Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

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.

It is true that some people imagine I invented you, that in order to be certain that the thread of comments below my posts are adequate to my purpose, I have found it necessary to imagine a first-generation Mongolian immigrant with a stent in his right coronary artery and a peanut allergy whose father was a tyrant, who votes like a pipe fitter from Indianapolis, and who is constantly trying to get women on this site to pay attention to him, and that I have done this simply in order to boost attention to my comments. On the contrary, I think it will be obvious to anyone who considers the facts for long enough that I could not dream up the likes of you, and your grisly English, and your outbursts of French, and your relentless talk about the private day school you once attended. I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.

Before I lodge my rating of the dismal Presidents’ City Hotel, let me say a few words about the ratings here on RateYourLodging.com. While I passionately believe in half-star increments (in a ★★★½ star rating, for example) where appropriate, RateYourLodging.com does not permit a half star, and this is a disappointment. Their argument is that if you’re going to have half stars, why not have a ten-point rating system instead of a five-point rating system? And you can understand their rationale. Nevertheless, at times like these, when faced with rating the Presidents’ City Hotel, you wish you did have a half star. Over time, and given a voluminous knowledge of reviews past on the RateYourLodging.com site, you will want, as I have, to split the hairs more and more finely, finding in the astute perception of basic services a will to critical refinement that requires more perfectly calibrated equipment, for which stars one through five seem ill-suited. ★ (Posted 6/8/2013)

Americas [ sic ] Best Value Inn, 150 West Dussel Drive, Maumee, Ohio, November 21–24, 2002

How the two of them slept, that formerly married couple at the center of some of my online work, is to be recorded today as a way of discussing what happened and how this married couple came to the period in which they no longer slept together at all. At first, they slept almost exclusively after lovemaking, though neither of them would, now, describe it as lovemaking; rather, they would choose a more clinical and neutral term so as to avoid seeming, in retrospect, intimate. They slept after lovemaking, because that is what one does after lovemaking, in the condition between waking and dreaming, and so, afterward, they were going from the one place to the other place, and they were a tangle of limbs (1). Isn’t a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don’t you wish to be in a tangle of limbs? Ought it not be the case for those who have given up some of the hope required to continue with this charade that they should be offered the opportunity to go and see a tangle of limbs in a bed somewhere, or even a photograph of a tangle of limbs, postcard-size, in order that (some) hope may be restored? For example, the feminine head reclining on the masculine chest — is that not, in some cases, the most agreeable tangle of limbs? How about the position in which the feminine arm is carelessly thrown over the masculine face? Or where a pillow is mushed, to use the colloquial term, against a rib cage, and a head pressed deeply into the pillow, so that head rests partially upon rib? It is the carelessness of the tangle of limbs that provides an individual-size serving of hope, the absolute careless placement of limbs, involving some employment of the concept of akimbo, which word may be related to the Icelandic kengboginn (“bow-bent”), all while sleep takes place.

If the tangle of limbs (1) was the first of their approaches to sleeping together, the second approach was rugged individualism (2), in which they would begin the overnight in the tangle of limbs, thinking back on the very first tangle as though it were the greatest time, the greatest tangle, and they were not so distant from it. They would start out in this slightly nostalgic tangle, and then they would migrate to a position that somehow seemed more comfortable, because, after all, the blood flow in the arm was being occluded, and one of them did have a little back pain and needed to roll over onto a side, and, naturally, at first, rugged individualism meant facing each other, and perhaps kissing each other a few times before drifting off, and then maybe it didn’t quite mean this, or the kissing part was forgotten, and there were a few words exchanged, a few kindnesses, and then they rolled away, and rolling away was so horrible at first, almost anyone would agree that rolling away is horrible, and yet it is a necessary thing, if you believe in the tenets of rugged individualism, because the first obligation of sleep is simply the sleeping part of it, but then the miracle of resilience is to be found in the fact that they came to find the rolling away somewhat acceptable, if solitary, and they rolled away, drifted off, sometimes pretty quickly, in their private dreams (some of these were nightmares).