🐊 Gator in a Box

A hotel at three in the morning is a different building than the one the guests checked into.

The lobby empties. The restaurant closes and the lights over the bar go down to whatever the lowest setting is. The piano stops. What is left is a very large machine with several hundred sleeping strangers inside it, running on its own — ventilation, ice makers cycling on floors nobody is standing on, an elevator moving somewhere for no reason you will ever learn.

And a handful of us awake in the middle of it.

That night I was alone in the bell closet sorting tags, waiting for the radio to want something. The graveyard shift is mostly waiting. It is long stretches of nothing punctuated by things that would never happen at noon.

Then the radio came up.

“Base to 940. Check in white ticket, 56789 for room 3242.”

Routine. Somebody’s stored luggage going up to a room. I grabbed the ticket, read the number back, and went into the storage room to pull it.

The Box

And then I stopped, because of what was sitting in the corner.

A large wooden crate. Not a suitcase, not a trunk — a proper wooden shipping crate, and it had been put down at an angle, the way things get put down by somebody who wanted it out of the walkway and did not want to spend time on it.

Across the top, in thick black marker:

I stood there for a while.

Live animal. In storage. In the basement of a nine-hundred-room hotel in downtown Seattle, at three in the morning, with a handwritten warning on it.

A monkey? Snakes? A pair of parrots? Something for a convention?

And here is the thing about DO NOT TOUCH written on a box that is breathing: it does not read as an instruction. It reads as a dare. I stood in that storage room genuinely wrestling with whether to just leave it alone, and I want to be clear that the wrestling did not last long, because it was not really the box that had me.

It was that there was something alive in there, ten feet away, and I was the only person on that floor.

I put it on the cart.

The Longest Elevator Ride of My Career

The service elevators at the Westin are slow. They are built for carts and laundry and room service, not for speed, and they take their time between floors with a kind of industrial patience.

I have never been more aware of that fact than I was going up to thirty-two.

The crate did not move. That is what I remember most clearly — it just sat there on the cart, completely still, and every few seconds I looked at it anyway. I kept expecting a shift of weight, a scrape, something. Nothing. Which was somehow worse than if it had thumped, because at least then I would have known what size of thing I was dealing with.

Thirty-two floors, alone, in a metal box, with another box.

Room 3242

The guest opened the door immediately, which meant he had been waiting for it.

And he was completely relaxed. No urgency, no explanation, nothing in his manner suggesting that anything about this was unusual.

Harmless. Alligator. In a hotel.

I was still working through the first of those three words when he took the crate off the cart, easily, like a man collecting a parcel.

“I’m just going to slip him into the bathtub for a while,” he said. And then, helpfully, as though I might not have known: “Gators like water.”

He put a twenty in my hand and smiled and thanked me and closed the door.

And I stood in the hallway on the thirty-second floor at three in the morning, holding a twenty-dollar bill, on the other side of a door with an alligator behind it.

I walked back to the elevator shaking my head. An alligator. In a wooden box. Delivered up thirty-two floors by a guy in a navy polyester suit, like it was a room service tray.

Nobody Believed Me

Which is the part that actually stings.

I told the morning crew when they came on and they laughed at me. Not unkindly — the way you laugh at a guy who has been awake all night and has clearly reached the part of the shift where things get strange.

“An alligator?” “Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.”

And that is the graveyard shift in one exchange. You see the whole strange underside of the building, all night, alone, and then at seven in the morning the day people arrive into a completely normal lobby and there is no evidence of any of it. The crate is gone. The hallway is empty. The alligator is thirty-two floors up in a bathtub and nobody is going to go check.

You cannot prove a single thing that happens between eleven and seven.

But Elmo, who had been working that block since before the Westin was even built, just gave me a knowing look and kept drinking his coffee.

“You’ll see crazier things on the graveyard shift.”

He was not being kind. He was being accurate. He had been on that corner for half a century and he had almost certainly carried something worse than an alligator up to a room, and he was not going to tell me about it, because that is not how it works.

You find out yourself. That is the whole apprenticeship.

He was right, incidentally. I did.