Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Have you ever waked in the middle of the night in a hotel without a clock and felt the desolation of timelessness, of living outside time, of the purgatorial way station outside of time? Have you ever waked in such a condition and realized that you were in an endless stream of bad hotels and that though you might alight in some apartment — say, in the New York metro area — your life, in essence, had become a sequence of hotels, and that you had become this way because you were a top-ranked reviewer at an online hotel-reviewing organization with no job security, very little money, and uncertain prospects? Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night in a hotel without a clock where you had come straight from the airport, at dawn, having slept not more than an hour or two, smelling like the yeasty interior of the red-eye, to find that the hotel was significantly flooded because of days of heavy rain, and that when you manually pushed back the broken automatic door of the hotel you had to slosh through a lake in Reception, where there was a cheerful and blond Danish lady who waved at you and said something in Danish about (you presumed) the flood, until you mentioned that you didn’t speak dansk, whereupon you strode gamely past, because your true love and life partner, named Tanager for this trip, was already in the room, having flown ahead of you, from Germany, where she had been consulting for a new media-business panel that you helped her get? Have you ever waked in this room with the fresh trauma still in mind, not a room, exactly, so much as a sort of adult-size changing table that looked like it folded down — two fold-down bunks, in fact, upper and lower, of which the lower also served as desk chair — with the sink directly adjacent, around which a moldy curtain could be drawn so as to provide modesty while you crouched over a toilet jammed into a corner by the shower to pass a bloody bowel movement before hosing yourself off with one of those handheld shower wands that therefore was capable of being sprayed fully around the room and that drained out onto the floor by the bed so that if you needed to shower while in bed, you really could have done so? Have you ever waked in such a hotel and wondered at the fact that you were paying money to be in this hotel?

You were somehow duped into paying Danish kroner to stay in this hotel although the lobby was flooded with inches of water, and your room for two, smaller even than your room at the Groucho Club, was exactly the size of a prison cell and whose only premium amenity was a moldy curtain, but otherwise the hotel was so like a prison as to be indistinguishable from a prison, and there was no clock. Have you ever been in such a room? Is it not the case that in your timelessness, your jet lag and clock-free feverishness, you imagined, for days after this experience, that you were seeing Cabinns everywhere, each with its complement of students and foreign travelers trying to pretend that the Cabinn was not happening, amazed that there could be so much degradation and that it could still be called a consumer-oriented business and not a reeducation facility? Was it possible that the Cabinn was not covered under the Geneva Conventions or under the United Nations Refugee Agency? Should you go directly to the København commune of Christiania to try to score some heroin after the Cabinn experience? Wouldn’t you, if you were more than one night in that clockless interior, try to score some smack in Christiania? Is there any way that this clockless interior was humane? Is it not in the nature of all things to be time-based, so that in all things you felt the steady march of that dimension of our natures, the decay? Was it not yours to total up how much time was lost in each and every chapter of your life? Your every failure?

You were never going to get back the night you spent in the Cabinn. You were never going to get it back. At the end of your life, you would think back on the time wasted, and you would think it was really not right that you were unable to reclaim the night you spent in the Cabinn in Denmark, but you won’t even be able to say definitively how many hours you spent in the Cabinn, because there was no clock there, and you forgot one of those little European adapter guys so that you could type up your recollections of the Cabinn, but that would have been hard anyway because the only plug was in the bathroom area, where the water spillage was enough that you would definitely have been electrocuted if you had tried to plug in any electrical appliance. You have no idea how long you were there, though it felt like it went on endlessly, and so you cannot even file some claim for the losses of that night. It was and now it’s gone. ★ (Posted 8/24/2013)

Hyatt Regency Cleveland at the Arcade, 420 Superior Avenue East, Cleveland, Ohio, October 19–20, 2012

I have stayed in Omaha, and I have stayed in St. Louis, and I have stayed in Manchester, and I have stayed in Springfield (it almost doesn’t matter which Springfield), and I have stayed in Sarasota, and I have stayed in Albany, and I have stayed in Providence, and I have stayed in New Brunswick, and I have stayed in Trenton, and I have stayed in Columbus, and I have stayed in Milwaukee, and I have stayed in Davenport, and I have stayed in Worcester, which may be the saddest American city I have ever stayed in, and I have stayed in Stamford, and I have stayed in New Haven, and I have stayed in Albuquerque, and I have stayed in Fort Worth, and I have stayed in Moscow (the one in Idaho), and I have stayed in Tacoma, and I have stayed in Denver, and I have stayed in Edina, and I have stayed in Rutland, and I have stayed in Lewiston, and I have stayed in Elko, Nevada. In each of these municipalities, you could feel these American cities grabbing you by the lapel and trying to remind you that they were not nearly as bad as they manifestly appeared out the window of either the hotel or the rented vehicle. And yet in no case was any American city as woebegone and desperate to change its story as Cleveland.

This particular trip was my third trip to Cleveland in a year, and perhaps it is simply that the people of Cleveland are in need of additional motivation. On this occasion, I was speaking to a church group in Shaker Heights on ideas of fitness. Prior to these three trips, despite being in my sixth decade, I had never been to Cleveland, notwithstanding my admiration for the hard-luck baseball team that hails from this locale. You would think, from its hard-luck veneer, that Cleveland wouldn’t boast a good hotel, excepting, perhaps, some four-hundred-dollar-a-night thing lodged in a distant safe area accessible only by helicopter, which would make it possible for candidates for higher office to avoid the masses of inconveniently underpaid and underworked individuals downtown, but you would be wrong, because in the nineteenth century, Cleveland built this arcade, this marvelous cathedral of indoor space not unlike something you would see in Milano or Köln, and tried to fashion a downtown around it, and this arcade has now been largely gobbled up by a luxury hotel chain.

Few downtowns are as ghostly and despondent as the downtown in Cleveland. Well, there are some other dead downtowns. Detroit, as is well known, is so crowded with the afterimages of failed capitalism that it is impossible to take a step there without the sharp in-breath of astonishment at how shattered destinies can be. It is also where I first met the woman who became my ex-wife. But Cleveland is bad, and that hall of fame, with its neon hagiographies about musicians, is far enough away from where you would ideally want pedestrians to circulate that it can do nothing to help. And so dust accumulates, and disenfranchisement festers, and not even a rat would bother to come by. The arcade that the Hyatt now occupies is no exception to this spree of desuetude, and were it not for the grandiosity of its initial conception, it would be just a footnote in the barely-holding-on narrative that is Cleveland. Indeed, the words that best describe the arcade and most of downtown Cleveland are the words deferred maintenance.