Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

While the casual reader of RateYourLodging.com could perhaps reasonably suppose that Morse’s painful, isolating disengagement from his wife would not result in a desire for ManilPhil91, that casual reader would lack the tremendous psychological insight that more engaged readers of my reviews have come to possess over the period in which I have been publishing them. Which is to say that everybody has his moment of weakness, where a discussion of economic disenfranchisement and nuclear physics can create a grandiose sympathy for the plight of Asian sex workers — not a sexual desire, it should be said, for ManilPhil91, so much as a Byronesque pathos for sociopolitical disenfranchisement. Which is also to say that the loneliness of the hotel reviewer is sometimes so pervasive, so overpowering, that anyone at hand will do, and if you have to pay certain parties to be at hand, then so be it. And in this particular case, I might add, paying for company created a tuition windfall for a gifted scientist in training.

The wife, coming upon the scene, insisted that I go downstairs to the main floor of Windmere and take in the art exhibition, which displayed art by the various residents of Windmere. I agreed to this proposal. In fact, there was a docent, or at least an underutilized resident of Windmere, who took us through the exhibition and indicated that all the works were for sale. Naturally I picked up a price list. The work was mostly representational and consisted primarily of the flower arrangements of beginning painters and the occasional nature morte. There was also a great wealth of landscapes. A couple of surrealist paintings were also included, things that had clearly been produced by painters with dementia. All of this work suggested that in the waning days of life, a visual artist will become preoccupied with the acute observation of what is, with the actual appearance of things that will not be seen for much longer. Distortions in the field of what is are perhaps the signs that an elderly visual artist will not come back from the edge of the known world but will topple off into and abyss. I paid two hundred dollars for a painting of somebody’s shih tzu and returned to the room, and while my wife showered she called from the interior of the shower about when we might reproduce. ★★★★ (Posted 9/7/2013)

Tall Corn Motel, 903 Burnett Avenue, Des Moines,

Iowa, 50810, November 30–December 1, 2009

Dear WakeAndBake, I have been impressed with your deep research-related capabilities, with your mole-like ability, given the scanty biographical details that I have allowed through the screen, to track, e.g., my credit rating and the status of my auto loan. I admit, WakeAndBake, that I periodically check my credit rating too, because it has been a problem on occasion. When you posted the number of my credit rating, that most American of data points, in the comments section of one of my earlier reviews, I was unclear on the reason for this particular violation of my privacy, though I did find it faintly amusing when, with a sophomoric self-satisfaction, you noted that last summer my credit rating had gone up two months in a row. I recognize, WakeAndBake, that to others there is a certain dastardly charm to your violations of my person. And the same goes for GingerSnap and her insistence on cataloging all the letters to the editor I have written over the years to various publications, both in print and online, as well as my most embarrassing status updates. It is, in a way, moving to me that you would care enough to look into these subjects.

However, I take an entirely different view of your dragging my child into this forum. WakeAndBake, the fact that you would dare to write about my child in the comments section is perhaps the most transparent evidence yet that you are a brain-damaged hacky-sack enthusiast and revenge-porn addict who can get out of bed only for a little of the old sadistic fun. I do not know where you got the photograph of my child playing a rental cello. As I do not have the image in question on my desktop, I am a little stumped about where you managed to procure it. However, that is neither here nor there. When you, WakeAndBake, and your like-minded friends accuse me of parental negligence for having failed to mention my child in a review up to this point (and perhaps it’s worth noting that I have hinted about my child on multiple occasions), it can’t but make me want to break your metaphorical fingers one by one.

Since when is it an obligation for me, or for anyone else in the online reviewing community, to give some kind of inventory about my progeny? Is not my progeny my particular business? Should not my child be free of the guilt by association that is RateYourLodging.com? Exactly how many reviews is she meant to appear in so that you can continue to have your profane obsession with these little reviews that I have been writing these many months? If I do it once, is that enough, or will you then hound me for an additional three times in this calendar year, urging me to include further mentions of my child? Do you have a child, WakeAndBake? Do you have a child with GingerSnap? Have you ever met GingerSnap? Perhaps at one of those online community meet-ups where it turns out that everyone has a club foot and cannot follow the train of any conversation without interrupting to talk about films like Galaxy Quest ?

Okay. Here, in my review of the Tall Corn Motel, I will mention my child to get you off my back, because the Tall Corn Motel is where I was served with the subpoena. I used my credit cards a few too many times, I suppose. Leaving the state, apparently, does not alter the course of your acrimonious separation. Nor does it alter the fact of the estrangement between father and child. But everything that comes into the world, WakeAndBake, whether it is the browned peeling wallpaper of the Tall Corn Motel, or the child wailing out by the Dodge Dart with the flat tire that someone is trying to change in the motor court, the child with the befouled diaper hanging between its legs, everything, and I mean everything, is put in our way so as to provide us with the opportunity to grow and learn.

By leaving out the child, I have left out paternal anguish about the child, it’s true, but I have also allowed her to live her life unimpeded by representations of her; for example, I have left out her delightful singing repertoire, among which are sections of the musical theater canon, downloaded from her brain with such avidity that one song often will blend seamlessly into the next, each delivered at top speed, often introduced with a count-in— Okay, I know you know this, one, two, three —and off she will go with fragments of something by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, occasionally performing at the same time her floppy musical theater dance. Here she goes, in that floral print dress that she will not take off because she believes that dress confers magical powers, flopping around the kitchen and reaching for the crumbling Toll House cookie on the edge of the kitchen table as though it were possible to sing the entirety of “The Hills Are Alive,” do the floppy dance, and eat the cookie all at once, at least until the end of the first chorus, barely avoiding collision with the stools by the kitchen table, back where I lived with her mother, and, at the relevant moments, spilling a beachfront of crumbs from the Toll House cookie, and then off toward the sofa and the coffee table, flopping still — and you might suspect that a beatific grin is a requirement for the performance, but no, there is on the contrary a dead seriousness to her face, not a look of concentration, but one that seems to believe the preservation of our musical theater heritage is a solemn responsibility — stopping briefly at the coffee table to look over a magazine, there long enough to ascertain that it contains few if any princesses, and then back to the second chorus until the volume of cookie in the mouth prevents reasonable elocution, whereupon my wife gives in to anxiety about the choking hazard and says: Stop.