Hotel Honolulu

46 Domination

Our near neighbor, Dickstein, manager of the Waikiki Pearl, seemed boringly faithful to his mistress. One of the conventional paradoxes of marital infidelity is this absurd loyalty to the one you're cheating with. How could it be love?

Daniel (but this was Hawaii; he dubbed himself "Kaniela") Dickstein was a monster for the way he screamed at his staff. "Verbal abuse" didn't begin to describe it. Dickstein's other habit was spending afternoons upstairs at my hotel with one of his employees. Kendra was her name, a tall, olive-skinned, part-Hawaiian beach queen — gray eyes, small breasts, a surfer's sinewy legs and muscly bum. She carried a gym bag to these weekly assignations. Naturally you'd want to know what was in such a bag. Compared to Dickstein I was passive, yet I felt I had power.

Having a wife and children on the mainland, living at the hotel he'd previously managed, where his wife still worked, did not justify his sleeping with the staff. It was wrong to become involved with employees — not only morally wrong but imprudent, bad for discipline, unfair to the others. And when the affair ended and the rejected sex partner was still on the payroll, what then?

Yet somehow Dickstein managed. I could not bring myself to call him "Dick." Nicknames seemed misleading and overly familiar to me, though

Honolulu was full of them — "Buck" Buchwach, "Gus" Guslander, "Sam" Sandford, "Link" Lindquist. "Kaniela" Dickstein had a big irregular head, a jaw like a backhoe, and the lumpy defiant face of a general in a war movie. He was a screamer, a swearer, and he threw things, anything he happened to be holding. He flung pencils at Kendra and once a coffee cup, which smashed against the door she was closing as she fled. He demanded that she return to clean up the mess. This was her lover.

Dickstein never raised his voice to me. He always greeted me with "Shaloha," his own cross-cultural coinage. He was grateful to me for allowing him to use the employees' entrance and the service elevator so he could slip up to room 710 for three hours every Wednesday afternoon. Scheduling a midweek tryst made it seem unsentimental; there would have been something sweet about their meeting on a Friday, and weekends were romantic. Wednesday was like work, more like an appointment, because they never skipped a week and were seldom late. Nevertheless, something in me said, Lucky dog.

As the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, I had employees for the first time. I was struck by how they made me feel powerful, and the less I confided in them, the more power I had. I had not asked for it. I did not pursue it. I needed only for them to do their jobs, because I was so helpless myself, in fact not powerful at all, no more so than a superior- looking puppet. That was how it seemed to me.

Everyone except my wife and child credited me with powers I didn't have. My employees said I was farsighted in my approving orders. They

praised my judgment. Even the strongest ones remarked on my strength. I was skeptical. Beware of anyone who praises your intelligence, for nearly always in saying so they are complimenting themselves.

Flattery always sounds like mockery to me. I suspected my employees of being scornful this way. Keeping their praise vague was also a cute way of not having to be answerable for it. And usually I hated the excuses they invented for me. "How were you to know she was cockroaching the money?" Or "I wish I could do this half as good as you." Or the too frequent "Man, you've been around, yah?" if I showed the slenderest acquaintance with a fact of world geography.

Fortunately I didn't have to live up to this inflated image of myself, nor did any of my employees believe it for a second. Their task was to prevent me from being a failure. They did all the work. All I had to do was let them continue. I could only fail by firing them. They were fully in charge.

Aware of this inverted power structure in my hotel, I was curious to know how Kaniela Dickstein succeeded. He was famous for his tantrums and fired employees all the time, even his head chef, forcing Dickstein to take over the supervision of the kitchen himself. His "You're outta here!" was a well-known catch phrase.

"Firing people keeps the others on their toes," he said to me one day when I asked him how he managed. "Think of it as a reign of terror." He set his jaw and said, "I am very angry when I wake up in the morning."

The Waikiki Pearl was no more successful than the Hotel Honolulu. In terms of rates, occupancy, and quality of service, they were pretty much the same, except that the Pearl got Japanese guests from a Tokyo travel agent and we got none. We had more local business, since we were associated with scandals, of which Madam Ma and Chip and Puamana were just a few, not to mention Buddy Hamstra's excesses.

But I saw Dickstein's hotel as being run by him alone, and mine run by my employees. I would have been lost without my people. His workers were expendable. I gave my employees second chances — third, even. A single mistake meant a Dickstein employee took a hike.

"Doesn't it make the others nervous?" I asked him.

"Exactly," he said. "Fear is the whole point."

"When someone is afraid of me, I'm uncomfortable."

"Then you're a fool," Dickstein said. "Mine are yellow in every respect. That's the only kind of person I would ever allow to work for me. The quality I value most in an employee is fear."

"Frightened people drop things."

"Or they learn how to hold on," he said.

We talked this way on Wednesdays after his time with Kendra, and I wondered how frightened she was. She was punctual, but they arrived and left separately, for the sake of appearances. Having finished with her boss, Kendra had to go immediately back to work. Dickstein was paler afterward,

puffy-faced, weary-looking, and satiated, I supposed. His hair, a bit too well combed, flat and still wet from the shower, stuck to his scalp and made him look older.

Although he tried to pay me for the room, I refused his money. This dispensing of a favor gave me the illusion of power, so one day he would have to give me what I asked. The hotel business was nicely reciprocal. Dickstein's parent company owned hotels on the mainland. I had no parent company. Sweetie and I might want a hotel room in Florida someday.

One week the whole thing ended, and from the fuss it caused, Dickstein's affairs were better known than I had thought. Dickstein stopped coming to my hotel. Kendra had resigned. She had not been forced to; she quit. This was unprecedented at the Waikiki Pearl under Dickstein, who controlled everything. Dickstein dropped from view. I guessed that it disturbed him, for Kendra was not just an employee who quit suddenly, but his mistress.

Buddy called me that same day. The news had reached the North Shore that quickly. "What was that man thinking? Doesn't he know this is a small town?"

"What have you heard?"

"Dickstein in a dress. People talking story."

What followed became that island recreation, a scandal in installments. Gossip is always steamy in a place too small and semiliterate to support sleazy tabloids. I had heard a little, but in time the whole story came out. Kendra got her revenge by blabbing. For weeks Dickstein was infamous in Honolulu, and my hotel was talked about for being associated with his disgrace.

The part about Dickstein's being a brute was apparently true. Kendra said he was a nightmare to work for — hypercritical, bullying, impatient, loud, demanding, foul-mouthed. But there was a side of him that no one had guessed at (there can be such simplicity in small towns and tiny islands), and this was exhibited to Kendra on Wednesday afternoons.

Dickstein was tied up, forcibly cross-dressed, and spanked, not with the flat of Kendra's hand but with a wooden hairbrush. He was sat upon.

He was insulted by Kendra, who called him foul names, after which she relieved herself, emptied her bladder, on his sputtering lips.

Everyone in Honolulu who knew Dickstein learned these details, and some people discovered who he was through the vividness of them. The cross-dressing involved more than just Kendra's putting women's clothes on him. Dickstein was in his fifties. The women's clothes he wore were the high heels and tight dresses of his high school pinups. He was transformed into a big squarejawed calendar girl.

Dressed this way, a clown's version of Marilyn Monroe, he was forced to lie face down on the bed. Wearing thigh-high leather boots and surgical gloves, Kendra manipulated him, then sodomized him with her strap-on dildo. She was so ferocious that, though Dickstein moaned and protested, he was hardly able to form a whole word.

Room 710 of the Hotel Honolulu was transformed into a mistress's dungeon in which Kaniela Dickstein in a prom gown was spanked, humiliated, pissed on, and sodomized. "You slut," Kendra would say as she slipped the panties on him, and she repeated the insult with the long stockings, the high heels, the ridiculous brassiere. She made him kneel. Some of the names she called him were words she hardly knew, or ones she had never before uttered.

Though he was greedy for it, the sessions so exhausted her she could not face him afterward. She always left my hotel feeling wrecked. That part of it was not gossiped about, and no one talked about what lay behind it. Dickstein was a sissy — a pantie, in the local slang.

No one understood that this was just another example of his bullying. The script was Dickstein's; everything that happened in the room was done at his command. Kendra had to learn precisely what to do, and if she failed in any detail, Dickstein was furious. He dominated her by forcing this pretty and submissive island girl to be his dominatrix.

"I couldn't take it anymore," Kendra said. "I thought maybe I could just do it the way you do stuff in hotels, like clean guests' bathrooms, but it just got worse."

No one would listen to Kendra's accusation of sexual harassment.

She tried to get Dickstein into court. Her argument was "He made me hit him." Her case went nowhere, nor was she able to prove her claim for workers' comp, for her sore arm that developed bursitis, her insomnia, and

her panic attacks. And Kendra was still in counseling in a clinic in Mapunapuna when Dickstein got his promotion.