Previously, I have written about the old Jack Tar Hotel in
Galveston, which unfortunately isn't there anymore. As far as I know, the largest
remaining piece of that hotel is a single weathered brick sitting on a shelf in
a bookcase in my office. Several
hurricanes ate the rest of the old hotel, taking a bite or two from me in the
process.
This is just about the end of the hurricane season, so I have
been thinking about the old hotel lately.
Every hurricane gnawed at the hotel (in some cases the damage was
spectacular), but even the smallest tropical depression brought wind damage and
flooding--this is the inevitable fate of anything built directly on a beach. An oceanographer once told me that the ocean
eventually either buries or washes away everything it touches, and a little of
both eventually destroyed the hotel.
Not all the hotel's destruction was caused by nature,
however: It suffered through a few
man-made storms, too. Some of the
"storm damage" was caused by the exuberant application of the law by
the off-duty police officers I employed as hotel security. Someday, I really should record a few stories
about "Too Cold" Taylor and "Colonel Klink”. (I'll have to check on the statute of
limitations first).
The worst man-made storm damage, however, was caused by
conventioneers. The only safe way to
attend a convention of the Telephone Workers of America is from inside an
Abrams battle tank--And keep the hatch firmly dogged! It still mystifies me how such a group of
harmless-looking people could hold such a wild drunken convention and it was
simply amazing how many of them ended up in either the county hospital or the
county jail!
One convention that stands out in my memory is a convention that started
out fairly mildly, anyway. The Mattress Tax Tag Collectors of Texas (the name has been changed to protect the guilty) was
the kind of mild-mannered group that could be counted on to arrive with a dirty
t-shirt and a five dollar bill...and by the time the convention was over and
they had left the island, they wouldn't have changed either one.
So it was something of a surprise when the front desk got a call
about 3:00 AM, from a guest in one of the of the lanai rooms, complaining about
the noise from a room occupied by one of the Mattress Tax Tag Collectors..
It was standard policy at the hotel that in the advent of
anything really weird, the front desk was to call a manager instead of
security, who would then make the decision about whether to call security.
The lanai rooms were strange,
two-story bungalows, scattered around the pool; each one was comprised of only
two rooms, with the upper room accessed by a flight of stairs. This shows the age of the hotel: not only would this kind of room fail to meet
current ADA compliance, but cleaning these rooms would be far too
labor-intensive for today's wages.
When I got to the room in question, sure enough, there were loud
sounds of a man's moaning and sighing. I
couldn't make out all the words, but I could occasionally hear what sounded
like someone saying, "Help! Help
me!"
When no one answered my knock on the door, I used my passkey let
myself into the room. The television was
on, the room was obviously occupied, no one was in sight, but there was loud moaning
coming from the bathroom.
As I moved into the bathroom, I found the source: A very large--and very naked--man was lying
on the floor, covered in splintered pieces of wood, lying half across what had
once been a sliding pocket door separating the shower from the rest of the
bathroom. His badly scraped and slightly
bleeding body was half in one room, and half in the other, and the remains of
the door had a large man-shaped hole right through it.
Note. When Rene Magritte painted the picture to the
right, I doubt that he had this use in mind, but it did sort of look like this.
The man was all but unconscious and incoherent, and it took
almost an hour to get the poor man to calm down, to stop crying, to remove most
of the tiny splinters of wood, to get him covered with a towel, and to be
relaxed enough to tell me what had happened.
For the record, there is an awful lot of naked on a large
panicky, semi-conscious, naked, (Did I already mention that he was NAKED?) man!
The story unfolded like this:
Despite being somewhat claustrophobic, and alone, the guest had locked
the door while taking a shower, but when he tried to unlock the door, it had
become jammed. Before long, according to
him, he had "run out of air", had begun choking, and had passed
out. The next thing he knew, I was
helping him up and he had absolutely no memory of crashing through the door.
Now, this had been a standard pocket door that slid in and out of
the wall. There was no way it
could actually jam: the latch could be
flipped open with a hard stare, so it was rather obvious that the man had just
freaked out and in a blind panic had simply crashed through the door.
Eventually, I got the man reoriented and calmed down, and
with the help of a bellboy, moved him to another lanai room. I wasn't too worried about the destroyed door
since maintenance could replace it the next day, then housekeeping could vacuum
up the remaining wood splinters, and the room would be ready for occupancy the
next night. I wasn’t even going to try
and get the guest to pay for the damages, I figured the poor guy had suffered
enough embarrassment.
The next morning, as I was making the rounds of the hotel, I
passed the room with the destroyed door and saw a note taped on the front door. Curious, I walked over and read it:
"Jerry, I've moved to 233. I had a little trouble with the bathroom door
in this room. I had to get tough and use
karate on it. Steve."
There's nothing scarier than a large naked claustrophobe who is convinced that the room they are in is running out of air, especially if you're a skinny kid, 100 pounds sopping wet and the claustrophobe in question is profoundly NOT a man. Don't ask how I know. you would NOT believe it anyway.
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