valet in New Orleans (“AC running and classic rock on low for you, sir,” went the patter) and then making his way indoors. It views the worst species of hotel guests with a gimlet eye. But Mr. Tomsky also captures the thinking of hotel patrons who just want decent treatment. His main tip on that score: tip. And don’t do it nervously. “It’s not a drug deal,” he says.

The transactions described in “Heads in Beds” do involve a high degree of cupidity and dishonesty on both sides. If there is one lie that desk clerks tell most often, Mr. Tomsky says, it is that all of the hotel’s rooms are the same. They aren’t, and a good frontman will know the specifics about each one of them. If there is one crass goal that hotel guests share, it is the desire to get something for nothing, whether it’s an upgrade to an elite floor or a free bag of cashews. “Heads in Beds” explains ways that each side in such trade-offs can wind up happy.

If this were simply a travel book of the news-you-can-use ilk, it would be of only minor interest. But Mr. Tomsky turns out to be an effervescent writer, with enough snark to make his stories sharp-edged but without the self-promoting smugness that sinks so many memoirs. He begins by explaining why he so enjoyed working in New Orleans. He learned the habits of his fellow valet car parkers, like the guy who spent time in the back office counting the change he stole from cars. “He made too much noise when he ran.”

Mr. Tomsky soon learned that the misery of running up the garage’s 10 flights of stairs in New Orleans heat could be offset by driving some stranger’s car around its ramps fast enough to make his stomach drop. “And so does the front end, right into the concrete, but who cares,” he writes. “That’s internal and nonvisual damage.”

He then became privy to the opening of a lavish hotel. “Luxury is more than chandeliers and horrible oil paintings of horses,” he counsels. This establishment encouraged staff members to cosset guests in every conceivable way, even if that left Mr. Tomsky, chin in hand, pretending to be amused by a description of exactly the same street performer another guest told him about on the previous evening.

After the New Orleans hotel became more hard-nosed and Mr. Tomsky more worldly, he began work at an established hotel, near Times Square, that he calls the Bellevue. Here, as elsewhere, almost all the names are changed but the stories sound very real — even Mr. Tomsky’s protective portrait of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who could jump in fear if the staff’s orders were yelled too loudly. New York was a much more cutthroat environment for hotel workers, and Mr. Tomsky directs special blame toward Bernard Sadow. Mr. Sadow, he says, is much loathed by bellmen for having invented the suitcase with wheels.

This book’s Manhattan stories are more mercenary than the earlier ones, not least because the Bellevue’s management decided to renovate the place and double its prices. Blame these crass business practices for Mr. Tomsky’s advice about cheating the house: he explains how to watch free movies, steal the entire contents of a minibar, avoid a cancellation charge even when canceling hours after the room rental started, and generally win any argument you choose to pick with a hotel employee.

But he winds up sounding like an essentially honest, decent guy. And his observations about character are keen, perhaps because he’s seen it all. If a guest checking in is noisily abusive, another guest who overhears this nastiness is apt to be almost unreasonably nice. “When his turn comes, I could tell him that he is staying in the basement rat room for fifteen hundred dollars a night, and he would say, ‘Hey, not to worry.’ Maybe even lean in and add a concerned, ‘Have a nice day, O.K.?’ ”

How much of this mano-a-mano combat could Mr. Tomsky take? He is no longer a hotel employee and now, with good reason, thinks of himself as a writer. There are hints of a “Heads in Beds II” to describe the anger-management group therapy to which the Bellevue finally drove him.

“Heads in Beds” embraces the full, novelistic breadth of hotel experience, not just the squalid late-night couplings for which they are so justly known. Many other kinds of things happen to guests, too, Mr. Tomsky writes: “They receive news of a loved one’s death from a blinking red light. They sign a fax that begins production on a factory in China. They receive a FedEx box containing everything left of their marriage.” And they “propose, get married, impregnate each other, turn 40, get divorced, snort heroin, murder and die in hotel rooms,” he adds. “Sometimes in that order.”