Hotels of North America (20 page)

Perhaps now I should tell you, as I have not told you in any other review that I have written here on RateYourLodging.com, that I cannot sleep without a pillow over my face, and thus it would be really easy to asphyxiate me, and perhaps my future wife, when I had fallen into narcolepsy after the first bloody round of lovemaking, might very well have executed me if she wanted to steer her fate away from a decade and a half of grief and progressive estrangement among both parties; instead, there I was that night, by myself, with a pillow over my face, probably getting insufficient amounts of oxygen and thus risking stroke, and I was thinking about how great the whole thing was, how great it was going to be, it was all going to be great, the fluorescent bulbs of the Loop twinkling below, the trains going around on the Loop like some monstrously scaled replication of a Lionel train set, the Chicago Bulls in the middle of a great season, it was all going to be great, because I had just had sex twice with a woman who was not in fact a Kansas housewife with IBS and multiple-personality disorder, and I had flown out to Chicago for this very purpose, which was a sign that I had grown into the completion of adulthood and masculinity, and I was enough moved by my hotel experience that I got up and located a piece of stationery in the desk next to the Gideon and with just the light from the window I scrawled out a thank-you note for the maid, and I set it on the desk and laid a crisp twenty beside it. It was all going to be so great.
★★★★
(Posted 3/8/2014)

What is it we really want from hotel life? We want the closest thing we can get to home. We want a reminder that home exists—that place you can come back to after a long inadvisable journey where they are in theory happy to see you. A place where the pillow awaits the impression of your head. A place where when you step in out of the rain, you breathe a sigh of relief. A place where everything broken was broken by you or by people you care about. A place where you could close your eyes and, more or less, make your way around just fine. A place at the end of a road you know well. A place where, should you suddenly become afflicted with a total absence of memory, it is reasonable to suppose that you would be returned.

Home, the place your enemies would wish to avoid. Home, the place your former lovers are troubled by. Home, where you can sit at the quiet table in the morning. Home, the place you sometimes hate that you also love the second you leave it. Home, any address that causes you to tear up. Home, near the metal box that has your surname on it. Home, where almost all the postcards you have ever received have been delivered. Home, where the government of your nation believes you live. Home, where your mother or your father brought you the second you no longer lived in a hospital. Home, where you first sang whatever it is you first sang. What
welcome
means, this you first learned at home, along with the word
home
. Home is where your bedroom was in the past and is now, and home is where you sleep more days than you sleep anywhere else, because if it were otherwise, you would renegotiate the application of the word
home
. Home is where there is almost always a beverage that you like. Home is where, if you wait long enough, it is likely that you will be fed a dessert even if it is not the best thing for you to eat. Home is where you are able to watch your favorite programs. Home is where people will try to find you when they need to find you. Home is the address you will sneak out of to kiss the first person you ever kiss who is not a member of your family, and it is the place to which you will return afterward, knowing about that kiss. Home is where you will first learn about disappointment, and it is where you will learn that it is okay to feel disappointed. Home is the place that is almost always indicated with a final major chord. Home, when you are older, is where you will watch your children grow, and, in fact, no other way of describing home is as valuable and meaningful as this, and when you are near death, the impossible sweetness of life will adhere first and foremost to the home where you watched your child or your children grow, or where you watched other neighborhood children grow, watched them rise up from the carpet and stab at something with their little paws before attempting to stick it into their mouths. This will be your home. Home may also be the place where they have called you an asshole more than any other place. Home is where you will paint your masterpiece. Home is what you will describe in your masterpiece; either home or the leaving of home. If you say you have no home on earth, then what you mean is that there was trouble at your home. Home is where you go right before dark. Home is where you go when you are recovered. When work becomes impossible, you will long for home. It is possible that in your life you have had multiple homes, a sequence of homes, and that each of these has required a transition. For example, when you were in a car that carried you from a house where both of your parents had lived together to a house where only one of your parents lived, even during that car ride, there was still an idea of home.

That catch in your throat that is the feeling that you will never be known, never be esteemed? That feeling evaporates in the presence of home fires, and while no substitute is adequate, there is the sense in the finest hotels that you are not far from home. When you embark on your journey, you set aside this notion of home, as if launching onto a whitecapped sea, certain that you are sturdy enough to let go of home, to relinquish the familiar, but it is only because you know that you can return home again, and it is the job of the hotel, the inn, the motel, the furnished room, to suggest the possibility of home or serve as a way station for home, preparing you for that return, lightening the load as long as you must be away. This is the great romance of life, the losing of home temporarily as when, upon that same storm-tossed sea, you lost the horizon line. The hotel helps you to see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.

Or so it has been in the recent, modern centuries of human history, and so it would continue to be if it were not for one tiny nettlesome bit of insect life that has emerged from up out of the eons of the past like a scourge to torpedo the serenity of our home lives, and that nettlesome life-form, as you must recognize by now, is the
bedbug.
Where did the bedbug come from? It came from somewhere in the evolutionary past, the dark ages, and it came to disturb your sleep, so that you would never sleep again, and while resting comfortably, you would wake to a stabbing pain on the surface of some extremity; somewhere the blood is pooling in such a way that the bedbug can come at you for warmth, creature comfort, and a full belly. It was gone, this species, but now it has returned, and it has descended on the cities, almost all places where there are hotels in abundance, and everyone you know, whether virtuous or sinful and carefree, is a potential vector of the dreaded bedbug.

Do you know any musicians? Do you know musicians from Francophone Canada who live in a sort of a commune and practice community ownership of their possessions and who do not wash their hair as often as they might? These musicians are almost certain to be harboring bedbugs, especially after a year of touring and sleeping on various people’s floors. Do not let them into your house. There are bedbugs in their guitar cases or their duffel bags. Every cinema that you visit carries with it the possibility of bedbugs, especially if it is not newly renovated, as in the old chain theaters that attract a downmarket clientele. You are better off not bringing any personal possessions, such as knapsacks or briefcases, into this movie theater. And then there are the hotels. It is widely known that even some of the best hotels in the nation have had outbreaks of these critters, and probably they bomb entire floors or strip them down to the studs before re-releasing the rooms onto the market. How do you know if they have eliminated the problem or not? I have stayed in some fine hotels in my day, but I was in no way certain in any of them that I would be unmolested by the bedbug.

At one time, the bedbug was a class marker. It separated the wannabes from the dynasts. Power is not afraid of powerful insecticides. But these things no longer separate us, for we are all fallen into the abyss of bedbug-related chaos. Some guy from Mali gets a visa because he is being tortured for his religious beliefs, and brings the hemorrhagic virus with him on the flight from London. Another guy comes from Pattaya with the antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea. It’s all one world now, the bedbugs cry out, and they gather up resolve in the neighborhoods of addicts, where people have stopped washing or cleaning, and these addicts take them to the motels where they are putting up for a day or two to get their heads together before going home to tell their husbands or wives that they have spent it all.

The bedbugs await these administrations of sorrow, and then they move on to the truckers, the truckers slumbering off a seventy-two-hour shift, so wasted and dead inside that they wouldn’t know if the bedbugs took off a six-inch patch of them, and the truckers in turn take them from one state to the next, or else the truckers pass them on to the hookers, because what trucker does not, at some point in his dismal haul, squint out into the parking lot and see in dim light the woman who does not look all that bad. The trucker comes from where we are most impoverished, and he brings the bedbugs, and when the bedbugs arrive in the city, they find an unimaginably colorful banquet laid out before them, a feast of human tissue, because where one human is neat and clean and somewhat cautious about such things, only fifty feet away lives a deranged and toothless hoarder of decayed snacks and tchotchkes whose apartment features a bounty of rats and cockroaches and unread copies of
USA Today.
So many places for the bedbugs to get comfortable, and when they are comfortable and have a base of operations, they move out to colonize.

What does this mean for the hotel guest? What does the bedbug mean for the likes of you and me as we check into another hotel? You know me, you know my wish to tell the truth, whether it is good for the operators of the hotels or good for their guests. I bring you the facts, no matter how controversial. I came to the Capri Whitestone, with its view of the Whitestone Bridge toll plaza, because I had booked the room online and there was a bargain price, and then I got here and realized there was no bathroom in my room, that it was down the hall, and that my bathroom, down the hall, was being used by itinerant preachers and opium addicts and appliance sales executives. And so I determined that I would not use the bathroom in the hallway, because whatever had been in that bathroom was at least partly rotted out, gangrenous; there was the overpowering reverberation of death in that bathroom, and the attendant sense of grief in the Capri Whitestone led me away from the bathroom and down the hall back to my room.

Since I had no desire to get up in the middle of the night and head down the hall, I instead took to using the sink in my bedroom, easier said than done. (I’m not proud of this, understand, and I don’t like admitting it in my column, though I think the Capri Whitestone should feel worse about this than I do.) I had to bring the rickety desk chair, really just a folding aluminum thing such as you could get at any office-supply store, over to the sink and stand on the chair, and then I had to find an angle that would permit a minimum of splashing. Afterward I hung my overnight bag in just the way you would tree your food if you were out in the forest, living off the land. My sleep at the Capri Whitestone was an unquiet sleep, and even the decades-old television on the shelf could not help me, with its meager array of programs about bachelors and bachelorettes; the remote had never seemed so well named. The whole first night was spent trying not to think about the most adaptable of pests, the bedbug.

In this edition of clinically diagnosed insomnia, I was thinking instead about seeing my kid the next day and about the fact that recently I have been seeing her alone, unaccompanied by K., who is back in Yonkers, refusing me admittance until the relapse that occurred after the Florida trip has passed. Look, some people think that relapse of the variety I am describing here happens because the cares of the world come elbowing in, and that in the double bind of these cares, there is no choice but to give in. If you had my life, you would do it too, etc. But I am here to say that sometimes it is when things go well that we get in a gypsy cab, drive to a honky-tonk dive on the Jersey shore, sleep under a pier in our clothes, drink rye whiskey for several days running, solicit the professional women in the industrial park, vomit on ourselves, sing unwanted classic-rock tunes in public places, whisper contemptuously to ourselves, and then take the train back to the city, sitting in the rearmost car so that no one will be forced to reckon with us, wondering how to spin the narrative of our episodic disappearance. Sometimes it’s the good stuff that causes this, sometimes it’s love and a week of Indian summer, it’s the bounty of life, or it’s so without cause as to be a perfect example of what goes by the fell name
human nature.

So I take the child to the movies or to a restaurant or to other such public places, but not back to my hotel room here at the Capri Whitestone—from which I am writing this review—for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has read the lines above. Under the circumstances, I have to admire the rock-bottom price of the Capri Whitestone, and yet my stay here has ensured that the child and I have no home to go back to, not really, and this has been the hardest thing of all, the inability to deploy that semantic warhorse
home
with reliable consistency. I could live at a great number of motels of the tristate area, like the Rodeway Bronx or the West Shore Staten Island, but I have landed here because the Capri has easy access to major thoroughfares of the region, such as the Bruckner Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, I-95, the Hutchinson River Parkway, the Pelham Parkway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Major Deegan Expressway, the Sprain Brook Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the Cross County Parkway, and this proximity seems enough, while waiting for the grip of relapse to unclench.