Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Swallow said: I won’t sit here and have you talk to my husband like that.

Religious nuts think they have all the answers, Tim said, slurring. You all die alone, just like everybody else. Let’s see if you all can figure out how to help me keep the family in this house when the bank people come along any day now, how about that? I’m not going to believe in any religious anything at all, and the thing I’m going to believe in is right here in my coffee cup. Cheers, fornicators .

Maybe it would be good if we tried to pray right now, I said.

A fine idea, Mrs. Albert said. I think so.

And each member of the Albert family grasped a hand adjacent, and I grasped Swallow’s hand, and then we were in a circle, except the last person to allow his hands to be grasped was Tim, who had to put down his travel mug, begrudgingly, and I said, Heavenly Father, make as to shine down upon this family the Alberts in their time of need, and bless those who would help the Alberts, and see through their reluctance and their doubts into their hearts, and keep them in their home, and may large platters of food and plentiful viands appear on their table whenever they need, and may their health be good. Shine down Your face upon them, for You alone are all-powerful, amen.

It is true, for those who have been wondering, that Swallow and I have a secret code, a semaphoric language of gestures, an emergency vocabulary that we practice when we want to convey to each other the need to vacate an address without actually speaking. We know that circumstances do arise. We plan ahead. At first, Swallow favored a grabbing of the earlobe. I believe it was the right earlobe. This gesture had the virtue of being highly visible because Swallow was in the habit of wearing nail polish, and thus I would notice the lacquered nails upon her earlobe. However, on what was, unbeknownst to me, the practice run, at a Rocco’s Tacos in Orlando, Florida, Swallow performed the grabbing of the earlobe and made for the restroom, disappearing for what seemed like twenty minutes. I hadn’t noticed the gesture. I was left talking to her freshman-year roommate for the duration, with no idea that Swallow was in fact now standing down the block by the Publix supermarket beside some Girl Scouts soliciting money for a blood bank. On another occasion, in Wilmington, North Carolina, I absently grabbed at my earlobe for some time before realizing that Swallow had disappeared out into a parking lot, where, it turned out, there had recently been arrests for pandering. And so in the end, we settled on tapping the ring finger of the left hand with the first two fingers of the right.

We had agreed on this procedure not long before the trip to Tyler, but we had not yet drilled. It was therefore risky to try it, but when I looked over at Swallow, she was tapping on her wedding-ring finger. How long had she been doing it? Five minutes? I did not know. I knew only that once she understood she had my attention, she got up and excused herself, and after Mrs. Albert pointed to the bathroom, Swallow shut herself in and turned on the exhaust fan. Improvising with great haste, I asked the Alberts if I could have a little tour, and then, while I was out in the backyard, as young Stan was showing me his 12-gauge, I wondered aloud where Swallow was and headed nervously back toward the restroom.

I knocked and, upon hearing no response, opened the door to the dawning realization that Swallow had made the gutsy move of going out through the Alberts’ bathroom window, still ajar. The window in question was one of those small, side-cranking windows, so instead of moving up and down, it swung out to the left. It bears mentioning that on this day Swallow was wearing a calf-length dress with a flattering neckline. In this outfit, she had apparently gotten herself over the sill and out the first-floor window onto the Alberts’ front lawn. At least she had left this insubstantial aperture open. Then it was up to me, with my bad knees and my lower-back pain, to climb onto the bathroom countertop and loft myself up through the window frame. Swallow had gently and quietly placed the screen in the shower stall to make my journey easier. I was nevertheless breathing heavily and feeling myocardially close to God as I lifted one leg out the Alberts’ window and then tumbled out, colliding with their recycling bin and dislodging some empties. I dashed across the front lawn of the insta-mansion adjacent to the lonesome barking of a neighborhood hound, a coonhound, from the sound of it. I had not run so fast or so freely in many years. I texted Swallow as soon as I could, meeting up with her in an unimproved stand of trees where the next tackiness of insta-mansions would soon be built, once the derivatives market improved.

All we had to do was get a taxi back to the Buick LaCrosse, parked onsite at _________, and spirit it away without being seen. Swallow, in her churchy dress, waited for me in a Tortilla Flats just down the county road, and I snuck onto the property at __________, slipped the key into the ignition of the LaCrosse like a repo professional, and coasted down the hill in neutral, all before Peterson or his coven knew that I was gone. Unfortunately, we had not yet chosen a hotel. In Tortilla Flats, we quarreled about our choices, and Swallow nixed the Holiday Inn Express. Which brings me back around to my initial query: What were the Spanish-language speakers doing up at dawn? ★★ (Posted 2/8/2014)

Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine, 2201 Beach Road,

St. Augustine, Florida, February 14–15, 2014

Early check-in is always a crapshoot, but in a good hotel they try to work with you. At this address, we were party to a rigid and inflexible conversation with the manager about why he wouldn’t accommodate us at the hour of 1:15 p.m. It should be noted that K. — known on this occasion as Chickadee — has a medical condition that makes it extremely inadvisable to entrap her in heated conversations. No conversation with K. of this type can conceivably be winnable without resort to Taser. Nevertheless, the manager, who, it should be said, had decided that check-in at his establishment was at 3:00 p.m. on the dot — notwithstanding the agitated group of twenty-odd stylish young Europeans who were probably in St. Augustine for SportsWearExpo 2014—repelled K.’s wish to investigate fully his managerial reasoning on the subject of early check-in. The discussion with this manager proceeded in an uncivil way, including Russian Federation — style doublespeak (“When I say the room is ready at three, I mean it is ready when I say it is ready, which is at three”), until K. snapped.

In her opening salvo, she accused the manager of looking at her like he wanted to murder her. Each side escalated. A simple managerial explanation would have sufficed. If the Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine wishes to have a decent relationship with its customers — despite its dangerously slippery bathrooms that must send a dozen seniors to the ER each year, and its paper-thin walls that make it easy to discern which of the high school athletes berthed next door is giving which of his teammates a blow job — this decent customer relationship is well within reach. Simply don’t stamp up and down with smoke coming out of your ears saying, This is my hotel! This is my hotel! (To which, by the way, Chickadee replied: Your family must be very proud! ) Just free up one of those rooms that you know are available after hours of sustained chambermaid activity, those rooms that are especially ready for the demanding customer. House the customer. That way the customer won’t have to say, Listen, friend, I am a nationally recognized hotel reviewer, and my laptop is open right now, and I am going to begin writing my review right now, while you are still bloviating.