🦆 Howard the Duck

Every crew has one person the whole place runs on and nobody can quite explain.

Ours was Dan.

He had been at the Westin about five years before I got there in 1997, which made him old school by the time I arrived. He had done every job in Service Express — minibar attendant when he started, then bellman, then room service, then all of them at once, in whatever order the schedule needed.

He is still there. That is the first thing to know about him. Twenty-eight years after I met him, Dan is still in that building.

How He Got the Name

It happened in Room Service, and it was a description before it was a name.

He was working some enormous double — luggage and room service back to back, twelve hours or more, and just going. Not surviving it. Going at it.

And the room service chef watched him work for a while and said, more or less to himself:

He’s not an animal. He’s The Danimal.

That was it. That stuck for the next three decades. Nobody voted on it. The chef said it once and the building agreed.

And it fit, because of how he was built and how he worked, which were the same thing.

Hence the name. It was never an insult. Nobody at the Westin ever meant it as one.

What He Could Do

Dan grew up in the Bay Area. His father was an electrical engineering professor — taught at both Stanford and Cal, which put Dan in an impossible position every November when those two play each other. He liked both. He has never resolved it.

He used to watch Cal games from up on the hill above the stadium, the way people there have always done, watching free from the ridge with the whole bowl laid out below.

I had lived in Moraga. My grandparents lived not far from Cal in Oakland. So we had the same map in our heads, and that was most of what we talked about for twenty years.

And then there is the thing Dan can do.

That combination is real and I watched it for twenty years. He was Wikipedia before Wikipedia. If a question came up in the back of the house about any game ever played, you asked 923 and you got the answer, complete, in about four seconds.

And then he would lose his umbrella. Again. He lost umbrellas and gloves constantly. He missed buses. He got turned around in a building he had worked in for a decade.

Technology would not survive him either. Watches died. Phones died. He carried a basic flip phone long past the point when everyone else had moved on, because that was what would stay alive in his pocket. And his work radio was always broken. Always. There was a running thing about it.

I am not going to pretend I understand how any of that works together. It is not mine to explain. It is just how Dan is, and it is a gift and it is a tax and he carries both.

The Vitamins and the Bike Cops

He was into vitamins decades before anybody was making a career out of telling you to be.

He took a great many of them, in bottles, which he carried in a gym bag — the classic barrel-shaped duffel, the kind everybody had in high school. Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club, except forty and enormous.

So. One night we both worked late in room service. Around one-thirty in the morning, done, closing out.

We lived in the same part of town — me in lower Queen Anne, Dan at the top of the hill. And there was a last bus. If you missed it, you walked. For me that was an annoyance. For Dan, at one-thirty, after a Danimal day, that hill was a genuine problem.

So he got a head start and said he would hold the bus. I was maybe three minutes behind him, finishing my tickets.

Dan went out that door at a full run, in the state we were all in after twelve hours — and if you have never seen someone at the end of a twelve-hour hotel shift, there is a particular wild-eyed quality that is difficult to explain to people who have not done it.

Running for the stop at Third and Virginia. Which at one-thirty in the morning, in 1990s downtown Seattle, was not the finest corner in the city.

Carrying a gym bag full of bottles. Rattling.

So I walked up and explained. I know him. We just got off work. We are trying to catch the last bus up the hill.

And right then the bus pulled up.

We flashed our hotel ID badges — which, remarkably, was enough — and we ran and we got on it.

Then we sat there breathing hard, on a bus, at one-thirty in the morning, needing our adrenaline to go down and having just sent it in entirely the wrong direction.

We made it. That is the main thing. But I have often thought about what those officers saw: an enormous man exploding out of the front of a downtown hotel at a dead sprint like he had just taken something, with a bag going like a maraca.

Completely innocent. Entirely explicable. Absolutely understandable that they stopped him.

That kind of thing happened to Dan constantly.

What He Was Like on the Floor

Chaotic and indispensable at the same time, which the hotel never fully resolved.

He would go AWOL mid-shift. Just gone. Then reappear and be The Danimal — catching up on every order at once, taking shortcuts, never smooth, never calm, always moving like a man who was late for something.

Because he was. We all were.

He got things wrong constantly. Wrong room. Missing luggage. Room service orders scrambled. Never once on purpose. He was not careless, he was overloaded, permanently, and he ran anyway.

Management could not work him out. They were exasperated with him — the milkshake business was only the most famous example, and there were others.

And they could not do without him, because he showed up.

He took the shifts nobody else would take, and then took the one after it, and never complained about either. When the schedule had a hole, Dan filled it. Twenty-eight years of filling it.

On the radio he was a study. He was slightly afraid of it — his was always broken, which I have never fully believed was bad luck. But when he keyed up he could be startlingly professional, clipped and precise, like we were running a launch at Cape Canaveral rather than sending toothbrushes to the twentieth floor.

And then it would talk back and tell him to go do something, and you could hear him get nervous.

The Catchphrases

He had an enormous supply and deployed them without warning, without context, and at full volume, generally into the service corridor between the towers, which carried sound like a cathedral.

And here is the thing about a hotel: the guests never hear any of it. The service corridor is a completely different building than the lobby. Out front it is marble and low music and please and thank you. Twenty feet away through a door, a very large man is yelling duck-based martial arts puns at nobody in particular at eleven at night.

It made the hard nights survivable. That was the entire function of it and everybody knew it.

Hulk Hogan, in Person

We both met Hulk Hogan at the hotel once, which for Dan was a significant convergence.

Dan said, “What’s up, brother?”

Hogan looked at him and pointed out that this was, in fact, his line.

Then said it back to him.

Then Dan said it again. Then Hogan said it again.

And it went back and forth for meaningfully longer than it needed to, two large men in a hotel saying the same two words to each other, both of them delighted.

We met Allen Iverson too. We did not use the line on him.

The Athletes

We handled pro teams constantly, and working a team with Dan was a specific pleasure.

You would be moving luggage for a visiting roster and Dan would come out with a player’s college numbers. Sometimes his high school numbers.

And you would watch it land on the guy’s face — that particular expression of a professional athlete being told something about himself from before he was famous, by a bellman, in a service hallway, in Seattle.

Who is this guy?

I could not tell you which players. We met so many over twenty-one years that they blur. Baseball, football, all of it. That part I genuinely do not remember and will not invent.

What I remember is Dan’s face when he did it. He was not showing off. He just knew, and it came out.

The Seahawks Game

But the sports thing had a cost, and I saw it clearly one January.

We were up on Queen Anne watching the Seahawks in the playoffs, a crowd of us, a good time. And the game turned bad — some ugly plays, the whole thing hanging on the next snap.

I turned to ask Dan what he thought.

He was gone.

He had got up and walked out into the January cold without saying anything to anybody, because he could not sit through it.

We made the play. The room went up.

And Dan was still outside, in the dark, and missed it entirely.

That is what people do not understand about knowing that much about something. It is not trivia to him. He is not carrying a fact collection. He is carrying every one of those games, and when it goes badly it goes badly at him.

Howard the Duck

Which brings me, finally, to the thing people have been asking about.

One of Dan’s favorite films was Howard the Duck.

Not ironically. He liked the plot. He liked the story. He would quote it in the service corridor at midnight and the rest of us found this baffling, because by any normal measure it is not a good movie.

So that is the joke of it. The most famous flop of the eighties accidentally funded Toy Story. Nothing that fails ever fails all the way.

But that is not why Dan loved it, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what was.

Look at what that movie is actually about.

A creature gets pulled out of his own world without asking and dropped into one that runs on completely different rules. He is the only one of his kind anywhere. Everybody misreads him. They treat him as a pet, or a child, or a joke, or in one scene as food. He gets frustrated and lashes out and it comes out wrong and makes things worse. He had wanted one life and ended up in a different one.

And he is just trying to get through the day in a place that was not built for him.

I asked myself once what Howard the Duck was supposed to mean. What did any of it mean? That is the real question. And I think the honest answer is that Dan, some days, was Howard the Duck. Just making his way through.

I do not think he ever said that out loud. I do not know that he ever thought it in those words.

But a man who is built enormously and moves stiffly, who can recall every play of a game from 1982 but not what time he is due at work, who is permanently overloaded in a building that will not slow down, who gets stopped by police for carrying vitamins, who loses his umbrella every single week — that man watched a movie about a creature stuck in the wrong world doing his best, and he took the phrases with him and yelled them down a service corridor at midnight.

That is not baffling at all. That is the least baffling thing about him.

Still There

We were coworkers, not close friends, and I want to be accurate about that. We went to union meetings together. We went to Mariners games. He met his wife in the later years and she would bring us sandwiches. We never once worked out together, which given the difference in our programs was for the best.

I think he considered me another eccentric Californian, which is fair and correct.

But we trusted each other, and over twenty years in a building like that one, that is the whole thing.

He was still there when I left in 2018. He is there now. I saw him briefly a few years ago at the hotel, and it had been long enough that we were both doing the arithmetic on it.

Was he good for morale? Mostly. He could be a distraction on a night when you needed to focus. But he knew the timing, more or less, and when the chips were down he made it fun.

And that is what I kept. Not the parts that made it stressful. The part where somebody made it fun.

So here is how I think about that building now.

Late at night, everybody upstairs asleep, the lobby empty and the piano quiet and the whole enormous machine humming along on its own.

And if you stand still in a service corridor down on the lower level and listen carefully, you might hear it, from somewhere back of the house, at full volume, for no reason anybody could explain to you:

923.