Hotels of North America Read online

  TownHouse Street, Milano Duomo, Via Santa Radegonda, 14, Milano, Italia, July 11–13, 2011

  I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning. Although it is also true that we were lamentably ignorant about Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion, nor would our exhaustion have made such calculations easier. Our trip had included six hours spent in the international terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport, where Delta Air Lines, the world’s largest, wore us down by putting us on the plane, taking us off the plane, changing the gates, and telling us four different departure times, all of which was followed by the fourteen-hour flight itself, inclusive of a layover at JFK. By the time we arrived at our Italian hotel, at 4:32 a.m. (or, as they say in Milano, 0432), at our wits’ end, K. was consternated to the point of tears, especially when we came to understand the still, humid fact of our interior. Did I say that we were staying at the hotel under assumed names, Jonas and Katherine Salk? The air-conditioning was not the only problem. The others I will itemize herewith.

  As a general rule, design-oriented hotel interiors should have some practical sense to them. The sink should make feasible the staging of objects on its edge or beside it. If the sink slopes all the way to the edges, it follows that no items may be put there. The phrenological-skull sculpture on the desk unsettles, and, given that there is one in every room (this we know because we demanded a room change), we might well deduce that the hotel had purchased dozens of these phrenological sculptures. At first we were unclear on the fact that the city depicted in the gigantic wallpaper mural of photos was actually the city we were visiting. Why do we want to look at wallpaper photos of Milan when we could just go downstairs and see the city for ourselves? A faceless and portly middle-aged businessman of Milan massaging some portion of his abdomen, a cherubic boy refugee standing in front of a farmacia, etc. We grew tired of them. Yellow rubberized furniture is unappealing. I was in graduate school in sociology during the heyday of the English pop group Culture Club, and I did, I’m afraid, enjoy humming along with their first celebrated tune, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” But playing this, and “Boys Don’t Cry,” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” in jazz versions through the dining-room sound system every day is asking for trouble. Katherine Salk believed that the Culture Club song was what precipitated her migraine, but it could also have been the yellow rubberized furniture.

  I didn’t realize she was ill until after I tried, at a morning business engagement, to interest some local Italian banks in collateralized-debt obligations—the kind of high finance I’d practiced when younger, before I became a motivational speaker—after which meeting we attempted to make a visit to the cathedral in town and were turned away because, as a carabiniere told us, Mrs. Salk was “too discovered.” She had to get a lightweight cardigan from the yellow rubberized rack on which were placed some unremovable white plastic hangers, and then we headed back to the cathedral. This while they removed our few belongings to room number 2, where the air-conditioning did perform as advertised. There was a very fat man standing in front of the hotel at all hours with his hand outstretched. He superficially resembled the businessman in the wallpaper photo collage. Mrs. Salk says that the door handles gave her “repetitive stress injuries.” And also multiple lacerations. The maid took our unwrapped bars of soap. And: There were people lining up for Hot Pockets, or the Italian confectionary equivalent, under our window, owing to a business adjacent. Was “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” an allegory for our relationship to Milan? Some people like a bidet, but Mrs. Salk said she does not want to shoot water up herself from a spigot that others have also used. ★★ (Posted 2/4/2012)

  Groucho Club, 45 Dean Street, London, Greater London W1D 4QB, United Kingdom, January 5–6, 1998

  There are times when it is necessary to be apart from K. for extended periods. Travel almost always marks our intervals of reflection and monastic separateness. In fact, there was an epoch before K., an epoch in which I was married. It was in those days, on a trip to England, that I first began developing my skills as a motivational speaker, at which I later became a highly regarded professional in the field. Prior to this career epiphany, you understand, I plied my trade in the trenches of securities exchange. It is true that the buying and selling of securities is related to motivational speaking, because in each case, I rely upon my powers of observation. When I see an undervalued company, I am powerless not to share the potential for shareholder value. This is an opportunity you cannot afford to pass up; if you do, you will be hitting yourself about the face and shoulders later in life; you will be rending your garments.

  That cigar-chomping hemorrhoidal bigot who sits astride the riding mower on the two and a quarter acres beside you, he is smart enough to spend his IRA on this stock, so why can’t you? Do you want him to have something you do not? Do you know what will happen if he has something over you? He will come for your possessions, and it will be symbolic at first, he will initially borrow your saw or your dripper hose, but then he will want your car and your fluffy Samoyed, and then, of course, he will come for your wife. Do not find yourself cuckolded! Buy this stock now!

  Sometimes this obligation, this intensive search for value, can lead me, internationally, to the old Europe. The Groucho Club, which is a sort of residential club in the City of London, neighborhood of Soho, is noted for the exclusivity of its bar and the eminence of its many patrons. It is true that not all of these persons are financial analysts, but when you consider that the Groucho Club hosts, on a nightly basis, stars of stage, screen, and popular music, then you can understand why I would have been obligated to berth myself there. The networking opportunities were significant. During the nights on which I was present, when I made my needs apparent to a certain bar employee, it became clear to me that there was a Pet Shop Boy on the premises, and while I understood only vaguely what a Pet Shop Boy was, I was even then extremely chuffed, as they say in London, about the possibility of talking to the Pet Shop Boy about opportunities that I saw with certain undervalued securities. His support could make all the difference. If it was necessary to snog with the Pet Shop Boy or members of his retinue in order to demonstrate the seriousness of my mission, then I would snog.

  On the night in question, I was talking with a certain lovely young woman, but mainly as a cover in order to get closer to the Pet Shop Boy—she was in no way a substitute for my wife. In due course, I was alone at the bar, and then I attempted to approach a Pet Shop Boy to ask if it would be possible to purchase him a drink, whereupon he turned on me his gimlet eye (Old Gimlet Eye being initially the nickname, by the way, of Smedley Butler, an American Marine who was at the heart of a coup to overthrow FDR). The Pet Shop Boy’s gimlet eye fell upon me, and almost at once there were employees of the bar at the Groucho who made it abundantly clear to me that the Pet Shop Boy was off-limits—Leave the client be, Yank—which behavior I do not think argues for the five-star rating that others have given the Groucho Club. It happens that in fact I was staying there in the single smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in; so small was my room at the Groucho, and here I kid you not, that I could open the door to the hallway from my Groucho Club twin bed and likewise reach into the minibar. The television did not require the remote, such was my proximity to it, and one could loft oneself out of the shower and into bed in one supple gymnastic move. Had I been given to claustrophobia, I would have suffered in my room at the Groucho Club. I understand it is the way of these social clubs to cordon off the persons of reputation, and I understand that I am a person who has nothing to offer a celebrity but talk.

  This, in fact, was the nature of my career epiphany that night. I seemed to have failed to move enough securities from one account to the other account in order to procure a revenue stream composed of commissions therefrom, and I lacked the resources to short the Japanese yen, but I still had the gewgaws of rhetorical English at my command. I could
still talk to a Pet Shop Boy, or a Jools Holland, who was also at the Groucho Club during my stay. And perhaps in some way I could make a profession from my language.

  I was in a room the size of a coffin, and I survived it by watching rugby on the telly, and the next morning I lugged my rather large bag down the staircase and into the lobby, where I awaited one of the black cabs of London. While I was doing so, a young woman with strategically disarranged mouse-brown locks called to me, “Are you a musician?” To which I replied, “No, I am a motivational speaker!” She further said, “Well, you look like a musician.” Which I must say moved me, as just the opposite is the case. And so I replied, “You just don’t know the right kind of motivational speakers!” And she: “Top answer! Top answer!” ★★★ (Posted 3/3/2012)

  Radisson Hotel, 42 Frontage Road,

  Waterbury, Connecticut, May 5–8, 2010

  Which reminds me of the tendency of hotel lobbies to feature a kind of jazz music that I refer to, despite the fact that K. has asked me to stop saying it, as “smoove.” Is there another place on earth where smoove is played with as much consistency as in the lobbies of hotels? Once upon a time, when I was still in the finance industry, I briefly had a car and a driver who came to pick me up at the office and take me home most nights. A fleet of such cars ferried back and forth the midlevel executives of our firm so that they wouldn’t have to risk public transportation. Often the driver of that Lincoln Continental, Oristeo, would play something smoove. In those days, there were radio stations of the tristate area that played smoove around the clock—because it was possible that there were people, at any hour of the day or night, who were about to have, or were in the midst of having, episodes of adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood (acute) and as a result were in need of smoove, because the smoove would restore equilibrium. Or sometimes there are somatic conditions that require a liberal employment of smoove in the immediate surroundings of a sufferer. I’m thinking, for example, of long QT syndrome—the thunderous, chaotic cardiac pulsations—which can be caused by second-generation antipsychotic medication, even at the antidepressant-dosage level. K. was once diagnosed with long QT, or catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, and as a result, on occasion K. would listen to smoove, though this was mostly in situations in which she did not expect to be overheard. Despite what I might have said elsewhere, she was occasionally partial to smoove renditions of, say, oldies like “California Dreamin’ ” or “I Write the Songs.” K.’s affection for smoove became an area of difference between us.

  At any rate, we arrived for a stretch at the Radisson Hotel, Waterbury, which was sort of a last-chance Radisson. I believe we had come from a hotel in the Midwest, though one whose particulars I did not choose to preserve for posterity. I recall simply that the lobby of the Radisson featured clocks indicating the different time zones. There was a clock for London, and a clock for Tokyo, and a clock for Los Angeles, as though people lodging at the Radisson of Waterbury were imminently embarking for Tokyo. There were no loiterers in the lobby whatsoever. The bar/restaurant was still open, and there was some kind of forgettable baseball game featured there, on the large screen, with no one watching, and you could see this from the uninhabited and threadbare lobby. The young man at the front desk looked like there was no sorrow he had not experienced, and you could imagine that the pariahs of Waterbury—the convicted frauds and disgraced politicians, the collectors of serial-killer memorabilia, the embezzlers of church donations, those found guilty of exposing themselves, the mortuary assistants with suppressed necrophiliac tendencies, the sadistic gym teachers and embittered traffic cops—all settled here when they were in search of the loneliest night imaginable, and nothing made them feel better than exceedingly loud smoove playing in the lobby. If you were experiencing catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, some flügelhorn soloing just might do the trick, could render you functionally unconscious in that way that hotel life can often do, unaware of any aspect of civilization that involves continuity, stability, devotion. However, it’s also possible that smoove could be seen as a music that requires absolute submission to the American economy, to the need to buy and consume, and, as such, it is straight out of the robber-baron playbook, the music that can and must drive you to your knees so that you can do nothing but purchase plastic trinkets of Southeast Asian manufacture.

  We were thinking this as we were checking into the Radisson in Waterbury, and paying in cash, which might have raised an eyebrow. The sleepwalker at check-in did ask us for a credit card for incidentals, because that was the policy of the operation, and we needed to submit to his regime, and so we did, with the resolve that we would not purchase any incidentals. K. was much restored when a Stevie Wonder tune came on, recast in smoove. Isn’t she lovely? By the time the elevator doors retracted, our submission was complete. ★★ (Posted 4/7/2012)

  Ikea Parking Lot, 450 Sargent Drive, New Haven, Connecticut, October 1–2, 2011

  It’s true, most people who stay overnight in the parking lot of a big-box retailer choose the more notorious Wal*Mart, and there they make their beds because the political attitudes of the Wal*Mart brand are palatable, even preferable, for these libertarian nomads. K. and I chose the Ikea parking lot not because we felt that it was somehow superior to Wal*Mart but just because we wanted to be closer to the New York metropolitan area in case certain business opportunities arose, or because there was a problem at our residence that could not be resolved satisfactorily between ourselves and our landlord and during which on one occasion I raised my voice in a way that was regrettable, or because my finances were in shambles for several months, or because I needed to amass a security deposit, or because of a legal situation that I may or may not write about another time. Not everyone you encounter while staying in an Ikea parking lot feels as though he or she needs to completely elucidate the reasons he or she is staying in an Ikea parking lot. It is enough that there is this dispossession you have in common with your fellow travelers.

  The following strike me as important features of parking-lot lodging—should this be your fate. First, the store in question should have inferior security. This was definitely the case with the Ikea of New Haven, which was as woebegone as most of urban Connecticut is and situated directly adjacent to the interstate. Moreover, the Ikea of New Haven had both indoor and outdoor parking-lot areas, so you could sit outside for a while if you wanted to get some sun, and inside if you were interested in additional privacy. Next, the store should have adequate and frequently cleaned restrooms. Any disadvantaged car dweller will tell you this, and during the period in which K. was having a problem with a certain medication, and when we were trying to stay extremely mobile, we came to think carefully about the nearness and cleanliness of various bathrooms in various public spaces and malls, and Ikea, I have to say, had an extremely good cleaning staff. The bathrooms are great. Is there a café? Yes, your store should have a café and it shouldn’t be one of those get-’em-in-get-’em-out cafés that feature only Starbucks coffee and some pastry. It should permit loitering. K. and I will forgo a meal or two now and again in order to keep ourselves at fighting weight. But we do like to be able to relax. Recent studies have suggested that thinness is associated with longevity.

  An Ikea tends to be huge and laid out like a Vegas casino, so it’s easy to give the in-store security, even the plainclothes people, the slip. The store provides a lot of opportunity for walking, which is cardiologically sound. I personally like how much the indoor-outdoor parking lot at the Ikea in New Haven is overrun with birds. There are birds roosting in there all the time. Sparrows, especially. You might think that an Ikea parking lot, if you’re stuck in there for a few days, would be devoid of meaningful wildlife, but you’d be wrong. In addition to the birds, I saw raccoons in there, trying to scale some of the dumpsters. And there were squirrels and some rats.

  I wasn’t sleeping much in the car, an old Saab that I’d bought used not long before. This was jus
t before the demise of the Saab brand. Some cars are more comfortable for overnights. If you were one of those child-abductor types, you would get a van and put a mattress in the back. K. alleges that her ex-husband was exactly that. A child-abductor type. (He was a psychologist, and degrees in psychology, I find, often conceal deviant tendencies. He was one of those psychologists who needed to smoke a lot of weed in order to relax, and he had a ponytail that he often plaited into a braid, among his many other Native American affectations, and he had a radio show on the local college station where he liked to interview sage-burners and New Age physicists. This was in Ohio, which attracts eccentrics, because from Ohio you can travel easily in any of the four cardinal directions.) But back to Ikea: Ikea began its march to world domination in Europe, and in a way it is still not of the United States. As you may have noticed, here we were living in a Swedish car in the parking lot of a Swedish mega-retailer. ★★ (Posted 5/5/2012)

  Gateway Motel, 260 Maple Avenue,

  Saratoga Springs, New York, July 29–30, 2011

  Yes, in the old days, I did have an actual job besides motivational-speaking gigs: brokerage trainee, institutional sales rep, day trader, and boutique advertiser at a firm in the great city of Trenton, New Jersey. I had a quantitative brilliance. Perhaps it follows, therefore, that I have wagered and gambled over the years. My mind was on the odds on this occasion, see, because we had been at the racetrack enjoying the crisp air of an unusually cool summer day and, unfortunately, losing a lot of money, amounts that one probably should not lose, and this was extremely challenging for K., who, as we were driving in this quaint upstate berg after having wagered on the ponies, beheld the exterior of the Gateway Motel and said, I’m not going in this fucking place, I am not sleeping in here, I told you no more cockroaches, I don’t want to stay anywhere with cockroaches, nowhere with cockroaches ever again! (Why is it that this simple little insect, this hardy evolutionary triumph, the Periplaneta americana, can cause such upset in the average motel-goer? Are we not by now habituated to them? They cause no bite, they inflict no harm except the occasional germ. All that is required for the nonappearance of Periplaneta americana is the correct sealing away of foods and rubbish containers.) I asked K. where it was she wanted to stay if she didn’t want to stay at the Gateway. One of those Victorian hotels in the downtown area, all done up in velvet and Adirondack pine, where the high rollers come in to sip from the top shelf? We were craftier than that; we didn’t need to spend every bit of what we had in one of those Victorian hotels. The Gateway was the gateway to the forest, a couple hundred miles or more of it. Such was my argument.