The Host

“…but then he said to her, money is just a social construct designed so that we don’t revolt against doing nothing all day!” The man and woman standing in front of Achilles burst into uproarious laughter, what certainly would have been unacceptable if it wasn’t 35 minutes after closing. One of the bussers looked up from clearing the last table but wasn’t surprised to see Achilles in the middle of the outburst and promptly got back to work. “That is absolutely outrageous, where on Earth did you hear that?” asked the woman with wide eyes. “I was there” responded Achilles, and responding with style. “That is truly remarkable” the man said shaking his head in utter disbelief. “You really are something else, Achilles.” He reached into his pocket and subtly put what was sure to be a handsome amount of cash in Achilles’ hand. “Thank you, thank you sir” said Achilles nodding appreciatively. “You two get home safely now.” “You too” the woman said pointing as she started through the revolving door back out to the real world. “Bye Achilles!” echoed the man. Achilles is basically the Greek host of your dreams, for all intents and purposes descended from Mount Olympus to welcome any and all; well, any and all with a reservation at the Millennium Hotel’s lounge that is. He’s six foot four, has enough muscle to get the women’s attention and keep the men’s respect, and just the right amount of salt to go with the pepper in his slicked back hair. He has a smile that competes with the lights in Times Square and enough charm to keep the fire hydrants in Washington Heights flowing with pressure to spare all summer long. Despite all this, however, he’s still mortal. As the revolving door stopped moving, the smile on Achilles’ face faded at about the speed you would expect from a genuine smile, but from a smiler who’d been on his feet all day. He straightened up his podium, grabbed his hat and coat from underneath, and tipped the hat to the closing bartender as he made his way out the back. It was a foggy night in New York, the type of fog that would make you feel like you were in a cloud if it wasn’t for all the cars, people, lights, and rats. Even at one in the morning the city was alive. Alive like Achilles, depending on how you define life. If life is pulse and neurological activity, then I suppose the city isn’t very technically alive. However, if you define life as the will to survive, then the argument is stronger. He makes his way down 6th Avenue to his favorite bar. It’s called the Wet Willy, which is a silly name but has just the right balance of analytical patrons worth talking to and people observant enough to fuck off without much hassle if needed. The walk is the same walk he’s done for almost 30 years; not every night, but on the nights where he would be looking to avoid his wife if he had one. He walks through the fog as if he’s returning to the Mount, confidence and exhaustion exuding of a man whose been at the height of his craft all day. He’s a host. His job is simple, to welcome. His job is difficult, to welcome. It’s easy enough to confirm a reservation, show people to the right table, explain who will be taking care of them, and wave them off when the time comes. What’s hard is actually welcoming people - making perfect strangers feel at home in a place they may have never been, with people they may have never seen, eating food they may have never heard of, and drinking wine and spirits they may have never imagined. To meet each and every person where they are when they walk in - physically, mentally, spiritually, etc… and then set the waiters and bartenders up for their leg of the relay while being on your feet the whole damned time, that’s what’s actually hard. But not hard for Achilles. It comes naturally to him, like Roger Federer swinging a racket or Ray Charles at the keys. “Hey Sam” chimes Achilles as he walks in the Wet Willy. “Hey Achilles, what will it be?” Sam asks from behind the bar. “Dark and stormy. On the rocks please and thank you” Achilles responds. “For a dark and stormy night?” asks Sam.
 “For a dark and stormy man” Achilles jests back. Sam nods the joke away as Achilles sits at the the head of the bar and starts to retreat into his mind. What he’s thinking about we’ll never know but the thoughts themselves are less important - whatever he’s thinking about, it beats the long odds that come with striking up conversation with the people at Willy’s who he’s never seen before. Not that he doesn’t trust himself to guide the conversation somewhere interesting or these strangers to have some experience that’s worth discussing, but rather that he’s already done that these last twelve hours. “Cheers” Sam says as he hands Achilles his drink. It’s colder than your eleventh grade Physics teacher who failed you by a point. Achilles thanks him with a tilt of his head and now our watch begins - the slow melding away of an indifferent world, cushioned by the warmth and tricks that only your favorite drink can offer. The perfect building blocks for love and connection in moderation, the perfect blueprint for chaos in excess. This is the dance that everyone in hospitality walks after every shift, a dance that many cannot do gracefully. Most people don’t walk up to Achilles, but that doesn’t phase the guy. He’s tall, strong, confident and bold, a perfect recipe for freaking out the insecure. But tonight’s different. Within a few minutes of letting the alcoholic arts begin to do what they do, Achilles finds himself looking into the eyes of a man whose seen it all. “Someone sitting here?” “You” retorts Achilles, without disinviting the man nor opening his arms. The man sits down and a few seconds go by as the uncertainty of conversation hangs. Achilles closes his eyes to start back into his mind. “You look like a man whose worked” offers the stranger. “What gave it away?” asks Achilles with his eyes still closed but starting to stretch his arms overhead, his back arching to the left and now the right. “The sweat stains in your armpits.” Achilles opens his eyes to look at his armpits and then the man, not in shock but in something between intrigue and respect. Sure enough there’s a subtle discoloration in his otherwise flawless attire, the type not every detective would notice at first. “Well, I’ll be damned. Now you have my curiosity.” The old man nods as if to say good. “I’m Frederick, Frederick Luan.” “Achilles Apostolos.” Frederick nods at the new information while cooking up his next question. It’s clear that he’ll have to drive the conversation but he’ll get cooperation if he plays his cards right. A challenge that would phase most people in 2023, but this man is from a different time. “Most people would ask what you do?” Achilles bobs his head from side to side in agreement “and most of those people would really just be waiting for me to ask this right back to them.” “Some sort of sociologist?” “Close. I’m a host.” He reaches for the next sip to dull whatever judgment is surely brewing. Frederick starts bobbing his head back and forth in the same way as Achilles just was, with the same agreement too. “That’s an awfully welcoming job for an un-welcomed fellow.” Achilles almost spit takes in Frederick’s face in utter surprise. As he regains control of the muscles in his face he smiles and says “well now you have my attention!!” They both laugh, whatever ice was there before is now gone, far beyond the rocks. “Did you get that from my pit stains as well?” “Not exactly. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone come to a bar by themselves and not instantly look at their phone. It takes a certain confidence to do that as naturally as I just saw you do it, a confidence that really only comes from being at peace with not having a group of people always ready to welcome you.” “Okay Sherlock. I suppose I could offer the same theory to you about a man who is as comfortable intuiting unwelcomeness as you are.” “I suppose you could” Frederick conceded. A silence hangs for a few seconds as both of the men decide where they want to take this conversation now that they have found an intellectual equal that they weren’t expecting, now that they have a reason to drink to go with their drinks. “Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Sam Bankman-Fried walk into a bar” Frederick started, “who picks up the check?” Achilles turns in surprise with his eyebrows high, a walk-into-a-bar joke being the last place he expected this conversation to go. After a few second he offers “the bartender??” “Haha, close. The taxpayer!” Achilles smiles and nods in approval, letting the punchline sit for a few seconds. “Does all that money really buy those fellas something they couldn’t get using their time the way they actually wanted to?” asks Achilles. “Some people don’t know how they want to spend their time.” “Well then they should spend their time figuring it out.” A beat passes. “Maybe how they want to spend their time requires spending a lot of money.” “I doubt it. I see these folks coming and going all day long. They have the same conversations we do just about bigger assets and more extravagant destinations. They long for everything that you and I long for despite their money - love, adventure, fulfilling work… the usual. Most of them just got boxed into some standard of living that they are too weak to run away from to pursue the things they actually want.” “The system takes some blame too no? A system that makes cogs out of artists and politicians out of governors.” “Everyone’s in that system and plenty of people figure out how to be happy enough. If these rich people are as smart as so many people give them credit for, they should be able to figure out how to be happy." Frederick lets another beat skip in attempts to let the silence speak for itself. “Has anyone ever told you that you that you wear gray-colored glasses?” “Well we’re talking about rich people, what do you expect? A dozen roses?” mocks Achilles. “The finer things are meant to be enjoyed, it is the unresolved which is meant to be discussed.” Frederick took the time to chew on that and signaled Sam for another round. He couldn’t argue with Achilles but felt that he should, perhaps out of some insecurity about how many years he himself spent chasing the status Achilles was so cruelly judging. “This outlook of yours can’t be the happiest way to live - criticizing others who you surround yourself with day in and day out.” “I surround myself with these people because I need to subsist. Besides, like I said before, there are few differences between these folks and the folks I’d be dealing with if I was hosting at a MacDonalds, so I might as well work with the rich bastards. “As far as my outlook goes, it’s realism. A philosophy built on observation and reason. A worldview built otherwise is a worldview built on unsteady ground and sure to fail sooner or later, even if there are happy times and optimistic smiles all the way to the end. I’ll take the darkness if it gives me control.” “Control over what?” “Control over my life” replies Achilles slightly impatiently, as if it should have been obvious. “Control to do what I’m good at. Control to welcome as much as the unrelenting laws of physics will allow. Just about every second of my day is spent doing that, even if I’m standing still waiting for someone to come or go. Sometimes I stand for 30 minutes at a time without a word to or from anyone, and all the while I play a role. I play the role of a person that everyone wishes would welcome them, whose waiting there just for them. It’s the difference between feeling accepted and rejected and it’s completely unconscious. It’s time that must be spent to do what I have set out to do which is offer people the most beautiful escape from whatever misery they are coming from and to which they’ll inevitably have to return to. “As soon as you start quantifying it with money, it’s dead. As soon as you start trying to save the world with it, it’s dead. All that I can say is that I’m one of the happy and I’m happy because I found something that I’m exceptional at and get to do it all day long.” It was a dark and stormy worldview of a dark and stormy man. A man whose mind had been bent the years over to accommodate the weight of the world, or perhaps just the weight of his reactions to that world. It would be impossible to ever tell the difference, but maybe what mattered most was that this man had found a way to spend his days doing something that at least made sense in his mind. Spending his days doing something he was best at, position in the social hierarchy be damned. Maybe this was the best way to soften those hard and unrelenting laws of physics which he couldn’t get off his mind, be it a world that was dark and stormy or a world that was both gray and rose.