The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (19 page)

I jumped out and went running into the lobby, across the lobby, and down to The Wave. The hostess met me at the podium.

“They’re unloading now,” I told her, and seconds later my parade of guests passed by, with Hanna in the lead and the security personnel trailing behind. The Wave had managed to clear out a private dining room for the guests, and set a table for forty. However, security quickly informed them that the guests could not all eat together, and there needed to be separate tables to accommodate the males in the group, and also the security members. The Wave scrambled to pull tables apart, and after ten minutes the guests were finally led into their own private dining room. They shut the door behind them.

“Now what?” Thomas asked.

The five of us made ourselves comfortable at the bar where we made friends with the bartender who brought us extra appetizers because we all looked sad and dejected and it was barely 1pm. I ordered a cheeseburger and I ate it like I had never seen food before, and might never see it again. We, collectively as a group, ordered every single dessert off of the menu.

About an hour into lunch we heard the door on the far side of The Wave open and The Woman stuck her head out. She called for Andrew, who jumped to his feet and ran to her. We couldn’t hear their conversation, but we could see Andrew’s happy disposition slowly disintegrate. He returned back to us like he had just seen a ghost.

“They need a place to pray,” he said, like he had just been told he had five hours to live.

No one knew what to say. We all just continued to sit at the bar. I pushed a half-eaten cheesecake around my place.

“Can they do it here?” Carl asked, his first contribution today.

Andrew shook his head. “I asked. They need to pray somewhere else.”

This was a common thing to happen at Disney World. I was used to guests from all over the world, and yes, there were areas inside of the parks where guests could pray whenever they wanted to. If a guest came into City Hall and asked for a place to pray, we offered them our VIP Room for as long as they’d like. During training we were told which way pointed west.

It wouldn’t be hard for us to load the guests back into the van and take them to Magic Kingdom, but it would be impossible for us to fit thirty-seven of them into the tiny Magic Kingdom VIP room. As soon as Hanna suggested that idea, Andrew shook his head no. “They all can’t pray in the same room. Different social classes,” he said, like he was suddenly a scholar in Middle Eastern cultures.

“What about here at the hotel?” Thomas asked.

“They need at least three rooms,” Andrew started. “I was instructed that they’ll need three rooms.”

Thomas got up from his seat at the bar and ran back into the lobby of the Contemporary. Andrew followed. Carl sat around for another few minutes, and then got up to go to the bathroom. Hanna and I sat at the bar and ate the remainders of everyone’s food, mostly French fries.

It was school vacation time in Disney World, and hotel rooms were a hot commodity at the Contemporary, so no, they couldn’t just give us three adjoining hotel rooms. The General Manager laughed when Andrew first requested it. Thomas called the Office. Maybe they could convince the General Manager to give us three hotel rooms for about an hour.

“It’s almost check-in time. If we give you three rooms, they have to be completely re-cleaned before 3pm,” The General Manager told us, as we huddled around in the waiting area of The Wave. “Are the guests paying for the rooms?”

We looked between one another. There was no way these guests were going to pay for three rooms to pray in. “No,” Andrew finally said.

The General Manager looked tired and weary, just like us, but he was managing a hotel with 500+ rooms and a thousand guests, and we were trying to manage only thirty-seven. He had way more reason to be stressed than us. “I’ll see if I can find some rooms that requested a late checkout. They might not be clean yet. Would that be okay with your guests?”

“Sure,” Hanna said, “We just won’t tell them.”

The General Manager took Andrew with him into a back room behind the front desk, where they pored over room assignments, trying to find three moderately close to each other with late checkouts. Somehow they managed to find two neighboring rooms in one of the far wings of the hotel. It wasn’t three rooms, but it would be good enough, we decided.

Not ten minutes later The Woman stuck her head out of the dining room, again, and informed us that the guests were ready to go. Andrew explained to her that we would be walking through the hotel to get to those two rooms on the opposite of the hotel for prayer. The Woman did not like that we were making the guests walk through the entire hotel, but there was no other choice. Hanna led them out of the dining room, through the lobby, and to the other wing of the hotel. The guests wouldn’t be praying in the A-frame, but instead in the north wing, or the boring wing, of the Contemporary.

Once again, a strange parade proceeded by, with thirty-seven guests, a security detail, and five tour guides, and I was already hungry again. We walked by the pool and into a side entrance of the opposite wing of the hotel. Thomas grabbed the door as the guests piled in, and Andrew called for the elevator. It arrived, and he stepped inside, sticking his arm out to let the guests in, too.

The guests looked from one to another, and silently shook their heads. They looked back at Hanna, standing off to the side, and pointed at her. Then they pointed at me.

Hanna somehow knew exactly what she needed to do. She walked to the elevator, shooed Andrew outside, and took the first group of guests up. I took the second group. Then Hanna took the third, I took the fourth, and this went on for eight trips up and down in a tiny elevator dating back to 1971. It took fifteen minutes.

The General Manager accompanied us on this trek through his hotel, and led us down a long hallway towards our designated rooms. He let the guests inside, showed them that the two rooms were conjoining, and shut the door behind him. He told us to call him when we were done, and disappeared down the hallway.

With all thirty-seven guests crammed into two standard hotel rooms, designed to occupy four at most, we turned the corner down another hallway, where I slumped to the floor. Hanna slumped down as well, pulled out her cellphone, and plugged it into a wall outlet.

I figured we had maybe a half hour of down-time before it was off to the next location, but we really only had ten minutes. The Woman emerged from one of the rooms and asked to speak to Andrew. Alone. They turned down another hallway and I continued to lay sprawled out on the floor in front of some unassuming guest’s hotel room.

“We’re going to Studios next.” Andrew said when he returned to our group. “We should probably go get the cars.”

The cars were back on the other side of the hotel. Thomas and Andrew took off running in that direction, as I hurried down to the first floor to await the arrival of the vans. Hanna stayed with the guests, still cooped up in the hotel room, and Carl did whatever he was doing on the tour, which was basically just a silent moral support for all of us. He was doing a great job at it, too.

After two-and-a-half trips, Thomas and Andrew had moved all the cars. Andrew pulled me aside, behind a bush and away from the earshot of Thomas and Carl, who was now eating some trail mix.

“Listen. Don’t take this the wrong way. But they want you and Hanna taken off the tour,” he said. I looked up at him, and he looked like a dad. A dad who was giving me horrible news, but wanted to make sure that I knew he was there for me no matter what.

“Huh?” I murmured back.

“They don’t think you and Hanna are interacting with the guests enough.”

“Who is ‘they?’”

“Security. They don’t know why you’re being so distant with them.”

“We were told not to talk to them!” I roared back. Thomas looked over at us.

“Security thinks you’re not making any sort of effort.”

“I was told not to!”

Hanna came out of the hotel, thirty-seven guests in tow. They began climbing into vans and Andrew called Hanna over to give her the good news, too.

“What do you mean we’re not being friendly?” she cried. “We were told not to talk to the guests. And now they’re mad that we’re not trying to talk to them?”

“Basically,” Andrew sighed. “They want you guys taken off the tour. I explained that it wasn’t possible to do that so late in the day. There’s no way another female guide is going to willingly go through this. I’m not going to let any other female guide go through this.” Andrew was right. Hanna and I had already suffered through this enough, taking the brunt of the tour, all thirty-seven guests, and their security’s ridiculous demands. I would feel bad having another guide take over.

“Let’s go to Studios, and get out of there.” Andrew patted both Hanna and I on the shoulder, then climbed into his van.

We drove off to Studios and parked in the lot behind Tower of Terror. Which brings me inside of Tower of Terror, and standing at the exit, waving cold, hard cash in front of the coordinator’s face, begging him to take my tour off my hands. Please.

But the coordinator politely declined. “Maybe next time?” he half smiled, almost flirting with me.

“I could be dead by then!” I yelled back, loud enough so that everyone waiting in the Tower exit heard me. Carl heard me.

“You okay?” he asked, getting too close to me.

“If you so much as suggest riding Toy Story, I will cut you,” I threatened, as the guests began to file out of the elevator shafts and back towards me. Hanna had ridden with the guests, sitting alone, in the back row, all by herself, a blank expression on her face as she plunged thirteen stories down to the ground.

By this point we had thrown all rules out the window. Hanna and I were mentally done with this tour, and I imagined the boys weren’t too far behind. We weren’t about to walk our guests from the exit of Tower, down in front of Tower, and across the courtyard to Coaster. Instead we cut through the backstage parking lot, and emerged at the entrance to Coaster.

I took one look at the wrapping queue line. The Woman would most certainly protest to being put in that line. “Stay there!” I yelled to Hanna, as I ran up the exit ramp of the attraction, through the merchandise shop, and to a coordinator standing there at the gate.

“Look. I’ve got like forty guests with me. They’re not a PEP, but we’ve been treating them like a PEP because there are so many of them. One of them might be an actual Princess Sasha. They can’t wait in line with males. I wish I were making this up. Can I bring them up the exit?”

The coordinator looked at me. “Are you the guide who just tried to pawn your tour off on Kyle at Tower?” I nodded. “Yeah, sure, bring them up the exit.”

I would have given my first born to that coordinator if he asked.

I raced back outside, across the courtyard again, and collected the guests. I marched them up the exit, through the merchandise shop, and down the back hallway leading alongside the Coaster track. Hanna took a head count, and there were going to be twenty five riding. We weren’t going to take up an entire car, but we needed two of them anyway. The males couldn’t sit with the females and we couldn’t load any single riders on. They rode once. We got them off and didn’t give them an option to ride anything else. This tour was done.

The boys brought the vans over to us, and the guests climbed inside. I drove in silence back to their hotel. With my big, thick-framed, black tinted sunglasses, none of them saw me cry as I drove down I-4. The guests climbed out of the vans and went inside the hotel without a single word to us. We drove back to the Office. Once inside the Office, Hanna and I cried to the coordinators and I drank a diet Coke in between tears.

No matter how frazzled I looked, or how many children were hanging off of me, or how many bags I was carrying, or drinks I was holding, other Cast Members always used to lean in and asked in a hushed tone, “Who are you with today?” like they imagined my life to be a constant stream of celebrities and their kin.

Most of the time I’d go “just a family!” since that’s what most of my tours were. They were just a family. Even when they were a celebrity, they were just a family to me.

However, sometimes the Cast Member would lean in and go, “Who are you with today?” and I’d reply with, “Jonah Hill”.

“Ohmygosh, does Jonah Hill want to ride Space again?” the Space Mountain Cast Member asked me as we stood together at the unload dock.

Yeah, Jonah Hill
does
want to ride space again.

When the family got off I leaned into them and whispered, “If anyone asks, Jonah opted out of this ride.” And they nodded, not bothering to ask why Jonah wasn’t riding again. As they were led up the ramp towards the load area I heard one of the littlest boys yell at the Cast Member, “This made Jonah sick!”

Once upon a time, I started a five-day tour with a really nice family that was actually super mean. They were a return tour for another guide who said they might be “difficult” but didn’t say that they were going to be incredibly inappropriate as we waited in line for Barnstormer one brisk afternoon. Mom, Dad, two kids, two nannies. They all seemed to get along and like each other, but I didn’t like any of them. Dad asked me ridiculously inappropriate questions in clear earshot of other guests, I’m pretty sure Mom had a flask of wine in her giant designer bag, and the kids were mean to other kids. Usually I’d just distance myself from the family as much as possible, but the two girls wanted to hang off of me, literally. They both needed to hold my hand, and took my hands, leaving me unable to put a few feet of distance between myself and the family I didn’t really want following me into a crowd. If it had just been a one-day tour I would have mustered through. But it was going to be a five-day tour. There was no way I could stay sane for four more days.

The family ate at Crystal Palace, and I excused myself to make a phone call, probably the only time in the history of my tour days when I said I needed to make a phone call and actually made a phone call. I got my comfort food, corn dog nuggets, and sat behind Crystal Palace on the hard pavement ground and called the Office.