Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

The following strike me as important features of parking-lot lodging — should this be your fate. First, the store in question should have inferior security. This was definitely the case with the Ikea of New Haven, which was as woebegone as most of urban Connecticut is and situated directly adjacent to the interstate. Moreover, the Ikea of New Haven had both indoor and outdoor parking-lot areas, so you could sit outside for a while if you wanted to get some sun, and inside if you were interested in additional privacy. Next, the store should have adequate and frequently cleaned restrooms. Any disadvantaged car dweller will tell you this, and during the period in which K. was having a problem with a certain medication, and when we were trying to stay extremely mobile, we came to think carefully about the nearness and cleanliness of various bathrooms in various public spaces and malls, and Ikea, I have to say, had an extremely good cleaning staff. The bathrooms are great. Is there a café? Yes, your store should have a café and it shouldn’t be one of those get-’em-in-get-’em-out cafés that feature only Starbucks coffee and some pastry. It should permit loitering. K. and I will forgo a meal or two now and again in order to keep ourselves at fighting weight. But we do like to be able to relax. Recent studies have suggested that thinness is associated with longevity.

An Ikea tends to be huge and laid out like a Vegas casino, so it’s easy to give the in-store security, even the plainclothes people, the slip. The store provides a lot of opportunity for walking, which is cardiologically sound. I personally like how much the indoor-outdoor parking lot at the Ikea in New Haven is overrun with birds. There are birds roosting in there all the time. Sparrows, especially. You might think that an Ikea parking lot, if you’re stuck in there for a few days, would be devoid of meaningful wildlife, but you’d be wrong. In addition to the birds, I saw raccoons in there, trying to scale some of the dumpsters. And there were squirrels and some rats.

I wasn’t sleeping much in the car, an old Saab that I’d bought used not long before. This was just before the demise of the Saab brand. Some cars are more comfortable for overnights. If you were one of those child-abductor types, you would get a van and put a mattress in the back. K. alleges that her ex-husband was exactly that. A child-abductor type. (He was a psychologist, and degrees in psychology, I find, often conceal deviant tendencies. He was one of those psychologists who needed to smoke a lot of weed in order to relax, and he had a ponytail that he often plaited into a braid, among his many other Native American affectations, and he had a radio show on the local college station where he liked to interview sage-burners and New Age physicists. This was in Ohio, which attracts eccentrics, because from Ohio you can travel easily in any of the four cardinal directions.) But back to Ikea: Ikea began its march to world domination in Europe, and in a way it is still not of the United States. As you may have noticed, here we were living in a Swedish car in the parking lot of a Swedish mega-retailer. ★★ (Posted 5/5/2012)

Gateway Motel, 260 Maple Avenue,

Saratoga Springs, New York, July 29–30, 2011

Yes, in the old days, I did have an actual job besides motivational-speaking gigs: brokerage trainee, institutional sales rep, day trader, and boutique advertiser at a firm in the great city of Trenton, New Jersey. I had a quantitative brilliance. Perhaps it follows, therefore, that I have wagered and gambled over the years. My mind was on the odds on this occasion, see, because we had been at the racetrack enjoying the crisp air of an unusually cool summer day and, unfortunately, losing a lot of money, amounts that one probably should not lose, and this was extremely challenging for K., who, as we were driving in this quaint upstate berg after having wagered on the ponies, beheld the exterior of the Gateway Motel and said, I’m not going in this fucking place, I am not sleeping in here, I told you no more cockroaches, I don’t want to stay anywhere with cockroaches, nowhere with cockroaches ever again! (Why is it that this simple little insect, this hardy evolutionary triumph, the Periplaneta americana, can cause such upset in the average motel-goer? Are we not by now habituated to them? They cause no bite, they inflict no harm except the occasional germ. All that is required for the nonappearance of Periplaneta americana is the correct sealing away of foods and rubbish containers.) I asked K. where it was she wanted to stay if she didn’t want to stay at the Gateway. One of those Victorian hotels in the downtown area, all done up in velvet and Adirondack pine, where the high rollers come in to sip from the top shelf? We were craftier than that; we didn’t need to spend every bit of what we had in one of those Victorian hotels. The Gateway was the gateway to the forest, a couple hundred miles or more of it. Such was my argument.

With this explanatory rhetoric on my side, I did manage to persuade K. to set foot in a room. And yet, almost immediately upon setting down our bags, we found a deceased example of Periplaneta americana in the bedsheets. You would think that such a motel would have rates in the $39.99 range, not the $175 range. Admittedly the $175 figure at the Gateway probably had something to do with the racetrack, with the crisp air, the Victorian tradition of breakfast at the track, the pomp, the strong feelings of rectitude that come from slapping down a hundred dollars in front of the man at the window and betting the trifecta. The ponies! Nothing says commitment like an opened billfold and the loss that usually succeeds this opening. On such an occasion, one should pay $175 a night for a room at a motel that is mostly empty the rest of the year. Still, Periplaneta americana is Periplaneta americana . Our late-afternoon nap having been disturbed by Periplaneta americana, we went to the office of the Gateway and struck up a conversation with the proprietress in which we said we were new in town and did she have any recommendations as regards dining establishments, but the proprietress, who had a wandering eye, was cool to the likes of us and mumbled something about having had her sense of smell destroyed by a popular nasal decongestant so she no longer had much taste for the finer foods.

Many are the cons that are available to the motel guest who wishes to arrive at a more reasonable price for a room, and over the years we have tried variations on the Melon Drop, the Jamaican Switch, the Sex-Toy Scam, etc., each refitted for the specific hotel or motel environment. In this case, we were using a short con that K. and I had attempted elsewhere, the Nouvelle Cuisine, which involves getting a dining recommendation, coming down with horrible food poisoning, and then blaming the recommender for the illness. This is a simplistic con, I will admit, but I believed the wandering eye of the proprietress would make her more sympathetic and impressionable, and thereby increase our chances. When this did not prove to be the case, K. started in: Listen, do you know how many bugs are in that room? We have caught some of the bugs, and we put them under the drinking glass in the bedroom that you didn’t bother to clean, and unless they are strong enough to push the glass off of them, there’s at least five cockroaches still under that glass, and we demand that you do something about them, about the cockroaches, because I don’t want to sleep with any cockroaches, and especially because you’re asking us to spend $175 on this shithole. Look, it’s worth noting that I occasionally kept in my overnight bag a small glassine envelope filled with four or five mummified Periplaneta americana, despite Skylark’s dislike of the poor little guys. Would you think less of the author of these lines if he occasionally needed to strategically place the mummified bugs in the room as a negotiating tool, a sort of scourge with which to improve relations with a motel owner?