‘Notes from an NPC at the Hotel Morton’

Vivian Calderón Bogoslavsky is a Colombia Native. She holds a bachelors in anthropology with a minor in history and a postgraduate degree in Journalism from Universidad of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. She has studied art for over 13 years with a well know Argentinian art master as well as studies in Florence, Italy, and Fine Arts & Design in USA.

Notes from an NPC at the Hotel Morton

“If Buc-ee’s can be known across the world for clean restrooms, so can this hotel,” said Marvin, our facilities manager at the Hotel Morton. He looked at me and then at one of my longtime co-workers. “Jeffrey and Melena, we have hired two people to backfill your previous duties, and your job now is to ensure that our common-area restrooms in the lobby, the conference room floor, and the roof restaurant are not just clean, not just sanitized, but worthy of praise in reviews and on social media.”

This gave me three restrooms to manage over my shift. I could watch over them scrupulously and I learned to position myself nearby during busy times—check-in and checkout for the lobby, late mornings and after lunch for the conference level, evenings for the rooftop restaurant. I also came to know who offended most in the restrooms. Take, for instance, the rooftop and a bleach-blond young man, age twenty-two, staying with his parents. They were down from Newport Beach, RI. Father had been a producer in Hollywood and a financier of several billion-dollar movies. 

The son? Well, some men won’t wash their hands, some won’t clean drips off toilet seats, some just can’t put the hand towel in the bin after use. This young man? Clogged the handicap toilet with paper towels, left a used condom on the sink, carved his initials into a stall door. How could I know he did these things? When I can police a restroom so closely, I can be there to erase the traces of individual guests. Except when they make carvings and I need maintenance.

Staff, his family, and friends across the country were shocked and heartbroken when, somehow, he went out a tenth-floor window and splatted on the pavement below, narrowly missing a baby in a stroller. Many were shaken, though I was not. We do not mourn when hyenas die.

Melena alerted me to a female guest she was struggling with. Said guest was a regular, in her fifties with short platinum hair. She visited from a manse in the Shenandoah Valley. “It is good to surround myself with people from time to time,” she told Melena during one visit. I don’t think she liked surrounding herself with people so much as she liked a discreet meeting place for her many liaisons. 

Melena had suspicions about her, had to clean up vomit more than once after our lady was found day-drinking in the restaurant. Carmela was her name. “Like Tony Soprano’s wife,” she would say. “I’m a hot-blooded Italian,” she would tell men she met up with. “And I was a high-frequency trader. I have a high, high risk tolerance.”

Indeed. Shortly after Melena and I had that conversation, there was an, uh, incident in the conference restroom. It seems that Carmela High Risk enjoyed many high-risk behaviors and was found in the restroom, in the open, fully exposed and in the throes with one of her paramours. “We thought no one would be around,” she confided in Melena with a giggle later in the evening. Granted, the “incident” occurred at 6:45 am, and on some days, they might have gotten away with it. But the fame of the incident went across social media to Melena’s and my everlasting humiliation. Buc-ee’s may have famously clean restrooms, but upscale hotels are not likely to be praised online for them no matter what Marvin says. We could not have imagined our restrooms hitting social media for this reason, though.

Poor Carmela. A few months later, she returned for a three-day stay. On day two, her flavor-of-the-moment returned from an errand to discover her nude body in the bathtub, blood streaming from a blunt-force injury to her head that may or may not have come from a fall (according to the medical examiner). Naturally, the married-man paramour was outed for his escapades while he was investigated (then cleared). It was very Sopranos-like, if the Sopranos were written by the team behind Days of Our Lives. Melena was horrified, said she admired Carmela’s “spirit.” I felt modestly relieved that we could admire her “spirit” in heaven.

Perhaps you have seen the second season of White Lotus? The, uh, female “entrepreneurs” selling their “wares” to male guests are a real thing, and for a time, we had one in particular who caught the attention of both Melena and me. Of course, she was on no guest register, but she had a tendency to wreck the restaurant restroom. And by “wreck,” I do not mean in a scatologically humorous way. No, she overstuffed the repository for sanitary napkins and left unflushed bloody and brown messes. Melena finally confronted her with gritted teeth. Sometime later, I found her emerging from the men’s conference restroom of all places. I did not feign courtesy.

“You do not belong in there. What are you doing?”

“Who are you to say I do not?” she said. “Have you inspected me?”

“I think we both know full well you could not ply your trade so well otherwise,” I said.

She half smiled. “I was told to stop wrecking the ladies’ room,” she said. She moved by me with a pat of my arm and a brush of her lips on my cheek.

She had indeed wrecked the men’s room, leaving sanitary products in almost all toilets, water overflowing in one, and a brown and bloody mess in another.

A week later, very tragically, in the early morning hours, our airport shuttle driver was about to turn into the driveway when a form pitched forward from the bushes and fell under the tires. Our own Lucia Greco had met her end. 

“You must live in despair to be in that line of work,” Melena said to me. “It must have become too much. What a tragedy.”

Tragedy? She made a life of creating wrecks everywhere she went, so her passing in a wreck seems fitting.

We recently had a man who approached me somewhat apologetically. He had gone to the lobby restroom and taken his toddler son with him.

“Ricky unlocked the stall door while I was doing my business and ran out. I thought he was just running around, but he climbed up into the urinal and, uh, dropped a deuce there.”

“Dropped a deuce,” I repeated.

“Yes. In the urinal itself.”

“A deuce in the urinal,” I said.

“Yes. I’m really sorry. I would help you clean it up, but I don’t know where to start.”

At least this man confessed, though his poor effort in not bothering even to try with some hand towels hardly indicates remorse and repentance. I will spare you the graphic details of the clean up.

The next morning, very early, while the child slept, the man was forcibly escorted from his room by a masked assailant who brought him, at the point of some weapon, to the restroom his son had fouled. The assailant knew enough to put a maintenance sign in front of the door, whereupon he led the man to the urinal, stuffed his head in it, and proceeded to water board him with flushes for somewhere between five and ten minutes. It was, of course, barbaric, and when the man was at last set free, he called police first and then hotel management. Naturally, I was interviewed in due course. Who but an employee could have gotten into his room? Who but an employee could have used a maintenance sign? But it was my off day and my cellphone affirmed I had been at home exercising in the basement, as did my wife who had no reason to assume otherwise.

The officer who interviewed me was a plainspoken ruffian who affected the air of having seen it all. “You have had a number of tragedies here,” he said.

“It is a large hotel with many people visiting in different stages of life,” I said. “I suppose we should expect some dark clouds now and again.”

“Dark clouds,” he said with a smirk.

“And it seems to me that people frequently do violent and untidy things in hotels. After all, an NPC working at the hotel will just clean it up after.”

“NPC?”

“A non-player character,” I said. “It’s what the kids say these days to refer to background people.”

“Background people, huh,” said the officer. He liked to repeat things I said.

“Unfortunately, you, too, are an NPC,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said. “Can you think of any common theme that runs through these incidents? Any thread that ties them together?”

I shook my head. “Aside from people staying at our hotel, not a thing in the world.”

Gordon Laws has recently published in Irreantum, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and the Line of Advance. He oversees course development at Coursera.