Higher Standards
(Originally published December 26, 2010)
“I SPENT A summer in Hong Kong for an internship and was supposed to give a presentation on the last day, but it got canceled because of a typhoon. So we went out to party and my boss bought me a shot of Jack and a beer, his favorite set of drinks to get things started. I woke in my hotel room the next day, already late for my flight, when the housekeeping guy knocked at my door. He took one look at me and started gesturing to his face – meaning my face – scared. I looked in a mirror and saw I’d been cut several times, possibly with a knife, and had huge gashes down my cheeks and forehead. I had no recollection how they got there.”
“Nice,” Pete and I both said.
The bartender brought three shots of Jack Daniels and three beers, one set for each of us. What a coincidence. Ted laid his card on the counter and raised his glass first:
“Cheers.”
I met Ted at nerd camp between 7th and 8th grade. You met Ted the night I went to a strip club in Queens, broke my glasses on the bar counter, and drove home holding the pieces together with my right hand while steering with a combination of my left hand and my knees.
Ted’s a little taller than me, with wavy auburn hair. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania an hour and a half outside Philly. His laugh is a hearty giggle. Your first impression of him is that he isn’t totally out of control.
You’d be mostly wrong.
Ted once told me a story so good I made him retell it into a tape recorder so I could steal it and use it at parties, about how he and a friend had borrowed a car to drive to Philly one night to get cheese steaks at “Pat’s” or “Gino’s” – I can’t remember which – and wound up encountering a pair of Mexican guys inside a closed Wal*Mart chasing each other on rideable lawnmowers, a gas station attendant creepily muttering about “painting the town red,” and, thanks to a lack of sleep and a stomach full of cheap meat and Cheez Whiz, a truck that came out of nowhere to knock the borrowed car’s side-view mirror clean off.
Some tell stories, some make stories. Ted makes stories. That was his plan for the night. But I didn’t know that yet.
My plan had been to get Ted together with Pete and Nick – two friends from high school and standup, both in NY – until I found out Nick was back in Connecticut for Christmas already and couldn’t come. Pete and I traded texts:
PETE: Nick mentioned to me last night that he might stick around if you were coming in, but he was wasted
ME: Hes so considerate when hes been drinking
PETE: You sound like a delusional battered wife
ME: Hes good to me unless Im asking for it
Pete had work ‘til 10:30 so I hopped a cab to Ted’s place first. When I arrived, Ted asked what the plan was. I said I didn’t have one. Ted said, “Good.” Then, “I think there’s a band playing at a place called ‘Pianos.’”
“What’s the band?”
“Bellevue’s Finest.” Ted’s phone started to ring. It was his friend Sam, from Pennsylvania. “Have you ever met Sam?” Ted asked.
“No. I’ve heard stories, but never met him.”
Ted answered and put it on speakerphone. “Sam, my friend Mike Critelli’s here. I want you to meet him.”
“What?”
“Say hi to Mike.”
“Hi, Mike.”
“Hi, Sam.”
Ted lives in an apartment with another couple, and his girlfriend. They grew up together but didn’t date until college. Ted left to talk to Sam, and she said, “One night, back in high school, he called me to ask if I wanted to drive to Philadelphia with him to get cheese steaks. It was like 11:00. Crazy, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was crazy.”
We left. Ted checked his iPhone for directions once we got onto the street. He started laughing. “I just realized why this isn’t working. I’ve been Googling the word ‘pianos.’”
“Maybe ‘Pianos, New York’?” I asked.
“Piano shops in NYC?”
“The band is called ‘Bellevue’s Finest,’ right? Try ‘Bellevue New York.’ ‘Bellevue Hospital.’ ‘Bellevue College in Washington State.’” (One of my old standup bits was about trying to locate a research report online,“too much fat in your diet can make it hard to get an erection” by Googling “Fat Hard Erections.” When I couldn’t find the scientific articles about men’s health I was looking for, I’d “narrow it down” by searching “Fat Hard Erections Nude Male Gay XXX Hardcore Pornography.” Frustrated, I’d turn to the audience and say, “How does this ‘Internet thing’ work, anyway?”)
Somehow, Ted found the address: Ludlow, just South of 1st.
“Pianos” is a bar set up to look like an old piano store. We arrived as Bellevue’s Finest started playing in back behind a soundproof glass door. Pete showed up between their set and another band called “Crinkles.”
That’s when we had our Jacks and beers. That’s when the night turned. (I’ve been talking up Ted, but I’ve got stories with Pete too. One time, Pete and I were selling Krispy Kreme donuts for a high school fundraiser. We couldn’t move the last few boxes so we went to Wal*Mart, bought a woven basket and a blanket, put the boxes in the basket underneath the blanket with a note that said, “Please Take Care Of My Baby,” left it on a doorstep, and dripped saline solution on the note to mimic the imaginary mother’s salty tears.)
Pete came to Piano’s off his shift at a celebrity restaurant. He’d just been serving a well-known ugly actress who I’ll be discrete and not name. All I’ll say is she was part of a major film franchise in which she replaced a much prettier actress between the first and second films. Pete’s theory was that they did this so the audience would be less upset when her character got killed.
We drank our Jacks and beers and beers and beers and left Pianos after Crinkles to hit The Crocodile Lounge, a bar by NYU that serves a free personal pizza with every drink. Last I came to NYC, Ted told me it was his new favorite bar. Also, he’d been getting fat and didn’t know why.
The place was quiet because it was past midnight on a Wednesday. Still, there was a French Canadian sitting alone at the bar, with facial hair only slightly too sparse for a beard. “Hey, you guys know where the pretty girls are?” he asked forlornly.
“What?”
“They say the pretty girls are in New York…” He shook his head. “In Montreal, where I’m from, you walk outside and—“ he jerked his neck sharply, side to side “—you break your neck looking at all those girls.”
“You try the Meatpacking District?” Pete asked.
“I don’t know. My friends said to come to New York for girls. But in Montreal…” he jerked his head around again. “You break your neck. And they’re easy there. Really, really easy.”
He did that thing with his neck two more times before we got our beers and pizza coupons and went in the other room.
The pizza coupons at The Crocodile Lounge look like arcade tickets. You drop yours in an empty pitcher and the “chef” – a short Mexican named Miguel – puts a pizza in the oven. While we waited, Ted talked about how great it would be to own a bar like this.
“How’s it going, Miguel?” he asked.
“Good.”
“You happy? Like working here?”
“Yeah, it’s all right.”
When we sat down with our beers and pizzas, I realized I was drunk. We all were getting there. That’s the only way I can explain how our conversation shifted from genuinely saying what a great guy Miguel seemed to be to joking about how we should “follow Miguel home and beat him within an inch of his life.”
(Pete had to leave after his second pizza and beer, and the first text I got from him the next morning was asking if we’d gone through with it. We hadn’t, obviously, but what we did end up doing wasn’t much better.)
Lately I’ve been reading Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, the National Book Award winner of 1950, of which Ernest Hemingway said, “This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch… Mr. Algren, boy, you are good.” It’s about a morphine-addicted card shark living in the tenements of Chicago’s South Side, trying to get his life together, and it sounds like its author had firsthand experience. In fact, he did. Algren grew up in slums and spent time in jail, and could “[identify] with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world” [Wikipedia]. I like that. I think truth is important in writing. I find it therapeutic to be honest about my baser instincts, rather than pretend they aren’t there.
That, in so many words, is why Ted and I went to The Penthouse Club. To quote Nelson Algren: “I don’t recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.”
Six months after our disgusting night at “XXO” in Queens, Ted and I paid $20 cover apiece to enter the classiest of skin bars, and were met immediately by a gorgeous Eastern European with fake breasts almost too big for her lingerie. I asked where specifically she was from. She giggled and said, “Eastern Europe.” She said her name was “cat,” which I misheard as “Goethe,” but decided to mishear it as “Berta” because I didn’t want to explain I thought she said she was named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “the supreme genius of modern German literature” [Wikipedia, again]. That would have been a very confusing conversation for her, as her English did not extend beyond explaining The Penthouse Club’s pricing plan for private rooms:
“Each of the rooms vary in price, from $450 to close to $2000. Each girl is $150 per hour…”
Ted asked where we could just sit down that wouldn’t cost lots of money. Cat/Goethe looked glum, and led us to a lower-level section of red velvet armchairs, facing a stage where half-assed holiday-themed girls - schoolgirl with reindeer antlers, Egyptian princess with Santa hat - were dancing. We watched about a song’s worth before a girl in a bikini and one of those cylindrical, fuzzy Russian hats offered to pour butterscotch liqueur in my mouth and chase it with whipped cream.
“Okay,” I said.
She did. “$20 please.”
“What?”
“Everything’s $20. Shots, lap dances—“
“—You should’ve told me that. I’d have gotten a lap dance instead.”
“Oh, I don’t do lap dances. Just butterscotch shots.”
I took out my wallet and wanted to mutter, “You think you’re too good for lap dances, huh?” But I didn’t. Because the next girl wasn’t. She was from Brazil via Northern Europe and brought a friend for Ted. Our conversation consisted entirely of variations on the following:
“I really enjoy turning you on.”
“Yes. I am also enjoying it.”
$20.
The song ended and she said, “Another?” I hesitated, and she started again.
$20.
“Third time’s a charm.” “Uh…” She started again.
$20.
“How about a fourth, baby?” At that point I realized my cash was all gone. Ted’s was too. He’d bought us a pair of whiskeys on the rocks before we sat down: $20, and $20.
There was no ATM, so our girls brought us to a special booth where we could withdraw “Penthouse Bucks.” The girl behind the counter took my card. My Northern European Brazilian said, “This girl only makes $3.70 an hour. You should give her a tip.”
“How does she only make $3.70 an hour? Isn’t that illegal?”
“She just does.”
“What’s minimum wage in New York? I’ll make up the difference for an hour. That’s more than fair.”
“Just tip her $20.” The Penthouse Club is like a game of Monopoly where all the spaces are Boardwalk and you don’t own any property.
I wrote “$20.00” under TIP and got five 20.00 denomination Penthouse bills, each with a portrait of a sexy, curly-haired blonde. “What president is this?” I asked. My girl giggled, took the cash, hugged me and left.
Ted and I got our coats from the coat check and I emptied my remaining small bills into the tip jar. It felt good to put in less than $20.
When we left it was 4 AM, all options exhausted but one: Ted’s friend A. texted him earlier to say she was partying on the roof of The Standard Hotel.
When we got there, two security guards were standing in front of the hall leading to the elevators. Ted asked if we could go up and see our friends on the roof.
“No. No one’s on the roof. It’s past 4 AM.”
We walked to the other side of the lobby to check if the restaurant bar was open.
“No, it’s after 4 AM. There isn’t a bar in the city open after 4 AM.”
We were alone in the lobby until three blondes in cocktail dresses came out of nowhere, stumbling toward an emergency exit. “Front entrance is over there,” I said, pointing the other way. They thanked me and turned around. I overheard one of them say, “Hey, you want to go get some drugs?” (They actually said “drugs,” like bad undercover cops.) I started to follow them out, not for “drugs,” just to leave. It felt like that time.
Ted walked with me toward the exit, then veered sharply left. A curtain divided the hall that led to the elevators and Ted found the side the guards weren’t on. “What’s back here?” he asked innocently, for the sake of plausible deniability. I followed him into an open elevator.
The guards didn’t notice, or care, because the elevator didn’t go to the roof. It didn’t even seem to work without a room key.
Ted slid his hands over the entire array of buttons and only one lit up: “3.”
We got out on the 3rd Floor, walked to the end of the hall, and found the stairwell. Ted started climbing, two steps at a time. He was a former water polo player and rowed crew in college; I was a former fat kid who’d just signed up for a gym membership a month ago. Now we were jogging fifteen stories? My throat was dry, my legs were tired, and I realized I was still drunk; apparently whiskey on the rocks isn’t Gatorade. Throughout, Ted stayed a few steps ahead of me and kept mumbling about “bathrobes.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I wasn’t really listening. I was exhausted.
At Floor 16, two from the top, I stopped.
No, I thought, we have to make this party.
I willed myself on, like Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest. Unfortunately, also like Sir Edmund Hillary, when we reached the top it was cold, windy, and we were the only ones there.
Maybe there’d been a party at some point, but all we could find was a deserted bar counter and a chalkboard listing drink prices. We strolled around and admired the view before entering a stairwell at the opposite end. Just inside the door was a vending machine with no food or drinks, just The Standard branded merchandise. Ted stuck his arm in and tried to grab the sunglasses on the bottom. He could’ve easily gotten his hand caught, tipped over the machine and been crushed, but I didn’t say anything. It was the least reckless thing we’d done so far that night.
Finally, he gave up. “Let’s go get some bathrobes,” he said. “Come on.”
What?
We walked down a single flight of stairs to Floor 17. Ted went down the hallway and jiggled the handle on every door marked PRIVATE. All locked. I kept looking for security cameras but didn’t see any. Either way, I figured I was safe because my face isn’t on file with the police; Ted I was suddenly not so sure about.
We went down to 16, and started again. “Act drunk,” Ted said. “We can play it off as being lost and looking for our rooms if it seems like we’re drunk.” So instead of walking straight from PRIVATE to PRIVATE, we began to zigzag and slur words, just in case.
On 15, a breakthrough: one of the PRIVATE doors was unlocked, though it only contained a stack of room service meal trays. Still, a good sign.
On 14, nothing.
On 13 – lucky 13 – JACKPOT. The PRIVATE room was full of towels, lotions, and soaps, all set in boxes on metal shelves. And then, hung from a rack on the ceiling, still wrapped in dry cleaners’ plastic: bathrobes.
Ted took one and started tearing the plastic.
“What are you doing?!” I asked
“Grab a bathrobe,” he said. He took off his jacket and slipped his arms through the sleeves. The robes were nice – too nice – a black satin-type material with “The Standard” stitched on the cuffs.
I told him I couldn’t take one.
“Really?” he asked. Ted had the same disappointed expressed as Cat/Goethe when we asked for alternatives to $600-a-night private rooms. But then he shrugged it off, put his jacket back on over the robe, and we left.
Around Floor 11 he said, “You know, I think you’re gonna regret not having the bathrobe as a souvenir.”
Inspirational author H. Jackson Brown Jr. once said, “Be bold and courageous. When you look back on your life, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.” I took Brown’s simple words of wisdom – surely meant for things like “asking for a raise” or “telling someone you love them” – and used their loosest possible interpretation to justify stealing that bathrobe.
Back on 13, I grabbed my own robe. We took our time stuffing the tails in back, and the hoods – yes, these bathrobes had hoods – into our pants and shirts before putting our jackets back on. When finished, we looked four months pregnant, with twins, one in front and the other in back. We knew we’d look suspicious to the security guards in the lobby and have to elude them, so Ted suggested we build momentum by getting a running start around Floor 9.
The stairs didn’t go to the lobby. At Floor “3.5,” there was a fire escape. We looked out.
The first thing we saw was a police car, parked directly below.
“This is bad,” I said.
Ted disagreed. “Come on.”
The Standard’s fire escape wasn’t your standard free-standing metal staircase; this one was carved into the building, with huge walls on either side keeping us hidden until we reached the bottom, which happened way too fast. Within moments we were out on the sidewalk, hands in our pockets, trying to look casual; trying to look unlike the drunks they’d seen wandering floor to floor on The Standard’s hidden security cameras.
I looked back when we’d put enough distance between us and the cop car to feel like we’d made it.
It was empty.
We came upon a woman standing at the corner in a skirt, stockings, heels, and tight black tank top. Not crossing the intersection, just waiting. A prostitute? Less than a block from a police car? It was the sloppiest sting operation I’d ever seen. (It also made me think: if you’re a female police officer who keeps her body in peak physical condition and occasionally wears makeup to work, sooner or later you’re going to be assigned to a street corner, wearing next to nothing, and pretend you’re a whore. It’s just going to happen.)
We still needed a cab to get home. The first one we found was off-duty. We pulled our bathrobe hoods over our heads to block the wind, and walked up the West Side Highway, hoping against hope there’d be a cabbie stupid or reckless enough to pick up two guys in hoods wandering the streets at 5 AM, both over six feet tall.
The second cab pulled over immediately. Maybe we weren’t that intimidating.
On the ride back, Ted told me he got the idea to steal bathrobes from Sam.
“The Sam I talked to on speakerphone?” I asked.
“Yeah. We did this once before at a Sonesta Hotel. Figured I might as well try it again, but up the ante.”
We crashed for four hours at Ted’s before waking up early – 10:30 AM – to catch trains, mine to Connecticut and his to Pennsylvania. Ted was badly hungover, but I was somehow fine; my only concern was getting my bathrobe safely back. Ted searched his room for something to put it in. He laughed when he found it: a plastic bag with a drawstring that said “Sonesta Hotel and Resorts.”
As a writer, after a long night, you hope you’ll at least come out with a story. But a souvenir bathrobe? That’s unbelievable. That’s as good as a wicker basket of Krispy Kreme donuts or a borrowed car with the mirror knocked off.
That said, the important thing is the story, which I was thankful to remember because one rarely does when he starts off the night with a shot of Jack and a beer.
Although that can be a story too.