Hotels of North America (4 page)

As a matter of fact, “artisan-crafted guest suites” were not the thing that moved me to take this room at the Sand Trap. Rather, it was that I saw certain gentlemen on the Sand Trap deck from the street, and I was listening to their conversation, and it was the conversation of these gentlemen that made me want to stay at the Sand Trap. They were not talking about golf, let me say here at the outset. They were talking as certain gentlemen talk when they are really interested in getting to know one another, when they are bent on opening up, and by this I mean, of course, that they were talking about their shifts. My sense is that men of a certain kind, when getting to know one another, will always talk at length about their shifts. You know:
That was that night in July when I pulled a double, a long night, and I wasn’t counting on having to go roust some kids who were trying to camp out in the abandoned plant, about as tired as I’ve ever been, practically seeing double, and those kids had all been drinking, and they really weren’t counting on anybody coming along and breaking up the party.
To which an interlocutor can only say,
I had to do a couple doubles in a row one time, I was doing security at the store, overnights, and I had to do a couple of nights in a row, because it was the lady’s birthday, it surely was, and I had to come up with some cash pronto to buy her something for her birthday, and I kind of got myself fixed on some jewelry, and so I had to stay up those two nights, and that is what it took.
No particular pathos is ascribed to this overwork, it’s just a discussion of the physical aspects of it.

Maybe, just maybe, on certain occasions, a fellow will ask another fellow exactly how much OT he has accumulated in a certain month, but this is usually later in the evening, when all of the possible sports-related conversations have already been depleted, after these men have already traveled to such layers of arcana as when a certain ballplayer will become a free agent, and therefore sports can no longer serve as a topic, then there will come a point when even the shift-related discussion will run out of steam, unless, perhaps, the conversation can extend to a comparison of swing shifts and graveyard shifts. For example, I heard one of these men on the deck, from where I was standing alone on Hemlock Street, totally alone, talking about how he actually preferred the graveyard shift, because he had nothing to get up for anymore, there was nothing in his life worth getting up for,
She moved out, you know, she moved on, said she didn’t understand me, that’s what she said, couldn’t go on if there wasn’t going to be even one minute when I expressed any type of kindness to her, and so she was gone, and the kids all cleared out already.
And another guy said,
One time I took the swing shift just to get away from her for a few weeks, I just filled in for this guy who had a back injury, and I came home when no one was awake, and then I’d just take some sleeping pills and drink a few beers.
Everyone had a good laugh.

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 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)

My cousin Dennis asked me if I would consider 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.