Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,2

I spent caught up in the story I wrote that day at the Palace, but when I placed the final period at the end of the last sentence and shut the front cover, I realized I hadn’t checked up on the silver-haired girl for a long time. I glanced over at where she’d been sitting and experienced two powerful and contradictory emotions at once.

Despair, because she was gone.

And elation, because her purse was not.

GOOD EGGS AND BAD EGGS

YOU’D THINK I STARTED HANGING out in hotels because they’re a great place to rip people off, but it actually happened the other way around. I’ve always loved hotels. I love their unapologetic hotel-ness. All hotels looks like all other hotels. All hotels smell like all other hotels. All hotel food tastes like all other hotel food. Someone could show you a picture of a room, anywhere in the world, and you’d immediately know if it was a hotel room or a normal room. There’s a sameness that transcends branding—Ramada or Hilton, Doubletree or Motel 6—as if every hotel were actually the same hotel, connected via wormhole across space and time. They all share the same flowery bedspreads with the crunchy texture of an unwashed gym class T-shirt, the carpeting that is almost (but not quite) dark enough to mask the full extent of its foulness, and art of such insistent and offensive blandness that it makes each guest feel as if he has been committed to a mental institution that believes he poses a danger to himself and must therefore be pacified via watercolor landscape painting.

If I ever owned a hotel, I think it would be cool to try and make it so that no one could actually tell it was a hotel. I could put a row of busted-up sneakers just inside the door of every room, and a couple of used toothbrushes in a glass above every bathroom sink, and pack every closet full of old coats and boxes and board games missing critical pieces. My guests would wake up thinking they were waking up at a friend’s house, or maybe even their own. Then they’d go downstairs into the kitchen and pour themselves a bowl of cereal from the half-empty box of stale Frosted Mini-Wheats placed there by my staff every morning.

Of course, a hotel like that wouldn’t be very useful to a kid like me, from a thievery point of view, because people would treat it the same way they treated their homes. And homeowners are always careful. They lock the doors and set the alarms. They’re on the lookout for suspicious activity. They call the cops at the first sign of trouble.

Guests at upscale hotels are never careful. Otherwise vigilant people are fooled by all that marble and gold leaf into thinking they’re somehow safe from the unwashed 99 percent. It’s practically an invitation, the way they leave their stuff unattended all over the place—in elevators and stairwells, in ballrooms and conference halls, on luggage carts “accidentally” abandoned by undertipped porters, on the pavement right next to their luxury rental cars, and sometimes just stacked up like so much designer firewood outside their rooms. It would be a crime not to swipe something.

I realize that might sound bad or wrong or whatever, but I’ve given this a lot of thought, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that “rightness” and “wrongness” are slippery concepts. I mean, some things are obviously shitty, and some things are obviously nice or noble or whatever, but between the two goalposts of black and white, between punching a baby in the kidney and donating a kidney to save a baby, there’s a freaking football field’s worth of gray area. (Side note: When I first learned about the Ten Commandments in Sunday school, I thought “covet” was another word for “have sex with,” which made a lot of sense when it came to “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” but a little bit less when it came to “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s animals,” and not at all when it came to “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s house.” Turns out it just means “want to have.” That’s the problem with the Bible—or one of them, anyway—it doesn’t just tell you what to do, it tells you what to want. That’s too much to ask, IMHO.)

Take stealing, for example. My dad taught me that our society punishes people who only steal a little, but it rewards people who steal a lot. Like