Hotels of North America (8 page)

I once worked at a summer camp. It had one of those unpronounceable Indian names, and it was located near the mighty Adirondack Park. I was the head counselor of the junior section, exceedingly adult by summer-camp standards, and these kids, many of whom must have had families staying in the vicinity for the summer, were affluent. They would come for the day, do hiking and sports and a little nature identification, have some chipped beef on toast around a campfire, and then head home. Our workdays were in the ten-hour category, and when they were over, most of the counselors needed to let off a little steam, which often involved sodden nights of drinking at biergartens in the Lake George area, where you could also see the tallest freestanding Uncle Sam in the Lower Forty-Eight.

It’s important to mention two things about my time at the summer camp with the unpronounceable name. First, I was, in that period, associating myself with Irena, the beautiful and high-strung daughter of a neurologist. Her neurologist dad had been a child in hiding in Poland during the Holocaust, stuck in a basement with his sister for eighteen months, nothing to read except Christian scripture while his parents were off being killed by the Nazis. Her father, gentle, brilliant, and full of barely suppressed feeling, was in many ways the opposite of Irena, who was whippet-thin, given to tempers of startling adamance, and jealous far in excess of what could be borne. Had she been a man, Irena would have been the kind of guy who makes his girlfriend wear a tracking device when she goes out for groceries. That’s the first thing about my time at the unpronounceable camp: Irena.

And the second thing about my time at the unpronounceable camp was Monique. Five or six years older than I was, Monique taught pottery at the summer camp. She was tall, quiet, easygoing, with hands like a lobsterman’s and a sardonic sense of humor. She was always covered in glaze and crumbs of clay. Monique and I had not consummated our intense fondness for each other, and I mostly stayed clear of her when I could, ducking behind trees and claiming other engagements whenever we chanced to pass, an easy enough excuse to make because I did in fact carry a clipboard and a golf pencil and was always looking for, say, a camper who had sprayed his shorts with aerosol, set them on fire, and was now attempting to don them. One night only, after Monique and I had sat by the canoes trying to recite as many children’s books from memory as we could,  I seized one of her hands (which is why I am able to describe them in detail), crying out with gratitude, and then, before I knew what I was doing, her hand, as if I could take it away from her, was in my lap, and I was holding it and studying it, and she leaned in to make this possible, and there we sat in silence, doing something fabulously erotic, at least if you are permitted nothing else by reason of a jealous daughter-of-a-Holocaust-survivor girlfriend.

Next day, Irena arrived for her weekend visit. She drove a Volkswagen Rabbit, despite the fact that the Volkswagen corporation was well known during the war for using slave labor, and the car had a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, no rearview mirror, problems with the transmission (you needed to start it in second gear), and a driver’s-side window that would not go up all the way. Irena liked to camp. Despite the fact that I was working at a summer camp and often took the kids up a hill at rest hour to bed down in a lean-to that we had erected for this purpose, I personally hated the outdoors. I cannot count the number of ways I hate camping, though the foremost reason is this: While camping, there is always a root sticking into the lumbar region of my spine during the night hours. A hundred air mattresses have I inflated during my life, and under no circumstance, air mattress or not, have I ever managed to steer clear of the root in the lumbar region. You are always, when camping, waking at some hour and trying to find a slightly different spot that does not feature a root or igneous outcropping.

In any event, Irena, because she was thrifty and liked camping, had already selected a fine lodging for us, namely the Emerald Campsites of Corinth (emphasis on second syllable), New York, which did enable RVs to pump out and did have hot showers available. (I guess in those days it was still not impossible to get a cold shower at the campground.) There was a barn on the property in which there were a few amenities, such as a soda machine, and then there was a doublewide where the owners of the property could be scared up, if needed. Almost all the campers there, when we pulled in, were RVs, and we picked a campsite for our tent that was as far from the RVs as we could get and still be on the site. The woods were carpeted with pine needles, thick with this carpeting, and very quiet, or maybe it was just quiet because I was there without a large group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, each bent on the candy bars that I had hidden away for them after rest hour. It bears mentioning that upon seeing Irena, the waves of guilt that I was feeling for having held Monique’s large, gnarled, clay-besmirched hands were intense and powerful. But I would have done it again just the same, and I later did. Having erected the tent, I was meant to perform some simulation of reunion with Irena while thinking about gnarled, clay-besmirched hands, and to tell stories of summer camp, the various brats with their various charms, without talking about Monique. This was scarcely possible.

We had to find something to do other than sitting out there in the quiet of the woods failing to make love, and so we ambled down into a grove of pines to the red barn, and there we spent some quarters on a couple of carbonated soft drinks, and we noticed that in the barn was a Ping-Pong table. It happened that I was rather a good Ping-Pong player and had been playing recently with one of the other counselors who was from China, where it wasn’t called Ping-Pong. He held the paddle in that Chinese fashion and was extremely gifted with spin, as though Ping-Pong were particle physics. And so Irena and I played the sport of table tennis, because I was freshly schooled in it. I could not but win.

After a couple of games, a screen door slammed up at the doublewide belonging to the campground’s proprietors, and a certain species of uncle lurched out wearing a T-shirt that did not quite cover his prodigious beer gut, which overspilled some baggy jeans that could not be compelled to hang around his abundant waist. He had a Narragansett beer, foaming over the lip. He must have heard the tinny carom of the Ping-Pong ball; he must have been lying in wait for it. Did I say that he was indisputably drunk, completely potted, staggering, slurring, incoherent, but nevertheless totally bent on challenging me on the Ping-Pong table? He must have believed, the uncle, that his drunkenness somehow improved his game, and that was just one of many delusions associated with his alcohol-related disability. Irena turned over her paddle, and the uncle made certain gestures that I interpreted to mean that the game had now commenced. As would likely be the case under these circumstances, the uncle could not play well. While he had a way of winding up to serve that must have been graceful once, in some prior decade before the advance of his alcoholism, by the time he was playing against me, this windup was more residual than helpful. He missed the ball frequently, he couldn’t serve, his table coverage was minimal. And his slam, which grew more urgent the more lopsided the score became, soon acquired an edge of irritation, even coiled anger. I was worried that my purposefully throwing some points would be recognizable to the uncle and that he would interpret this as a kind of disrespect. But, fortunately, he was so wasted that I got away with it. I swatted at a few things that sailed the ball off into the recesses of the barn, and the uncle had to go root around in the dirt and straw, happy, nonetheless, that he was on the scoreboard.

Of course, I pummeled him in the first game. I don’t believe he got to double digits. Still, he wanted play again, and then when I threw even more points, watching Irena watch the proceedings with a nervous, gaping anxiety, I won again, and then won a third game, and still the uncle would not give up. Rivulets of infected spittle streamed down his chin as he tried to concentrate in ways that divided him from his fog bank, so that he appeared to be watching himself fail, in a state of curiosity and mounting shame. Which caused him in turn to suck on his tall boy all the harder. The light was failing in the barn, and a few kids had happened along to watch as the uncle went down to ignominy, and maybe they were happy about it, because he was a drunken wretch, and he was unpredictable and treated them poorly. At last, after the fourth game, at which I was also victorious despite my efforts to be otherwise, I said something about how we had to get some dinner, and we left.

Irena and I whispered, gasped, and stifled cackles about how laughable the uncle had been until we got back to our tent, made cheese sandwiches by Coleman lantern, and then, in each other’s arms, tried to sleep. In the forest, you know, though it is the placidest location of anyplace, it’s hard not to think about murder. In the silence there is murder; in the murmuring of night owls there is murder; in the occasionally snapped twig caused by some fawn happening by there is murder, and it’s worse when you have just beaten the alcoholic proprietor, not just once but four times, at Ping-Pong, and all you can think about is that he knows which campsite you’re squatting on, and if he wants to come by with his chain saw, he can. He’ll simply tell the local paper that you never showed up at all.
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(Posted 5/11/2013)

Dear KoWojahk283, I do thank you for your generous comments on my posts, among which I especially appreciated your suggestion that I hang out my own shingle. As you know, this is exactly how I began on my current career. I hung out the proverbial shingle re motivational speaking. First I was in investment banking, and then I did a little day-trading, and then I became a motivational speaker, after which, as you know, I began publishing some of these writings about hotels I have stayed in. It is fair to say that over the years of motivational speaking, I’ve had a real impact on the lives of many friends and coworkers through my counsel in such areas as professional life and love. I think my overarching theme, if I were called upon to reveal one, would be
You Can Do It.
I believe in a phrase like
You Can Do It,
I believe it is a phrase with an
energy emulsion.
We should all take the time to think back on where we have failed those close to us, and we should all try to imagine that special adviser and counselor who would be willing to sit down with us, give a light, friendly smack upside the head, and then tell us:
You Can Do
It.
You can overcome these moments of horror. You can employ the
energy emulsion.
I, for example, remember some things that I said in elementary school, and the shudder of misery I experience during the reconsideration of these incidents is prolonged.
You Too Can Do It,
KoWojahk283. Having said this, I suspect that you, KoWojahk283, are going to be the one who complains that Presidents’ City Inn of Quincy sports no possessive apostrophe in the name even though it does. And then you will type:
Hotel room not clean services bad [
sic
],
as though this conveys the specifics of your dissatisfaction.

I can’t say I enjoyed staying at the Presidents’ City Inn, and I am reasonably certain that I heard prostitution happening in the stairwell outside the room, and I may also have heard prostitution in the room adjacent to mine, I just cannot be sure that a fee was exchanged, and when I am not sure, I don’t include the relevant details in order not to expose myself legally. I could not yet present my reviewing credentials at the front desk, as I had not yet published a review, but I had a confirmation number, and I had paid in advance. At times it seemed as though the fellow at the front desk and I were not communicating in exactly the same tongue, and it is true that there was thick Plexiglas between this staff person and me while we had our discussion, and it is likewise true that he failed to make eye contact (one of the very basic requirements in my motivational-speaking class).

I quickly realized that the three-figure price I had paid through a third-party discounter was far in excess of what was warranted under the circumstances. Please note the high fence around the Presidents’ City Inn, and the rather sinister men ambling around outside, and the sheets with cigarette holes in them, and Continental breakfast of white bread and bagels but an inoperable toaster and not so much as a little single-serving sleeve of grape jelly. I didn’t sleep ten minutes while there and lived in fear of the possibility that this was not just a motel, this was a bad-luck bazaar, all poor decision-making and synthetic opiates, and while lying in bed in the Presidents’ City Inn I understood that
L’accueil est deplorable la ventilation de la salle de bain fait autant de bruit qu un moteur d’avion,
which is you, KoWojahk283, breaking badly into another language, as you do on occasion in your comments. But just because I am not willing to go as far as you in the language of outrage does not mean, despite your suggestion, that I am an employee of the hotel or motel about which I post my remarks.

In fact, I take umbrage, a little bit, at this suggestion. I am not an employee of any lodging establishment, and certainly not of the Presidents’ City Inn, whose employees are probably mortuary students or compulsive masturbators or people from countries where the citizenry subsists on less than a dollar a day. I have never been an employee of the Presidents’ City Inn, nor have I been an employee of any other motel, KoWojahk283. In order to operate free of conflict of interest as a reviewer, I never take any perquisites from any hotels, motels, or professional establishments, or at least I take no perquisites that are not available to the rank-and-file consumer (check for those online coupons, fellow hotel enthusiasts), and I will not be spoken to in this way. Please do not repeat your remarks that I have lost my edge, that I have grown soft from the months on the road, that I am middle-aged, as it is scarcely possible for a middle-aged person to have the kind of flexibility required to stay at a place like the Presidents’ City Inn, to demand a refund after two or three hours, and then to go sleep in the car, because it is safer there.