Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the travel. I told you I’ve always hated the traveling and being away from my family. And I’m certainly not talking about the demons I wrestled with in all those soulless sleeping rooms. What I miss is the sense of place those hotels always had, a kind of upper crust other worldliness you just can’t get unless you’re willing to pay three or four hundred dollars a night.
I mean, I know it was all phony—the fake crystal chandeliers, the bellmen in their starched uniforms, the concierge lounges with their carafes of fresh-squeezed orange juice and copies of The Wall Street Journal on their imitation mahogany tables—it was all calculated by some corporate hack to ensure a certain kind of experience for their guests. I knew that, and could always tell what kind of place I was staying in by how obvious the calculation appeared to be.
Some places didn’t have a clue. Sure, they put chocolates on your pillow every night, but they were old and had long since gone stale; or they provided you with one of those fluffy bathrobes, but they hung it on one of those cheap hotel hangers attached to the closet rod. They were just going through the motions, and didn’t understand that it’s not really about props like bedtime chocolates or white terry cloth bathrobes. The best hotels knew those things were only the means to a larger end, and they used them to seamlessly construct what was ultimately an imaginary place where the harshness of the outside world wasn’t allowed to peek through any nook or cranny.
Think I’m kidding? The kind of hotels I’m talking about are a lot like big Hollywood productions. The amount of thought, time, and money that goes into creating their illusions is staggering, and when they pull it off successfully, their construction is completely hidden from the eyes of the paying guest.
Have you ever seen one of those “behind-the-scene” specials about one of your favorite movies? Well, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. You watch one of those and you begin to appreciate the artistry that goes into the two-hour illusion you just enjoyed. Maybe there was a twenty-second scene in your movie where the actors are standing amidst the ruins of an abandoned city. And you find out only by watching the “behind-the-scene” special that those buildings in the immediate background—the ones they used for the close-ups—were built to specification by hundred-person crews, then artificially aged, weathered, and deteriorated under the guiding hand of building restoration specialists from the National Historical Society. And for the wide-angle shots you discover they used an enormous matte painting, twelve feet high and thirty-five feet long, worked on by a team of twenty-five artists for eight months and shot with a special lens to heighten the diminishing perspective as your eye retreats into the distance.
I’m telling you the hotels I used to stay in are like those budget-busting Hollywood epics—or better yet some Broadway extravaganza, since they were really more live theater than anything else. And doing what I did for a living, well, that was like having a backstage pass.
I saw it all. Things you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them with your own eyes. They tried to impress me, you see. They knew what kind of business my client represented, and they were only too proud to show me all the details that went into their production. They wanted me to see the magic so I could be their ally in filling their hotel with a bunch of people who had spent their whole lives in front of the curtain, never knowing nor caring how the illusions that defined them were manufactured. And do you know what it all came down to? Do you know the secret that drove their success?
Waste. Those hotels were fundamentally all about waste. It was their primary strategy, the only way they could maintain their competitive advantage. The minute any piece of reality intruded itself on the illusion—a frayed curtain, a stained bathroom floor, a lukewarm pot of coffee; any actual residue from the thousands of human creatures who breathed, drank, ate, slept, fucked and shat in their magical building—it was torn out at the root and replaced with something new and beautiful. It required the hotels to constantly remodel themselves, ripping up perfectly good carpeting and junking perfectly good furniture, desperately trying to stay ahead of the changing tastes of fashion.
And that’s nothing compared to the waste associated with their food and beverage. I’ve seen things there that would turn your stomach, make you think there wasn’t a hungry person anywhere on the planet. More day-old pineapple than an army could eat, thrown away because the fresh shipment arrived that morning and the cost was already factored into the price of breakfast.
Why do they do these things? They do them because that’s what their clientele expects. That, more than anything else, is what the client is actually paying for. A mythical place that exists nowhere else, a place where the soft goods are always in fashion and the morning fruit is always fresh.
I knew it was fake, but even I could succumb to the illusion from time to time. Sitting on the balcony of my suite overlooking San Diego harbor, or sipping three hundred dollar wine in the sky lounge amidst the tips of San Francisco’s skyscrapers, or paying some banquet captain a hundred bucks to set up a private table in the unused balcony while Tony Bennett performed in the New York ballroom below—stuff like that made it fun in a way it probably never will be again.
But something always shattered the illusion for me. And more often than not, that thing would be kids. I’d see kids staying in these hotels. Kids, sometimes no older than the one I had at home, staying in a place my son didn’t even know existed, a place he couldn’t even imagine because it was so far removed from anything he had ever been exposed to.
I’d see little boys with slicked-back hair and Ralph Lauren sweaters running up and down the carpeted hallways, and little girls at the concierge with their stick-thin mothers making hair and spa appointments, and I would think to myself, who are these kids? What kind of world are they growing up in? Here they are, swaddled in a cocoon of illusion, and to them it’s all normal, it’s the way the world is.
Stuff like that creates gulfs in our society—deep chasms between people that can probably never be bridged, and certainly not by kids who grow up not knowing those gulfs are even there.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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