Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Norse Motel, 112 °County Road 165,

Story City, Iowa, December 6–11, 2009

You know what else can really distract you from your low circumstances? Hotel pornography. I haven’t really had a chance to rate hotel porn on Rate Your Lodging, but I think it’s a significant part of the hotel/motel experience. (However, before I begin, it’s perhaps useful to speak of that disagreeable colloquialism, viz., the noun porno, as in “Last night I rented a porno,” or “There were several good pornos on the television last night.” Porno sounds like it’s Esperanto, and, as everyone knows, the dream of an international language that is simple and easy to use and based on Romance languages is an infantile wish. Esperanto is like giving the world gruel out of a vacuum-packed sleeve instead of actual food. And porno does not describe the brutish need of sexually explicit video products, and so, in my ratings of hotel porn, I will exclusively use that abbreviation, porn. You will find no pornos here. No Esperanto.) Often, when traveling alone, I will walk into a room and feel an overpowering need to defile myself. Nothing says lonely like a brisk six or seven minutes with Candy Store Vixens and some giveaway lotion and a washcloth from the fungally rich motel bathroom, after which the contempt for self will be amplified to a level that is familiar, even comfortable. So hotel pornography is a useful service to have available in a motel, and it was generous of whatever sex addict originally came up with the idea. There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

So now that we have agreed with the idea of hotel porn and with the importance of reviewing it, what kinds of features should be peculiar to hotel porn, to a clientele that is busy, hardworking, emotionally blunted, ashamed, and cost-conscious? Obviously, the price point for hotel porn should not be too high, should not rise, for instance, to 50 percent of overall lodging expenses, because that will drive off the customers, but it should also maximize the profit potential in what is essentially a compulsive activity. That is, demand for hotel porn among frequent users is inelastic. People who use it need to use it and are therefore willing to pay. Ordinarily, when you purchase pornography, there is a period of getting acquainted where you speed through the film for a few minutes, trying to find a model who is particularly attractive and who is being well employed, and in this getting-acquainted period you can afford to have a film that wastes some of your time, because the thrill of anticipation, when it comes to pornography, vastly exceeds the reward of pornography. And yet, in a hotel setting, narrative exposition is your enemy. The consumer is not going to be engaged with such a film at great length. Therefore, hotel pornography, somewhat uniquely, should have no exposition at all. A hotel or motel that continues to broadcast exposition-heavy pornography is liable to have an angry clientele on its hands, because no compulsive user of pornography in a small-town motel like the Norse Motel is going to sit still for a long dialogue in a doctor’s office in which a bored twenty-one-year-old with a triple-D cup indicates that she might have dropped her insurance card down her brassiere.

Additionally, there is the question of exactly what kind of pornography to include on your two or three adult channels at your hotel. While there is the danger of driving off evangelical patrons by including any gay porn— Locker Room Studs or what have you — there is also the possibility that a significant portion of these evangelical patrons are themselves gay- or bi-curious and thus willing to have a line item on their bills that simply says Video incidentals and does not specifically indicate that it was two strapping young guys with dog tags and shaved chests going at it for hours. A certain range of tastes only enhances the opportunity to monetize the compulsivity of the hotel-pornography phenomenon.

Third, the filmed entertainment we’re after here needs to contain the maximum number of ejaculatory moments, because while these ejaculatory moments are often coterminous with the orgasmic release of the user of the pornographic entertainment — thus shortening the amount of time the film is used — there is the chance, especially with the particularly addictive members of the clientele, that porn is going to be used two or even three times in a night, and therefore it should not risk wearing out its welcome. A given film should, rather, deliver the goods as many times as possible in ninety minutes so that one fee enables repeated viewings, especially when one is in the room alone drinking beer, thinking about the past, regretting, and trying to avoid calling old friends and weeping. Under these circumstances, the pornographic video should withstand frequent use without becoming dull or hackneyed.

A guy should be able to walk into the room with the knowledge that residing in this motor court constitutes an abundance of bad luck, a milestone of failure in his life, and he should be able to turn on the television, flip straight to the screen that indicates what networks are included here (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, HLN, FOX, MSNBC, HSN, SHO, HBO, MTV, MTV2, VH1, TLC, Syfy, THC), and he should be able to find the pay-per-view adult-entertainment channel, strip off his tie, and begin the investigation of his own loneliness that is to be revealed in Candy Store Vixens, a process which involves the same old self-pleasuring techniques that have worked since he first did this, let’s say thirty-five years ago; it’s almost impossible to stay awake while doing it now, and anyone who could see him doing it would be challenged to find pity or compassion in her heart; he can barely keep the thing from softening into a doughy and unresponsive blob, and not even the enormous and artificially enhanced breasts will help, or the little-girl cries of ecstasy, which he is worried about the next room overhearing; it barely works, or when it works, it works in such a meager way that scarcely does the moment of halfhearted pleasure streak across his limbic brain before he feels the surge of despond. This is the pornography of the modern motel, which is the pornography of disgust. It is at the heart of travel in America, and I for one try to do it just about every time I’m out on the road by myself. ★★ (Posted 11/10/2013)

Willows Motel, 3127 Route 22, Boston Corners,

New York, December 1–3, 2012

Again, I have to address briefly the idea that I am not who I say I am, a line of argument fomented by KoWojahk283 and by TigerBooty! but not exclusively by them. The argument goes that no one could possibly stay in the number of hotels and motels I have stayed in without being independently wealthy. According to this independently wealthy hypothesis, which is about as accurate as the theories brought up in the recent inquiry into my refusal to discuss my child, I cannot possibly be an effective or accurate reviewer of hotels and motels because I do not, in fact, have thrift as a motive. KoWojahk283 has tried to connect me, however tenuously, to the Libor scandal, the implication being that I am someone who has colluded in the fixing of international credit rates and who therefore needs to hide out in motels like the Willows of Boston Corners in order to avoid prosecution.

I can assure you that if I were still in high finance, I would rather serve out my time in a minimum-security facility that has a squash court, attempting to set up effective bookkeeping at the prison laundry and counseling the other prisoners with motivational tips, than stay two nights at the Willows Motel. The Willows has no squash court. In fact, it has one telephone, which is out on the parking lot by the ice machine, which ice machine no longer has any ice in it. KoWojahk283 alleges that I am employed by the Royal Bank of Scotland based on the fact that my name is Reginald, which he imagines to be a Scottish name, probably because he comes from Mongolia. Others got into the swing of it, and rapidly the notion took hold that I was not only at the Royal Bank of Scotland, but also ICAP, the interdealer brokerage firm in the UK, and, of course, the omnipresent Deutsche Bank, beloved of conspiracy theorists the world over. Yet none of these critics has had occasion to verify my claims by staying at any of the numerous hotels or motels that I have been writing about over the course of twenty-two months.