“I think you may be curious about the wrong kind of bodily fluid, my friend.” He belches, loud and disturbing.
“What?”
George wraps his fingers around a ghost dong and jerks it off for a moment. “One hundred percent of every goddamn hotel room that’s ever existed. Semen! Semen everywhere!”
“HELLO?” someone shouts from the lobby, and I jump up from my seat in the back office and rush to the front desk.
A guest slams a laptop down on the counter, most likely cracking the bottom in the process. “I CAN’T GET ON THE INTERNET!”
“Oh. Well…have you connected to the WiFi?”
“Of course I have!”
I wipe sweat out of my eyes, trying to convince myself that I’m not drunk. “Have you agreed to the terms and conditions?”
“No. What does that mean?”
“Well, with our WiFi, once you’ve connected to it, your browser will ask you to read and agree to our terms and conditions. Basically, you are agreeing that you won’t download anything illegal, stuff like that. It should pop up when you try to get online.”
“But that’s the thing, your goddamn Internet isn’t letting my browser come up!”
“Just let me see it.”
He stares at me, sighs, and pushes the shitty laptop across the counter. The first thing I notice is that the wallpaper is littered with shortcut buttons to various pornographic websites. Not only that, but his mouse cursor is a tiny pistol.
I restart the computer, have the guest log on to his account, then try to connect to the Internet. It spends a few minutes “connecting” then dies a tragic death. It’s difficult to come up with a solution when a giant baby man pounds his fist in front me and screams.
“All you fuckin’ hotels are out to get me, I swear. Last night, at the Days Inn, same goddamn problem. Then again at Starbucks. Why won’t you give me your WiFi? I just want to watch a movie!”
“Sir, if you haven’t been able to connect to WiFi at all of those places, then I am afraid you have a virus.”
“What the hell is that?”
I return the laptop to him. “It’s like when your computer gets sick, it can’t function properly. Since you can’t get online to download any type of system mechanic, I would advise you either do a system recovery, or consider sending it in to Geek Squad or something.”
The guest stands there for a moment, quiet, staring at me, then says, “So, how do I get to the Internet?”
I point down the hallway. “Try looking that way.”
The guest grunts at me and turns around. Before he can say anything else, I’ve returned to the back office and pried the flask from George’s hands.
“Did he find…the Internet?” George asks, and I flip him off.
I set the flask down and close my eyes as the liquid burns through my chest. A minute passes and I’ve reprogrammed myself. I belch and tell George to consider Elisa Lam.
“Who?”
“You know. The lady who drowned in that hotel water tank.”
“What? Here?” George looks around for extra effect, but I’m not buying it.
“No, man. Don’t play stupid. Like three, four years ago, that hotel in Los Angeles?”
“Why are you talking to me about hotels in Los Angeles, Isaac? That doesn’t concern us. Haven’t you heard? Texas is gonna be its own country practically any day now.”
“Oh fuck off. Remember the video that went viral of the girl who was being chased by something in a hotel hallway? She was in the elevator, freaking out, hitting all the buttons. Then she went missing. Two weeks later, an employee found her in one of the water tanks up on the roof.”
“That never happened.”
“Sure it did. For two weeks, the guests at the hotel drank the decomposed remains of the girl floating in the water tank.”
“I bet they sued like a motherfucker.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, but that’s the kind of bloodshed I’m talking about. Not bloody noses or paper cuts. Not menstruation blood. But gruesome, unexplained insanity. Do you think there’s a similar story in every hotel?”
“I don’t know. When was the last time you checked your water tanks?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“Wait, how did the girl get on the roof?”
“What?”
“Surely only an employee could unlock the door leading to the roof.”
“True.”
“Bam.” George fist-bumps the air. “The night auditor did it. Mystery fuckin’ solved.”
“It’s always the night auditor.”
“We’re a bunch of homicidal motherfuckers.” George finishes off the flask and falls into a coughing fit. “Oh man, I may have overdone it tonight. Fuck, my chest.”
“C’mon, I’ll walk you next door.”
My arm around his, we look like two lovers taking a midnight stroll. George sings a unintelligible song about making love to peanut butter. A man waits in the lobby of the Other Goddamn Hotel, and when George sees him he can’t stop laughing.
“Look at this fucking guy,” George says. “Actually expects some kind of service.”
The guy checks his watch. “As a matter of fact, I—”
George makes a fart noise and flips him off. “No vacancies, dickwad.”
“But…I already have a room.”
“Not anymore. I sold it to your mom.”
I sneak out of the hotel before they have a chance to drag me into their argument.
The bulimic girl is waiting for me when I return to my own hotel. I stumble up the walkway, drunk, focusing all my energy on putting one foot in front of the other. She’s standing in the foyer, arms crossed, staring at me. She’s wearing the same clothes as the morning she punched me. Her odor is both erotic and repulsive.
“Wow, man,” she says “Your nose is really fucked-up.”
“I wonder who I have to thank for that.”
She smiles. “You’re welcome.”
I step around her and unlock the entrance. She follows me into the lobby.
“So, where were you?” she asks.
“The Other Goddamn Hotel.” I refuse to turn around and look at her. What if I try to kiss her? What if she punches me again? What if I punch her? Shit, the possibilities are endless.
“You work here and the Other Goddamn Hotel?”
“Nah, I just…go there sometimes.” I sense her nearing me, so I flee behind the front desk, where the fairy tale of safety is much easier to swallow. I gather some random sheets of paper and pretend to organize them. She leans over the counter and I try to avoid eye contact, but her gaze is magnetic.
“Are you afraid of me?” she asks, giggling.
“No, of course not.”
“Oh my God, you totally are.”
I hold a stack of receipts closer to my face before answering. “Well, you did almost break my nose. Maybe you did break it.”
“You don’t expect me to defend myself when some random dude tries to grope me?”
I forget about being shy and drop the papers to look at her directly. “I did not try to grope you.”
She shrugs and backs away, then sits on the lobby sofa. “Well, you at least thought about it.”
“I was trying to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“Our maintenance guy, he has it out for you. He wanted to confront you this morning. Embarrass you in front of everybody.”
“Embarrass me for what?” This time she’s the one avoiding eye contact.
“We can hear you, when you’re in the bathroom. Plus the maintenance guy followed you to the Other Goddamn Hotel once.”
She stands up and tightens her hands into fists. “He followed me?”
“Yeah. He’s, uh, pretty creepy.”
“Ya think?” She shivers. “Jesus Christ, why would he follow me?”
“How many hotels do you go to every day?”
“It’s not every day.”
“You’ve
been here every morning this week.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it. She paces around the lobby furniture, mumbling profanities.
“Are you okay?” I consider going over there and consoling her, but fear another facial injury.
“What do you mean, you can hear me in the bathroom? You don’t hear anything.”
“I mean, aren’t you, like…bulimic?”
She stops, staring at her feet, breathing heavier. “You can just go fuck yourself,” she says after a while, and runs out of the hotel.
Part 6
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
A quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The movie might be better than the book, which is rare, but in this case true. The quote originates after Charlie asks his English teacher, “Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we’re nothing?” The character is referring to this girl he likes, but she’s already dating a known scumbag.
The teacher answers, “We accept the love we think we deserve.”
This quote won’t leave my brain tonight. It is such a simple sentence, yet it is so heavy in truth it could sink a warship. I see fucked up relationships every day, and I’m constantly wondering why anybody would stay with someone else who constantly makes them so miserable.
Then I think about the hotel, and the way it treats me, and my refusal to end the relationship, and I don’t know what to think.
My older brother is married to someone who is going to kill him in the end. They had five kids together before they even got hitched, because apparently that’s the next step you take after you conceive almost half a dozen children. They used to break up every other week, and they still do, too, if my mom’s updates from Indiana are at all accurate. Physical beatings from both sides of the party are a regular thing for them. I had a hard time imagining two grown adults spitting in each other’s faces until the day I had dinner with my brother and sister-in-law.
They fucking hate each other. They say this on a daily basis. It’s as common as a normal marriage’s “I love you” before heading off to work. At least until they finally break up and a few days pass, then my brother’s crawling back to her, declaring his undying love with a knife to his own flesh. One day he will kill himself. This is a truth that I’ve long accepted. Everybody else in the family is still in denial, but not me, but of course, that doesn’t do any good, seeing as I live in Texas now and the rest of my toxic, shitty family is back in the Midwest.
There will come a time when no one will be there to stop my brother from committing suicide, and he will finally be dead. In my brother’s mind, it will be romantic, but in reality, it will be irrational and stupid. He will do this not for love, but for the idea of love. For the misplaced notion of what he wants, not what he actually has.
Deep down, my brother knows he is not a good person. He is right. But he could change. He won’t, though. This kind of relationship is what he subconsciously believes he deserves. This lack of happiness is his own self-punishment.
I have witnessed the same kind of shit over and over at the hotel. The bars in town close during the middle of my shift, so the lobby is every drunk’s salvation. This is when their true feelings come out. They are ugly, and they do not care.
There’s this one couple who stay at the Goddamn Hotel quite frequently. John Hobbs and Brenda Wilson. Usually for about three to four days, then a couple weeks will pass and they’ll stay again. I don’t know why they stay so much. Maybe they’re homeless, maybe they have a tiny shampoo fetish. I don’t care. What I do know is, at least one of those nights on each reservation, the woman will stumble up to the front desk at about two-thirty in the morning, reeking of alcohol. Voice slurring, she’ll tell me that she’s going upstairs, and no matter what, I am not to give her boyfriend a key to their room. Since the room is technically in her name, she gets to call the shots. Then, sure enough, an hour or so later the boyfriend will come waltzing into the lobby. I will watch with dread as he nods at me and heads up the elevator, only to return to the front desk a few minutes later complaining that his old keycard no longer works on the door. This is when I have to explain to a very drunk and obnoxious man that his girlfriend requested for the locks to be reset and I can’t give him a new key. The boyfriend will ask what the hell he’s supposed to do, where the hell’s he supposed to go.
I hate the girlfriend for the situation she constantly puts me in. I hate the boyfriend even more for the things he says.
When people are drunk, sometimes they say things they would never in a million years say while sober. This does not make what they say any less the truth. If anything, the alcohol takes off their protective shields, allowing their inner thoughts to finally come out into the cold.
The boyfriend is a horrible human being. Imagine a ball of dried dog shit you one day discover on the bottom of your shoe. That is John Hobbs. When I talk to him, I visualize breaking his jaw. Sure, it wouldn’t do any good, but it still helps me cope with our interactions. The first night I had to lock him out of the room, the boyfriend spent almost two hours hanging around the front desk, trying to shoot the shit. Of course, he was drunk off his ass, so “shooting the shit” basically broke down to him telling me how his girlfriend’s father was currently on trial for molesting her and her sister’s children. The boyfriend said he despised his girlfriend, yet he had to be with her anyway, because what else was there? All woman were pretty much shit, he said, but you aren’t left with much choice. What else are you going to do—fuck a man? Hobbs then went on a rant about how homosexuals are not a part of God’s plan, and proceeded to yell in the lobby that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” because if bigots are one thing, it’s original.
This has happened about seven times now. Two nights ago, the girlfriend came in again, but with a new guy, the other boyfriend nowhere in sight. She told me she’d finally dumped that no good son of a bitch of hers, and she was never taking him back. This is a line I have heard from many other people about other boyfriends, other girlfriends.
Never, never, never.
As they walked toward the elevator, her new guy started howling like a dog and shouted, “I’m a cheap little slut who needs to be punished! I’m a little whore, Mommy, a smelly little whore!”
I doubt I will see this new guy again. By now, the woman has probably already gotten back together with her bigot boyfriend. Of course they have. It’s a story that’s been played out a thousand times before, and it’ll happen a thousand times again.
People’s self-esteems are a dying fire under a black cloud. The rain will kill everybody soon enough, so why should they bother trying to breathe the oxygen required to survive?
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
This does not have to be a bad thing. But first, people have to stop being so goddamn cynical. Happiness is not something reserved for characters in movies. It is something people can have, dammit. At least that’s what I try to convince myself. People will not achieve contentment with a partner by acting out some shitty cliché movie montage. It is something people have to work at, something they have to actually try for.
People need to have the strength to push, the strength to search for not what they think they deserve, but what they do deserve. They must purify the waters in their toxic relationships. They have to know when to hold on, and they have to know when to let go. They must have the willpower to say no, even if it means completely reprogramming their lives. Inconveniences are worth it if they are putting an end to a future of misery. They can either put out the fire with their hands, or let it consume them whole. I think these thoughts without ever having had my own partner. I don’t know why I believe it to be true. Maybe this is all a delusion on my part. Maybe I only feed the fire.
I wonder what the bulimic girl would say if she knew I thought like this. Would she fall in love with me? Would she think I’m a fucking weirdo and tell me to piss off?
One day, I’m goin
g to find out.
But not today.
* * *
I smell him before I see him. It’s a familiar scent, one I’ve come to recognize with John Hobbs. Him and his girlfriend probably stay here more often than anyone else I know. Brenda supposedly works at the call center of one of the Goddamn Hotels, some building located into the heart of San Antonio, so she’s always getting a $35 or $17.50 rate, depending on the time of year. Out of everybody who stays at my hotel, I despite this couple the most, especially the boyfriend. Like me, Hobbs is an owl, which means most of the time he’s here, he’s roaming around the lobby trying to talk to me. Most of the time he’s drunk. Other times, he just smells like he is. And he’s always bitching about his hands and showing me the latest scars his job has inflicted on them, crying that one day he’s going to get a real job where nobody treats him like shit, which might be the funniest thing anybody has ever said.
I’m in the back office when the lobby doors open. The smell drifts from the entrance, over the front desk, and to my chair within seconds. The scent of booze and unwashed genitals. I’m caught off guard by the smell, because last I checked, I had no more reservations for the night, and Hobbs isn’t currently staying with us. So what the fuck is he doing here?
My body is frozen. I pretend that if I sit here for a while, not moving, maybe he’ll go away. But he starts slapping the front desk and yodeling, and I surrender to his redneck charm.
“Hey, boy!” he shouts at the sight of me. “How the fuck ya doin’?”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
He nods, smiling, revealing teeth stained black from a lifetime of chewing tobacco. “I just need to check-in to my room. It’s been a hell of a day. Gotta clock in to the good ol’ shoe farm, if ya know what I mean.”
I, of course, do not have the slightest clue what he means. I check the system to make sure a new reservation hasn’t been made since the last time I checked. There’s nothing there. When I look back up at him, it’s a struggle to force my smile into a frown.
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 5
