America 51

by Corey Taylor

  Anyway, off we sped on our day-and-a-half trip. We were making fairly decent time considering how late we left, but by the time we reached Denver it was about time to stop for the night. I made a quick decision not to stop and find a hotel in Denver itself because I wouldn’t want to deal with the traffic once we hit the road again in the morning. So we drove on through the city, opting for a smaller hotel on the other side closer to the mountains. Not only was this a fucking stupid thing to do, but it also turned out to be a fateful idea because we weren’t quite prepared for the ridiculousness waiting to unfold out in front of us in the darkness. After maneuvering through the late-night traffic, we motored on out of town, looking for those exits of promise: hotel, restaurant, and gas, like little islands of civilization among the rocks of desolation, the boondocks of the greater Denver area. We found the exit we were looking for—a nice-sized Best Western with the lights on, right next to a gas station so we could fuel up in the morning. So we stopped, pulled up, parked, and stretched some blood into our legs as we walked inside. The nice man behind the counter gave us two very troubling words.

  “No vacancy.”

  Ah…

  Well, shit.

  But that made sense. It was after midnight, and these parts tended to cater to tourists, so of course they were going to be booked up for the night. But there was no need to panic—that very rationale meant that there were other hotels out there in the darkened distance, just waiting for a couple of road-weary travelers. Unfortunately we ran into the same reaction at the next hotel as well. I was worried for a second—the sign I’d just passed said there wasn’t anything for another forty miles. I didn’t want to drive all night just to get to a hotel for a nap; I needed some fucking sleep. Griff, now wide awake because of his twenty-five teenage naps during the drive, was suddenly interested in what was going on. I assured him we’d be okay as I turned down the final exit before the drive got a little longer than I’d hoped for the night. This one looked promising: there were several signs for hotels down the two-lane run, so we passed the first hotel off the exit—just across from a McDonald’s—and headed down the street. The good news was that there were indeed a shit-ton of hotels to choose from. The bad news was that every god damn one of them was closed. I couldn’t understand it: the office doors were unlocked and I could see people milling about in their rooms and out to the ice machine and whatever. But there was no manager on duty, and no one answered the bells when I’d ring them. This happened at four different places—the rest of the fucking hotels had their lights off. I was dumbfounded. I’d never seen anything like it. We reached the end of the ironic “hotel row” and were forced to turn around. Griff said, “Well, now what do we do?” As we reached the highway where we pulled off, I told him not to worry, that we’d find something eventually. That’s when I realized we’d passed the first hotel by the Mickey D’s without even checking to see if it had rooms for the night. So with a quiet hope I pulled in and went inside.

  The front desk was empty, but this time when I rang the bell a very nice old Vietnamese man came out and asked me if I needed a room. With a sigh of relief, I said yes and we began the paperwork. Out the window I gave Griff the “A-okay” sign. Once I’d settled the bill, he handed me the key, and this was the first sign that things weren’t going to be your standard J/11 evening out and about. The key was straight out of the 1970s: hard metal like a house key, hanging from a big diamond-shaped keychain, on which was a numbered sticker delineating the room number: 16. For a second I was kind of amazed at the “old-school analog” feel of the thing in my hand. It never occurred to me that this may be a warning sign. I just shrugged, giggled, went out, and got in the car, handing the key to Griff (“What the hell is this?” he said). We pulled around the back of the hotel to where our “room” was located. We rolled past what I can only describe as dark cement cinder-block outbuildings designed to be used as laundry facilities in most major trailer parks, until we reached number 16. We parked directly across from it, grabbed our gear, and with a deft turn of the key in the lock… the door wouldn’t open. So I tried again—no bueno. Finally, after frantically jiggling the handle as hard as I could, the antiquated locking mechanism eventually gave in, and the handle from the past turned. I said to myself, Jesus Christ, okay, settle down. Time to relax. I opened the door, and my son and I were immediately assaulted by the most horrible stench I had experienced in a very long time. It smelled like a dead hooker had been raped by another dead hooker while they were both drenched in cat piss.

  We both stood at the door, reeling from the lambasting we’d just taken from the ferocious odor, neither of us in any real hurry to go inside. It was that fucking bad. For a second I felt like we should call the authorities for fear that we were walking into a crime scene. But once I turned on the lights there were no obvious signs that anything nefarious had been committed. So I went in first, just to make sure myself. Griff followed after a moment, looking nervous and leery about getting comfortable in a place that we may have need to flee at a moment’s notice. It might have been the oddest hotel room I’ve ever set foot in: everything about it was wrong. There were two beds, like I’d asked for, but they were set up perpendicular to each other, at strange angles that didn’t make any sense. The TV was in the corner—an old thirty-five-inch tube TV from the early nineties (ironically with full DirecTV access). The bathroom was against the far wall, opening up like a long closet. Between the mold growing in the shower and what looked like a false wall made of paneling, I decided neither of us would be using those facilities very much. The paneling wall is also why we christened it “The Murder Hotel”—all night long I had visions of that sliding open to reveal the killer, stalking his prey H. H. Holmes style and using our meat in some crazy form of Sweeney Todd room service. Before you ask, yes, I do watch the Investigation Discovery Channel—why?

  We stood pondering the bathroom for several minutes, as I took pictures to send to The Boss in a “you’re never gonna believe this” sort of way. We were still holding our bags like we were afraid to put them on the floor, just in case our backpacks contracted carpet chlamydia. As I FaceTimed the family back home to show them what kind of situation we were dealing with, I swung the camera around to the radiator, placed just to the right of the door. Suddenly I realized there was something sitting on it. At first I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. I mean, it was so out of place that I didn’t want to trust what my eyes were making me have to deal with at that moment. After the absolute assholing we’d already taken at the hands of this bastard room, you’d think I would’ve just nodded and been like, “Yep, makes total fucking sense.” But no. I balked so hard at the absurdity that the reality took a second to catch up to me, like an echo down a long valley. I blinked, asked Griff to confirm what I was seeing, and then offered a glimpse to the people on the other end of the phone.

  Resting on the radiator, as if it’d been abandoned in an earthquake evacuation, was a fucking gross grungy toilet brush.

  It seriously looked like someone had taken a call while they were cleaning the bathroom, put it down as they walked outside to talk, and had simply forgotten it was there, never coming back to retrieve it. I was baffled. I didn’t want to touch it, and I wouldn’t let Griff fuck with it—we both just tried to ignore it. Weirdly, Griff slept like a fucking champ, whereas I spent all night thinking there were bedbugs in my hair. As soon as the sun came up, I had him up and ready to go. I was smoking at the time, so as I stepped out to have a cigarette, I noticed a man doing the exact same thing. We made eye contact, and he said, “Your room smell as bad as ours did?” When I said yes he told me that he’d been through there a few months prior and the whole place had been underwater. So basically we’d all been breathing mold all night. That was pretty kick-asteroid. It took two Starbucks Americanos and driving with the window down for a few hours to make me feel like I didn’t have fucking black lung. Griff loves that fucking story—makes me tell it to this day. Unfortunately, eve
ry time I think about the experience, I break out in fucking hives.

  Here’s the point of that story—and the Semi Near-Death story as well, as I blew right by it earlier. I make no qualms about the fact that I’m a pretty progressive dude. In fact, I am of two minds: to steal a quote from my good friend Stubs, I am socially liberal yet fiscally conservative. I’ve talked about why I subscribe to both ways of thinking, and I’ve always maintained that most people are like this, regardless of what the professional politicians try to force down our throats. But I’m also open enough to say that I can find common ground with people who may or may not believe the things I believe or subscribe to the values and ideas that I hold. I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way I do on things—we’re all different, and expecting everyone to blindly accept the various things thrown at them is fucking idiotic and naïve. Yet that’s not to say we couldn’t get there someday. Just giving up socially is fucking pathetic as well. That’s why my feet are planted firmly in the center, away from all the extreme shit and cancerous garbage they use to keep us at each other’s throats. No matter what I’ve said in this book and no matter what you think about me and my opinion, please understand something: I am first and foremost an American who loves his country and his people. I worry about everyone who was born here and everyone who fought like heroes to get here and everyone who dreamed and managed to stay here. I don’t mean to offend my white American brothers and sisters; however, looking American doesn’t mean looking whiter. Being American means just that: THERE ARE NO RIGHT WAYS TO LOOK FUCKING AMERICAN, no matter what those assholes who stir up shit try to say.

  One of the things I love about this country is that we are always moving forward. From the minute we were conceived as a theocratic idea, we were designed to evolve, constantly evolve, to the point where our documents are living documents and our nation is a living nation. We were set up to live in the future, not die in the past. It’s the thing that separates us the most from the older republics. When we talk about freedom for all, it’s not meant to be about freedom for a certain group of people at a certain period in our history; it’s about working our way through the stereotypes and prejudices, looking for the common ground to guarantee that promise Thomas Jefferson first wrote and then Abraham Lincoln paraphrased: ALL MEN (AND WOMEN) ARE CREATED EQUAL. Of course, I added that little bit about women because it’s not in the original document. Granted, most great minds are hindered by the class and gender biases of their eras; however, that doesn’t mean we should detract from the message; it simply means we should stand on their shoulders to reach the light.

  On a clear day, when the storms have stopped blowing us over or raining on our parades, we’ll look up from our bunkers or we’ll peek out from behind our walls and realize the war is over, the sun is shining, and maybe, for the first time in forever, we’ll be able to find a way to come to terms with everything that has been swirling around our heads. There will be no more AM blasts on Twitter, no more resignations amidst perjury or other illegal acts, no more sitting at the right hand of ignorance, and no more choosing insanity over rationality. Much like when the Germans and the Allies stepped out onto No Man’s Land that Christmas Day during World War I, we will be able to put aside so many differences and listen, really listen, because we won’t feel so far away that we come off as misunderstood and, by that mindset, not so misunderstood that we have to scream at each other. Maybe the message is in the nuance. Maybe the malice comes from the measures we take just to be right. I may be wrong. But I don’t think I am.

  Years ago I started this book with one intention: to point out the absurdities that make our country sort of a fundamental funhouse. Later it became something a little more self-righteous: deciding what was better for people after a millionaire tyrant was “defeated” in the name of democracy and the right thing to do. Not too long ago, after a decent dish of “should’ve kept my fucking mouth shut,” it became something simpler, something better and more substantial: a possibility to get everyone to come together and be a country again instead of a collection of regions bent on surviving change. Have I pulled it off? Fuck, I don’t know. But at least I gave it a shot. So many people are so concerned with pulling up “stats” and “facts” that they refuse to see where the problem was in the first place: that they didn’t listen to begin with.

  When the time comes, when the hammer falls, when the light reveals what we’ve all feared all along, will we all be willing to accept what is right in front of us? Will we be ready to stand together because it’s the right thing to do? Can we set aside our falsehoods to build our brother and sisterhood again? I hope so. The last time our nation was this split, thousands died—but millions were freed. There must be a silver lining in this somewhere beyond the pale quality of our own stubbornness. Tomorrows will happen with or without us; it all comes down to whether we all would like to wake up together and feel the same sort of sun on our faces. There will always be disagreements, but there doesn’t always need to be contention. I believe that when the chips are down, we’ll all flop in as a team, ready to win it all and split the spoils, basking in the glory that is pure and unadulterated freedom and prosperity. And why not? That’s a “happily ever after” I can gladly live with.

  After all, isn’t that the American way?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book took a lot out of me, so I’m blessed to be surrounded by people who helped me do it: My wife Stephanie; my editor and friend Ben Schafer; my agent and friend Marc Gerald; my family at 5B: Cory Brennan, Bob Johnson, Kim Schon, Brad Furman, Harold Gutierrez, Brit Buckley, and any I might’ve missed; my massive family: the Taylors, the Bonnicis, the Mays, the Williams, the Bennetts, the Ballards… my artistic conspirator, P. R. Brown; my cast of ‘51’: Roy Mayorga, Jason Christopher, Kira Kawakami, James Ingram, Art Ruffin, Brittany Curran, Debi Kohos, and Harold as “Uncle Santos”; and of course, all my fans. I love you and cherish you. See you out there, somewhere…

  ALSO BY COREY TAYLOR

  Seven Deadly Sins (2012)

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (2013)

  You’re Making Me Hate You (2015)