The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (9 page)

I thought it was the perfect scam, but one day I was caught. And not by my boss or one of my fellow waiters. No, that would’ve been too easy. I was caught by none other than Mark Etess, the son of the owner and the heir to the Etess-Grossinger family fortune.

I was out on the dance floor, making pretty good time with a young girl who was staying at the hotel, when I saw Etess standing nearby, studying me like he could’ve sworn he knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Thinking fast, I pulled my date toward me and kissed her, hoping it would obscure my face just long enough to distract Etess.

It was too late. Etess recognized me. The jig was up.

“Oh my fucking God!” he screamed. “You’re Ron Hyatt!”

“Excuse me?” I said, deepening my voice and assuming a regal pose that I hoped might make me seem like one of the Grossinger’s regular clientele. “I think you have me mistaken with somebody else.”

“Fuck you, Ronnie. I know it’s you!”

I could feel sweat beginning to trickle down my forehead. I was busted! All that remained was for Etess to fire me and send me packing. But he didn’t. Instead, he just laughed and hugged me like we were old friends.

“Unbelievable,” he said. “That’s pure genius, Ronnie! I can’t believe you had the balls to pull it off.”
*

We partied together for most of the night, flirting with girls and dancing until our legs felt like rubber. I was a bit more careful after that, visiting the hotel’s clubs only when I was sure that none of the higher-ups might be there. But when the owner’s son himself lets you get away with bending the company rules, it’s hard not to feel like you’re untouchable.
**

The restaurant managers weren’t quite so generous with me. They had no sympathy when I’d arrive late for my shift, especially when my puffy eyes and bleary expression made it painfully obvious that I’d spent another all-nighter at the discos.

“You’re fucking late!” they’d scream at me. “I know you had a fucking date last night! Any other guy, I’d let it go. But not
you
, Hyatt!”

I probably deserved the abuse. Even for a kid with little use for sleep, I was burning the candle at both ends, working all day and chasing the girls all night. All around me were vacationing women, walking around in their skimpy bikinis, looking for a fling with the first teenage boy with a big penis to walk up and buy them a drink.

Not all of the flirtation between the staff and guests was frowned upon in some of the smaller hotels. When it came to the Borscht Bunnies, sometimes we were expected to “date.” Though we couldn’t socialize in their nightclubs or discos, there was an unspoken understanding that we were allowed to “take care of the women” if they needed company.

Sometimes it was taken further. Sometimes it
wasn’t
an unspoken arrangement. Once our manager sat us down and said, “You’re dating this girl.”

That was exactly what happened with Connie. Poor, innocent, homely Connie. The hotel was the Paramount, in Parksville.

When we arrived in the morning for our daily chore assignments, we all noticed that a new job had been added to the list. As the manager explained it to us, one of the more affluent guests was visiting the Paramount for the summer. He was staying at the most exclusive, deluxe, superexpensive condo, and he wanted to get his money’s worth. He had a daughter named Connie whom he wanted to, as he put it, “have a good time.” And who better to show her a good time than a nice Jewish waiter who would be closely supervised?

Her name was listed on the bulletin board under chores like vacuuming the carpet and burnishing the silverware. “Date Connie.” We couldn’t believe what we were reading. This was a
chore
? What was wrong with this girl, anyway?

As it turned out, quite a lot.

Connie was not easy on the eyes. I’m not saying I’m God’s gift to women. I’m not saying I’m in great shape right now. I hate to say bad things about anybody, but she was everything unattractive you could imagine in a girl. She had braces and buckteeth and pimples and acne and a high-pitched nasally voice that sounded like fingernails being scratched down a blackboard.

My brother (also a waiter) said, “Great. This hotel has our mind, heart, and soul, and now it wants our
balls
.”

In some ways, dating Connie was worse than polishing the silverware or cleaning the bread trays. But when the time came, we accepted our chore assignment gracefully and took Connie out on the town. My friend Randy, however, was not quite so willing to be a date for hire. He called it “taking out the garbage.”

“Aw fuck, guys,” he moaned. “I don’t want to do this. She’s a fucking cow. God
damn
it, it’s too fucking nasty to think about. I’ll trade you vacuuming the dining room.”

The next morning, Connie walked into the dining room for breakfast, and I asked about her date with Randy.

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh my
God
,” she said in her most nasally voice. “He was an
animal
.”

“
What
?”

From every corner of the restaurant, waitstaff and busboys came running. We gathered around the table, pleading with her for more details.

“He kept trying to force his lips into my lap,” she said, delighted with the attention. “And then he pulled out his schmeckel and asked me to touch it.”

“Did you do it?” we asked, a bit too eagerly.

“Oh
God
no,” she shrieked. “It was disgusting.”

We couldn’t take it anymore. We rolled on the ground in laughter. Here was the only guy on the entire staff who complained about dating Connie, and he was the only one who actually made a move on her.

Needless to say, we teased Randy mercilessly. And he denied it all, of course. He howled about the injustice for weeks, but it was hard to miss the excitement in his eyes when he checked the chore assignments every morning, scanning for Connie’s name.

The list of summer chores got a little shorter that day. We still had to empty the trash and vacuum the carpets. But when it came to Connie duty, we knew just the guy who would always be happy to trade.

W
ill you stop laughing?”

“I’m not laughing!”

“Move your leg over a little bit. You’re squishing your balls together.”

“Like this?”

“That’s great. Now hold that position.”

“Wait, wait, give me a minute to suck in my gut.”

“You don’t have a gut.”

“Are you sure? They say the camera adds twenty pounds.”

“Relax. You look amazing. Now shut up and smile for me.”

The year was 1977, and Alison and I were enjoying a private weekend together to celebrate the end of the summer. Alison was my girlfriend at the time, my first serious relationship since Mandy. She was a Taino, a Spanish Indian from Puerto Rico, and a vision of beauty. We met while working together at the Catskills, and I dated her for almost four years, which was some kind of record for me.

Eventually she would leave me, as all my girlfriends do, claiming that I was incapable of committing to a monogamous relationship. “You’re a lost cause,” she would tell me. But at least for that summer, we were very much in love, and unable to imagine life without each other.

We were staying at the Paramount Hotel, which was a rare treat. When business was slow, the owners would allow their staff to live in the empty rooms. Because of our seniority, Alison and I had the pick of the freebies. We always stayed at the Deluxe Building, Room 214. It was our favorite suite because it was usually reserved for honeymooners. It had a king-size bed, a hot tub, anything that a couple of young lovers could possibly want or need. We bought a bottle of champagne and decided to make a romantic weekend of it.

Somewhere along the way, a camera got thrown into the mix.

It started out as a joke. For months, Alison had been teasing me to pose for some naked pictures. She wanted something to look at when she couldn’t have the real thing, or at least that was her rationale. I agreed to do it, mostly in jest, never thinking anything would come of it. When she showed up for our weekend rendezvous with a camera, I thought, What the hell? It’ll be good for a laugh.

I undressed and lay on the bed, and she began snapping pictures. It was awkward at first. I’m not, by nature, an exhibitionist, and it was a little discomfiting to be so exposed. Alison had seen me naked plenty of times, but never like this. It’s impossible not to feel self-conscious when you know that you’re making a permanent record of your body, available for anybody to see.

“Is it too hard?” I asked her, motioning to my penis. “I think it’s too hard.”

“It’s not too hard, Ronnie.”

“I’ve never seen erections in any of these magazines. Maybe we should wait until it goes limp.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

Our impromptu photo shoot had evolved from a silly little game into something more significant. She mentioned, completely off-the-cuff, that we could probably sell the pictures to
Playgirl
magazine and make a small fortune. We both laughed and I said, “Sure, why not? God knows I haven’t had much luck finding as much acting work as I wanted.”

It had been a tough year for me. I’d given up teaching to become a full-time actor, but thus far I had only a few off- and off-off-Broadway productions to show for my efforts. I was just another out-of-work actor, living with his father and watching his savings rapidly dwindle away. But maybe getting into a magazine would be just the trick to jump-start some kind of career. The exposure would be invaluable. Granted, my cock would be getting most of the exposure, but it was better than nothing. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I told Alison my plan, and she agreed that it was brilliant. Motivated by our new sense of purpose, we stayed up until the wee hours, shooting lots of film. The next morning, we went through every last Polaroid and narrowed it down to a select few. We bundled them into a manila envelope and walked down the block to the post office.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Alison asked. We were holding the envelope together, dangling it over the mailbox as if we were daring ourselves to drop it.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. She loosened her grip, which only made me clutch tighter. “I think I am.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to.”

“I’m fine. What’s the worst that can happen? The entire world gets to see my tallywhacker. Big deal.”

“Okay then,” she said.

“Okay.”

She glanced at my hand, which was still clinging to the envelope. “You ready?” she asked.

I swallowed hard. “You do it first.”

She smiled at me. “We’ll do it together.”

We counted down, like we were preparing to launch a rocket.

And then we both let go.

W
hen the October 1978 issue of
Playgirl
came out, I went to the nearest newsstand and bought two dozen copies. The salesman looked at me like I was some kind of pervert. He probably thought that I was gay, and very, very lonely. I considered explaining, but I was in too good a mood to be bothered. I almost wish that I had added a jar of baby oil to the stack, just to spook the poor guy a little more.

As you’ve probably guessed, my pictures had made it into
Playgirl
! I had hoped they might call me in for a professional photo shoot, but instead, they used the untouched pictures for a new section called the Boy Next Door. They sent me a couple hundred bucks, and that was the end of it. It would’ve been nice to be on the cover—that honor went to John Ritter, the lucky bastard—but I was happy just to be in the magazine.
*

Now that my face (and the rest of me) was finally in print, I sat back and waited for the calls from producers to come pouring in. And just as I had hoped, they did. But they weren’t from producers. And worst of all, they weren’t calling
me
.

“Ronnie,” my grandmother told me one morning over breakfast. “Some sissy called for you last night.”

I nearly spat out my eggs. “I’m sorry,
what
?”

“A sissy boy called and asked if you’d be willing to meet him at the gas station downtown. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Uh…”

“I assume it was one of your drama friends. He sounded like a sweet fellow, though he was breathing awfully heavy. I’m guessing he has asthma.”

It didn’t take a huge leap of logic to figure out what had happened. Because I lived with my parents, I didn’t have my own phone number. But my grandmother, Rose Hyatt, did. She lived downstairs in our house and was listed in the phone directory under “R. Hyatt.” Anybody who had seen my pictures in
Playgirl
, where I was credited as “Ron Hyatt from Bayside, Queens,” would surely think that “R. Hyatt,” also residing in Bayside, must be the same person.

But when they called, expecting to talk to a young stud with a big cock, they ended up getting a very annoyed elderly woman who was in no mood to be pestered by, as she called them, “sissies.”

“A lady called for you,” she told me the next day. “She asked me to tell you that you’re very handsome, and she loves your body. Ronnie, what in the world is she talking about? Do you know this woman?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I lied.

“Well, when you talk to her, tell her that it’s not in very good taste to call a complete stranger and tell her intimate details about her grandson’s physique. It’s just…it’s inappropriate.”

We expected the calls to stop after a while, but it only got worse. Rose even moved out of the house because she couldn’t take it anymore, and it took a month before we could get her number changed. My dad was furious, and, of course, he blamed me.

“Listen, Ron,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with your getting into this naked, crazy business. But if you use the family name again, I’ll kill you.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m done with it. No more nude photos, no more magazine layouts. I’m going to stick to serious acting from now on.”