Rick Moody: Hotels of North America

On the night in question, I was talking with a certain lovely young woman, but mainly as a cover in order to get closer to the Pet Shop Boy — she was in no way a substitute for my wife. In due course, I was alone at the bar, and then I attempted to approach a Pet Shop Boy to ask if it would be possible to purchase him a drink, whereupon he turned on me his gimlet eye (Old Gimlet Eye being initially the nickname, by the way, of Smedley Butler, an American Marine who was at the heart of a coup to overthrow FDR). The Pet Shop Boy’s gimlet eye fell upon me, and almost at once there were employees of the bar at the Groucho who made it abundantly clear to me that the Pet Shop Boy was off-limits— Leave the client be, Yank —which behavior I do not think argues for the five-star rating that others have given the Groucho Club. It happens that in fact I was staying there in the single smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in; so small was my room at the Groucho, and here I kid you not, that I could open the door to the hallway from my Groucho Club twin bed and likewise reach into the minibar. The television did not require the remote, such was my proximity to it, and one could loft oneself out of the shower and into bed in one supple gymnastic move. Had I been given to claustrophobia, I would have suffered in my room at the Groucho Club. I understand it is the way of these social clubs to cordon off the persons of reputation, and I understand that I am a person who has nothing to offer a celebrity but talk.

This, in fact, was the nature of my career epiphany that night. I seemed to have failed to move enough securities from one account to the other account in order to procure a revenue stream composed of commissions therefrom, and I lacked the resources to short the Japanese yen, but I still had the gewgaws of rhetorical English at my command. I could still talk to a Pet Shop Boy, or a Jools Holland, who was also at the Groucho Club during my stay. And perhaps in some way I could make a profession from my language.

I was in a room the size of a coffin, and I survived it by watching rugby on the telly, and the next morning I lugged my rather large bag down the staircase and into the lobby, where I awaited one of the black cabs of London. While I was doing so, a young woman with strategically disarranged mouse-brown locks called to me, “Are you a musician?” To which I replied, “No, I am a motivational speaker!” She further said, “Well, you look like a musician.” Which I must say moved me, as just the opposite is the case. And so I replied, “You just don’t know the right kind of motivational speakers!” And she: “Top answer! Top answer!” ★★★ (Posted 3/3/2012)

Radisson Hotel, 42 Frontage Road,

Waterbury, Connecticut, May 5–8, 2010

Which reminds me of the tendency of hotel lobbies to feature a kind of jazz music that I refer to, despite the fact that K. has asked me to stop saying it, as “smoove.” Is there another place on earth where smoove is played with as much consistency as in the lobbies of hotels? Once upon a time, when I was still in the finance industry, I briefly had a car and a driver who came to pick me up at the office and take me home most nights. A fleet of such cars ferried back and forth the midlevel executives of our firm so that they wouldn’t have to risk public transportation. Often the driver of that Lincoln Continental, Oristeo, would play something smoove. In those days, there were radio stations of the tristate area that played smoove around the clock — because it was possible that there were people, at any hour of the day or night, who were about to have, or were in the midst of having, episodes of adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood (acute) and as a result were in need of smoove, because the smoove would restore equilibrium. Or sometimes there are somatic conditions that require a liberal employment of smoove in the immediate surroundings of a sufferer. I’m thinking, for example, of long QT syndrome — the thunderous, chaotic cardiac pulsations — which can be caused by second-generation antipsychotic medication, even at the antidepressant-dosage level. K. was once diagnosed with long QT, or catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, and as a result, on occasion K. would listen to smoove, though this was mostly in situations in which she did not expect to be overheard. Despite what I might have said elsewhere, she was occasionally partial to smoove renditions of, say, oldies like “California Dreamin’ ” or “I Write the Songs.” K.’s affection for smoove became an area of difference between us.

At any rate, we arrived for a stretch at the Radisson Hotel, Waterbury, which was sort of a last-chance Radisson. I believe we had come from a hotel in the Midwest, though one whose particulars I did not choose to preserve for posterity. I recall simply that the lobby of the Radisson featured clocks indicating the different time zones. There was a clock for London, and a clock for Tokyo, and a clock for Los Angeles, as though people lodging at the Radisson of Waterbury were imminently embarking for Tokyo. There were no loiterers in the lobby whatsoever. The bar/restaurant was still open, and there was some kind of forgettable baseball game featured there, on the large screen, with no one watching, and you could see this from the uninhabited and threadbare lobby. The young man at the front desk looked like there was no sorrow he had not experienced, and you could imagine that the pariahs of Waterbury — the convicted frauds and disgraced politicians, the collectors of serial-killer memorabilia, the embezzlers of church donations, those found guilty of exposing themselves, the mortuary assistants with suppressed necrophiliac tendencies, the sadistic gym teachers and embittered traffic cops — all settled here when they were in search of the loneliest night imaginable, and nothing made them feel better than exceedingly loud smoove playing in the lobby. If you were experiencing catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, some flügelhorn soloing just might do the trick, could render you functionally unconscious in that way that hotel life can often do, unaware of any aspect of civilization that involves continuity, stability, devotion. However, it’s also possible that smoove could be seen as a music that requires absolute submission to the American economy, to the need to buy and consume, and, as such, it is straight out of the robber-baron playbook, the music that can and must drive you to your knees so that you can do nothing but purchase plastic trinkets of Southeast Asian manufacture.

We were thinking this as we were checking into the Radisson in Waterbury, and paying in cash, which might have raised an eyebrow. The sleepwalker at check-in did ask us for a credit card for incidentals, because that was the policy of the operation, and we needed to submit to his regime, and so we did, with the resolve that we would not purchase any incidentals. K. was much restored when a Stevie Wonder tune came on, recast in smoove. Isn’t she lovely? By the time the elevator doors retracted, our submission was complete. ★★ (Posted 4/7/2012)

Ikea Parking Lot, 450 Sargent Drive, New Haven, Connecticut, October 1–2, 2011

It’s true, most people who stay overnight in the parking lot of a big-box retailer choose the more notorious Wal*Mart, and there they make their beds because the political attitudes of the Wal*Mart brand are palatable, even preferable, for these libertarian nomads. K. and I chose the Ikea parking lot not because we felt that it was somehow superior to Wal*Mart but just because we wanted to be closer to the New York metropolitan area in case certain business opportunities arose, or because there was a problem at our residence that could not be resolved satisfactorily between ourselves and our landlord and during which on one occasion I raised my voice in a way that was regrettable, or because my finances were in shambles for several months, or because I needed to amass a security deposit, or because of a legal situation that I may or may not write about another time. Not everyone you encounter while staying in an Ikea parking lot feels as though he or she needs to completely elucidate the reasons he or she is staying in an Ikea parking lot. It is enough that there is this dispossession you have in common with your fellow travelers.