By Joshua Ryan
Chapter 20: Opportunities for Success in Uniformed Service
I’m leaving out a lot of stuff about the “guests.” The kids that trip you in the hall. The people that open their doors and see you and squirm and slither away as far as they can get, hoping not to catch your disease. The old gentlemen who like to tell you jokes. “Hey boy—how many slappies does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Don’t know? Well, what DO you know? Ha ha ha ha ha! I heard that one on the tour today.” The young ladies who check in for their bachelorette party, four to a room, and totter off to shop for their bridesmaids’ dresses, leaving their puke on the couch. The boyfriends muscling them past the ugly slappies that would otherwise want to rape them. The annual guests who’ve learned that if Housekeeping turns up at an inconvenient time they can always say “Corner,” and the slap will have to find the nearest one and stand there facing it until the guests are ready to leave their room.
It was good that during those first days I had Dave to keep me standing at attention with my hands behind my back, anytime there might be trouble. And to teach me a lot more things than how to change a hotel bed. He went way beyond what hotel management calls Guest Relations.
You need to understand that if you put a slappie down in the middle of your street, it’s gonna be helpless out there, with all those freemen around to fuck it up. But slappies don’t live in the middle of the street. They live behind bars, which is a different place entirely. Dave taught me how to succeed behind bars. Way beyond what I was doing back in the Coop.
Money, for example. Every country has its currency. In Slap World, currency is all the stuff you’re not supposed to have. That’s what makes it valuable. An apple. A half-used tube of toothpaste. A cigaret. I’d seen that kind of currency in the Coop. The stakes were lots higher in the hotel basement. A whole pack of cigarets. A joint! One of those tiny “sample” bottles of whiskey. A stamp you can use to smuggle a letter to your long-lost boyfriend—for all the good it will do you. Things like that are valuable, very valuable. And hotels are full of them. They are also full of 50-dollar bills and semi-expensive watches and phones that slip out of people’s pockets and into the couch, or somewhere.
If you snatch too much of the stuff, you have trouble trading it. And of course you’ve got to share with the bosses. And your fellow thieves. Dave made it clear that he’d get his slice. But if you don’t gamble it away or drink it away, you can put something together for yourself. I traded bits of cash to the kitchen servants for their cooking sherry, and cooking sherry to the floor cleaners for the cigars they found when they turned on the lights and swept up the bar, and cigars to the busboys for the drinks that weren’t finished when they picked up the glasses, and drinks to the slaps at the door for the tips they got from the guests that wanted a call girl, and I stashed the money in a hole in the wall behind the stacks of water bottles in the housekeeping room on Five. I passed enough liquor around to make everybody in the barracks happy and not wanting to raid my stash, and I loaned something out whenever I saw a slap that was good at gambling or at stealing without getting caught.
Contrary to expectations, Kris developed very well in that way. He was an agile boy with the senior slaps in the basement and soon fucked his way from Floors to Rooms. Once his hair grew out he would stun a certain kind of guest into forgetting where he’d left anything he had that was valuable. Kris wasn’t so charming around the other slaps; he was a surly island-talker with a bad attitude when he lost at cards. Which he usually did. But I got my stakes back, with interest. It was good to see how mad he got at me. I’d forgotten how much I used to enjoy doing business.
Then things took another turn, not so good. Boss Derek decided that I didn’t have enough to do in the afternoons and made me a part-time go-boy. A go-boy is a slappie that runs errands, like being sent to a store to buy some last-minute item for the dining room, or getting a message from the concierge that Mrs. Waltham-Thomas needs some Pepcid from the drug store, so go there and get it. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d learned to take the humiliation of busting beds and cleaning toilets, and I’d finally got the dunce cap off my head. But going out in the street was a different issue. I’d gotten used to being locked inside.
Of course, nobody asked me how I felt about my new job. Boss Derek just extended my collar range to some unknown radius, and I was the new go-boy. On my first errand I was as awkward as a dog on a conveyer belt. A call came down, I’d done my rooms for the day, so I was it. Security unlocked the bars to the staircase, and I went to the Slap Counter. This time I was all alone. My face blank, my hands clasped behind my shorts, my shirt smoothed down and buttoned to the top, I waited nervously for orders. It must have taken 15 minutes for one of the desk queers to grace me with his presence. “A guest desires a supply of sex protectors, boy.”
“Sex protectors, sir?”
“Condoms, boy. Rubbers.” Naturally, he said “rubbahs” in the most Empire way possible. “A package of ten is desired, flesh color. Go to Wesson’s. Down the street, left. Make it quick. We don’t like you slaps roving the streets.”
Unless they’re luggage porters or security boys, or immediately attending a guest, slappies don’t go out the front door. They go through a little door on the side—one of those doors that in America have “Associates” or “Team Members” above them. On St. Bevons, the signs say that they’re doors for “Servants.” So that’s how I had to leave the hotel. Dev had told me the rules for servants on the street. If you’re a servant, you yield to any freeman you see, and you try to remain “at a respectful distance” from all freemen. Which means that if there aren’t four or five feet of room for you on the sidewalk, you head for the gutter and trudge along in that. At the store, you find the Servants entrance and address yourself to the first free employee or store slappie you see. If there isn’t a Servants entrance, you go in where the other customers do, but if there’s a queue, you yield place to any free person who shows up. Slappies are not permitted to carry money or credit cards, so when you get to checkout, you show the number and the hotel tag on your collar, and they put the purchase on the hotel’s account. If you lied, they’ve got your number, and you’ll be in the fields tomorrow, and stay there.
I got to the street and started my journey toward this place called Wesson’s. The sidewalk was clogged by freemen and their wives and children. It was the hotel district, so lots of them were foreigners ape-gazing at the windows of the expensive stores and gawking at the slappie boys stationed in front of the hotels and stylish restaurants. There were also lots of St. Bees, and as I went along I sensed their temperature turning from cool to frigid. I was a slap boy that was taking up space on their concrete. So I stepped into the gutter, my boots splashing through the muck contributed by an afternoon shower, my legs wet from the swish of some slappie’s broom as he smoothed a puddle off his owner’s sidewalk. No “Sorry mon.” A slap can tell when another slap is new to his job, and an old slappie’s got just one dependable asset—he’s been around longer than you have. So fuck you.
“Down the street” meant five blocks, which is a long way for a retired executive to splash through the gutter in shorts and boots, wearing his number all over him and wondering when his collar is going to report that he’s gone out of bounds. But just when I was sure that I’d gone too far and the store must be in the opposite direction, there it was. A big modern drugstore, typical in every way except that it didn’t have a Servants entrance. I waited till every freeman who looked like he wanted to go inside had satisfied his desire, and then I was there, prowling the aisles like a normal customer. A normal customer that has most of the other customers watching him in disgust. They got more disgusted when they saw me carrying my box full of “sex protectors” up to the counter. I’d been scared that I wouldn’t be able to find that shit. But I did, and then it was like walking into a football game carrying your sister’s purse.
Of course there was a line at checkout, and only one clerk to manage it. If I’d just been waiting in line, I would have got to the front in maybe four or five minutes. But new freemen kept showing up, and every time they did I had to step back and let them take my place. Because I also had to keep my distance from the last freeman in line, it wasn’t hard for them to cut in front of me. They just moved into the line as if no one like me existed. But every one of them stared down at the package I was carrying. Some of them laughed; some of them looked indignant, like I was fucking some free woman, or wanted to, and she’d sent me there. I’d had a lot of worst moments in my life, but this was up near the top. Excuse me for calling it “my” life, which it wasn’t.
When I finally got to the counter, the clerk was an old black islander.
“What you got there, boy?”
“It’s, uh . . . . ”
“Plan on usin those, boy?”
A white couple was browsing the aisles and evidently looking for entertainment. They snickered and came closer. Dave said there are two ideas on St. Bevons about slappies and sex. One is that a slappie will fuck anything, and therefore fucks something all the time. The other is that being a slappie is the same as having your nuts cut off: sex is out of bounds for you; therefore, you never have sex. Both ideas make a slappie into a comical clown that can’t deal with a condom.
“No sir, the man at the hotel . . . . ”
“That’s all right, slap boy. Doan want you leakin all over thee floor.”
“If he does, he can clean it up!” the male half of the couple chimed in.
“Yessir,” said the clerk. “If he got enough to leak. You got enough to leak, boy?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“OK, slap” he said, getting serious. “Number and place of service.”
My number was on my shirt, and the King George emblem was on my tag, but making a slap recite its ownership and identity is satisfying proof that it is, in fact, an owned object.
“Sir, my number is 21338, and I serve at the King George Hotel, sir.”
“Well!” the female hissed. “Isn’t that special?” Everybody heard that, and everybody had a big laugh. One thing that everybody knows is that no slap is special in any way.
“Ver’ well,” the clerk said, scanning the package. “The sum will appear on the hotel’s account. Now scuttle on back, boy.”
“Sir,” I said. “Yes sir.” And scuttled. The clock in the store said 4:11. I’d already been gone for more than half an hour. I’d need to move fast, to make sure the hotel didn’t report me and I’d find cops grabbing me at the next intersection and holding me as a runaway slap. The rain was starting again, but I ran. I ran in my heavy slappie boots. I ran on the sidewalk. I ran in the gutter. I ran with my dog tag bouncing up and down on my collar. I started to run into the front door of the hotel, until the security slaps pushed me back and asked what the fuck I thought I was doing. “Roun to thee side, boy!” Even to them I was a boy. Also, of course, to the clerks at the desk, when I finally got there. I was dripping water, but they still asked me why I was late, slappie?
It must have been considered adequate performance for a slap boy, though, because after that I was sent on errands almost every day. I was one more object in the ceaseless flow of mud-brown servants shuffling up and down the fashionable streets. But soon I began to recognize other slappies and be recognized by them. Some of them were wide-eyed kids, clumsy in their servant gear and their programmed motions. Maybe I should say “my heart went out to them,” but it didn’t. They were just suckers that got caught, like any other slappie. Like me. A few of the slaps I saw had the look of wisdom and experience. These were the operators, the slaps I kept seeing on the streets and at the stores, the slaps that were happy to talk to me whenever we got the chance. I guess they saw me in the same way–as a slap that might be good at trading favors.
Which I was. Suppose you’re a guest at some fancy hotel. You want some weed. You want some uppers. You want some downers. You want a hook-up. You want that special message conveyed to that special person. The network of slappies will get those things for you—if you know which slap to contact. Since it’s dangerous, you will pay the network well. Just by carrying very short messages and very small objects a slappie can make a lot of money, if he can find a place to hide it. And any slap in Housekeeping has that place.
Now I was really in business again, and making a lot in slappie terms. I had to be careful. I couldn’t tip the slaps at the King George in the same proportion that I had before; that would just show how well I was doing and increase my chance of being held up or snitched on. When you’ve got money, it’s hard to spend it without giving yourself away. I had my stash of money and I had my private reserve of liquor, but you can’t buy a place where you can go and live and drink and not be a slappie. You can loan the money out, which I kept doing, and buy small luxuries, like the young hotel slaps that would never look at a guy my age but for some pills or some liquor they would let me punish them all night. Which I was happy to do. The slappie that sat everybody down on a wooden stool and gave them a haircut every two weeks was pleased to take my money and give me a cut that was “almost as distinguished as Boss Derek’s.” “Why not make it more distinguished?” I said. “That’s what I meant,” he said, taking the extra dollars out of my hand. When I was balling the slap boys, some of them wanted to run their hands through my hair. “Daddy!” they said. But I just kept balling them. Harder.
My hope was to find some way of buying my freedom. The players on the street all said the same thing: nobody had ever done that. But money will buy anything, right? If you can figure out where to spend it. And the way I saw things, if you give up your hope of being on top again, then you’re admitting you’re a pussie. I don’t care what you were before, you are now a pussie spending the rest of its life adjusting to being a pussie. That’s why I resisted speaking thee islan’ talk. I was fucked, that’s true, but I didn’t want to adapt to being fucked. One of the slaps I did business with said to me, “How come you mad all thee time mon? You makin money. You gettin ass. I see you drunk bout evry other day. So what if you ain’t payin no mortgage, dude?” In other words, I should enjoy being on the bottom. I wanted to smack his head off, but I just walked away. Hurting him wouldn’t be good for business. When you’re scrubbing the toilet where some fat ugly tourist has just taken a crap that didn’t quite flush out, you feel better knowing that you’ve still got your financial skills.
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