Rick Moody: Hotels of North America

The proprietress started shouting too, saying if we didn’t like it we could just get the hell out (and her perceptiveness about our motives must be admired), and she said this with an accent from some faraway nation, though she had mastered the slang of her adopted land. The argot came so easily to her, Get the hell out, and she actually reached out with a rolled-up newspaper and tried to swat Skylark cranially, whereupon I flung up my arm and my windbreaker, which I was holding there, to keep the proprietress from striking K., and I startled the woman. She let out a shriek, and this was enough for Skylark and me to head for the door, and anyone in any of the rooms, any of those compulsive gamblers who were holed up there trying to come up with some more clams, could have heard over the traffic on the county road the cries of “These rooms have cockroaches!” while we ran for the car and drove halfway out of the turnaround before we realized we’d forgotten our luggage… ★ (Posted 7/7/2012)

Rest Inn, 7475 East Admiral Place, Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 14–15, 2012

The Rest Inn of Tulsa on Valentine’s Day. It seems as though this is something that needed to happen to me, one of the top-ten reviewers on the Rate Your Lodging site, with over twenty “helpful” stars from miscellaneous readers. (Thank you, readers!) It is my fate that I should, at last, come to this, the Rest Inn of Tulsa, needing to find somewhere to flop near the Tulsa International Airport. K. and I traveled here, on Valentine’s Day, only to find it demonstrably proved that Tulsa is a hard-living place (and here’s a link to some info, in case you need it, that’ll take you to some former addicts of the area, who’ll tell you that in parts of Tulsa, there are legions of kids cooking who don’t really know, geopolitically, what they’re doing when they’re cooking, and they’re going to purchase bulk amounts of nasal decongestant, and then they’re going to come back to this, the methamphetamine capital of the world, according to some law-enforcement sources, and a number of them are going to flop at the Rest Inn on Admiral Place, an ironically titled name for the location of the Rest Inn, and these kids, who are cooking for recreational use, and in some cases blowing themselves up, are undergoing profound vascular changes such that their appearances are drastically transformed, you can see all kinds of self-inflicted facial scarring taking place from the attempted excavation of bugs under their skin, and then there is the weight loss, two weeks without even a microwavable burrito, and the pounds are dropping away, until they have that sort of internment-camp mien, and then there are also the neurological changes that come from the dopamine-release free lunch of the active ingredients, and here I leave unmentioned the dental horrors of this, the greater Tulsa area; there was some lady of Tulsa who tried to manufacture some of the drug inside a big-box store because she couldn’t afford to take the raw materials through checkout and into the parking lot, so she was trying to cook it inside the big-box store and was there for six hours, inexpertly manufacturing it, before someone tipped off the police and this lady got hauled off to the county lockup; meanwhile, just about anywhere within a fifteen-mile radius there is cooking, there is lithium aluminum hydride and sometimes hydrochloric acid and lots of other chemicals that you don’t want around because they’re explosive, and so right there in the Tulsa area, some kids with cognitive impairment and Parkinsonian neurological symptoms, not to mention murderous excesses of self-esteem, are performing advanced chemical operations not dissimilar to medieval alchemical transmutation, although in this case they’re not trying to achieve enlightenment, the articulation of self, or even trying to convert base metals into gold, they’re just trying to flood the brain with twelve hundred units of dopamine, and in doing so, in cooking, they are pouring hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid and lots of other stuff out into the environment around their trailer, endangering the neighbors, poisoning the groundwater supply, depressing real estate values, and causing, in the aftermath of their cooking adventures, EPA intervention in the degraded land around their trailer).

Before I tell you about the sketchy characters, and the cameras everywhere, and the bulletproof Plexi in the lobby of the Rest Inn, and the way that these impacted our stay, I need to tell you about a remarkable thing K. said to me on that Valentine’s night, while we were hoping that we were not going to be drug-war casualties and warming ourselves in the Midwestern chill against each other between extremely-low-thread-count sheets. (K., in fact, tried to get through the doorway [where she left her flats] and to the bed without her bare feet ever touching the floor.) K. said to me, in the course of our exchanging Valentine’s-related pleasantries, that she had never experienced trauma. She put it in a more colloquial way, I think, saying something like “I’ve never really experienced trauma,” and this was not, as you might suppose, a slightly fearful remark about the gun-toting toothless meth gangs of North Tulsa popping into the Rest Inn to suck on their lightbulb pipes; no, on the contrary, this was a statement of sanguinary goodwill, a sense of the rightness of things, of improvement in the world in the causative locus of K. I did not think the statement “I’ve never really experienced trauma” was an accurate statement at all. And if it was true, it would not be for long. There was every reason to suspect that our car would be vandalized, as indeed both cars next to ours appeared to have been, either before or during their stay, and we had been asked, at check-in, if K. was a runaway or a prostitute and if we planned on using drugs while we were staying. Under such circumstances, a certain amount of Halcion or Ambien would have been warranted, to loft us through the nighttime expanse of those eight and a half hours. It wasn’t traumatic at the Rest Inn, but it was close.

I demanded to know, while I reached for the blackout curtain and pulled it imperceptibly aside in order to watch some guys down in the parking lot loitering in a particularly malevolent way, how K. knew that she’d never experienced trauma, and if she was sure that she was using an adequate definition of the word trauma , like, for example, a “developmental emotional wound leading to psychological injury”; she observed that she had taken the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, because it was required for a certain research job she had had when she thought she was going to be a CSW — indeed, when she was training to become one — and the test had indicated that in all significant ways, she was a rather normal person, and her memories of her childhood, of when there had been trouble, were of her father sitting down after an argument and inviting the family to hold hands and saying, Look, there are always times that are hard, but it’s our job, during hard times, to look a little deeper, and to try to find ways to love.

I countered: Aren’t there times when an earnest point of view could cause trauma? And isn’t it almost guaranteed that fathers who say this kind of thing are either (a) failures in business, (b) evangelical, (c) talk-show hosts, or (d) cult leaders? K., in the calmest way imaginable, the way that endeared her to me, said that in fact it was that particular worldview, which was the posttraumatic worldview itself, that caused the harm, and actually her father was a generous and masculine presence (dead now, so I will never know) whose construction business gave him complete satisfaction and put food on the table, and even his death from metastatic mesothelioma at a rather young age was so long in coming, after the date of first diagnosis, that she had ample time to make her peace with him, and this included playing checkers with him in the hospital and recording and transcribing a lengthy interview with him about fishing, which she then made into a self-published chapbook. I had never been able to verify the existence of this chapbook, and this had made it impossible to execute my plan, wherein I would go online and write several four- and five-star reviews of the chapbook under various assumed names. (By the way, I did find a five-star review of the Rest Inn: “Clean, convenient, and right near the airport! Staff friendly, patient, and kind! Microwave and fridge in room very helpful. There’s a Safeway just up the block, so you can make dinner for yourself. Kids loved the pool. You could find a less expensive hotel during your stay in Tulsa, but you couldn’t find one with more love.”)