Hotels of North America (10 page)

What I’m really driving at here is that the Davenport is the hotel where Snowy Owl and I began to collect our sequence of films of Snowy Owl running and dancing in public places and in extremely long hotel corridors. The bliss of dancing in a long hotel corridor (not that I have done it anywhere near as many times as Snowy Owl has) is to be found in the fact that you know you are showing up on someone’s camera somewhere. There is not a chance that at any moment you could be asked to discontinue it. There was a very long corridor in the Davenport, that is true, but it was nothing compared to its Hall of the Doges. I don’t really know what a doge is, some kind of magistrate in Venice, perhaps, but I do know that the name has the right kind of seriousness about it, and when we opened the door to the Hall of the Doges, K. was unable not to dance across it. K. was a dancer as a young person, and she can still jump pretty high, and even though she has a few injuries of the sort that a person is liable to have when approaching true middle age, she just threw her jacket, a hoodie of some kind, on the floor of the entirely empty Hall of the Doges and began dancing into the center of the room, irrepressibly. Did I know yet that this moment would describe everything we were going to be, the kind of people who would find it important to dance in hotels and especially to dance in hotels when otherwise besieged by the worst of circumstances?

So, as I say, here it was, just a couple of months after some cretin in Spokane had left a backpack with wires sticking out of it by the parade route on Martin Luther King Day, and we were just visiting the city as I attended a conference on social media in the motivational-speaking world, and I was failing to make any headway at the plenary session, failing to get any speaking offers, but we were, despite all of this, dancing in the Hall of the Doges. How long would they allow us to rehearse this dance? I personally know enough about Terpsichore to understand that diagonals are the most exciting shapes in a dance, how the dance starts at the back corner and moves forward toward the audience along diagonals, and I was an audience of one, and K. started from the back corner, and we had had our hard times, which I don’t need to enumerate here, but now we were here in the Hall of the Doges, and Snowy Owl was coming from that corner, on a diagonal, just like in one of those spectacular ballets where there is a princess and a frog, there is the history of the German peoples, or someone is a swan, and there are a dozen fifteen-year-olds whose toes are all bleeding as they do their extraordinary leaps, and it was all exactly like that, and I was worried about security coming to tell us that our stay was terminated in this hotel that was too good for us, but I was also worried about the dance ending, worried about the time after the dance, when the moment that had brought it about would begin to slip away.
★★★★★
(Posted 7/20/2013)

The question you want to ask about certain lodgings, even if they are newly constructed or newly renovated hotels primarily for alumni who happen to be visiting the campus, is whether sex in these hotels is somehow better than sex at home. There should be a way to test this, there should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse? Increments of remorse can be measured in hesitations of footfall. Increments of remorse are measured in
la nausée
. Are you more remorseful after sex at home or after sex at the hotel? Or are your orgasmic epiphanies more or less epiphanic? In certain women’s magazines, it is always possible to speak of mind-blowing orgasms, but never do these magazines advertise diminished remorse. Have less sexual remorse with him at home! Or is it only the male of the species who feels incremental postorgasmic remorse?

You are not the one at the conference. You are the one staying behind in the hotel room, logging too many hours watching ESPN, simply waiting, just waiting, for the time when a certain language arts instructor (back during a brief recidivist spell after a years-long break) will come up to the room and torture you a little bit, because you have not very much going on, except that you have left someone at home, and because of the increments of remorse, a certain amount of ordering-in of foods, especially ice cream, has taken place, despite the fact that any ordered-in foods are going on the credit card of the language arts instructor. You are fat, you are indolent, you are middle-aged, and you are tenuously employed. You are in this newly constructed hotel, and you are looking out at the shiny newly constructed veneer on the campus of George Mason University and thinking that a great many of your very best days are behind you now, which means that you are emotionally affected by commercials for Cialis. You are hoping that the sexual torture that will eventually ensue from the language arts instructor will be noteworthy for varieties of torture not yet experienced so that you will be distracted and your shame will be temporarily mitigated and your increments of remorse will be temporarily diminished by the hotel and the sexual torture and the oblivion.

This is all as it should be, until the trip back to the airport and the dreaded parting from the side of the language arts instructor, when you will be released back into your life, and then where will be all the devices, the serrated metal objects, the ropes and binder clips and clothespins that were attached to you in an attempt to get your attention? You should be forced to wear the binder clips on your intimate parts back into your life, instead of confining all of this torture to the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, which is actually squeaky clean and staffed by people who are of good humor, even though they are hosting a conference on the feminist art and literature of the seventies, a subject you know nothing about except what the language arts instructor tells you when she ties you up and threatens your life, vows to put out cigarettes on your inner thighs, and forces you to listen to incredibly long digests of the meals after conference events.

And then B. said that this was not a fair and equitable seating arrangement at the table, not if the department chair was going to sit at the head of the table. This was a revanchist seating arrangement. This was a seating arrangement that perpetuated certain self-hating stereotypes among people of color in the group, and really the best thing to do would be for all of them to stand around the table in a modular way, not in front of seats, but rather at some discreet distance from the seats, so that there would be an implicit reordering of seating customs, and so that the hierarchy of roles that left
intact an unexamined privilege for white members of the delegation would be interrogated. That is, there would be no sitting down until they had had a discussion of these procrustean seating arrangements, a discussion that was feminine in the following way—indeterminate, nonlinear, unfixed, and nonteleological, but with syndicalist roots—until the group arrived, perhaps through some theoretical way, at a homosocial consensus, because anything short of homosocial consensus was a de facto reduplication of patriarchal structures, of neoliberal paternalist privilege, anything achieved through persuasion of a rigid sort was a replication of patriarchal structures, and even the shape of the table must be fit for negotiation, or at least under discussion, a biomorphic shape with negative space being preferable, because the fact that the restaurant had only a few circular tables and was more likely to push four-tops together to make sixteen meant that there would be an obelisk shape to the table, which was unacceptable, only a circular table would do, or perhaps an oval table, or, if there was enough discussion, perhaps a table that had a circle at one end and rectangular features at the other end, as long as the chair of the department was not at an end, because the point,
the language arts instructor remarked,
was to avoid anything that was demonstrably phallic, because we were there to have an important departmental meeting about which of the applicants we were likely to hire, and even though one of the applicants was, alas, a guy, he was the guy who was giving the paper on Stein, and the woman applicant was giving hers on Joni Mitchell post-1974, specifically the album called
Hejira,
and of course all of us revere Joni Mitchell, but we just think she’s not rigorous enough as a discipline,
and this is of course when the language arts instructor attaches a clothespin to a certain intimate part of you.

It’s not the single most painful thing that ever happened to you—that would be, let’s see, the legal dissolution of your marriage—but it’s on the list. When you have several clothespins attached to you and you are directed to go stand by the window and watch the students marching across the quadrangle while you are whipped on the posterior region with a leather belt, then you begin, for a moment, to be distracted from increments of shame, while, it should be said, adding more increments of shame onto the total, so the entire experience—including the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, which you can barely remember except for the lobby and the bar and the kindliness of the concierge—is about the arithmetic of shame, the diminishment of shame by virtue of a certain amount of sexual torture, and the aggregation of shame by virtue of a certain amount of sexual torture, things placed in you in such a way as to magnify your worthlessness, both releasing you from feelings of worthlessness and increasing feelings of worthlessness. This is the basis on which you might evaluate whether sex in the hotel setting is somehow better than sex in a domestic setting. Does a preference for hotel sex necessarily summon up the shame/worthlessness metric, or does a preference for hotel sex lead to feelings of warmth and intimacy? Is the dilution of your marital bond, accomplished with a language arts instructor who tells you that you are an abject slave whose only purpose is to somehow keep the erogenous part of you going for another twenty-four hours, something to be proud of or something to be ashamed of, and is the oscillation between these thoughts enough to keep you alert at the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel during the long, tedious periods of ESPN watching? At least until the hour when she comes in and says, in fact, that she is no longer uncertain about moving on.
★★★★
(Posted 7/27/2013)

Once I knew this guy in real estate. I didn’t contact the guy in real estate until my wife asked me to find a new address for myself, and then I contacted him. I asked if he knew anywhere I could stay for an extremely modest price while I figured out my next move. He said sure, I could stay in Sid’s Hardware, which had recently relocated to Gowanus, leaving their space downtown empty. It was more square footage (something like three thousand square feet) than any apartment I had ever had. My friend was the kind of guy who would stress the square footage and the location (downtown, convenient to mass transit
and
family court). The storefront was opaque, so no one would be able to see in, and I would not be able to see out. I asked my friend, jokingly, if the location featured poltergeists, because if I was going to stay in there by myself for a few days, I needed to know about all the paranormal activity. He laughed, and then there was an awkward silence. For the three days that followed, all I could think about was the silence. Was he trying to tell me something?

There were two and a half floors in Sid’s. The main floor was where the cash registers had been—this I knew because there was still a sign that said
Cash Registers
hanging from the ceiling. Adjacent and above, up some steps, there was a secured office space where Sid must have hidden himself, periodically taking time from the counting of profits to oversee what he imagined were the shifty and unprofessional cashiers. The office also housed the punch clock that had once been used to oppress the hourly indentured servants. This became apparent when, on the second night, I jimmied open the door to the office. The following were the other items remaining in Sid’s Hardware, all three thousand square feet of it, during my brief residence: a ladder, two dusty throw pillows, a hot-water heater, a beat-up old cassette/radio/CD player, one trash bin, some toilet paper, a shovel, a few pieces of posterboard, some tacks, some blue electrical tape, one large bag (a cubic foot or so?) of mulch (pine bark), and, downstairs, several seriously outdated computer monitors and printers that obviously were more expensive to dispose of than to leave behind. I brought with me the following items: an air mattress, a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow, a flashlight, some toiletries, a couple days’ changes of clothes, and a suit. I had almost nothing else, nor would I, after the divorce agreement was completed.

My real estate friend, Brice, left Sid’s open and a key just inside. He observed that no one on earth would want to break into Sid’s, even though it was downtown near several large, cut-rate shoe emporia of the Fulton Mall neighborhood, and this was not exactly a statement that comforted me, when, on the eighth of October, my wife sent me a proposal for the division of property involving my surrender of enormous amounts of savings and items of nostalgic import. I traveled by train to the Jay Street location and arrived at Sid’s fully believing that there could be persons of a heroin-addicted, Night Train–drinking, or paranoid-schizophrenic nature living in Sid’s, having taken advantage of its recent neglect. Sid’s could easily, from the exterior, have been a front for some kind of psyops outfit, or a street ministry for some splinter church, or perhaps a sub-rosa battalion from NYPD Internal Affairs, full of stalwart and idealistic young cops about to infiltrate a corrupt precinct in the Clinton Hill area.

My first impression of Sid’s was that among the traces of failed capitalist endeavor were all the varieties of quiet. Commerce is never quiet. This is why casinos are the least quiet places of all. Sid’s Hardware was quiet like few places. This despite the fact that several bus lines went past, and the subway traveled beneath it, and in the diurnal hours, there were a lot of people going to the office towers just down the block. Sid’s Hardware was quiet. From the cash registers up front, you moved back into the main floor, which must have been heavily mirrored once and hung with a variety of home-renovation products, tools, grades of sandpaper in handsome packets, and kinds of PVC tubing. (I find PVC tubing uplifting.) Alas, the walls, which closed in on any resident of Sid’s, no longer bore any trace of mercantile purpose. A tiny water closet by the elevator would have just barely permitted the morning-sickness crouch of certain cashiers who had been impregnated by the raging and wildly alcoholic night manager, Padraig, who came from County Mayo and had no papers. Padraig was also known to vomit up the Jameson’s that he had drunk in the half-gallon size the night before at O’Lunney’s, just around the corner. He was frequently unable to remember who had won at darts. Sid himself had type 1 diabetes and was in danger of losing both feet to poor circulation, and he often shot up his insulin in the water closet, and none of his employees knew of his problem because he felt it was undignified to describe his illness in public.

Some steps at the back of the first floor, past the tiny water closet by the elevator, led up into an inner sanctum just off the HVAC apparatus. The farther back I got into the empty and silent Sid’s spaces, the farther I got from whatever there was about civilization that recommended civilization over its opposite; the inner sanctum was where Sid’s offered safe passage into the wild and unpredictable, which happened to coincide with my defenestration from matrimony. Indeed, what was keeping me from running loose across state lines with a one-legged prostitute and some open containers, plotting embezzlement and get-rich-quick schemes, insider trading and arms dealing? The back door of Sid’s, past the ducts and plumbing lines, exited, according to this argument, onto the loading dock of a fertilizer wholesaler in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gateway to the Midwest, where some guys were plotting fell deeds and wearing hoods at night. These guys and their pals imprisoned women in basements across the region. At first I thought to put my air mattress in exactly this room because a little bit of poison inoculates, but I decided, instead, that I did not want to be on my way to Lancaster and its horse-and-buggy rigs and antigovernment spectacles. But in the end I set the air mattress out on the main floor, where the outlines of human bodies had somehow been drawn onto the walls with blue masking tape. The demolition crews must have done it, the guys looting Sid’s of its everything-must-go items.

I found, the first night at Sid’s, that I could not wear my own clothing. I found that in Sid’s I needed to wear someone else’s clothing, and so the next day, on the Fulton Mall, I bought some camouflage pants, a muscle T-shirt, and a faux-silk bathrobe, as well as a kind of sash that I wound into a turban, and I stripped down to the most naked possible version of Reginald Morse and gazed at myself in the convex mirror of Sid’s water closet, noticing that, yes, there were five or ten pounds that had not been there a few years ago, that my nose seemed to have grown ceaselessly, that there were gossamer blood vessels summiting the ridge of my nose, and that I appeared to have, not full-fledged breasts, but some kind of sagging pectoral musculature. I looked like a child’s seasonal confection in the middle of a bad melt; I couldn’t have aroused myself in Sid’s even if I had wanted to, though I could weep with abandon in the three-second reverb of that space so that the sound of weeping lasted long after its proximate cause. Indeed, weeping hung in the room after I covered my nakedness with the used clothing of the Salvation Army, wondering if there was a friend, beside my real estate friend, Brice, who was interested in where I was. Would you have wondered, regular posters on Rate My Lodging? Was it the case that my wife had made a horrible mistake by ordering me off the premises? Did she ever feel regret in her tiny, ginger, five-foot frame? Was it the case that the galaxy of our union was expanding in such a way that we, its constituent points of light, were now farther apart than we had ever been and were getting ever farther apart at an unimaginable velocity?