Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Still, I probed K., there must have been something traumatic that had happened to her. First boyfriend sexually aggressive? Nope, he went on to be a sound engineer for Hollywood movies, and he had been very concerned about the number and duration of her orgasms. Was there a pretty girl in high school who tormented her and wrote slut on her locker? Nope, the pretty girl had bulimia, and K. felt sorry for her. Hadn’t she been in a horrible car accident, or didn’t she know some guy in high school who was a daredevil and who, in turn, had gotten into a horrible car accident involving his parents’ BMW and a telephone pole and in which several of her close friends from high school were killed? In fact, K. said, in the greater Tampa area, where she had grown up, there was a telephone pole where an acquaintance had died in a car accident, and this had been her first experience with the finality of death, but her parents had encouraged her to talk about what she was feeling, and because her mother was a Reiki practitioner, she (K.) had realized that she was holding a lot of dread of the afterlife in her hips. Her mother had worked on her and had encouraged her to do a lot of hip openers, and then she (K.) had let go, in a welter of tears, of the dread of the afterlife, and while she knew me well enough and cared about me enough to comprehend that I was not going to believe that she had carried a dread of the afterlife in her hips, or that her mother was able to release this dread, it was in fact the case, and because it was the case, she felt comfortable saying that she had never experienced trauma, and because she had never experienced trauma, she was able to be here, in the Rest Inn, at least today, without losing her shit, though she had in the past lost her shit, like that time we were in a foreign country with a malfunctioning air conditioner, or that time we were somewhere with live cockroaches, as opposed to the dead cockroaches that we sometimes brought with us for the Denial of Service con.

This was a very loving way of responding to my inquiry, which, after all, was taking place on Valentine’s Day, and it caused me to reach into the drawer where the Gideon Bible was and fetch the chocolates that I had managed to procure in Hot Springs, Arizona. It was a bad night, and I often felt we were in some apocalyptic topography wherein the Islamist rebels were hiding out from the government forces and expecting nerve agents, but I had K. and I had the chocolates, and these were more important than any insurrection.★ (Posted 8/4/2012)

Sand Trap Inn, 539 South Hemlock Street, Cannon Beach, Oregon, June 5–12, 2002

The sign advertised artisan-crafted guest suites, and, during my somewhat desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) trip to interview for an HR position at the Tillamook cheese factory, I was curious to know how the artisan had crafted these particular suites. Did an artisan consist of some slightly inbred white supremacist from the eastern part of the state working on the finish of the handcrafted teak bar in the suite over the course of seventy-two hours, never once needing sleep because of the stimulants employed when energy flagged? Or was there an aging dropout from the dot-com world, someone who had retreated to this charming beach town to work on some artisan-crafted guest suites while transitioning from the dot-com sector, sobbing in the room over the cherry he was using for the desk, whereby he lightly stained the surface of the wood with human tears? There was a subheading on the sign out front that boasted an “in-room Jacuzzi.” I wondered, naturally, if the absence of a plural in the matter of Jacuzzis indicated a single Jacuzzi in a single room, the rest of us being, as the saying goes, shit out of luck. Or were there in fact multiple Jacuzzis in which multiple groups of intoxicated golfers and their paid associates could make double entendres until the clock ran down on the Jacuzzi timer. In certain hotels, or motels, or bed-and-breakfasts, etc., it is important to get the proprietor to give you a tour before you settle on a specific room. Often the employees will resist this tour, and you will have to scale the rhetorical heights in order to procure it. Because I am a motivational speaker, I have surpassing persuasive skills. You need to start slowly, in a muted and nonseductive way, using honeyed and time-tested approaches.

As a matter of fact, “artisan-crafted guest suites” were not the thing that moved me to take this room at the Sand Trap. Rather, it was that I saw certain gentlemen on the Sand Trap deck from the street, and I was listening to their conversation, and it was the conversation of these gentlemen that made me want to stay at the Sand Trap. They were not talking about golf, let me say here at the outset. They were talking as certain gentlemen talk when they are really interested in getting to know one another, when they are bent on opening up, and by this I mean, of course, that they were talking about their shifts. My sense is that men of a certain kind, when getting to know one another, will always talk at length about their shifts. You know: That was that night in July when I pulled a double, a long night, and I wasn’t counting on having to go roust some kids who were trying to camp out in the abandoned plant, about as tired as I’ve ever been, practically seeing double, and those kids had all been drinking, and they really weren’t counting on anybody coming along and breaking up the party. To which an interlocutor can only say, I had to do a couple doubles in a row one time, I was doing security at the store, overnights, and I had to do a couple of nights in a row, because it was the lady’s birthday, it surely was, and I had to come up with some cash pronto to buy her something for her birthday, and I kind of got myself fixed on some jewelry, and so I had to stay up those two nights, and that is what it took. No particular pathos is ascribed to this overwork, it’s just a discussion of the physical aspects of it.

Maybe, just maybe, on certain occasions, a fellow will ask another fellow exactly how much OT he has accumulated in a certain month, but this is usually later in the evening, when all of the possible sports-related conversations have already been depleted, after these men have already traveled to such layers of arcana as when a certain ballplayer will become a free agent, and therefore sports can no longer serve as a topic, then there will come a point when even the shift-related discussion will run out of steam, unless, perhaps, the conversation can extend to a comparison of swing shifts and graveyard shifts. For example, I heard one of these men on the deck, from where I was standing alone on Hemlock Street, totally alone, talking about how he actually preferred the graveyard shift, because he had nothing to get up for anymore, there was nothing in his life worth getting up for, She moved out, you know, she moved on, said she didn’t understand me, that’s what she said, couldn’t go on if there wasn’t going to be even one minute when I expressed any type of kindness to her, and so she was gone, and the kids all cleared out already. And another guy said, One time I took the swing shift just to get away from her for a few weeks, I just filled in for this guy who had a back injury, and I came home when no one was awake, and then I’d just take some sleeping pills and drink a few beers. Everyone had a good laugh.

We were all alike when you got right down to it, myself included, because, though married, I was traveling alone in those days, having very recently extricated myself, at least for the time being, from a star-crossed and athletic dalliance, and so this was exactly the hotel for me, the hotel with the old-fashioned wall-mounted pay phone in the lobby, the hotel with the pool that had been drained of water, the hotel without the minibar, the hotel with the constituency of men who had fallen down on the job or who had had the reversal that they weren’t exactly talking about, the men who got up in the morning to shave and greeted their reflections with a few choice epithets, the men who had dreamed big when young and failed more spectacularly to develop these dreams, and when I got to the room, I realized that the artisan was exactly my kind of artisan. There were arachnids in every corner, and you could see all those people walking past on the way to the ice cream parlor or on the way to get saltwater taffy, and there would be no surprises, and the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair. ★★★★ (Posted 9/8/2012)