After completing the census recently, I am left with the feeling that a large section of the population is being overlooked. I’ve noticed a dramatic burst in the community of uncategorized “Crazies” and even though I have not yet discovered scientific evidence, I still think the smaller unratified groups such as the idiots, the psychos and the insane should rally themselves together as a definable citizens group so that the 85% of drivers on the road and 25% of guests at the Inn I encounter each day, can wave a proud common flag.      

I made the acquaintance of a guest named Glen Glassman via telephone when the Inn’s out-of-state central reservations office transferred his call so that he could speak with a manager. Typically this kind of transfer occurs when a reservation agent does not have a particular authority or permission, such as a guaranteed room upgrade or special corporate rate. Mr. Glassman had much more asinine inquiries to pose however, with seemingly no purpose other than to take me down his winding road of outright absurdity.

I tried in vain to determine whether he asserted his ridiculous requests as they occurred to him in the same moment or if he had actually designed them more carefully prior to the call. He wanted me to guarantee an odd numbered first floor room; he needed only one pillow and since he “never knows what to do with the rest,” any extras should be removed prior to arrival; he told me that he kept his watch running seventeen minutes fast at all times and whined that he would get confused unless all the clocks in the room were set ahead also. Mr. Glassman then confided that he was interested in keeping a “low profile” during his stay and asked me ensure he had no loud or intrusive neighbors.

As ludicrous as the requests sounded (and as positively unnecessary as I considered them), they were technically manageable, so I agreed. I hung up the phone and pulled up his reservation on the computer in my office. Hotel computer programs have come a long way in the last decade and provide some useful tools for just this occasion. I pre-assigned him to room #133 and created a flag for the room in the housekeeping program on his date of arrival with the note: “One pillow only” attached. I listed him as a “night-time worker” in his profile so that staff members would not attempt to call his room during the day time without going through management or assign rooms to guests with children and pets nearby; night-time worker translates to minimal daytime interruptions. Lastly, I posted a pop-up message for Maintenance regarding the clock-setting responsibilities.

On the day of Glen Glassman’s arrival, intrigue began to circulate quickly around the Inn about who or what he was exactly. Wild rumors began to fly at a stunning pace – all created and instigated by Mr. Glassman himself; his value of privacy was flawed at best. Select staff members from every department whispered about the tall, grey haired man in room #133. When he wasn’t peeking around corners and questioning the security of his guestroom door locks or obsessing about anyone that may be asking about or looking for him, he would corner staff members alone and confess unbelievable tales about his true identity. Complied together, they look something like this:

Born to a shoe salesmen and housewife just outside Providence, RI, he was a mistreated and misunderstood child prodigy who’s never found his proper place with academics in his local public school system or with his simple suburban hometown lifestyle. He ran away at 16 and joined the military, where he soon found his niche in life. After outperforming his comrades and superiors alike, in both training and in the field, he excelled in the armed forces’ exceptional international affairs training academies and was enlisted by various US intelligence agencies for further employment. He tracked down war lords in the Persian Gulf, single-handedly stopped assassinations of heads of state, talked terrorists into surrender, invented the Clapper, helped Al Gore invent the internet and rescued dozens of orphans from guerilla warfare in the Far East…imagine all these accomplishments with only one pillow for rest at night.

Calling Mr. Glassman’s autobiography a work of fiction may be putting it lightly, but what got me the most was the way he ended these little confessions, “I have pressing matters so I have to go now, but let’s keep this between me and you,” he’d say before shifting his eyes back and forth while slowly creeping away.

Despite all the stories and rumors, the staff refrained from getting too carried away with Mr. Glassman in-person. They would nod and listen as his stories became more and more far-fetched and always promised to keep their lips sealed about his disclosures. They unquestioningly passed along phone messages from men with bad fake accents and fax pages marked “Confidential” (most of which curiously came in while he was out of the hotel during the day).

The only prolonged direct contact that I had with him was when he rented one of the Inn’s safe deposit boxes. He pulled a small, locked tin box with a wide, hollow key hole from his pocket, placed it into the deposit box and asked if he would be in the way if he sat in the front lobby for a few hours while he waited for a visitor. I had no objection of course and realized that he just wanted me to chomp at the bit, so I asked him if he’d like to leave a name with the Front Desk in case his visitor arrived while he wasn’t around, but he did not. Instead, he asked me to deny his status as a guest at the Inn if anyone asked, especially a woman - a redhead he added.

I heard later from Ivan, the Front Desk’s Night Auditor, that he returned the same night to check on his box and relay that it was the basis for his stay. He was retired now, he told Ivan, deactivated officially by the government ten years earlier with a mandatory retirement, but he was often contacted for specialty missions every now and again to be carried out in anonymity. He would get a package in the mail containing a key to some bus station locker which would then contain an odd tin box and instructions for it to be transferred to another agent who would show up unexpectedly at the Inn some time soon. 

On the day he checked out, I was sampling the Inn’s new dark roast coffee in the lobby when I was approached and tapped on the shoulder by an unknown redheaded woman.

“Are you the manager?” she asked, “Can you help me find my brother?”

“Is he a guest here?”, I responded.

“I hope so; he goes by Dan Acorn, or Terry Drigger, or sometimes Glen Glassman,” she said.

I couldn’t confirm or deny to her that I had a guest named Glen Glassman, but after a heated appeal to speak with me privately, we sat and spoke at a corner table on the other side of the lobby.

She told me about Mr. Acorn-Drigger-Glassman, her brother, “I don’t even know how he gets these IDs with these names,” she said, “he has three or four of them.” She went on to say he was an ex-Army vet, dishonorably discharged after picking too many fights in the kitchen where he worked as a dishwasher for the entirety of his military career. He lived with her now and worked as a merchandise stocker at a department store. She described him as well meaning, but helpless without his medication, which she was sure he hadn’t taken in many days, even prior to his disappearance earlier in the week. She told me he was known to pick up and leave unannounced every so often, “I should have known he was going to have an episode when he started becoming distant after he got a package from an old Army buddy in the mail last week,” she blamed herself, “too much to handle I guess.”

I allowed her to stay in the lobby for the rest of morning and eventually she encountered him before noon. I saw them chat a while and before long they approached the Front Desk to inform us he would be checking out right away and wanted to retrieve his little tin box. The redhead plucked a small silver key from her pocket and fit it smoothly into its keyhole. He removed an orange pill bottle with a white label, tapped a few pills into his cupped hand and pitched the contents into his mouth.

Wave your proud flag, Mr. Acorn-Drigger-Glassman; wave it high. 

~The Innkeeper