Hotels of North America

by Rick Moody

  With this explanatory rhetoric on my side, I did manage to persuade K. to set foot in a room. And yet, almost immediately upon setting down our bags, we found a deceased example of Periplaneta americana in the bedsheets. You would think that such a motel would have rates in the $39.99 range, not the $175 range. Admittedly the $175 figure at the Gateway probably had something to do with the racetrack, with the crisp air, the Victorian tradition of breakfast at the track, the pomp, the strong feelings of rectitude that come from slapping down a hundred dollars in front of the man at the window and betting the trifecta. The ponies! Nothing says commitment like an opened billfold and the loss that usually succeeds this opening. On such an occasion, one should pay $175 a night for a room at a motel that is mostly empty the rest of the year. Still, Periplaneta americana is Periplaneta americana. Our late-afternoon nap having been disturbed by Periplaneta americana, we went to the office of the Gateway and struck up a conversation with the proprietress in which we said we were new in town and did she have any recommendations as regards dining establishments, but the proprietress, who had a wandering eye, was cool to the likes of us and mumbled something about having had her sense of smell destroyed by a popular nasal decongestant so she no longer had much taste for the finer foods.

  Many are the cons that are available to the motel guest who wishes to arrive at a more reasonable price for a room, and over the years we have tried variations on the Melon Drop, the Jamaican Switch, the Sex-Toy Scam, etc., each refitted for the specific hotel or motel environment. In this case, we were using a short con that K. and I had attempted elsewhere, the Nouvelle Cuisine, which involves getting a dining recommendation, coming down with horrible food poisoning, and then blaming the recommender for the illness. This is a simplistic con, I will admit, but I believed the wandering eye of the proprietress would make her more sympathetic and impressionable, and thereby increase our chances. When this did not prove to be the case, K. started in: Listen, do you know how many bugs are in that room? We have caught some of the bugs, and we put them under the drinking glass in the bedroom that you didn’t bother to clean, and unless they are strong enough to push the glass off of them, there’s at least five cockroaches still under that glass, and we demand that you do something about them, about the cockroaches, because I don’t want to sleep with any cockroaches, and especially because you’re asking us to spend $175 on this shithole. Look, it’s worth noting that I occasionally kept in my overnight bag a small glassine envelope filled with four or five mummified Periplaneta americana, despite Skylark’s dislike of the poor little guys. Would you think less of the author of these lines if he occasionally needed to strategically place the mummified bugs in the room as a negotiating tool, a sort of scourge with which to improve relations with a motel owner?

  The proprietress started shouting too, saying if we didn’t like it we could just get the hell out (and her perceptiveness about our motives must be admired), and she said this with an accent from some faraway nation, though she had mastered the slang of her adopted land. The argot came so easily to her, Get the hell out, and she actually reached out with a rolled-up newspaper and tried to swat Skylark cranially, whereupon I flung up my arm and my windbreaker, which I was holding there, to keep the proprietress from striking K., and I startled the woman. She let out a shriek, and this was enough for Skylark and me to head for the door, and anyone in any of the rooms, any of those compulsive gamblers who were holed up there trying to come up with some more clams, could have heard over the traffic on the county road the cries of “These rooms have cockroaches!” while we ran for the car and drove halfway out of the turnaround before we realized we’d forgotten our luggage… ★ (Posted 7/7/2012)

  Rest Inn, 7475 East Admiral Place, Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 14–15, 2012

  The Rest Inn of Tulsa on Valentine’s Day. It seems as though this is something that needed to happen to me, one of the top-ten reviewers on the Rate Your Lodging site, with over twenty “helpful” stars from miscellaneous readers. (Thank you, readers!) It is my fate that I should, at last, come to this, the Rest Inn of Tulsa, needing to find somewhere to flop near the Tulsa International Airport. K. and I traveled here, on Valentine’s Day, only to find it demonstrably proved that Tulsa is a hard-living place (and here’s a link to some info, in case you need it, that’ll take you to some former addicts of the area, who’ll tell you that in parts of Tulsa, there are legions of kids cooking who don’t really know, geopolitically, what they’re doing when they’re cooking, and they’re going to purchase bulk amounts of nasal decongestant, and then they’re going to come back to this, the methamphetamine capital of the world, according to some law-enforcement sources, and a number of them are going to flop at the Rest Inn on Admiral Place, an ironically titled name for the location of the Rest Inn, and these kids, who are cooking for recreational use, and in some cases blowing themselves up, are undergoing profound vascular changes such that their appearances are drastically transformed, you can see all kinds of self-inflicted facial scarring taking place from the attempted excavation of bugs under their skin, and then there is the weight loss, two weeks without even a microwavable burrito, and the pounds are dropping away, until they have that sort of internment-camp mien, and then there are also the neurological changes that come from the dopamine-release free lunch of the active ingredients, and here I leave unmentioned the dental horrors of this, the greater Tulsa area; there was some lady of Tulsa who tried to manufacture some of the drug inside a big-box store because she couldn’t afford to take the raw materials through checkout and into the parking lot, so she was trying to cook it inside the big-box store and was there for six hours, inexpertly manufacturing it, before someone tipped off the police and this lady got hauled off to the county lockup; meanwhile, just about anywhere within a fifteen-mile radius there is cooking, there is lithium aluminum hydride and sometimes hydrochloric acid and lots of other chemicals that you don’t want around because they’re explosive, and so right there in the Tulsa area, some kids with cognitive impairment and Parkinsonian neurological symptoms, not to mention murderous excesses of self-esteem, are performing advanced chemical operations not dissimilar to medieval alchemical transmutation, although in this case they’re not trying to achieve enlightenment, the articulation of self, or even trying to convert base metals into gold, they’re just trying to flood the brain with twelve hundred units of dopamine, and in doing so, in cooking, they are pouring hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid and lots of other stuff out into the environment around their trailer, endangering the neighbors, poisoning the groundwater supply, depressing real estate values, and causing, in the aftermath of their cooking adventures, EPA intervention in the degraded land around their trailer).

  Before I tell you about the sketchy characters, and the cameras everywhere, and the bulletproof Plexi in the lobby of the Rest Inn, and the way that these impacted our stay, I need to tell you about a remarkable thing K. said to me on that Valentine’s night, while we were hoping that we were not going to be drug-war casualties and warming ourselves in the Midwestern chill against each other between extremely-low-thread-count sheets. (K., in fact, tried to get through the doorway [where she left her flats] and to the bed without her bare feet ever touching the floor.) K. said to me, in the course of our exchanging Valentine’s-related pleasantries, that she had never experienced trauma. She put it in a more colloquial way, I think, saying something like “I’ve never really experienced trauma,” and this was not, as you might suppose, a slightly fearful remark about the gun-toting toothless meth gangs of North Tulsa popping into the Rest Inn to suck on their lightbulb pipes; no, on the contrary, this was a statement of sanguinary goodwill, a sense of the rightness of things, of improvement in the world in the causative locus of K. I did not think the statement “I’ve never really experienced trauma” was an accurate statement at all. And if it was true, it would not be for long. There was every reason to suspect that our car would be vandalized, as indeed both cars next to ours appeared to
have been, either before or during their stay, and we had been asked, at check-in, if K. was a runaway or a prostitute and if we planned on using drugs while we were staying. Under such circumstances, a certain amount of Halcion or Ambien would have been warranted, to loft us through the nighttime expanse of those eight and a half hours. It wasn’t traumatic at the Rest Inn, but it was close.

  I demanded to know, while I reached for the blackout curtain and pulled it imperceptibly aside in order to watch some guys down in the parking lot loitering in a particularly malevolent way, how K. knew that she’d never experienced trauma, and if she was sure that she was using an adequate definition of the word trauma, like, for example, a “developmental emotional wound leading to psychological injury”; she observed that she had taken the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, because it was required for a certain research job she had had when she thought she was going to be a CSW—indeed, when she was training to become one—and the test had indicated that in all significant ways, she was a rather normal person, and her memories of her childhood, of when there had been trouble, were of her father sitting down after an argument and inviting the family to hold hands and saying, Look, there are always times that are hard, but it’s our job, during hard times, to look a little deeper, and to try to find ways to love.

  I countered: Aren’t there times when an earnest point of view could cause trauma? And isn’t it almost guaranteed that fathers who say this kind of thing are either (a) failures in business, (b) evangelical, (c) talk-show hosts, or (d) cult leaders? K., in the calmest way imaginable, the way that endeared her to me, said that in fact it was that particular worldview, which was the posttraumatic worldview itself, that caused the harm, and actually her father was a generous and masculine presence (dead now, so I will never know) whose construction business gave him complete satisfaction and put food on the table, and even his death from metastatic mesothelioma at a rather young age was so long in coming, after the date of first diagnosis, that she had ample time to make her peace with him, and this included playing checkers with him in the hospital and recording and transcribing a lengthy interview with him about fishing, which she then made into a self-published chapbook. I had never been able to verify the existence of this chapbook, and this had made it impossible to execute my plan, wherein I would go online and write several four- and five-star reviews of the chapbook under various assumed names. (By the way, I did find a five-star review of the Rest Inn: “Clean, convenient, and right near the airport! Staff friendly, patient, and kind! Microwave and fridge in room very helpful. There’s a Safeway just up the block, so you can make dinner for yourself. Kids loved the pool. You could find a less expensive hotel during your stay in Tulsa, but you couldn’t find one with more love.”)

  Still, I probed K., there must have been something traumatic that had happened to her. First boyfriend sexually aggressive? Nope, he went on to be a sound engineer for Hollywood movies, and he had been very concerned about the number and duration of her orgasms. Was there a pretty girl in high school who tormented her and wrote slut on her locker? Nope, the pretty girl had bulimia, and K. felt sorry for her. Hadn’t she been in a horrible car accident, or didn’t she know some guy in high school who was a daredevil and who, in turn, had gotten into a horrible car accident involving his parents’ BMW and a telephone pole and in which several of her close friends from high school were killed? In fact, K. said, in the greater Tampa area, where she had grown up, there was a telephone pole where an acquaintance had died in a car accident, and this had been her first experience with the finality of death, but her parents had encouraged her to talk about what she was feeling, and because her mother was a Reiki practitioner, she (K.) had realized that she was holding a lot of dread of the afterlife in her hips. Her mother had worked on her and had encouraged her to do a lot of hip openers, and then she (K.) had let go, in a welter of tears, of the dread of the afterlife, and while she knew me well enough and cared about me enough to comprehend that I was not going to believe that she had carried a dread of the afterlife in her hips, or that her mother was able to release this dread, it was in fact the case, and because it was the case, she felt comfortable saying that she had never experienced trauma, and because she had never experienced trauma, she was able to be here, in the Rest Inn, at least today, without losing her shit, though she had in the past lost her shit, like that time we were in a foreign country with a malfunctioning air conditioner, or that time we were somewhere with live cockroaches, as opposed to the dead cockroaches that we sometimes brought with us for the Denial of Service con.

  This was a very loving way of responding to my inquiry, which, after all, was taking place on Valentine’s Day, and it caused me to reach into the drawer where the Gideon Bible was and fetch the chocolates that I had managed to procure in Hot Springs, Arizona. It was a bad night, and I often felt we were in some apocalyptic topography wherein the Islamist rebels were hiding out from the government forces and expecting nerve agents, but I had K. and I had the chocolates, and these were more important than any insurrection.★ (Posted 8/4/2012)

  Sand Trap Inn, 539 South Hemlock Street, Cannon Beach, Oregon, June 5–12, 2002

  The sign advertised artisan-crafted guest suites, and, during my somewhat desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) trip to interview for an HR position at the Tillamook cheese factory, I was curious to know how the artisan had crafted these particular suites. Did an artisan consist of some slightly inbred white supremacist from the eastern part of the state working on the finish of the handcrafted teak bar in the suite over the course of seventy-two hours, never once needing sleep because of the stimulants employed when energy flagged? Or was there an aging dropout from the dot-com world, someone who had retreated to this charming beach town to work on some artisan-crafted guest suites while transitioning from the dot-com sector, sobbing in the room over the cherry he was using for the desk, whereby he lightly stained the surface of the wood with human tears? There was a subheading on the sign out front that boasted an “in-room Jacuzzi.” I wondered, naturally, if the absence of a plural in the matter of Jacuzzis indicated a single Jacuzzi in a single room, the rest of us being, as the saying goes, shit out of luck. Or were there in fact multiple Jacuzzis in which multiple groups of intoxicated golfers and their paid associates could make double entendres until the clock ran down on the Jacuzzi timer. In certain hotels, or motels, or bed-and-breakfasts, etc., it is important to get the proprietor to give you a tour before you settle on a specific room. Often the employees will resist this tour, and you will have to scale the rhetorical heights in order to procure it. Because I am a motivational speaker, I have surpassing persuasive skills. You need to start slowly, in a muted and nonseductive way, using honeyed and time-tested approaches.

  As a matter of fact, “artisan-crafted guest suites” were not the thing that moved me to take this room at the Sand Trap. Rather, it was that I saw certain gentlemen on the Sand Trap deck from the street, and I was listening to their conversation, and it was the conversation of these gentlemen that made me want to stay at the Sand Trap. They were not talking about golf, let me say here at the outset. They were talking as certain gentlemen talk when they are really interested in getting to know one another, when they are bent on opening up, and by this I mean, of course, that they were talking about their shifts. My sense is that men of a certain kind, when getting to know one another, will always talk at length about their shifts. You know: That was that night in July when I pulled a double, a long night, and I wasn’t counting on having to go roust some kids who were trying to camp out in the abandoned plant, about as tired as I’ve ever been, practically seeing double, and those kids had all been drinking, and they really weren’t counting on anybody coming along and breaking up the party. To which an interlocutor can only say, I had to do a couple doubles in a row one time, I was doing security at the store, overnights, and I had to do a couple of nights in a row, because it was the lady’s birthday, it surely was, and I had to come up w
ith some cash pronto to buy her something for her birthday, and I kind of got myself fixed on some jewelry, and so I had to stay up those two nights, and that is what it took. No particular pathos is ascribed to this overwork, it’s just a discussion of the physical aspects of it.

  Maybe, just maybe, on certain occasions, a fellow will ask another fellow exactly how much OT he has accumulated in a certain month, but this is usually later in the evening, when all of the possible sports-related conversations have already been depleted, after these men have already traveled to such layers of arcana as when a certain ballplayer will become a free agent, and therefore sports can no longer serve as a topic, then there will come a point when even the shift-related discussion will run out of steam, unless, perhaps, the conversation can extend to a comparison of swing shifts and graveyard shifts. For example, I heard one of these men on the deck, from where I was standing alone on Hemlock Street, totally alone, talking about how he actually preferred the graveyard shift, because he had nothing to get up for anymore, there was nothing in his life worth getting up for, She moved out, you know, she moved on, said she didn’t understand me, that’s what she said, couldn’t go on if there wasn’t going to be even one minute when I expressed any type of kindness to her, and so she was gone, and the kids all cleared out already. And another guy said, One time I took the swing shift just to get away from her for a few weeks, I just filled in for this guy who had a back injury, and I came home when no one was awake, and then I’d just take some sleeping pills and drink a few beers. Everyone had a good laugh.