Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Union Station, Water Street, New London, Connecticut, May 13–14, 1984

How grateful I am that you guys have named me a top reviewer on this site! You and I are people conjoined by a belief in sincerity and by a basic agreement about what that means. I’m not going to say the hair dryer in the room didn’t scorch a hole in the wall if it did. That’s just who I am. Say you are staying in a hotel room in Hilton Head, South Carolina, that was used shortly before you took occupancy for the filming of an adult movie, perhaps because of the sybaritic amenities of the hotel and the appearance in the backdrop of southern vegetation, such as Spanish moss. Don’t you want to know that this is the kind of hotel that allows such uses, the kind of hotel that might clean up a little bit and spray around some disinfectant but doesn’t bother to eradicate the condom that is draped across the desk chair that had been wheeled into a corner so that the makeup girl could linger there before applying more concealer to the buttocks of the principal actress?

Which reminds me: I have often desired to have an infrared camera of some kind that could detail the dried, encrusted seminal fluid that is surely concealed on hotel-room bedspreads, which we all know are not routinely cleaned. Should we not be trying to create a national conversation on the subject of cleaning the unlaundered bedspreads of the world? I think there should be a referendum on the laundering of those bedspreads. Is it not worth saying aloud, if you are a well-respected reviewer on a well-respected hotel-rating website, that the fact that we accept these bedspreads as reasonably clean is hard to fathom? Is this just where we find ourselves, in a world where the bedding in every unregulated public space is heavily encrusted with dried seminal fluid? It’s true, the sheets were changed this morning, the old ones taken down to a subterranean cave where a group of Hispanic women stirred the sheets in gigantic vats of bleach and probably threw in frogs and newts and cursed you and your Gringolandia, but your bedspread has been in touch with chlamydia, scabies, human papillomavirus, and crabs, and on that bedspread two college students who borrowed their parents’ credit cards and charged the night’s lodging (in order to get away from their roommates) made four hours of furious love without bothering to peel back the bedspread, because their urgency made the peeling back unnecessary, and maybe you lie awake some nights in your hotel wondering why you do not have the urgency that the college students had, but that does not mean you want to sit on that bedspread, or put your windbreaker on that bedspread, thereby coming into brief contact with the vermin cataloged above.

My own college career, which was spotty and episodic, mainly took place in the so-called college of life, also known as “The Land of Steady Habits,” and on one occasion close upon my graduation (which took place in the seventh year of my undergraduate studies and had involved a lot of moving around between departments: premed, English literature, philosophy, and then business), I traveled a little farther to the east of the Nutmeg State in order to try to make contact with a girl on whom I had some kind of feverish and mostly imaginary crush. The girl in question was staying with her family on Long Island, and I determined to take a ferryboat from the run-down and hard-luck town of New London, Connecticut. There are roadhouses upon roadhouses in New London. And a very few strip clubs, and a lot of people with missing limbs. I was young and poor, and I was bent on love the way a crow is bent on a flattened squirrel, and so I made my way to New London, regardless of the lateness of the hour; no, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour. I climbed down from the Amtrak train at Union Station and jogged toward the ferry company’s ticket office, carrying (clumsily) my overnight bag — whose zipper had long since given out and which was now closed only with safety pins — desperate for reunion with this girl (I’m leaving out her name), only to find that the last ferry of the evening had already left.

Suddenly, I had a lot of time. The temperature was not exactly as balmy as it ought to have been for a night in May, and, as I recall, the moon was gibbous. I walked into one roadhouse and feared for my life and I walked into a second roadhouse and feared for my life and so returned to the train station, only to find it closed and locked. I had no money and no protectorate, and there was nothing to do but find a place there by the station to wait out the night and reevaluate my plans in the morning. This was the time before mobile telephony. I was young, in love, and free, and so I settled down beneath a shrub. No doubt the local authorities assumed that I was like other drifters of that town, all of them protesting their waning relationship to New London’s once great whaling operations, or I was perhaps obsessed with the nuclear submarines across the river Thames. In any event, there I slept for several hours, with no worldly possession that anyone could take from me, with nothing but my earnestness for any who should pass by. I don’t want to tell you what happened later the next day with the girl. ★ (Posted 4/13/2013)

Emerald Campsites, 1373 Route 9, Corinth, New York,

June 24–27, 1991

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.