Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

What does this mean for the hotel guest? What does the bedbug mean for the likes of you and me as we check into another hotel? You know me, you know my wish to tell the truth, whether it is good for the operators of the hotels or good for their guests. I bring you the facts, no matter how controversial. I came to the Capri Whitestone, with its view of the Whitestone Bridge toll plaza, because I had booked the room online and there was a bargain price, and then I got here and realized there was no bathroom in my room, that it was down the hall, and that my bathroom, down the hall, was being used by itinerant preachers and opium addicts and appliance sales executives. And so I determined that I would not use the bathroom in the hallway, because whatever had been in that bathroom was at least partly rotted out, gangrenous; there was the overpowering reverberation of death in that bathroom, and the attendant sense of grief in the Capri Whitestone led me away from the bathroom and down the hall back to my room.

Since I had no desire to get up in the middle of the night and head down the hall, I instead took to using the sink in my bedroom, easier said than done. (I’m not proud of this, understand, and I don’t like admitting it in my column, though I think the Capri Whitestone should feel worse about this than I do.) I had to bring the rickety desk chair, really just a folding aluminum thing such as you could get at any office-supply store, over to the sink and stand on the chair, and then I had to find an angle that would permit a minimum of splashing. Afterward I hung my overnight bag in just the way you would tree your food if you were out in the forest, living off the land. My sleep at the Capri Whitestone was an unquiet sleep, and even the decades-old television on the shelf could not help me, with its meager array of programs about bachelors and bachelorettes; the remote had never seemed so well named. The whole first night was spent trying not to think about the most adaptable of pests, the bedbug.

In this edition of clinically diagnosed insomnia, I was thinking instead about seeing my kid the next day and about the fact that recently I have been seeing her alone, unaccompanied by K., who is back in Yonkers, refusing me admittance until the relapse that occurred after the Florida trip has passed. Look, some people think that relapse of the variety I am describing here happens because the cares of the world come elbowing in, and that in the double bind of these cares, there is no choice but to give in. If you had my life, you would do it too, etc. But I am here to say that sometimes it is when things go well that we get in a gypsy cab, drive to a honky-tonk dive on the Jersey shore, sleep under a pier in our clothes, drink rye whiskey for several days running, solicit the professional women in the industrial park, vomit on ourselves, sing unwanted classic-rock tunes in public places, whisper contemptuously to ourselves, and then take the train back to the city, sitting in the rearmost car so that no one will be forced to reckon with us, wondering how to spin the narrative of our episodic disappearance. Sometimes it’s the good stuff that causes this, sometimes it’s love and a week of Indian summer, it’s the bounty of life, or it’s so without cause as to be a perfect example of what goes by the fell name human nature.

So I take the child to the movies or to a restaurant or to other such public places, but not back to my hotel room here at the Capri Whitestone — from which I am writing this review — for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has read the lines above. Under the circumstances, I have to admire the rock-bottom price of the Capri Whitestone, and yet my stay here has ensured that the child and I have no home to go back to, not really, and this has been the hardest thing of all, the inability to deploy that semantic warhorse home with reliable consistency. I could live at a great number of motels of the tristate area, like the Rodeway Bronx or the West Shore Staten Island, but I have landed here because the Capri has easy access to major thoroughfares of the region, such as the Bruckner Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, I-95, the Hutchinson River Parkway, the Pelham Parkway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Major Deegan Expressway, the Sprain Brook Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the Cross County Parkway, and this proximity seems enough, while waiting for the grip of relapse to unclench.

I can feel, in the sometimes stilted conversation between myself and the child, the future when we will not talk as well or as easily as we usually do now, when she will ask questions about why I have lived the way I have lived, and I won’t be able to answer, except to say that I have lived the way I knew how to live, hic et nunc . I am a father who wanted at all costs to keep his daughter away from bedbugs. And that is something. Her mother has the pies to bake and the blankets to tuck around her, that song of femininity that no father can give, and what have I but some meager store of words that have fogged up the windows of progress and distracted a few people over the years? They are the same words that I have always used, and now they are careworn. Okay, bachelorettes. ★ (Posted 3/22/2014)

The Guest of Honor, 131 Cricket Hill Road, Lakeville, Connecticut, February 6–7, 2010

KoWojahk283 and others have accused me of failing to review bed-and-breakfasts on RateYourLodging.com, and I must admit that this charge, as distinct from many other charges I have detailed elsewhere, is in fact true. I have not reviewed any bed-and-breakfasts. And the reason is simple: because I hate bed-and-breakfast inns. What’s the problem with B&Bs, as they are often called among the types of people who prefer these inns? First, there is the issue of throw-pillow abuse. It is as if the throw pillow were a sign of affluence. There must be some kind of bed-and-breakfast trade association where the various owners get together and compete on how many throw pillows they have in their various rooms. The second problem, as is widely known, is the scented product called potpourri. Why is it that potpourri is so uniformly understood as the solution to the olfactory problem of the B&B? Potpourri is meant to cleanse the air of any human residue and to render neutral even the most foul-smelling traveler so that he seems to hail from a knickknack shop in Sedona, Arizona. That everyone has agreed that this one particular smell — of orange, sandalwood, lavender, cinnamon, and a hint of cocoa — is the idealized scent of human exchange is bizarre. There’s a desperation to the brutal efficiency of the potpourri solution.

The third, and biggest, problem of the B&B, however, is the breakfast itself. In a way, I’m being facetious here, because everyone will admit that the food at these breakfasts— The honey comes from our own apiary! — is some of the best food you are ever liable to eat. It’s not that the food is bad. I could probably put away forty-five hundred calories at one of these breakfasts and go back for more. The issue with the breakfasts is the human conversation. I would subdivide this conversation into two separate categories. The first of these categories includes the conversation you must have with the innkeeper herself. The innkeeper, though she is pleasant, is worried that you are a barely concealed sociopath, and when she allows you into her house, she makes especially sure to lock the doors that lead to her private residence. She has the local authorities on speed dial and is on a first-name basis with these local authorities, and all her conversation, no matter how simplistic or unsophisticated, can be understood as exploratory, in which she is attempting to make a quick but reliable mental-health determination. So when the innkeeper says, Such a shame about the rain! , you can bet that she doesn’t really mind the precipitation, especially if she has already taken an impression of your Visa card, but is instead trying to judge how the precipitation might affect your own mien. And when she asks a couple of leading questions about your reasons for being in the area, she breathes an almost palpable sigh of relief when she realizes that you are touring. The prattle of the innkeeper, then, while a colossal waste of your time, is not to be understood as anything but legitimate research. The same cannot be said for conversation track two, conversation with other persons staying at the bed-and-breakfast establishment. It is of the utmost importance that you establish, with these other persons, a reputation for ill humor and an absolute inability to be lucid before a certain hour. You can allude to a chronic dependence on caffeinated hot beverages. Sometimes it is useful to produce a pill jar containing medication. Whatever the technique, it is essential that you do not begin conversation with the other couple, however mild-mannered they appear, lest you should begin to discuss other bed-and-breakfasts (almost as if the bed-and-breakfast is capable only of creating an environment in which one must endlessly lobby on behalf of the bed-and-breakfast as institution), or fastest routes from Boston to the Maine coast, or prettiest churches in the neighborhood, or most spectacular weekends spent leaf-peeping. Upon making conversation, it is further possible that you will have to exchange e-mail addresses with the couple or that they will invite you to dinner that night at a farm-to-table restaurant in the vicinity. This is why abysmal hotels in the Midwest where the only thing you can have for breakfast is Wheaties are somehow superior to the B&B experience, because at least there you don’t have to explain.