After the New Orleans hotel became more hard-nosed and Mr. Tomsky more worldly, he began work at an established hotel, near Times Square, that he calls the Bellevue. Here, as elsewhere, almost all the names are changed but the stories sound very real — even Mr. Tomsky’s protective portrait of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who could jump in fear if the staff’s orders were yelled too loudly. New York was a much more cutthroat environment for hotel workers, and Mr. Tomsky directs special blame toward Bernard Sadow. Mr. Sadow, he says, is much loathed by bellmen for having invented the suitcase with wheels.

This book’s Manhattan stories are more mercenary than the earlier ones, not least because the Bellevue’s management decided to renovate the place and double its prices. Blame these crass business practices for Mr. Tomsky’s advice about cheating the house: he explains how to watch free movies, steal the entire contents of a minibar, avoid a cancellation charge even when canceling hours after the room rental started, and generally win any argument you choose to pick with a hotel employee.

But he winds up sounding like an essentially honest, decent guy. And his observations about character are keen, perhaps because he’s seen it all. If a guest checking in is noisily abusive, another guest who overhears this nastiness is apt to be almost unreasonably nice. “When his turn comes, I could tell him that he is staying in the basement rat room for fifteen hundred dollars a night, and he would say, ‘Hey, not to worry.’ Maybe even lean in and add a concerned, ‘Have a nice day, O.K.?’ ”

How much of this mano-a-mano combat could Mr. Tomsky take? He is no longer a hotel employee and now, with good reason, thinks of himself as a writer. There are hints of a “Heads in Beds II” to describe the anger-management group therapy to which the Bellevue finally drove him.

“Heads in Beds” embraces the full, novelistic breadth of hotel experience, not just the squalid late-night couplings for which they are so justly known. Many other kinds of things happen to guests, too, Mr. Tomsky writes: “They receive news of a loved one’s death from a blinking red light. They sign a fax that begins production on a factory in China. They receive a FedEx box containing everything left of their marriage.” And they “propose, get married, impregnate each other, turn 40, get divorced, snort heroin, murder and die in hotel rooms,” he adds. “Sometimes in that order.”