Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

It is especially galling, Mr. Manager, when you say no room is ready, vehemently refuse service, and then free up a room six minutes later, implying that complaint is indeed effective and that you are a dissembler. Many readers insist that online reviewing is shallow, that the reviewers are vindictive, that their prose is bad, that they want for human feeling, that their physical isolation from the person they are attacking suggests that the worst possible instincts are liable to come to the surface in this online-reviewing process. I want to prove otherwise. It is true that Chickadee, on Valentine’s Day (we had come down south for a day on the links, on a Pricelined package deal and through some barter that I had effected with a golf-pro acquaintance who needed to expand his client base), treated the manager to a few choice words and then had to go lie down (when our room was ready), indicating that her ovaries were about to explode. Our Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine experience was already soured, but we did feel somewhat ashamed of using our privilege to gain access to a room while elsewhere the SportsWearExpo 2014 attendees were killing time, waiting thirty minutes in the manager’s queue. We felt ashamed enough, in fact, that I, as a preferred reviewer on the Rate Your Lodging website, wanted to send Devon Morrison, general manager, a little gift as an apology. I went online and located a trifle that might serve as an appropriate gift, an amiable five-pound jar of attractive Japanese bonbons highly recommended on one of the most esteemed shopping sites on the World Wide Web:

Haribo Sugar-Free Teddy Bears 3KG

First of all, for taste I would rate these a 5. So good. Soft, true-to-taste fruit flavors like the sugar variety…I was a happy camper. But not long after eating about twenty of these, all hell broke loose. I had a gastrointestinal experience like nothing I’ve ever imagined. Cramps, sweating, bloating beyond my worst nightmare. I’ve had food poisoning from some bad shellfish and that was almost like a skip in the park compared to what was going on inside me. Then came the, uh, flatulence. Heavens to Murgatroyd, the sounds, like trumpets calling the demons back to Hell…the stench, like 1,000 rotten corpses vomited. I couldn’t stand to stay in one room for fear of succumbing to my own odors. But wait; there’s more. What came out of me felt like someone tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a coffee straw. I swear my sphincters were screaming. It felt like my delicate starfish was a gaping maw projectile vomiting a torrential flood of toxic waste. 100 % liquid. Flammable liquid. NAPALM. It was actually a bit humorous (for a nanosecond), as it was just beyond anything I could imagine possible. AND IT WENT ON FOR HOURS. I felt violated when it was over, which I think might have been sometime in the early morning of the next day. There was stuff coming out of me that I ate at my wedding in 2005. I had FIVE POUNDS of these innocent-looking delicious-tasting HELLBEARS so I told a friend about what happened to me, thinking it HAD to be some type of sensitivity I had to the sugar substitute, and in spite of my warnings and graphic descriptions, she decided to take her chances and take them off my hands. Silly woman. All of the same for her, and a phone call from her while on the toilet (because you kinda end up living in the bathroom for a spell) telling me she really wished she would have listened. I think she was crying. If you order these, best of luck to you. And please, don’t post a video review during the aftershocks. Also, not sure why so many people assume I’m a man. I am a woman. We poop too. Of course, our poop sparkles and smells like a walk in a meadow of wildflowers.

Why does anyone argue that online reviewing cannot be of the highest caliber? (And let me stress that I didn’t write the above lines, they are by an online-reviewing colleague, C. E. Torok.) In any event, after reading Ms. Torok’s fine work, I made sure the general manager at the Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine was the recipient of this token of our esteem. ★ (Posted 2/22/2014)

The Inn at Harvard, 1201 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 6–7, 2013

I miss the child, I miss the child, every day I miss the child, I miss a certain way that the child says things, the er-um stammer that seems to precede her significant utterances, I miss a certain range of the child’s voice, especially when the child is singing, I miss even the child’s incessant repetition of the “Do-Re-Mi” song, I miss the child, I miss the tangles in her hair, I miss the wear and tear on the knees of her jeans, I miss how the child insists that her pants are not jeans but jeggings, I miss even the child’s numberless requests to watch television, I miss the child’s spitting out of apple skin, should there happen to be one last speck of apple skin among the slices of apple provided, I miss the child at the moment she wants to be hugged and at the moment after she wants to be hugged, I miss the child’s naked, enthusiastic sprints through our tiny apartment before she takes a bath, I miss the child hanging upside down, I miss the child reciting plot points in superhero books, I miss the child, and I experience missing the child as a kind of physical lack, as though I have not eaten properly, have not ingested a sufficiency of calories, I miss the child when she skips to try to keep up with the pace of adults walking, I miss the child when she (still) demands to be picked up, I miss the child and the way she eats string cheese horizontally, some days I miss even a tantrum by the child, I miss her falling on the floor and shouting as she intones the words You are the worst father ever, or the bizarre request that she never be called by her name again, I miss the child on sunny days and on days when it is too cold to go outside, I miss the ceaseless chatter that characterizes the child while in a swing, Three little maids who all unwary come from a lady’s seminary, I miss being able to hear her, from the other room, screech at the television set, I miss the child, I miss the child’s smell, I miss the child’s insistence on wearing all the time that pink nightgown, now in shreds, I miss seeing the child in bed with the nightgown wrenched around half backward, I miss her waking me up to say, Is it time yet? I miss the child refusing to go to bed, saying that she isn’t tired, she isn’t tired, right before collapsing into total exhaustion, I miss even the irritating hours of time that have slipped out of my human life span when all I was doing was trying to persuade the child that it was time to go to sleep, I miss the child, I miss when she says she is scared, so scared, even though nothing particularly scary has happened on the television or in the book, and how this requires me to say that I will protect her, even though I know there are some ways in which I cannot protect her.

I have not protected her from the fact that her mother and I are no longer together, and as I also have parents who ended their marriage, I am in a very good position to know that I have not protected the child, I rue my failures, yet I miss claiming that I will protect her, even though I feel the vacuity of this claim and understand the ways in which I have failed to protect her, I miss even the profoundly boring moments of being in her company, moments when respiration seems like activity enough, moments when the task is repetition, repetition, repetition, coloring in one more line, I miss even the princesses, I miss all the talk of princesses, I miss making up stories about princesses, for example, a story about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella all having a dinner party and getting snowed in and needing the princes to fetch the carriages so that they, the princesses, will not need to walk in the snow, after which the princes bring snowblowers and blow off the sidewalk, and the prince who does the best job of plowing out the driveway gets to take home the comeliest of the princesses, who happens to be the princess called Snow White, I miss the child’s proclamations about wanting to dye her hair black like Snow White, I miss the subtle gradations of consciousness, the emerging into consciousness that is the child, I miss the subtle emanations of a vanishing self-centeredness as the child begins to understand the world around her, and, nevertheless, I miss the child’s demanding to have another birthday present, I miss the child saying that she never gets a present, even though my guilt about the facts of the child’s life and my inability to protect her from the slings and arrows lead me to give her presents with some frequency, I miss the child’s eyes, which are the color of flagstone, a better and more superior flagstone than the color of my own eyes, I miss the child’s blond highlights, I miss the earlier, ghostly presences in the child of now, though this child of now will be a ghostly manifestation in some future iteration, I both do and do not miss all the manhandling of diapers and so on, but miss especially the growth that has made those things no longer part of my life, I miss the moment when the child tumbled out of her mother, and I miss being joyous about family as I was in that moment, which means that I miss what I once gave the child but can give her no more, I miss the child past and the child present and I miss the moments that I will miss of her in the future, I miss listening to the child breathe, I miss listening to the child cough in the moments when she coughs, I miss the child’s detailed descriptions of her own waste production, her distinguishing of one kind of waste production from another, her requests for company while producing waste, I miss the child’s remarks about her friends, which are almost always contradictory and paradoxical, I love Mark he is my best friend even though he doesn’t want to play with me, I miss the child’s vulnerability, and I miss the steely invincible times of the child, when her very resilience proves how broken and lost I am sometimes, and how what I struggle with, the loss of the child, proves that I am less able to withstand the slings and arrows of being than the child is, which means, in some way, that there is more that she can do for me, by schooling me in resilience, than I can do for her, I miss the child’s sneakers, which are a size too large as I write these lines but will not be six months from now, I miss the way she used to apply the Velcro fasteners on the sneakers, as she often did before she began the process of mastering the tying of her shoes, I miss the spot behind the child’s ear that I often remind her to wash carefully, I miss the area of her cheeks that is somewhat windburned by the gusts of January and February, I miss her sweaters, I miss her coats, I miss her socks, I miss her books, I miss her sleep friends, whom she now disdains, I miss the times with her and I rue the times without her, and I especially regret the times without her that are caused by my going on the road, and so as I go on the road and attempt to conduct business and stay, for example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right near a university of some note, I ask myself, Who gives a shit about Harvard, who gives a shit about the sullen client-services professional at the front desk, who cares about the Hamworthy design of the toilet at the Inn at Harvard, who cares about the view of the English Department out the window, who cares about the crowded bars of Cambridge, with their flocks of the best and the brightest, who cares about any of this when there is the absence of the child? ★★★ (Posted 3/1/2014)