Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

This is all as it should be, until the trip back to the airport and the dreaded parting from the side of the language arts instructor, when you will be released back into your life, and then where will be all the devices, the serrated metal objects, the ropes and binder clips and clothespins that were attached to you in an attempt to get your attention? You should be forced to wear the binder clips on your intimate parts back into your life, instead of confining all of this torture to the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, which is actually squeaky clean and staffed by people who are of good humor, even though they are hosting a conference on the feminist art and literature of the seventies, a subject you know nothing about except what the language arts instructor tells you when she ties you up and threatens your life, vows to put out cigarettes on your inner thighs, and forces you to listen to incredibly long digests of the meals after conference events.

And then B. said that this was not a fair and equitable seating arrangement at the table, not if the department chair was going to sit at the head of the table. This was a revanchist seating arrangement. This was a seating arrangement that perpetuated certain self-hating stereotypes among people of color in the group, and really the best thing to do would be for all of them to stand around the table in a modular way, not in front of seats, but rather at some discreet distance from the seats, so that there would be an implicit reordering of seating customs, and so that the hierarchy of roles that left intact an unexamined privilege for white members of the delegation would be interrogated. That is, there would be no sitting down until they had had a discussion of these procrustean seating arrangements, a discussion that was feminine in the following way — indeterminate, nonlinear, unfixed, and nonteleological, but with syndicalist roots — until the group arrived, perhaps through some theoretical way, at a homosocial consensus, because anything short of homosocial consensus was a de facto reduplication of patriarchal structures, of neoliberal paternalist privilege, anything achieved through persuasion of a rigid sort was a replication of patriarchal structures, and even the shape of the table must be fit for negotiation, or at least under discussion, a biomorphic shape with negative space being preferable, because the fact that the restaurant had only a few circular tables and was more likely to push four-tops together to make sixteen meant that there would be an obelisk shape to the table, which was unacceptable, only a circular table would do, or perhaps an oval table, or, if there was enough discussion, perhaps a table that had a circle at one end and rectangular features at the other end, as long as the chair of the department was not at an end, because the point, the language arts instructor remarked, was to avoid anything that was demonstrably phallic, because we were there to have an important departmental meeting about which of the applicants we were likely to hire, and even though one of the applicants was, alas, a guy, he was the guy who was giving the paper on Stein, and the woman applicant was giving hers on Joni Mitchell post-1974, specifically the album called Hejira, and of course all of us revere Joni Mitchell, but we just think she’s not rigorous enough as a discipline, and this is of course when the language arts instructor attaches a clothespin to a certain intimate part of you.

It’s not the single most painful thing that ever happened to you — that would be, let’s see, the legal dissolution of your marriage — but it’s on the list. When you have several clothespins attached to you and you are directed to go stand by the window and watch the students marching across the quadrangle while you are whipped on the posterior region with a leather belt, then you begin, for a moment, to be distracted from increments of shame, while, it should be said, adding more increments of shame onto the total, so the entire experience — including the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, which you can barely remember except for the lobby and the bar and the kindliness of the concierge — is about the arithmetic of shame, the diminishment of shame by virtue of a certain amount of sexual torture, and the aggregation of shame by virtue of a certain amount of sexual torture, things placed in you in such a way as to magnify your worthlessness, both releasing you from feelings of worthlessness and increasing feelings of worthlessness. This is the basis on which you might evaluate whether sex in the hotel setting is somehow better than sex in a domestic setting. Does a preference for hotel sex necessarily summon up the shame/worthlessness metric, or does a preference for hotel sex lead to feelings of warmth and intimacy? Is the dilution of your marital bond, accomplished with a language arts instructor who tells you that you are an abject slave whose only purpose is to somehow keep the erogenous part of you going for another twenty-four hours, something to be proud of or something to be ashamed of, and is the oscillation between these thoughts enough to keep you alert at the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel during the long, tedious periods of ESPN watching? At least until the hour when she comes in and says, in fact, that she is no longer uncertain about moving on. ★★★★ (Posted 7/27/2013)

Sid’s Hardware, 345 Jay Street, Brooklyn, New York, October 8–10, 2008

Once I knew this guy in real estate. I didn’t contact the guy in real estate until my wife asked me to find a new address for myself, and then I contacted him. I asked if he knew anywhere I could stay for an extremely modest price while I figured out my next move. He said sure, I could stay in Sid’s Hardware, which had recently relocated to Gowanus, leaving their space downtown empty. It was more square footage (something like three thousand square feet) than any apartment I had ever had. My friend was the kind of guy who would stress the square footage and the location (downtown, convenient to mass transit and family court). The storefront was opaque, so no one would be able to see in, and I would not be able to see out. I asked my friend, jokingly, if the location featured poltergeists, because if I was going to stay in there by myself for a few days, I needed to know about all the paranormal activity. He laughed, and then there was an awkward silence. For the three days that followed, all I could think about was the silence. Was he trying to tell me something?

There were two and a half floors in Sid’s. The main floor was where the cash registers had been — this I knew because there was still a sign that said Cash Registers hanging from the ceiling. Adjacent and above, up some steps, there was a secured office space where Sid must have hidden himself, periodically taking time from the counting of profits to oversee what he imagined were the shifty and unprofessional cashiers. The office also housed the punch clock that had once been used to oppress the hourly indentured servants. This became apparent when, on the second night, I jimmied open the door to the office. The following were the other items remaining in Sid’s Hardware, all three thousand square feet of it, during my brief residence: a ladder, two dusty throw pillows, a hot-water heater, a beat-up old cassette/radio/CD player, one trash bin, some toilet paper, a shovel, a few pieces of posterboard, some tacks, some blue electrical tape, one large bag (a cubic foot or so?) of mulch (pine bark), and, downstairs, several seriously outdated computer monitors and printers that obviously were more expensive to dispose of than to leave behind. I brought with me the following items: an air mattress, a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow, a flashlight, some toiletries, a couple days’ changes of clothes, and a suit. I had almost nothing else, nor would I, after the divorce agreement was completed.