Hotels of North America Read online

  We were all alike when you got right down to it, myself included, because, though married, I was traveling alone in those days, having very recently extricated myself, at least for the time being, from a star-crossed and athletic dalliance, and so this was exactly the hotel for me, the hotel with the old-fashioned wall-mounted pay phone in the lobby, the hotel with the pool that had been drained of water, the hotel without the minibar, the hotel with the constituency of men who had fallen down on the job or who had had the reversal that they weren’t exactly talking about, the men who got up in the morning to shave and greeted their reflections with a few choice epithets, the men who had dreamed big when young and failed more spectacularly to develop these dreams, and when I got to the room, I realized that the artisan was exactly my kind of artisan. There were arachnids in every corner, and you could see all those people walking past on the way to the ice cream parlor or on the way to get saltwater taffy, and there would be no surprises, and the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair. ★★★★ (Posted 9/8/2012)

  The Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, December 27, 1970–January 2, 1971

  The proprietors of this web-publishing venture where I have now been posting for several months have expressed a preference that I refrain from libeling existing establishments and indicated that if my remarks cannot be confined to the merits of the particular hotel in question, they will have to ask me if I would consider posting elsewhere. But I know that you, the audience, are enjoying these essays on the nomadic compulsion, and I know this because while a lot of other people on this site simply vent their particular helping of bile and then move on to post on another site devoted to shoes, or intelligent design, or whatever, unlike those others, I actually have comments beneath my posts (u r the road warrior reg!). I read the comments that follow my own, and so I know that there are those of you on whom I have had an impact, and I know that the proprietors not only do not want me to take my opinions elsewhere, but want me to post more, and it is therefore reasonable to assume that theirs are cosmetic suggestions. Am I willing to play ball? Am I a utility infielder, a multipurpose kind of guy willing to tell you about one of the first hotels I remember staying in as a child, if that constitutes a respite from the truth as I practice it here? I am. I am willing to tell you such things, especially when some of you have been so kind as to ask about my early life. (See some of the comments from Dalmatian131, GingerSnap, WakeAndBake, et al.) Perhaps some of this early life material will serve as backdrop to the more contemporary posts above.

  My parents were parted early in my childhood. My father was an organization man, and he was often away, and he simply stopped returning to our address after a certain time. No explanation was offered. Or maybe there was an explanation but it was so vague as to be uninterpretable by the likes of me. What a dreadful experience for a young boy who just wanted the company of his dad, who just wanted to whack at baseballs in the backyard with the old man, who just wanted to be taught to use a circular saw, who just wanted to learn the rudiments of five-card stud or blackjack, who just wanted to understand the precise location of the clitoris or how to pronounce clitoris, or who wanted to learn how to order meat from a waiter, or who wanted to say the word meat with great gusto, or who wanted to learn the proper way to mix and shake a martini, or who wanted to learn to say good little piece of tail, or who wanted to contemplate the necessity of moving on, or who wanted to neglect to shave, or who wanted to learn the specifics of firearms, wanted to be able to eject a used shell, to drive with one hand and dangle the other out the window, to belch without shame, who wanted to drink in the morning, who wanted not to bother flushing the toilet, who wanted to learn to walk naked from the bathroom without worrying about who saw him, and who wanted to cut down his colleagues, his personal friends, in midsentence when he had to. Who would not want his dad when his dad was gone?

  After a year when my mother often retired to her chamber with aggravated attacks of nerves, she took up with a fellow I’ll call Sloane. I come from people whose first and last names are often reversible, and Sloane’s first and last names could have been reversed with no loss of plausibility, like Wendell Willkie or Forrest Tucker. Anyhow, Sloane was a guy my mother was fond of, and Sloane had certain avuncular qualities that made him unlike my father, as I remembered him. For example, Sloane did not implore you to shut the hell up, you little fucker, any time you made any noise, like when you trod from closet to bedside in your good shoes. Maybe Sloane tried a little too hard. He did, in fact, attempt to help me learn how to throw a couple of pitches overhand, saying that if I just let my fingers fall off the ball this way, I’d get a little bit of a curve; that is, if I threw with enough velocity. When you’re starved for this kind of contact, a little goes a long way.

  In any event, we were going to take a ski trip and all I knew of ski trips was that another fellow in my elementary school had come back from a skiing vacation with a compound fracture and a big cast, and everyone got to sign that cast, and they all used those felt-tip pens that were kind of new in those days, and that made this fellow Nicholas a popular lad, because everyone could sign his cast. I was afraid to break my leg, but I surely wanted the attention.

  Before we went skiing, though, we went to the Plaza Hotel, which for those of you who do not know is a hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that is occupied mostly by caliphs from various emirates. Sloane was an entrepreneur, or that is what he liked to say, though I have never met a man who said he was an entrepreneur who wasn’t some kind of fraud, but he had a daughter I liked just fine, and we all headed to the hotel. This was my first time in that city I have never quite solved, though I have worked hard at it. Now, I had certainly heard about Eloise, and there was my sister and girlfriends of my sister’s who had read all those Eloise books, and I knew the hotel was supposed to be glamorous, and there was the Oak Room, and I ran around the Oak Room, and no one stopped me from running around the Oak Room, where, I believe, I had my first ever Shirley Temple, and if anything gave me the taste for the bliss that is the afternoon cocktail, it was the Shirley Temple and the maraschino cherry. I couldn’t even say maraschino, but I knew I needed to have it. And then there was the Palm Room, and maybe it was the Palm Room that my sister and I did the running around in, and no one could stop us, because we knew that this would never be ours. It costs, I don’t know how much, seven hundred dollars a night for a room? And people can buy condos in there, and back when I was there, probably the only person who lived in it was Elizabeth Taylor or someone like that.

  I remember that we stayed over New Year’s Eve, and there was some talk from Sloane about going to watch the ball drop in Times Square—Honey, why don’t we take all the kids over there?—but my mother had no intention of going along with this, and so we watched it all on television, though we were only fifteen blocks away, and afterward my sister and I went running out into the corridor (Sloane’s daughter, the daddy’s girl, was long since asleep), because my mother and Sloane were taking no interest in our pastimes, they were in their room, romancing perhaps, and out into the hall of the Plaza we went, and we were free, running up and down the halls, and what other five-star hotel would let the kids of young couples from the suburbs go running wild, looking for Eloise and her staff pals? But we did it until, going around some corner, we were stopped short, and I looked up into the face of some older lady, makeup-less, unjeweled, wearing some kind of nightshirt, her face a lattice of wrinkles, such as might indicate untold wisdom, her face a ballad of experiences, and she held me by the shoulder, now looking right into my eyes, while my gaze took in her diaphanous nightshirt and her unknotted robe, her slack skin, and she said, Hush now, some of us are trying to sleep through all of this, and she gestured around. ★★★★ (Posted 10/13/2012)

  Viking Motel, 1236 North Detroit Avenue, Eugene, Oregon, August 15–19, 2011

  My cousin Dennis asked me if I would co
nsider officiating at his nuptial event, and I agreed and therefore needed to find a way to get myself ordained fast. Now, it occurred to me that officiating at weddings was a sideline, a moonlighting gig not at all dissimilar to my primary business line of motivational speaking. What kind of wedding-related oratory, after all, is not motivational at its core? Just about everything that comes out of your mouth in the nuptial theater inspires, transports. It seemed just and right that I should apply to the Infinite Love Church, which is one of those seminaries that ask of you only the eighteen dollars that will thereafter enable you to carry out the sacred rites associated with marriage. The Infinite Love Church requests that you read a few rather sugary pamphlets about their ecumenical views, and then they send you an e-mail confirming that you are in law ordained, after which you are advised to contact the county clerk wherever you are intending to serve to ascertain that an online ordination is considered valid in that state. In this case, the affianced parties were Dennis and his bride-to-be, Olga, of Ukrainian origin. Olga had been in this country since she was seven and had no trace of an accent. She favored brightly colored athletic gear, a little on the baggy side, as though she were trying to hide a third breast. She had read a lot of Dostoyevsky. I learned all of this at a meeting I had with Dennis and Olga, which seemed like something that I ought to do before conducting the nuptial ceremony. If you’re officiating, and you’re trying to seem as though you are an intercessor, that the Word of God speaks through you, then you had best meet with the parties concerned.

  Olga and Dennis came by the motel where I was staying while in town, the Viking Motel. (K. was still mad about the gambling losses in Saratoga Springs. And in this, she was blameless.) About the women loitering in the parking lot, let me just say: That is just youth culture! It’s a college town! (Go, Ducks!) And let me say too that Dennis did not deserve the long interval he served in the federal penitentiary for transporting copies of stolen material across state lines, and if anyone was capable of being rehabilitated in the penitentiary, it was Dennis, who met Olga while he was there. It was some kind of epistolary romance, permitted and facilitated by Dennis’s job in the prison library. Dennis was a trembly, nervous person, with an island of hair on the front of his forehead, a saddle horn, if you will, with not much else anywhere around it. He was thin and hunched and resembled one of those dogs that you see in public squares in Eastern European countries. Dennis had not found a way to be comfortable in the world. He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him. He said it was because he wore that necklace with the human tooth on it that his father had given him.

  At the Viking Motel there was a sign on the front of the vinyl-sided cottage that served as Reception, and that sign said Back Later, See James in Housekeeping. I never did see the sign removed. When James in Housekeeping finally did turn up, after Olga and Dennis stood out in the parking lot watching women in detachable skirts marching past, he sheepishly admitted that he had blood he needed to wipe up, and the proprietor never appeared at all, which was why Dennis had trouble finding me, neither he nor Olga having sufficient funds for a cell phone, or so they said. After I had drunk several bottles of beer, or more, awaiting their appearance (this behavior is sometimes called a relapse, and K. did not approve), staring at myself in a mirror on the wall by the bathroom that was so large I began to believe that I could walk into it, there was a knock on the door. Oh, mirror on the wall, who has the beginnings of an irremediable panniculus associated with middle age that no amount of dieting can affect? Who has more body hair than a bonobo? I was wearing only boxer shorts, in purple, when the knock came. The hip waders on the cabinet housing the television were for a planned fishing trip in the Cascades area, and I was unwilling to dislodge them to get corduroys out of my drawer. I therefore donned the hip waders. I could see, when I opened the door, that Olga was surprised by the outfit, and I begged her to understand that I was an unsurpassed angler and had a suit at the green dry cleaner up the block, as well as a tie with a naked woman on the reverse side.

  Dennis knew me well enough not to be surprised, however, and soon the two of them were sitting on the bed, somewhat uncomfortably. I poured them pop with some ice from the dispensary out by vending and then sat in the lone chair by the window, still wearing the hip waders, which were not suspended properly on my shoulders. I asked them, first of all, if their resolve with regards to marriage was earnest and true and characterized by profundities of desire and mutual support. I told them that marriage, as I had understood it during my own union (come to an end a couple of years before), was a sacred trust, and that many people married because they thought they were supposed to marry or because society expected it of them or because one of them was with child or simply because they were bored and did not know what else to do with their lives. But, I observed, it was possible to do better than this. It was possible to be changed by the revealing light of marriage. In proportion to one’s development in marriage, in proportion to the amassing of age-related epiphanic moments, in the habit of love that is marriage, it was possible, I said, for the beloved to become more ravishing, more perfect, as when ascending into the concentric rings of paradise, and that in marriage we come to find the flaws of the beloved less irksome and instead more delightful and endearing—like that weird spitting noise that the beloved sometimes makes when hawking up reserves of toothpaste, for instance, or that tendency the beloved has to nervously scratch her ankle over and over again, or how about her wearing two pairs of socks all the time?

  However, as I was saying these things, I happened to look down and notice that because of the odd layering of my own garments—that is to say, the boxer shorts and the hip waders, whose strap had fallen from one shoulder completely, resulting in a sort of bagging of the waders on one side of me and a concomitant riding up of boxer shorts on the other—one portion of the intimate area of my own person was bulging out the side of my shorts, the sack portion of my private self, and while some men have modestly sized testicular containers, I was not one of these men. It was not unknown to me previously, the occasion of that fleshy pouch becoming somehow visible, it was an ongoing problem, and as indeed this was the case now, I quickly looked up, hoping that Olga and Dennis had not glimpsed the bit of me extruded from the shorts via the falling-down and bunching hip waders. Believe me when I say it was one of those wardrobe malfunctions that only chance can bring about. If I could continuously maintain eye contact during the discussion, perhaps I could imperceptibly move the shorts a bit, or the waders, through some kind of isometric hip exercise, so that a bit of fabric would flap over the testicle and its colony of white hairs. I was driven to ever greater heights of rhetorical fancy in order to assure myself that Olga, in particular, continued to make eye contact with me and did not look down. I smiled like a mad person. Any false move or attempt to excuse myself could easily draw her eyes that way. I began looking around the room myself, in the hope that my darting eyes, alighting here on the extra-large sex mirror, there on the stain on the stuccoed ceiling, would likewise seduce her gaze.

  I asked Olga if the marital relations were satisfactory, if she could assure me that these relations were characterized by gentleness and intimacy and proper frequency, and there was a surging in-breath from Olga, which at first I worried was because she had finally witnessed my little semi-bald protuberance with its four white hairs fumbling for recognition, but in fact I think the in-breath was owing to the question being a probing and challenging one, and she thought for a while, and then said she believed that the intimate relations were intimate, and she said, as I recall it, Dennis is a very sensitive man who loves the bodies of women, and I am lucky to have a man like Dennis. Then I asked Dennis if the relations were sufficient from his point of view, and he said, In the time I was inside the penitentiary, I came to believe that I might never get to touch the body of a woman again, and so our love is a holy kind of thing, and here the
two of them smiled at each other, bashful smiles of the confederates of love.

  Next I asked them about money; I said that it was the lot of some people in the world never to figure out the money problem, and there was no shame in this, because love endured beyond money, and did each of them understand this, and was each of them willing to do the working part, the moneymaking part, if the other was unable physically or was for some other reason unemployed, whether because of felony conviction or ADHD? Olga opined that she had known poverty in Ukraine when it was under the control of the Soviet regime, and her father had for many years had a job as a machinist in which he did nothing at all, he simply showed up at work in a certain dilapidated factory and then came home and spent what little he had on Latvian vodka, and she certainly hoped that the Land of Opportunity would have more monetary reward than that, but as long as Dennis loved her and took her to the movies twice per quarter, then it would be okay. After which Dennis said that he had seen the light about trying to make money by transporting stolen goods across state lines, and now he simply wanted to be, as he said, legit, and if that meant the loading dock, then the loading dock it was. And again they looked at each other and smiled.