Box Girl (2 page)

2.
  
Switch off the space heater before you leave at night.
³

1
The actual rule sheet, provided by management.

2
At one point, the box shift was changed from 7:00
PM
–2:00
AM
to 6:00
PM
–1:30
AM
, and the pay was increased from $100 to $125/night. Then, during the recession, the shift was changed to 8:00
PM
–12:00
AM
, and the pay was cut to $60/night.

3
Another rule, which is absent from this list but I have seen on others, is “No sweatshirts, socks, or blankets.” If a Box Girl gets cold, we are told, she can turn on a space heater, which is hidden below the mattress in a storage area. If she gets hot, she can turn on a fan, which is clipped to the ceiling and also hidden from the guests' view.

Please Wear Undergarments

I never thought I would be employed at a place where that
needed to be put in writing.

The Box

Since The Standard Hotel opened on Sunset Boulevard in
West Hollywood in 1998, a glass box with the dimensions of a large, waterless aquarium—fifteen feet long, four feet wide, five feet tall—has been a permanent art installation behind the front desk. Three sides of the box are glass, while the back wall, the one farthest from the lobby, is solid. The box is big enough for sitting, lying down, or sleeping, but about a foot too short for standing.

Inside the box, there is only a single mattress with white, starch-smelling sheets tucked and folded crisply at its corners. On top of that, there is one firm pillow. Two, if I'm lucky.

In front of the box is the concierge desk: a minimalist block of glossy off-white. In front of that are three backless barstools, which no one ever sits on. The floor in the lobby is an eggshell shade too, shiny like it's just been shellacked with a coat of clear nail polish. Five succulent plants—four that look like legitimate cacti, one that looks more like a desert tree—line the left side of the lobby, a wall of white tiles behind them. Below the plants' polished white pots, five piles of broken sea glass
undulate like a shattered wave. To the right, slouchy brown chairs are clustered in various combinations—two facing each other, six side-by-side to create the effect of a couch. Beneath them, there's a white shag rug, which is no longer white, and no longer shaggy, but a matted-down gray. A waterfall of pale beads cascades from the ceiling in one corner, and four large silver lamps dip their necks like giraffes toward the center of the room. Their globular metallic heads look like dryers at the hair salon, or something out of
The Jetson's
living room.

This lobby is not sure if it's from the future or the past. It's mod in the modernist space-age sense, like what we thought the future was going to look like in the 1950s. In the corner, a maid is dressed like Alice from
The Brady Bunch
, wearing a pressed, pink uniform with a Peter Pan collar. She sprays Windex on an acrylic bubble chair, which dangles from a chain.

Automatic sliding-glass doors open onto the hotel's valet area, where a sign that reads
The Standard
hangs purposefully upside down. Giant
Jurassic Park
leaves obscure an unattractive stretch of Sunset Boulevard across the street: a 1970s-style beige office building; a parking lot (ten dollars during the day, twenty at night); a Guess billboard featuring a model gyrating in the sand, wearing a pair of jeans and a denim jacket; and a Cabo Cantina, which looks like it's decorated for Cinco de Mayo every day of the year.

During the day, the scene in the lobby rarely changes. Everyone always seems to be waiting for someone else. A man fidgets with his phone. A woman jangles the bracelets on her wrist, digging for a watch under an armful of accessories.

But by dusk, as the smell of chlorine surrenders to cigarette smoke, the set begins to change. Every night, at seven o'clock, the Box Girl arrives. From 7:00
PM
to 2:00
AM
, she can do whatever she wants inside the box—read, talk on her phone, use her computer, even sleep. The only thing she absolutely
cannot do is make eye contact with anyone outside the box. It is supposed to appear as if this mysterious creature has no idea anyone else is around. No clue that anyone is out there, looking in.

Once a week, I am that mysterious creature.

Could You Tidy It Up a Bit?

I would like to think I'm a fairly responsible Box Girl: I arrive
on time; I wear undergarments; I have never shown up to a shift with my leg in a cast. Yet tonight, I find myself reprimanded, the recipient of my very first Box Girl demerit.

It's a few hours into the night when the concierge swings open the door, which he never does, so I am sufficiently startled. He takes in the view: me, the mattress, my stuff.

“You're not supposed to have so much stuff in the box at once,” he says. “Only one thing at a time.”

I guess this is an unwritten rule.

I am, in fact, surrounded. To my left, my laptop. To my right, my phone. Next to that, three books, two spiral-bound notepads, a blue pen, two black pens, headphones, hand cream, a nail file, and my electricity bill. On the periphery, countless pieces of paper are wadded into frustrated little fists. It looks like my apartment. It looks real. It looks
too
real.

“Could you tidy it up a bit?” he says. “It looks messy.”

Well this is mildly mortifying
.

“Oh my god, of course,” I say, groping for the most overtly disposable items. A colony of notebook-paper balls has assembled like dust bunnies where the mattress meets the glass. I crunch the pieces of paper together, unsuccessfully attempting to create one humongous sphere, and start stacking my stuff.

Did he say I was only allowed to have one thing in here? Only one? Which thing will it be? Obviously it will be the computer, but what if I want the book? While I know I can only do one thing at a time, I'd like to at least have the option of some other distraction.

My Natural Habitat

It's been documented that animals in captivity exhibit some
very bizarre behaviors. Primates, for example, often eat and throw their own feces. They are also known to engage in a behavior called “regurgitation and reingestion”—vomiting into their hands and then eating the vomit. While I have never thrown my own feces or voluntarily reingested my own vomit, I can say, with certainty, that how one acts while stuck inside a cage is most definitely not how one acts when left to one's own free will.

We are told to behave in the box as if we are alone in our living rooms. First of all, I don't have a living room. And if I did, when I sat in it, I wouldn't make sure I was sitting in a way that doesn't make my thighs look fat. I wouldn't continually untangle my hair with my fingers. I wouldn't make sure my lip gloss was not smudged outside my lip area. I do not wear lip gloss at home.

Observed in my one-room apartment, I'd most likely be wearing my other uniform: a greenish-yellow sweatshirt that most closely resembles the color of diarrhea, pajama pants
that are too short, and tube socks that are too tall. If it was chilly, I might have a powder blue bathrobe over that. My hair would be piled into a hay-like heap on top of my head, and I probably would not have shaved my legs even to my knee—forget the elevations my razor has to ascend before a box shift.

I'd be sitting on my bed, surrounded by a smattering of books and magazines—a
New Yorker
from weeks before (they just come
so
frequently), an
In Touch
from that week—and a variety of items not meant to be on bed sheets: a laptop, a jar of nail polish, various crumbly snacks. I'd probably be neglecting it all while turning up the volume on the latest episode of
Extreme Couponing
.

Not only does my apartment not have a living room, it also does not have a bedroom. Technically, a studio does not have a bedroom, a living room, or a kitchen. It's just one large room having an identity crisis. I can basically open my front door while in the shower. To make matters worse, my address has a half in it—316 ½—the studio apartment's bastard stepchild. The ½ handle is very confusing for delivery people, and thus very inconvenient for me, a delivery enthusiast.

“No,” I say, to the Domino's order-taker, “I'm not the house in the front; I'm up the stairs in the back.” More often than not, my downstairs neighbor has to bring my pizza up to me, which was particularly embarrassing the time I had already fallen asleep and didn't remember I had ordered pizza in the first place.