🎒 How I Got the Job

Every job you keep for twenty-one years starts as an accident.

I moved to Seattle in 1997 with two goals. Graduate school at the University of Washington, and mountains bigger than the ones I had been climbing back home in the Sierra. Microbiology and exobiology. Space bugs, weird science, higher learning. I had seven years of hotel and casino work behind me at Harrah’s in Reno, and I figured that would float me while I did the real thing.

That was the plan. It was a good plan. I still think it was a good plan.

I moved to Seattle in the gap. After the seminar, before the program. The exact thing I had come for was being invented at that university while I was learning where the service elevators were.

I have never decided how I feel about that. Two years earlier or two years later and it is a different life. But you do not get to pick your timing, and anyway the rent was due in the timing I had.

But dreams need rent money.

Four Dollars and Twelve Cents

By the time it got bad, I had exactly four dollars and twelve cents.

Not roughly four dollars. Not about four. I knew the number, the way you know it when the number is small enough to count. Four dollars and twelve cents, and Seattle rent coming, and no job.

I had been smart enough, early on, to buy a ten-pound bag of rice. That turned out to be the single best financial decision of that entire year. Rice keeps. Rice is cheap. Rice will feed you for a remarkably long time if you are willing to be honest with yourself about what dinner is.

And I was stealing soy sauce packets from the Chinese place up the street.

Not stealing exactly. Taking. There was a bowl of them by the register, and a cup of those little dry spice packets, and I would go in maybe every third day and take a small handful, and the woman at the counter definitely knew, and never once said anything about it. Which I have thought about since, and which I did not have the sense to be properly grateful for at the time.

That was the diet. White rice, soy sauce, and whatever came in the packets. For weeks.

Hunger is not dramatic. That is the thing nobody tells you. It is not a scene. It is just a low steady flatness where your energy used to be — you go up a flight of stairs and notice it, you stand up too fast and the room goes gray at the edges, and you spend a lot more of the day thinking about food than you would ever admit to anyone.

Nobody Was Hiring a Guy Who Wanted to Study Space Bugs

Before the real desperation set in, I tried to do it properly. Anything science-adjacent. Lab tech work. Glassware duty — and I want to be clear that I was genuinely, enthusiastically willing to wash other people’s glassware for money. Tutoring bio undergrads.

Nothing. Not a callback, not a maybe.

So I did what you do, which is stop pretending and go back to what you actually know how to do.

I knew hotels.

The Building

You can see the Westin from most of downtown Seattle, because it does not look like anything else in the skyline. Two enormous cylinders. Round towers, side by side, like something set down out of a different decade.

Which they were. The south tower went up in 1969, forty stories of it, back when the place was called the Washington Plaza. The north tower came in 1982, taller by fifty feet. They were designed by the same firm that had done the Space Needle six years earlier, and built by the same construction company, which is exactly the kind of thing you can see once somebody points it out to you. That same optimism about circles.

Nine hundred rooms, give or take. The flagship of the whole Westin chain, in the city where the chain was headquartered.

I walked in with four dollars and twelve cents in my pocket and a resume, through those doors and across that lobby, and I remember exactly how that felt, which is: extremely aware of my shoes.

That is the specific experience of walking into a nice hotel when you are broke. Everything in there is designed to be quietly, expensively fine. The floor is polished. The air is conditioned and smells faintly of somebody’s idea of clean. Somebody is playing a piano badly but sincerely. And you are carrying a piece of paper that you hope is going to be enough.

That is the thing about arriving somewhere right before it changes. Nobody tells you. The city was about to become extremely expensive and extremely important, and in 1997 it was still mostly a rainy port town with good coffee and cheap rent by the standards of what came after.

I did not know I was standing at the front edge of anything. I knew I had four dollars.

They took the application. And they offered me a job as a minibar attendant.

Which, if you have not done it, means going room to room counting the little bottles and the seven-dollar cashews and logging what the guest drank last night. It is not thrilling. It is not close to thrilling.

It was a foot in the door and I took it and I was grateful.

Then Somebody Else Ruined His Life

Here is where the whole thing turns, and none of it had anything to do with me.

On what was supposed to be my first shift — my first minibar shift, counting bottles — the graveyard bellman came in drunk.

He was, by the accounts I got later, already something of a legend. The wrong kind of legend. The kind where people say the name and then make a face.

They needed somebody. That night. Right then.

Somebody went and looked at the stack of paperwork for the guy who had just been hired to count minibar bottles, and saw front desk and bell stand experience in Reno, and came and found me.

“Can you start tonight?”

I said yes before the sentence was finished. I would have said yes to almost anything with a paycheck attached to it, but I want the record to show that I also said yes because it sounded interesting.

And that was it. I skipped the minibars entirely. I never counted a single bottle. I went straight onto the graveyard bell stand at one of the biggest hotels in the city, on a shift I knew nothing about, because a man I never met got drunk and swung at his boss.

What They Handed Me

There was no orientation. No welcome packet, no tour, no shadowing somebody for a week. There was no HR video about the Westin family.

There was a night crew who looked at me, established that I was in fact the new guy, and got on with their evening.

That master keycard is the part that still gets me. Six hours earlier I had been a stranger with four dollars in his pocket. Now I could open any door in the building.

Hotels run on that. The whole enormous machine of it — the towers, the ballrooms, the nine hundred rooms with people asleep in them — runs on somebody deciding, fast, that you are probably fine. And then it is three in the morning and you are the only person awake on that floor and it is entirely up to you whether that judgment was correct.

Graveyard

Nobody explains the graveyard shift to you because nobody can.

It is the strangest, loneliest, most genuinely mysterious piece of hotel life. The lobby empties out. The restaurant closes. The piano stops. The building keeps going — the ventilation, the elevators moving on their own, the ice machines — but the people drain out of it, and what is left is a very large structure with several hundred sleeping strangers in it and a handful of you awake in the middle.

Everything that happens between eleven at night and seven in the morning happens differently than it would at noon. The same request is a different request. The same guest is a different guest. Things arrive at that hour that would never come near the building in daylight.

I did not know any of that. Not one bit of it.

I knew I had a navy suit that did not fit properly, a radio I had not been shown how to use, a keycard to nine hundred rooms, and the number 940.

I was now officially a Westin bellman, and I had no idea what I had just walked into.

Twenty-one years, it turned out.