Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

My real estate friend, Brice, left Sid’s open and a key just inside. He observed that no one on earth would want to break into Sid’s, even though it was downtown near several large, cut-rate shoe emporia of the Fulton Mall neighborhood, and this was not exactly a statement that comforted me, when, on the eighth of October, my wife sent me a proposal for the division of property involving my surrender of enormous amounts of savings and items of nostalgic import. I traveled by train to the Jay Street location and arrived at Sid’s fully believing that there could be persons of a heroin-addicted, Night Train — drinking, or paranoid-schizophrenic nature living in Sid’s, having taken advantage of its recent neglect. Sid’s could easily, from the exterior, have been a front for some kind of psyops outfit, or a street ministry for some splinter church, or perhaps a sub-rosa battalion from NYPD Internal Affairs, full of stalwart and idealistic young cops about to infiltrate a corrupt precinct in the Clinton Hill area.

My first impression of Sid’s was that among the traces of failed capitalist endeavor were all the varieties of quiet. Commerce is never quiet. This is why casinos are the least quiet places of all. Sid’s Hardware was quiet like few places. This despite the fact that several bus lines went past, and the subway traveled beneath it, and in the diurnal hours, there were a lot of people going to the office towers just down the block. Sid’s Hardware was quiet. From the cash registers up front, you moved back into the main floor, which must have been heavily mirrored once and hung with a variety of home-renovation products, tools, grades of sandpaper in handsome packets, and kinds of PVC tubing. (I find PVC tubing uplifting.) Alas, the walls, which closed in on any resident of Sid’s, no longer bore any trace of mercantile purpose. A tiny water closet by the elevator would have just barely permitted the morning-sickness crouch of certain cashiers who had been impregnated by the raging and wildly alcoholic night manager, Padraig, who came from County Mayo and had no papers. Padraig was also known to vomit up the Jameson’s that he had drunk in the half-gallon size the night before at O’Lunney’s, just around the corner. He was frequently unable to remember who had won at darts. Sid himself had type 1 diabetes and was in danger of losing both feet to poor circulation, and he often shot up his insulin in the water closet, and none of his employees knew of his problem because he felt it was undignified to describe his illness in public.

Some steps at the back of the first floor, past the tiny water closet by the elevator, led up into an inner sanctum just off the HVAC apparatus. The farther back I got into the empty and silent Sid’s spaces, the farther I got from whatever there was about civilization that recommended civilization over its opposite; the inner sanctum was where Sid’s offered safe passage into the wild and unpredictable, which happened to coincide with my defenestration from matrimony. Indeed, what was keeping me from running loose across state lines with a one-legged prostitute and some open containers, plotting embezzlement and get-rich-quick schemes, insider trading and arms dealing? The back door of Sid’s, past the ducts and plumbing lines, exited, according to this argument, onto the loading dock of a fertilizer wholesaler in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gateway to the Midwest, where some guys were plotting fell deeds and wearing hoods at night. These guys and their pals imprisoned women in basements across the region. At first I thought to put my air mattress in exactly this room because a little bit of poison inoculates, but I decided, instead, that I did not want to be on my way to Lancaster and its horse-and-buggy rigs and antigovernment spectacles. But in the end I set the air mattress out on the main floor, where the outlines of human bodies had somehow been drawn onto the walls with blue masking tape. The demolition crews must have done it, the guys looting Sid’s of its everything-must-go items.

I found, the first night at Sid’s, that I could not wear my own clothing. I found that in Sid’s I needed to wear someone else’s clothing, and so the next day, on the Fulton Mall, I bought some camouflage pants, a muscle T-shirt, and a faux-silk bathrobe, as well as a kind of sash that I wound into a turban, and I stripped down to the most naked possible version of Reginald Morse and gazed at myself in the convex mirror of Sid’s water closet, noticing that, yes, there were five or ten pounds that had not been there a few years ago, that my nose seemed to have grown ceaselessly, that there were gossamer blood vessels summiting the ridge of my nose, and that I appeared to have, not full-fledged breasts, but some kind of sagging pectoral musculature. I looked like a child’s seasonal confection in the middle of a bad melt; I couldn’t have aroused myself in Sid’s even if I had wanted to, though I could weep with abandon in the three-second reverb of that space so that the sound of weeping lasted long after its proximate cause. Indeed, weeping hung in the room after I covered my nakedness with the used clothing of the Salvation Army, wondering if there was a friend, beside my real estate friend, Brice, who was interested in where I was. Would you have wondered, regular posters on Rate My Lodging? Was it the case that my wife had made a horrible mistake by ordering me off the premises? Did she ever feel regret in her tiny, ginger, five-foot frame? Was it the case that the galaxy of our union was expanding in such a way that we, its constituent points of light, were now farther apart than we had ever been and were getting ever farther apart at an unimaginable velocity?

On the third day, I ventured into the elevator of Sid’s and down into the basement, the quiet of which was matched with a soupy blackness, and as I penetrated into the blackness, I became less and less enamored of the light until the light was only a certain rectangle of door, scarcely ajar, across forty yards of cinder-block isolation. There was a whiff of musty stillness, as though a flood had once washed into those depths. I had recoiled as far as I could recoil under the circumstances, and I sat there for some hours trying to disassemble computer parts in the gloom, as though there could be a monetary purpose for doing so, and I might have stayed there with the computers had it not been that someone else rented Sid’s, and so Brice had to come around and persuade me out.

I had taken to playing the jazz stations on the old radio/CD player on the main floor, and first thing in the morning I listened to one particular expert opine on the variorum recordings of Charlie Parker, and when Brice came in, I was unsure if it was really Brice or if his yammering was, instead, the jazz expert’s. Up and out of the basement I came, dusty and carrying a length of copper wire, which I would have believed was implanted in my brain had I stayed another day. Brice said, What the fuck are you doing down here? I said, Dictating my memoirs . Brice said, Well, you gotta get out of here, because we just had someone sign a short-term lease. I said, Who? Brice said, You’ll know soon enough. I was released into these my travels, my permanent condition of travel, and there was no one now who could stop me. Three weeks later, I happened onto Jay Street, and my footsteps brought me inevitably back to the exterior of Sid’s. It had been rented to a political campaign. ★★ (Posted 8/3/2013)

Cabinn City Hotel, Mitchellsgade 14,

København, Denmark, August 24, 2012

The hotel room without a clock must be made to see the error of its ways. What is the purpose of the hotel room without a clock? Is it the same as the purpose of the clockless casino interior, where you are heedless of the days, attentive only to the harlot who keeps bringing you drinks? Have you ever had that experience in which you are walking in a big-box retailer that is exactly like every other big-box retailer, and while you feel you know exactly where you are, you also feel as though you don’t know where you are at all, and suddenly all the racks of inexpensive Chinese-made garments conceal the exit, until you feel as if there is not an exit, and you have the illusion that you could circumambulate forever in the big-box retailer, never quite repeating? Have you ever felt that you didn’t exactly know the way out and panicked? What would it cost this chain of inexpensive inns in the Low Countries to outfit each hotel room with a small, battery-powered clock?