Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

In the middle of this smile it occurred to me that I could simply swipe the ice container off the tiny lacquered side table by my chair and dash it to the floor; the ensuing mess would direct attention away from the testicle stretching itself languidly en plein air, and I could then rush into the bathroom and perhaps straighten myself up a bit or at least throw a thin white mildew-inflected towel over my midsection. This I did, and I’m sure the swiping motion, in which all the ice went flying toward the door, did not look terribly realistic, and you can only imagine how distressed Dennis and Olga must have been to think that the man officiating at their service was a hip-waders-at-night kind of guy, but there was not time to dwell on this, because the ice was everywhere, and I got down on all fours and began trying to clean it up, and soon Olga was beside me, and I could smell her perfume, which she had probably put on just for this evening; in our shame, we were close together, she and I, we were investigators of shame, trying to make the most of the moment, and maybe she never saw the testicle at all, nor the slight varicose vein at the bottom of the testicle that I had sometimes had occasion to look at; maybe she hadn’t seen it at all, and I do not know why this motel was called the Viking Motel, and it leads one to wonder many things about Vikings. They did not last long on this continent, because of starvation and disease. They quickly headed back to Iceland and Denmark, in their spiritual devastation, where they could feud with one another and hack one another with axes named Head-Splitter and Tree-Foe. What the Vikings had to do with the Pacific Northwest, I cannot say, as it is my impression that no Viking ever lived in the Pacific Northwest.

Once Olga and I had cleaned up the ice and I had properly hiked up the hip waders, Dennis asked if everything was all right, and if they should be going. I said that I wanted to say something, and what I said was: Look here, we are in the Viking Motel for this purpose, the purpose of the moment in which you begin your lives together, and I just want to tell you how much it means to me that you have asked me to do this, and I know my father, wherever he is now, and your father were not terribly close, and we didn’t have that many opportunities when we were young to spend time together, especially because you lived down south, and I know that you are in a time of need right now, and so I am honored to be the fellow who helps you in your time of need. I have a lot of ideas about how to make this a special day, and I’d like to tell you about a few of my ideas, and I hope you can see that I make these suggestions out of love for you both and out of reverence for the love that you have for each other, and despite my own situation, I make these suggestions out of appreciation and admiration for the state of holy matrimony. And then I suggested that maybe we should have some kind of group hug, to indicate the seriousness of my purpose, and they consented to a group hug, though I had to gather Dennis in like he was a stray sheep and I the shepherd, but soon I could smell his perspiration and his clothes that had clearly never seen much bleach, and I held this couple close and said, This is the warmth that all good people are looking for, and that was when Dennis began to edge away. I continued, telling them that I had been compiling a list of things that had been done to me in my own marriage that I thought were inadvisable, that no one should do to another person in marriage, but by that point Dennis had his foot across the threshold of the Viking, and Olga stood beside him, and though I offered them a couple of stiff ones from a bottle of bus-station rotgut, they declined.

My feeling then was of forlornness, of the desperate inadequacies of this human linguistic apparatus that we employ to forestall, a little longer, aloneness, and of how futile these fumblings so often are. In the next lurch of solitude I began trying to add to the list of things not to say to someone in your marriage: Don’t ever use a pen while lying on the bed; don’t ever forget to put the cap back on a pen after using the pen; don’t ever use a pen if it’s new; put items in the refrigerator at ninety-degree angles; do not throw things in the bathroom trash if there are already a lot of things in the trash; don’t ever lie on the bed, made or unmade, in your clothes; don’t get into the bed without having showered; don’t put your bag on the bed, don’t put your bag on the chair, don’t put your bag on the counter, don’t put your bag on the table; don’t ever do the laundry; don’t bite your nails; don’t put the toilet paper facing out; don’t put the toilet paper facing in; don’t accelerate quickly; don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear a stripe and a plaid, don’t wear that shirt, that looks bad on you, that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you too, are you sure you want to wear that, that looks bad on you; please stay out of the house one night a week, please stay out of the house a couple of nights a week so I can have some privacy; don’t put that there; don’t put that there; that plastic cup was given to me by my grandmother; don’t use my towel; don’t use my bathroom; you don’t understand your own family; you don’t understand your own role in your own family; you don’t understand what people think of you; you don’t understand other people; you don’t understand me, you don’t understand yourself; I need money for clothes, I need money for credit cards, I need money for school; don’t cut your meat on the plate, that sound is awful, cut your meat on the cutting board before putting it on your plate; don’t touch me.

And when I was done with this list, which I wrote out on the bed with a pen that I didn’t cap afterward, I slumped onto a proper spot on the floor of my room in the Viking Motel and there I took up a close inspection of the carpet’s dust, blood, seminal fluid, Ritz Crackers, and insect parts.★★ (Posted 11/10/2012)

Steamboat Inn, 73 Steamboat Wharf, Mystic, Connecticut, May 3–4, 1997

Diversity of key and lock design in contemporary lodging is a subject that we need to address, and have needed to address for some time. That there should be some kind of industry standard for how the rooms lock and in the way that you enter the rooms — this does not seem too much to ask. In the old days, you had the little key with the brightly hued tag attached, If found, please drop in any mailbox . The postage was guaranteed. You were unlikely to keep the thing for long, because you could easily put it in a mailbox. What was the volume, at the USPS, of hotel and motel keys shipped back and forth across our great land? You can see how the constant duplication of physical keys would be a genuine business expense, because what if you have a guest waiting at that very moment, but the prior guest has run off with the last remaining key? (My favorite keys are the ones in Europe that are attached to little round baubles of lead so that you will not wish to carry the thing around with you. When you depart the premises, you are expected to give it to the philosophy student who is at the front desk overnight. Her hair is blond and straight, her lips are pursed, her English is workmanlike, she has tiny breasts, and she doesn’t want to talk to you, she wants to read Heidegger. So you give her the key so you won’t be tempted to carry the thing around and have it with you when you are set upon on some small footbridge and deprived of your credit cards and all your cash. As you walk across the bridge with your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) on this summer morning some months after you met in the wintry Midwest of America, a cute little kid in rags comes up to you and rubs his head against your hip, probably cutting a hole in your handmade Irish sweater, and then his friend comes along from behind and they speak to each other in their impenetrable dialect that you later recognize to be Carpathian. And you laugh at their apparent adorability, thinking nonetheless about how you are not supposed to carry your billfold in your hip pocket, how many times have you been told this? Is it some kind of evolutionary thing, that the Romany urchins are so cute? The kid in front is laughing at you and you are giving him a playful smack on the top of the head while the second one is cutting open your pocket with a switchblade. The whole thing is not meant to go unnoticed — on the contrary, it is meant to be noticed, because there’s an art to it, and they want the art to be appreciated — and that’s when the diversion starts: this one is a girl, and they’re feeling her up or something on another part of the bridge, and you rush toward her to defend her honor, but while you are going to do that, they are making Carpathian comments about your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife). Aș dori să dracu ‘soția lui. Doriți să dracu ‘soția lui? Ea are un fund mare. Ea este de mărimea unui automobil. Nu aș ști de unde să încep . And then you realize they’re counting the bills in your very own billfold, your pitiful supply of foreign currency, and off they run in different directions, with your passport too, and you don’t know which to chase, and the girl, the dishonored one, is refixing herself and laughing at you as well, and you reach for her wrist, as if she’s going to help you somehow, and in that way you come to dishonor her just as she was dishonored symbolically before. You let go of her, and she is fleet, as they all are, and you and your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) are standing there on the far side of the bridge now, divested of all worldly goods, having been welcomed into this central part of Europe.)