Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

TigerBooty! who I believe is a South Korean adherent of her local pop music (Gangnam style!), because I have found postings by her elsewhere on the subject, advances the alternative theory that I am in fact a teenage girl, which is interesting to me, not only because if I am a teenage girl, I have an astonishing vocabulary and range of knowledge such as the Libor scandal and the Iran-Contra scandal and many other scandals, but also because I believe myself to be a solidly middle-aged man with a bit of a weight problem and a receding hairline who knew nothing about teenage girls even in the period when he was a teenager himself. (I did, perhaps ironically, lose my virginity to a Korean girl, or a half-Korean girl, in her closet, and it was not a terribly comfortable way to lose one’s virginity, though I confess that when she agreed to pursue this particular activity, after years, literally years, of refusing to do so, there was a moment when I felt something of the solar eclipse in me; I knew I was being transported to a new period in my life where I would be substantially changed, confident, worldly, different, where I would not have to carry around the self-consciousness of Reg, where I would know something about the human body and about the ultimate register of love that I had not known before, and at that moment sex had not been cheapened yet by overuse or drunkenness or some lack of enthusiasm for life, it was something heady and mysterious, and I was about to taste its delights, but unfortunately it didn’t go so well, and I cannot say that in the immediate aftermath of human sexuality I took advantage of the intimate knowledge I had gained of the half-Korean girl to talk with her about her hopes and fears.) So, TigerBooty! when you say I am a teenage girl, you reveal your own paradoxical ignorance of how teenage girls talk — American girls, at any rate — which I imagine is with emoticons. My theory is that the accuser almost always accuses the other of his or her own shortcomings. So it is that TigerBooty! must be a Korean girl recording herself on some instant videochat site singing along with the K-pop.

Yet another antagonist, called RedDawn301, who has posted a lot on this site hawking various mobile-home designs, accuses me of some kind of responsibility for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. Again, in this case, it is said that I come to establishments such as the Willows Motel in order to avoid prosecution, rather than to review the motel for your edification. Now, interestingly, RedDawn301 is enthusiastic about oil drilling itself, believes passionately in it, in the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, but he still maintains that the executives of British Petroleum are all bisexual and German and that they have the capability of storing and cataloging people’s thoughts. Somehow RedDawn301 considers me to be among the offending parties in this case, and, in part, he sees a pattern of excessive comfort in the hotels and motels I have reviewed on this site, though I say he has not yet stayed in the Willows Motel, or the Gateway Motel of Saratoga Springs, New York, or the Rest Inn of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the Presidents’ City Inn of Quincy, Massachusetts. He responds by saying that I must be a government agent.

I can’t dignify all of these ideas about me with reply, but I will say that in this digital world of widespread fraud, in which elderly women from rural Michigan claim to be steroid-enhanced weightlifting experts and the like, it is useful, on occasion, to advance the cause of belief simply for the sake of belief, because if not belief in this world, then what do we have? If not the action of belief, we have only the grinding disappointments. You could go on finding weaknesses in the pattern of my online reviews when really what you should be doing, KoWojahk283 and TigerBooty! and RedDawn301, is going out into the yard and staring up at the night sky, or meeting people and looking for the good in them. And while you are doing that, I will talk about the emergency-escape plan at the Willows Motel, which advises that you should first feel the door to see if it’s hot and also that if there is a fire in the room, you should leave the room immediately. The escape plan for the main floor, and there is only a main floor here, is simply to exit into the parking lot. How often this is the case! How often our only exit is into the parking lot! And how often the parking lot empties onto the county road, where there are only package stores and full-service gas stations. If KoWojahk283 were right about me, would I be here? Feeling the door, making sure it’s not hot, and then exiting into the parking lot? ★★ (Posted 11/30/2013)

Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market Street, San Francisco, California, December 17–18, 2012

It has a dungeon in the basement, and if you don’t believe me, look it up. Right after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the Hotel Whitcomb, for a time, served as the seat of local government, other civic buildings having burned to the ground, and so a makeshift jail was installed. Ectoplasm, for the purposes of this hotel review, is defined as a paste excreted by spirit mediums during the course of intercessory activity and/or a kind of gelatinous epidermal layer covering over spirits so that they may interact with the physical world. Accordingly, it may be that any film of gelatinous paste in the Hotel Whitcomb is “palpable ectoplasm,” owing to the hotel’s having served as a jail. Or it may be that the Hotel Whitcomb is simply not being cleaned effectively.

RateYourLodging.com reader Harmonia 13 has had occasion to describe spirit-related magnetic energy. Such magnetic activity can be easily measured and dissipated with “divining materials” and also with fresh garlic or sage-burning. If the ectoplasm on the premises is caused by onsite incarceration during the last century, it almost certainly also commemorates a number of deaths in the Hotel Whitcomb, both incidental and intentional, including murders, suicides, and murder/suicides. People seemed, at one time, to favor jumping out the windows of the Hotel Whitcomb onto Market Street, a hotbed of stripping, gambling, opiates, vagrancy, and other varieties of nonspecific grunge. You might want to ask, you regular readers of the Rate Your Lodging site, what value does ectoplasm contribute to the overall rating of a hotel? Do you add stars for ectoplasm? Or do you eliminate stars? Have I, the reviewer, ever experienced ectoplasm? you might ask. Have I ever felt a glowing gelatinous presence in a half-lit room where a deceased person deceased? Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.

I remember staying at an inn in a certain southwestern state where there was an outdoor hot tub. I remember convincing an employee of the inn to join me in the hot tub, which featured a timer that triggered compressed jets of water. Normally, I am a little insecure about myself without a shirt on, as my days of being attractive are now behind me. However, on this occasion the amenity of the hot tub created feelings of well-being, which in turn eventually caused me to reach out for the employee of the inn and pull her close to me. Generally, the decision to pull close a hotel employee is a poor decision. Unless there is a presumption of collective will in the pulling close, it is extremely dim-witted, this decision, and sometimes even when there is a collective will, it is inadvisable. Were it not for the amenity in question and the feelings of well-being and the pierced navel of the attractive employee of the inn and her unusually colored tresses, I can say that I would probably have forgone the opportunity to reach across the expanse of chlorinated water in the hot tub and pull her close to me, unleashing further waves of so-called well-being, feelings that are attendant upon a sudden experience of moving-into-nearness that was, in the moments before, unanticipated. Say you are working three weeks as a personnel consultant at a community college in the Southwest, and your loneliness is suddenly punctured by the moving-into-nearness of a hotel employee in an outdoor hot tub above which, in the sky, Canis Minor is clearly visible. This is an amenity. Why does this moving-into-nearness involve such surges of well-being when other things — for example, cookies and cider, or even hitting it big on Powerball — pale by comparison?