Last weekend, for my birthday, my fiancé took me to New York to see the Josh Groban/Annaleigh Ashford Sweeney Todd. We had a wonderful time. That wonderful time, however, is not what I am going to write about at this juncture.
We arrived in New York on Friday about noon and worked until about 5:00. That night we had nothing in particular to do; Julia had been planning to work late that night, but got a surprise extension on her looming project, so instead we decided to go to dinner and have a few cocktails. We ended up having more cocktails than we probably should have, but the night was fun and nothing bad happened; the bar we were at was only a few blocks away from the hotel. We went to sleep, content in the knowledge that we would probably be a bit hungover the next day, but excited for our plan to go to the MOMA during the day and then spend our evening watching Josh Groban pretend to kill people. We did not set alarms on our phones.
I awoke with a start about 4:00 in the morning in a surprising fashion: I was standing outside the hotel room. I needed to go the bathroom. There was not a bathroom in the hall outside the hotel room, though of course there was one in the hotel room itself. I attempted to re-enter the hotel room. It was locked. Julia did not appear to notice when I knocked on the door. I reached into my pocket to see if I had my wallet on my person, when I noticed the fact that would predominate my consciousness for the next half-hour or so. I did not have my wallet in my pocket, because, as it turns out, I was clad only in a t-shirt. Please understand that I do mean only.
I don’t believe I have properly sleepwalked since I was a child, though I did it occasionally in my youth. My parents do have a few funny stories of me stumbling past them to stand confusedly in the shower in the middle of the night, but these were only occasional occurrences even at their peak, and I do not recall any further instances of somnambulism after about the age of twelve. If it has occurred since (and I suppose it is possible, since one is presumably often only made aware of sleepwalking if someone else witnesses it and tells you about it later) it has never put me in a situation that caused me any particular discomfort.
The facts appear to be these: roused to a state of partial alertness by a full bladder, I strove to approach the bathroom. The bathroom door of this particular hotel room is immediately adjacent to the door leading to the hallway outside the room. In my sleepwalking/drunk/both state, I mistook one door for the other and found myself in the cold, fluorescent light of a hotel hallway. I had, of course, conscientiously shut the door behind me; there are those who micturate with the bathroom door open in full view of their partners, but I am not among that barbaric number. At some point shortly after the closing of the portal, I became fully awake (though certainly still a little fuzzy, with the telltale signs of a pretty good hangover creeping in around the edges) and it is here that the story really begins.
I was not immediately panicked; no one else was around, and thankfully my room was at the far end of a hallway and around a corner, so it seemed likely I would be able to get back into the room without being witnessed in my state of undress. Yet one problem began to become clear to me: Julia was not responding to my repeated knocks on the door. I was reluctant to pound on the door with too much fervor, as the last thing I wanted was to awaken someone else who was also staying on the tenth floor of this hotel, but I overcame my initial reluctance and was making a fair amount of noise before I gave up on this endeavor.
Julia, you must understand, can occasionally fall into such a deep sleep that nothing short of physically shaking her will rouse her. This is not a function of alcohol (though that probably helped in this instance), it is just a fun quirk that she has that is usually not much of a problem. Here, however, it promised to make my evening much more exciting than I hoped. I don’t know exactly how many times I knocked on the door, but I believe I persisted in this vain hope for a very long time. I was fairly invested in the idea that she would awaken and retrieve me from my predicament. I fervently believed that the version of events where Julia blearily opened the door and let me back in was better than any other possible solution to this quandary. Alas, it was not to be. I was forced to realize that Julia was not going to assist me; I was on my own. I had been abandoned, in my moment of deepest need, by the person in this life whom I love the most. Julia was content to sleep until the problem figured itself out, unconcerned by my dilemma.
I considered my options. In itself, the crisis of being locked out of a hotel room is not a particularly insoluble one. Ordinarily, one can simply travel down to the front desk and request a new key. This is a practice I am familiar with, as I am a very forgetful person who is never content to end a hotel stay without acquiring at least a half-dozen extra keys. The problem here, however, as you have probably already identified, is that I was not appropriately clothed for this plan. I did not relish the idea of full-on Porky Pig-ing it down the elevator to the front desk of this previously reputable establishment. I was also not wearing my glasses, making me very nearly blind, and as I am very capable of getting lost in my own apartment, I was concerned that I might take a wrong turn and start aimlessly haunting the halls of this hotel. I could see several possible endings to this story which resulted in me warming a New York City jail cell for an evening.
Yet no other path seemed open to me. I could pound on this door forever, but I had no reason to believe it would call Sleeping Beauty to action. I could thus either 1) go down to the front desk or 2) lie down and wait to die. I did not want to die because I was very excited about seeing Sweeney Todd, and also because it was my birthday, and it seemed silly to die on my birthday. Yes, this incident was occurring in the early hours of the 34th anniversary of my birth; not only down to the day, but nearly down to the exact same hour, as I am given to understand that I first graced this wretched world with my wailing presence at about the same hour of the morning.
I thus began to experiment with methods of improving my sartorial situation. There were no scraps of cloth in my vicinity, but I was wearing a t-shirt. Let it be known, however, that this was not one of the t-shirts of my youth, those halcyon days of the ‘90s when one wore t-shirts that stopped at knee length. This was an ordinary white undershirt, designed primarily to protect nicer collared shirts from sweat. It did little to conceal the portions of my body that I ordinarily go to great lengths to conceal. I could not simply walk down in that fashion without committing a misdemeanor.
I tried removing the shirt and wrapping it around my waist, but this did not work. It was not a big enough shirt to function as a sort of makeshift kilt. Again, however, I did not abandon this line of inquiry until I was certain of its results. No, I persisted in several variations on this theme, but to no avail. Eventually I deduced that by means of pulling the shirt down and sort of crouch-waddling around, I would be able to maneuver without revealing my genitals to any passersby. That this was a danger, however, would be immediately apparent to anyone who witnessed me perambulating in this manner.
Oh, how helpless is man, stripped of his usual tools! Oh, how vulnerable and pathetic a spectacle he makes, forced to surmount even a trivial difficulty without the engines of his dominance over this world! Not five hours prior I had been capable of many works of wonder; I carried with me a small, black rectangle that provided me with access to all of the secrets known to our species; now, I was as impotent as the day I was born. Naked I came into this world, 34 years before, naked will I leave it, at some point in the future; naked, or nearly so, must I now also ask an underpaid concierge to rescue me from a disaster entirely of my own making.
There was nothing for it, so I descended the elevator and walked through the halls of the hotel to the front desk. It was at this point important for me to communicate two simultaneous things to my hoped-for benefactor: first, of course, the seriousness of my situation and my urgent need for his assistance; but also, that I was not here to Cause Trouble. No sex pest I, no exhibitionist; only an idiot. I thus attempted to project confidence and clarity; a sort of wry irony and world-weary Zen acceptance of my situation. I sought to inspire in this clerk a sense of camaraderie and warmth; I hoped to turn him into a font of fellow-feeling. “I should not laugh at this man,” I imagined him thinking. “Nor should I be afraid of him; he is just another of God’s feeble creatures, here in need of simple kindness and aid. I shall not stare at his nudity, nor call for the local constabulary; instead, I shall simply give him a new key and bid him farewell and Godspeed.”
To accomplish this goal, I entered the atrium of the clerk’s demesne and said “Hi there,” in a loud tone, and then immediately crouch-waddled behind a pillar so as to shield myself from his eyes, hoping I had given him enough visual confirmation of my plight as to foreclose any further need for ocular examination.
“Uh,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Listen,” I said. “I sleepwalked myself out of my room and am locked out. Can you help me? My fiance did not wake up when I knocked on the door.”
“Uh,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“We could call her?” He said.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Do you know her phone number? I could call her and ask her to open the door.”
“I do not know her phone number,” said I. “It is the year of our Lord 2023. I do not know anyone’s phone number except for my own.”
“I could call your number?” he said.
“That could work,” I said, but it didn’t, because my phone was dead, for Lo: I was too intoxicated previously to remember to plug it in.
“Well, what room number is it? I could call that phone.”
“Yes, that would be good.” But Lo: the ringing of the phone did not awaken Julia, who, as previously indicated, can sleep through anything once ensconced in the blessed Avalon she makes of any bed on which she lays her head.
“Well,” he said. “I can call one of the other employees to let you into the room, but I’d need to see some ID.”
“I,” I said, “clearly do not have my driver’s license on me at this precise moment. I would be more than happy to present that ID to your colleague once I am let into the room.”
“Well, it’s just, your name is not on the room, and I don’t want to, you know, if there’s a woman in there.”
“Yes,” said I. “I, too, do not want you to go around letting strange, naked men into the rooms of sleeping female patrons. But I am allowed to be there, I promise. I am unsure how to prove this to you at this time.”
“Also,” said I. “Would it be possible to get, say, a towel? Or really anything at all?”
“Oh, right!” he said, and radio’ed his colleague, who began to approach from some secret place in the building, far from the front desk. The clerk graciously allowed me to wait in the nearby bathroom. His colleague arrived, gave me a robe, and escorted me to my room. Once there, he let me in, and I grabbed my wallet (thankfully very easily found on the desk near the door) and confirmed that I was who I said I was. The colleague left, and I was saved.
It occurs to me that me merely having my wallet in the room did not actually provide any proof that I was allowed to be in the room. I suppose it proved that I did not simply wander off the street and ask to be let into a random room, but one could easily imagine a situation in which a newly-acquired beau is initially allowed into a woman’s room, and then is summarily ejected after sufficiently boorish behavior. I considered saying something to this effect, out of a gentlemanly concern for the policies the hotel should consider adopting in the future, but decided that in this particular instance, at least, this practice was not going to pose a problem, and that perhaps I did not wish to further complexify the situation by suggesting that I might be some sort of predator.
Julia did not wake up at any point during this process. I, of course, shook her awake immediately, and related the specifics of my encounter.
There is one other part of this story I have not told you yet. I said that I went down to the front desk; this is true. But this journey was not accomplished without incident. For when I summoned the elevator to the tenth floor, standing there, pulling the base of my shirt over my unmentionable parts, the elevator that arrived was occupied. A man stepped out before I had the presence of mind to dodge out of the way. He made a sort of noise, a startled, choked “eurgh”-like exclamation. “Yeah, man,” I said, and walked out of his way.
For the clerk, the surprise appearance of a half-nude man is certainly unusual, but one must assume that it is not entirely unforeseeable. It is a concierge’s duty to assist hotel patrons with their needs, and I am probably not the only person who has done something like this.
But for the man in the elevator, this was something else entirely. I ask you to consider his position: coming back to his hotel room after a long night out on the town, he takes the elevator to the tenth floor. He is ready to go to sleep; he has striven mightily against the hazards and challenges of the day. He has rewarded himself with a night of revelry and amusement. He has, perhaps, gotten laid. But when the door of the elevator opens, it reveals not simply the bare aesthetic of the hotel’s walls, but, well, me.
I do not think of myself as a particularly hideous man; I believe that in certain lights I can even project a sort of unique charm. But it is nevertheless true that I do not possess the sort of physical form that inspires strangers to dreamily imagine seeing me in the nude. Further, whatever charms my body may theoretically possess, none of them are properly showcased in the manner in which this man encountered me. I have often thought of the sight I provided this man in the time since this adventure; hair scattered this way and that (for I desperately need a haircut); beard all akimbo and crazed, a look of sheepish horror in my eyes, my hands feverishly clutching the edges of a t-shirt, looking altogether like a startled toddler. For the concierge, I was a funny story; for the man in the elevator, I am now forever a feature of his nightmares. It is possible to move through life worrying that one is not leaving any sort of legacy; I know for certainty that will not be my fate. Whatever else I may accomplish in this life, I have given the elevator-man something he will need to discuss with his therapist at length.
The rest of the trip was very fun.
On the bright side, if you ever decide to wear a miniskirt, you'll be mentally prepared.