Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

I can tell you that I was once turned back at the border of Dubai, where I was going to stay in one of those hotel casinos in order to give a lecture on retiring personal debt. Getting back on the plane was utterly humiliating and professionally devastating, but even that is nowhere near as bad as the feeling of human failure that I associate with the abridgment of my visitation with the child, owing to the enmities and vituperations of separation. Some of you will imagine that the great number of hotel reviews I write are due to some desire to avoid the child, but this could not be farther from the truth. Some of you, those readers more charitable than WakeAndBake, will imagine that I write the hotel reviews in order to produce an additional income stream to fund the child-support portion of my financial obligations, and this, while partially true, does not tell the entire story. Because it is also true that I travel in the way I travel to find a way to outrun not the child, but my feelings of human failure and disconsolation that are attendant upon my inability to see the child for a full 3.5 days per week. (My tendency to do badly when it comes to keeping up with rent and mortgages and so forth, you see, has at times had a concomitant bad effect on a complete itinerary of visitation with the child.) Sometimes this disconsolation leads to an address that is nearby the child, and sometimes far, far, far from the child, in a town, for instance, where the freight trains are keening past from dusk to dawn, and where one of the most American of interstates, the august I-80, intersects with one of the major north — south routes, I-35, and where there are just enough people to allow for a major drug subculture, some prostitution, some hog farms, feed corn, and libertarianism, along with the worst motels for three hundred miles in any direction.

I always say, when I am giving instruction in motivational speaking, that you should speak from the desire to heal the most broken part of yourself. You should speak from where you are most wounded, and out of the desire to heal that most hurt part of yourself. Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball? That’s the place that you start from. You start from the fetal ball, and you start with the sense that healing is good and that if you were some kind of totally omnipotent or omniscient being, you would shine down a lot of love on the guy in the fetal ball.

Now, imagine that you are saying that to yourself, you, the guy in the dingy motel in Des Moines who is opening the door and finding there a suited-up business type saying, Is your name Reginald Morse? To which you reply, Yessir, knowing even then that something awful is about to happen, wondering if it’s too late to retract the yessir somehow and replace it with Actually, I’m Don Smith, Agway regional sales manager, but, no, it’s too late, you have said yessir, and now the business type is saying, You are served, and never has there been a present-tense statement of fact that has seemed so present tense and so factual, yes, you are served, and the little bundle of papers now lying at your feet compels your appearance at a county courthouse in ________. Imagine you are an omnipotent being looking down on this guy and the bundle of papers at his feet. He has done so much wrong, he has tried so hard and failed so thoroughly, he has not loved when he had the chance to love, he has not lifted a finger, sometimes, for the people who needed some heavy lifting from him, he has not called his mother in weeks, even though his mother is still hale and living in a retirement community in Connecticut. (His sister, as his mother is fond of telling him, semiannually, calls regularly.) Yet is he not worthy of compassion? Is this not the place from which to begin speaking now? The Tall Corn Motel of Des Moines, Iowa? And is it not now apparent, WakeAndBake, why I might have preferred to leave the child out of all this?

I met a police officer at the Top Hat Lounge, across the street, to which I later repaired, and she was unwinding from her shift, and she told this story about the Tall Corn, how there was a sign on a bulletin board in the lobby of the Tall Corn saying For a Good Time, Call …, a sign so brazen, and the police officer and her undercover partner, whom she described as significantly resembling a child molester (but on the side of good), did call the number in question, and the child-molester partner managed to procure a meeting with “Tamara” in the alley behind the Tall Corn. He then donned his Thunderwear, which was a special pair of briefs in which he could frontally install his heat, just about where his manly proboscis lay nested, because this is dangerous work and one must not overlook to include the heat, and he likewise donned a wire, as they say in substandard police-procedural television dramas, and off he went, on foot, to the alley, outfitted with Thunderwear and the proverbial wire, whereupon he began a colloquy with Tamara on a price for services. Various menu options were discussed, including oral for forty dollars, at which point (according to the police officer), the child-molester partner began berating the woman of the evening, the working girl, for giving herself away too inexpensively. Don’t you have any self-esteem? the partner said. Don’t you think you’re worth more than that? There’s no one on this earth who should give away her dignity for that kind of a price, I don’t care who you are or what hard times you have seen. Don’t you have self-respect? Self-respect is worth more than forty dollars! And what can you buy with forty dollars anyway? You couldn’t even get a decent winter coat for forty dollars, for when it gets cold like this. You couldn’t even buy a decent dinner out and a bottle of wine!

On he went, though this speech was not meant to be part of the buy-and-bust operation. And the working girl, Tamara, took issue with this lecture. She pointed out that the price was fixed by her pimp, and they had been in this business for a while, the pimp especially. He was a prostitution expert, and they (she and her pimp, who perhaps thought of himself more as a dispatcher) did not believe that this was an unusually low price at all but rather a competitive price in this market, which was somewhat glutted with working girls, owing to the regional drug boom. Still, the child molester said, totally off script, I just don’t think it’s right, and she said, Well, you’re free to pay more if that’s what you want, but I’m not doing more than what I already agreed to, and then they set off for the room in the Tall Corn; that is, they headed from the alley around the corner to the room off the parking lot, which she had booked for several weeks (and thus the sign on the bulletin board), and the working girl said, It’s not so bad in here, really, and it doesn’t smell, but don’t take a bath, because last time I took a bath here I got fungus on my back. The tenderness of this advisement — fungus on the back — was lost on no one.

Now, let it be said, the officer told me, that there was a code, audible upon the wire he had concealed about himself, that was the indication for the lady officer and her cohorts to swoop down and arrest the pitiable and kind working girl, Tamara, and that was when the child-molester officer said, The tuna is in the can, whereupon the swooping was to take place, and why the code was not The snake is in the grass or The worm has turned or The fishing will be good, I do not know, maybe the child molester just liked tuna. You have to admit it’s a pretty great bit of code, and one wonders only how the child molester was able to speak his line in the context of procuring oral favors. Nevertheless, the child molester did say, The tuna is in the can, and they swooped in, and the working girl was set facedown on the pavement of the Tall Corn parking area, and her wrists were cuffed, and in this way yet another prostitute operating out of the Tall Corn was taken out of circulation for a couple of weeks, at least until yet another sweet young thing with a drug problem decided to make some easy money. Yes, all of this took place in the motel where I got my subpoena. ★ (Posted 11/9/2013)