by Rick Moody
Additionally, there is the question of exactly what kind of pornography to include on your two or three adult channels at your hotel. While there is the danger of driving off evangelical patrons by including any gay porn—Locker Room Studs or what have you—there is also the possibility that a significant portion of these evangelical patrons are themselves gay- or bi-curious and thus willing to have a line item on their bills that simply says Video incidentals and does not specifically indicate that it was two strapping young guys with dog tags and shaved chests going at it for hours. A certain range of tastes only enhances the opportunity to monetize the compulsivity of the hotel-pornography phenomenon.
Third, the filmed entertainment we’re after here needs to contain the maximum number of ejaculatory moments, because while these ejaculatory moments are often coterminous with the orgasmic release of the user of the pornographic entertainment—thus shortening the amount of time the film is used—there is the chance, especially with the particularly addictive members of the clientele, that porn is going to be used two or even three times in a night, and therefore it should not risk wearing out its welcome. A given film should, rather, deliver the goods as many times as possible in ninety minutes so that one fee enables repeated viewings, especially when one is in the room alone drinking beer, thinking about the past, regretting, and trying to avoid calling old friends and weeping. Under these circumstances, the pornographic video should withstand frequent use without becoming dull or hackneyed.
A guy should be able to walk into the room with the knowledge that residing in this motor court constitutes an abundance of bad luck, a milestone of failure in his life, and he should be able to turn on the television, flip straight to the screen that indicates what networks are included here (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, HLN, FOX, MSNBC, HSN, SHO, HBO, MTV, MTV2, VH1, TLC, Syfy, THC), and he should be able to find the pay-per-view adult-entertainment channel, strip off his tie, and begin the investigation of his own loneliness that is to be revealed in Candy Store Vixens, a process which involves the same old self-pleasuring techniques that have worked since he first did this, let’s say thirty-five years ago; it’s almost impossible to stay awake while doing it now, and anyone who could see him doing it would be challenged to find pity or compassion in her heart; he can barely keep the thing from softening into a doughy and unresponsive blob, and not even the enormous and artificially enhanced breasts will help, or the little-girl cries of ecstasy, which he is worried about the next room overhearing; it barely works, or when it works, it works in such a meager way that scarcely does the moment of halfhearted pleasure streak across his limbic brain before he feels the surge of despond. This is the pornography of the modern motel, which is the pornography of disgust. It is at the heart of travel in America, and I for one try to do it just about every time I’m out on the road by myself. ★★ (Posted 11/10/2013)
Willows Motel, 3127 Route 22, Boston Corners,
New York, December 1–3, 2012
Again, I have to address briefly the idea that I am not who I say I am, a line of argument fomented by KoWojahk283 and by TigerBooty!, but not exclusively by them. The argument goes that no one could possibly stay in the number of hotels and motels I have stayed in without being independently wealthy. According to this independently wealthy hypothesis, which is about as accurate as the theories brought up in the recent inquiry into my refusal to discuss my child, I cannot possibly be an effective or accurate reviewer of hotels and motels because I do not, in fact, have thrift as a motive. KoWojahk283 has tried to connect me, however tenuously, to the Libor scandal, the implication being that I am someone who has colluded in the fixing of international credit rates and who therefore needs to hide out in motels like the Willows of Boston Corners in order to avoid prosecution.
I can assure you that if I were still in high finance, I would rather serve out my time in a minimum-security facility that has a squash court, attempting to set up effective bookkeeping at the prison laundry and counseling the other prisoners with motivational tips, than stay two nights at the Willows Motel. The Willows has no squash court. In fact, it has one telephone, which is out on the parking lot by the ice machine, which ice machine no longer has any ice in it. KoWojahk283 alleges that I am employed by the Royal Bank of Scotland based on the fact that my name is Reginald, which he imagines to be a Scottish name, probably because he comes from Mongolia. Others got into the swing of it, and rapidly the notion took hold that I was not only at the Royal Bank of Scotland, but also ICAP, the interdealer brokerage firm in the UK, and, of course, the omnipresent Deutsche Bank, beloved of conspiracy theorists the world over. Yet none of these critics has had occasion to verify my claims by staying at any of the numerous hotels or motels that I have been writing about over the course of twenty-two months.
TigerBooty!, who I believe is a South Korean adherent of her local pop music (Gangnam style!), because I have found postings by her elsewhere on the subject, advances the alternative theory that I am in fact a teenage girl, which is interesting to me, not only because if I am a teenage girl, I have an astonishing vocabulary and range of knowledge such as the Libor scandal and the Iran-Contra scandal and many other scandals, but also because I believe myself to be a solidly middle-aged man with a bit of a weight problem and a receding hairline who knew nothing about teenage girls even in the period when he was a teenager himself. (I did, perhaps ironically, lose my virginity to a Korean girl, or a half-Korean girl, in her closet, and it was not a terribly comfortable way to lose one’s virginity, though I confess that when she agreed to pursue this particular activity, after years, literally years, of refusing to do so, there was a moment when I felt something of the solar eclipse in me; I knew I was being transported to a new period in my life where I would be substantially changed, confident, worldly, different, where I would not have to carry around the self-consciousness of Reg, where I would know something about the human body and about the ultimate register of love that I had not known before, and at that moment sex had not been cheapened yet by overuse or drunkenness or some lack of enthusiasm for life, it was something heady and mysterious, and I was about to taste its delights, but unfortunately it didn’t go so well, and I cannot say that in the immediate aftermath of human sexuality I took advantage of the intimate knowledge I had gained of the half-Korean girl to talk with her about her hopes and fears.) So, TigerBooty!, when you say I am a teenage girl, you reveal your own paradoxical ignorance of how teenage girls talk—American girls, at any rate—which I imagine is with emoticons. My theory is that the accuser almost always accuses the other of his or her own shortcomings. So it is that TigerBooty! must be a Korean girl recording herself on some instant videochat site singing along with the K-pop.
Yet another antagonist, called RedDawn301, who has posted a lot on this site hawking various mobile-home designs, accuses me of some kind of responsibility for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. Again, in this case, it is said that I come to establishments such as the Willows Motel in order to avoid prosecution, rather than to review the motel for your edification. Now, interestingly, RedDawn301 is enthusiastic about oil drilling itself, believes passionately in it, in the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, but he still maintains that the executives of British Petroleum are all bisexual and German and that they have the capability of storing and cataloging people’s thoughts. Somehow RedDawn301 considers me to be among the offending parties in this case, and, in part, he sees a pattern of excessive comfort in the hotels and motels I have reviewed on this site, though I say he has not yet stayed in the Willows Motel, or the Gateway Motel of Saratoga Springs, New York, or the Rest Inn of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the Presidents’ City Inn of Quincy, Massachusetts. He responds by saying that I must be a government agent.
I can’t dignify all of these ideas about me with reply, but I will say that in this digital world of widespread fraud, in which elderly women from rural Michigan claim to be steroid-enhanced weightlifting experts and the like, it is useful, on occasion, to advance the cau
se of belief simply for the sake of belief, because if not belief in this world, then what do we have? If not the action of belief, we have only the grinding disappointments. You could go on finding weaknesses in the pattern of my online reviews when really what you should be doing, KoWojahk283 and TigerBooty! and RedDawn301, is going out into the yard and staring up at the night sky, or meeting people and looking for the good in them. And while you are doing that, I will talk about the emergency-escape plan at the Willows Motel, which advises that you should first feel the door to see if it’s hot and also that if there is a fire in the room, you should leave the room immediately. The escape plan for the main floor, and there is only a main floor here, is simply to exit into the parking lot. How often this is the case! How often our only exit is into the parking lot! And how often the parking lot empties onto the county road, where there are only package stores and full-service gas stations. If KoWojahk283 were right about me, would I be here? Feeling the door, making sure it’s not hot, and then exiting into the parking lot? ★★ (Posted 11/30/2013)
Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market Street, San Francisco, California, December 17–18, 2012
It has a dungeon in the basement, and if you don’t believe me, look it up. Right after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the Hotel Whitcomb, for a time, served as the seat of local government, other civic buildings having burned to the ground, and so a makeshift jail was installed. Ectoplasm, for the purposes of this hotel review, is defined as a paste excreted by spirit mediums during the course of intercessory activity and/or a kind of gelatinous epidermal layer covering over spirits so that they may interact with the physical world. Accordingly, it may be that any film of gelatinous paste in the Hotel Whitcomb is “palpable ectoplasm,” owing to the hotel’s having served as a jail. Or it may be that the Hotel Whitcomb is simply not being cleaned effectively.
RateYourLodging.com reader Harmonia 13 has had occasion to describe spirit-related magnetic energy. Such magnetic activity can be easily measured and dissipated with “divining materials” and also with fresh garlic or sage-burning. If the ectoplasm on the premises is caused by onsite incarceration during the last century, it almost certainly also commemorates a number of deaths in the Hotel Whitcomb, both incidental and intentional, including murders, suicides, and murder/suicides. People seemed, at one time, to favor jumping out the windows of the Hotel Whitcomb onto Market Street, a hotbed of stripping, gambling, opiates, vagrancy, and other varieties of nonspecific grunge. You might want to ask, you regular readers of the Rate Your Lodging site, what value does ectoplasm contribute to the overall rating of a hotel? Do you add stars for ectoplasm? Or do you eliminate stars? Have I, the reviewer, ever experienced ectoplasm? you might ask. Have I ever felt a glowing gelatinous presence in a half-lit room where a deceased person deceased? Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.
I remember staying at an inn in a certain southwestern state where there was an outdoor hot tub. I remember convincing an employee of the inn to join me in the hot tub, which featured a timer that triggered compressed jets of water. Normally, I am a little insecure about myself without a shirt on, as my days of being attractive are now behind me. However, on this occasion the amenity of the hot tub created feelings of well-being, which in turn eventually caused me to reach out for the employee of the inn and pull her close to me. Generally, the decision to pull close a hotel employee is a poor decision. Unless there is a presumption of collective will in the pulling close, it is extremely dim-witted, this decision, and sometimes even when there is a collective will, it is inadvisable. Were it not for the amenity in question and the feelings of well-being and the pierced navel of the attractive employee of the inn and her unusually colored tresses, I can say that I would probably have forgone the opportunity to reach across the expanse of chlorinated water in the hot tub and pull her close to me, unleashing further waves of so-called well-being, feelings that are attendant upon a sudden experience of moving-into-nearness that was, in the moments before, unanticipated. Say you are working three weeks as a personnel consultant at a community college in the Southwest, and your loneliness is suddenly punctured by the moving-into-nearness of a hotel employee in an outdoor hot tub above which, in the sky, Canis Minor is clearly visible. This is an amenity. Why does this moving-into-nearness involve such surges of well-being when other things—for example, cookies and cider, or even hitting it big on Powerball—pale by comparison?
What about towel warmers? Some people really like towel warmers, and I will admit that there is a moment after a shower when a towel warmer is a rather extraordinary thing. Other examples of an amenity might be on-staff astrologers, or free onsite e-book readers, or perhaps a barbershop on the premises, or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, crusts sundered, on the room-service menu. The Hotel Whitcomb did not have these sorts of amenities during my stay there with K., who berated me for taking a room there.
And what if the ghost on the premises resembles your own father? Now, astute readers of Reginald Edward Morse are aware that his father has been infrequently discussed in this canon of work, but let’s say there were, at each floor’s elevator disembarkation point, mirrors facing mirrors, and while waiting for the rather slow elevators, there was ample time for reflection, as it were, upon one’s own appearance, or the appearance of one’s loved ones, in these ample mirrors enveloping on all sides. I was having, on the night in question, one of those middle-of-the-night perambulations, insomnia-related, and heading past the elevators for the ice machine down the hall, when, upon hearing something that could easily have been picked up on extra-sensitive investigative-recording equipment, I stopped, because it sounded as though there was a voice, or voices, coming from behind the mirrors, as if issuing from the reflections themselves. The sound, if I was going to characterize it, was like a barely stifled sob, or a series of barely stifled sobs, something alto, or perhaps falsetto, from the throat, not the chest or diaphragm, but the kind of heaving, asphyxiating sobs you associate with high grief. I stopped by the mirrors and, in so doing, felt myself lassoed into their complexity. In architectural and design circles, the mirrors-upon-mirrors gambit affords the illusion of scale, but I was distracted, in overhearing these ghostly sobs, by the way that mirrors eternally reflecting one another muddy the reflecting pool with their layers of philosophical and oneiric speculation, with ideas of the infinite, and infinite regress, as if, it would seem, any kind of reflection is to be had only in the beholding of the infinite.
While thinking about all of this, hefting my as yet unfilled ice bucket, I realized, at first casually, that I was seeing a man—a man besides myself, that is—in the systematized mirrors. He was wearing a suit of black three-piece serge with narrow lapels and a red tie, from sixty or seventy years ago, and a fedora, and I wondered, you know, because it was California, if this was itself a hotel amenity, as with those amusement-park rides in which an apparition appears in your gondola with you—would the serge-wearing fedora-sporting gentleman have been visible to anyone happening this way?—or if it was an apparition visible only to me. With sangfroid I thought of waking K. and asking her if she would come and look at the suited visitant, the mourner in the looking glass, but before I could take this on (and the wrath that would ensue for having awakened her), it occurred to me that this was not just any man, but my own father. I didn’t know, at that time, if he was living or dead, and I had not had anything to do with him since well back in my early life, and he was a presence more in his absence than in any other way, and that was why, perhaps, I realized suddenly that the stifled sobs were my own and did not belong to the mourner, who, when gazed upon directly, vanished out of my sight. He had been perceptible only with the literary sidelong glance, this ghost who haunted the father (me) who was worried about being another father who abandons his daughter, another father who is insufficiently present in the life of his daughter (stifled sob). Is that an amenit
y?
At one time, the Hotel Whitcomb had the largest indoor parquet floor in the United States of America, which is the kind of thing your grandmother would have known. For jazz-age voluptuaries circa 1929, it was a “see and be seen” hotel. K. went looking for weaknesses, and there were, it’s true, not one but two toothpaste caps stuck down the old-fashioned drain in the modestly sized basin in the bathroom. The mirrors, by the way, that appear everywhere in the Hotel Whitcomb are slightly yellowed. Is that a feature of the original 1910 design? Or a slightly later Art Deco renovation? The dog-eared pamphlet in the top drawer of the desk indicates that the Hotel Whitcomb has been renovated to keep up with the times, but as far as we could tell, no significant renovation had taken place in the past twenty or thirty years, with the possible exception of the “business center,” which seemed, when we checked in, heavily populated with mobsters. Was one of these men my father? ★★★ (Posted 12/14/2013)
