Fond Memories...

I went to Cleveland for a year. I was hired for 6 weeks, and the job ran for a year. I have been to a lot of bad places, and Cleveland is by far the worst. I hated it so much I had T-shirts made for the team listing the top 10 things I hated about it. I was absolutely miserable while working there. High maintenance clients, very little security work, and I put out a lot of fires caused by the hotel staff. So many fires that watching the bumbling of the hotel staff started to amuse me to no end. At one point we had 160 rooms in a 200 room hotel...I think the bill was around 2 million a month when the expenses were tallied up.

Regardless of how much money my client was spending the first answer when presenting a request to hotel staff was always no. Granted, some of the requests were pretty outlandish. But, outlandish or not, no should not be in your vocabulary when a guest paying well into the millions every month asks for something. As a matter of fact, if you came to my house and paid me 2 million a month to live there you can drop a steaming crap on my dining room table during Thanksgiving Dinner and I would probably just smile and clean it up like nothing happened. OK, not really but you get the point.Finding good things to focus on while in Cleveland was rough. So good became a relative term.

I make no secret of the fact that I love watching stupid people act stupid. If their stupidity causes injury or arrest I am amused even more. If their stupidity causes injury AND arrest even better!! You may be thinking wow this guy is a serious asshole! There is no shortage of successful arguments to be made attesting to that fact. I make no apologies. I think stupidity should be painful, and folks doing stupid things should be exploited for the amusement of the not so stupid. I should point out that I apply these rules to myself as well. The folks at our hotel offered a lot in the way of amusement during our long days of boredom. So many in fact that I am sure I can write a book based on my 366 days there.

If you worked in a hotel and a man came to check in wearing a bathrobe, a pair of pants with handwritten epithets all over them, a t-shirt, and a trumpet would you check him in? Before you answer that consider this...he was having conversations with people only he could see, he was somewhat menacing to the front desk clerk, and he smelled bad...really bad. In any other 5 star hotel in any city he would have been turned away. Not in Cleveland. The Cleveland Ritz Carlton had no qualms about putting him on the club level right down the hall from my clients suite. I cant thank them enough for that!

"I WILL KILL ANYONE THAT COMES TO MY DOOR!!!" was the angry exclamation I heard shatter the tranquility of the club lounge. Not something I hear everyday in a 5 star hotel so I was immediately enthralled. I walked down the hall to the lounge expecting the worst...I was secretly hoping that some deranged gunman would just end the misery of Cleveland for me. I was disappointed to find no deranged gunman, just the club lounge concierge with a concerned look on her face. The shouting had come from a room right next to the lounge. In addition to the shouting it sounded like a UFC title fight was going on in said room. It was pretty bad.

Hotel security arrived pretty quickly (Off duty Cleveland PD moonlighting). Not knowing what was on the other side of the door, she asked my partner and I to back her up until the Cleveland PD got there. As bored as we were in Cleveland, we were happy to oblige. She knocked and this little man opened the door. He was polite, articulate,lucid, and pleasant. He gave zero indication that he was in distress. He was so convincing that he caused all of us to question our senses. He politely thanked hotel security for checking in, and assured her that there was no problem. We all stood there in puzzled amusement watching the exchange come to an end...and then he closed the door!

I wont repeat the string of racially insensitive profanities that came out of that room as soon as the door closed, but I will give credit to the hotel security person for not taking the door off the hinges and conducting a gravity experiment from the top floor. It was pretty bad, and she just took it in stride. She casually turned to us and stated " Oh yeah...he has to go!". Cleveland PD arrived pretty quickly. The hotel manager was on hand to observe, and he deftly routed guests around the scene with the skill of Obi Wan Kenobi. With a french accented "nothing to see here" he jedi mindtricked the hell out of a few people on that floor.

The first cop on scene was greeted with a HUGE snot projectile, and a loud FUCK YOU from the little crazy man in the room. A little advice...bad idea to open a door to law enforcement with fuck you and a lung oyster no matter how unhappy you are to see them. It is just not a good ice breaker. I don't think the little man expected what came next. He tried to slam the door in the cops face only to be rushed by his 5 cop friends coming out of the service elevator. I have never seen anyone tackled as hard as this little guy was tackled. It took about 1 second for the hallway to clear of law enforcement as all of them rushed into the room.

I would have loved to have heard the commotion from the room directly below. I bet it sounded like a drug fueled pachyderm orgy. Crazy dude got hit so hard he shit himself. Seriously, he pooped...peed too. At some point his lip was split, and his nose started bleeding but man he kept fighting. The fight to subdue him was shortened considerably when he started spitting blood on the cops. Matter of fact I think he got two full spits out before a no nonsense Cleveland PD veteran issued him an ultimatum.

"You spit on another police officer, and I will break your arm"...spitting sound followed quickly by a dull snap and a blood curdling scream! That veteran of the Cleveland streets was a man of his word. The fight ended completely and they got him in custody. Thus ending the most fun I had had in Cleveland to date. I am not sure what became of the guy, but he had graffiti ed everything in the room. Tagged up the windows, the walls, the desk. In the bathroom he had used his own blood to tag up the mirror. The smell was incredible as well.

Some of you may be thinking that this is just a horrible story. Terrible for the hotel, sad for the crazy guy, sad for the folks that have to clean the room etc...I totally get it. When I look back on it now I feel all of those things...kinda. But, while living in the bitterness of my experience in Cleveland I laughed. It is a testimony to the absolute shittiness of Cleveland that the only thing I could find to take joy in was the folly of my fellow man. I fear I would be lacking in conviction if I did anything other than laugh though. Sure the desk clerk could have avoided all the ensuing problems by refusing service but that would have been the smart thing to do...plus it would have deprived me of a great deal of satisfaction at the expense of my fellow man...

Here's to the idiots...thank you so much for being idiotic!