Hotels of North America (11 page)

On the third day, I ventured into the elevator of Sid’s and down into the basement, the quiet of which was matched with a soupy blackness, and as I penetrated into the blackness, I became less and less enamored of the light until the light was only a certain rectangle of door, scarcely ajar, across forty yards of cinder-block isolation. There was a whiff of musty stillness, as though a flood had once washed into those depths. I had recoiled as far as I could recoil under the circumstances, and I sat there for some hours trying to disassemble computer parts in the gloom, as though there could be a monetary purpose for doing so, and I might have stayed there with the computers had it not been that someone else rented Sid’s, and so Brice had to come around and persuade me out.

I had taken to playing the jazz stations on the old radio/CD player on the main floor, and first thing in the morning I listened to one particular expert opine on the variorum recordings of Charlie Parker, and when Brice came in, I was unsure if it was really Brice or if his yammering was, instead, the jazz expert’s. Up and out of the basement I came, dusty and carrying a length of copper wire, which I would have believed was implanted in my brain had I stayed another day. Brice said,
What the fuck are you doing down here?
I said,
Dictating my memoirs
. Brice said,
Well, you gotta get out of here, because we just had someone sign a short-term lease.
I said,
Who?
Brice said,
You’ll know soon enough.
I was released into these my travels, my permanent condition of travel, and there was no one now who could stop me. Three weeks later, I happened onto Jay Street, and my footsteps brought me inevitably back to the exterior of Sid’s. It had been rented to a political campaign.
★★
(Posted 8/3/2013)

The hotel room without a clock must be made to see the error of its ways. What is the purpose of the hotel room without a clock? Is it the same as the purpose of the clockless casino interior, where you are heedless of the days, attentive only to the harlot who keeps bringing you drinks? Have you ever had that experience in which you are walking in a big-box retailer that is exactly like every other big-box retailer, and while you feel you know exactly where you are, you also feel as though you don’t know where you are at all, and suddenly all the racks of inexpensive Chinese-made garments conceal the exit, until you feel as if there is not an exit, and you have the illusion that you could circumambulate forever in the big-box retailer, never quite repeating? Have you ever felt that you didn’t exactly know the way out and
panicked?
What would it cost this chain of inexpensive inns in the Low Countries to outfit each hotel room with a small, battery-powered clock?

Have you ever waked in the middle of the night in a hotel without a clock and felt the desolation of timelessness, of living outside time, of the purgatorial way station outside of time? Have you ever waked in such a condition and realized that you were in an endless stream of bad hotels and that though you might alight in some apartment—say, in the New York metro area—your life, in essence, had become a sequence of hotels, and that you had become this way because you were a top-ranked reviewer at an online hotel-reviewing organization with no job security, very little money, and uncertain prospects? Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night in a hotel without a clock where you had come straight from the airport, at dawn, having slept not more than an hour or two, smelling like the yeasty interior of the red-eye, to find that the hotel was significantly
flooded
because of days of heavy rain, and that when you manually pushed back the broken automatic door of the hotel you had to slosh through a lake in Reception, where there was a cheerful and blond Danish lady who waved at you and said something in Danish about (you presumed) the flood, until you mentioned that you didn’t speak
dansk,
whereupon you strode gamely past, because your true love and life partner, named Tanager for this trip, was already in the room, having flown ahead of you, from Germany, where she had been consulting for a new media-business panel that you helped her get? Have you ever waked in this room with the fresh trauma still in mind, not a room, exactly, so much as a sort of adult-size changing table that looked like it folded down—two fold-down bunks, in fact, upper and lower, of which the lower also served as desk chair—with the sink directly adjacent, around which a moldy curtain could be drawn so as to provide modesty while you crouched over a toilet jammed into a corner by the shower to pass a bloody bowel movement before hosing yourself off with one of those handheld shower wands that therefore was capable of being sprayed fully around the room and that drained out onto the floor by the bed so that if you needed to shower while in bed, you really could have done so? Have you ever waked in such a hotel and wondered at the fact that you were paying money to be in this hotel?

You were somehow duped into paying Danish kroner to stay in this hotel although the lobby was flooded with inches of water, and your room for two, smaller even than your room at the Groucho Club, was exactly the size of a prison cell and whose only premium amenity was a moldy curtain, but otherwise the hotel was so like a prison as to be indistinguishable from a prison, and there was no clock. Have you ever been in such a room? Is it not the case that in your timelessness, your jet lag and clock-free feverishness, you imagined, for days after this experience, that you were seeing Cabinns everywhere, each with its complement of students and foreign travelers trying to pretend that the Cabinn was not happening, amazed that there could be so much degradation and that it could still be called a consumer-oriented business and not a reeducation facility? Was it possible that the Cabinn was not covered under the Geneva Conventions or under the United Nations Refugee Agency? Should you go directly to the København commune of Christiania to try to score some heroin after the Cabinn experience? Wouldn’t you, if you were more than one night in that clockless interior, try to score some
smack
in Christiania? Is there any way that this clockless interior was humane? Is it not in the nature of all things to be time-based, so that in all things you felt the steady march of that dimension of our natures, the decay? Was it not yours to total up how much time was lost in each and every chapter of your life? Your every failure?

You were never going to get back the night you spent in the Cabinn. You were never going to get it back. At the end of your life, you would think back on the time wasted, and you would think it was really not right that you were unable to reclaim the night you spent in the Cabinn in Denmark, but you won’t even be able to say definitively how many hours you spent in the Cabinn, because there was no clock there, and you forgot one of those little European adapter guys so that you could type up your recollections of the Cabinn, but that would have been hard anyway because the only plug was in the bathroom area, where the water spillage was enough that you would definitely have been electrocuted if you had tried to plug in any electrical appliance. You have no idea how long you were there, though it felt like it went on endlessly, and so you cannot even file some claim for the losses of that night. It was and now it’s gone.
★
(Posted 8/24/2013)

I have stayed in Omaha, and I have stayed in St. Louis, and I have stayed in Manchester, and I have stayed in Springfield (it almost doesn’t matter which Springfield), and I have stayed in Sarasota, and I have stayed in Albany, and I have stayed in Providence, and I have stayed in New Brunswick, and I have stayed in Trenton, and I have stayed in Columbus, and I have stayed in Milwaukee, and I have stayed in Davenport, and I have stayed in Worcester, which may be the saddest American city I have ever stayed in, and I have stayed in Stamford, and I have stayed in New Haven, and I have stayed in Albuquerque, and I have stayed in Fort Worth, and I have stayed in Moscow (the one in Idaho), and I have stayed in Tacoma, and I have stayed in Denver, and I have stayed in Edina, and I have stayed in Rutland, and I have stayed in Lewiston, and I have stayed in Elko, Nevada. In each of these municipalities, you could feel these American cities grabbing you by the lapel and trying to remind you that they were not nearly as bad as they manifestly appeared out the window of either the hotel or the rented vehicle. And yet in no case was any American city as woebegone and desperate to change its story as Cleveland.

This particular trip was my third trip to Cleveland in a year, and perhaps it is simply that the people of Cleveland are in need of additional motivation. On this occasion, I was speaking to a church group in Shaker Heights on ideas of fitness. Prior to these three trips, despite being in my sixth decade, I had never been to Cleveland, notwithstanding my admiration for the hard-luck baseball team that hails from this locale. You would think, from its hard-luck veneer, that Cleveland wouldn’t boast a good hotel, excepting, perhaps, some four-hundred-dollar-a-night thing lodged in a distant safe area accessible only by helicopter, which would make it possible for candidates for higher office to avoid the masses of inconveniently underpaid and underworked individuals downtown, but you would be wrong, because in the nineteenth century, Cleveland built this arcade, this marvelous cathedral of indoor space not unlike something you would see in Milano or Köln, and tried to fashion a downtown around it, and this arcade has now been largely gobbled up by a luxury hotel chain.

Few downtowns are as ghostly and despondent as the downtown in Cleveland. Well, there
are
some other dead downtowns. Detroit, as is well known, is so crowded with the afterimages of failed capitalism that it is impossible to take a step there without the sharp in-breath of astonishment at how shattered destinies can be. It is also where I first met the woman who became my ex-wife. But Cleveland is bad, and that hall of fame, with its neon hagiographies about musicians, is far enough away from where you would ideally want pedestrians to circulate that it can do nothing to help. And so dust accumulates, and disenfranchisement festers, and not even a rat would bother to come by. The arcade that the Hyatt now occupies is no exception to this spree of desuetude, and were it not for the grandiosity of its initial conception, it would be just a footnote in the barely-holding-on narrative that is Cleveland. Indeed, the words that best describe the arcade and most of downtown Cleveland are the words
deferred maintenance.

But that does not mean that it’s not worth staying in the Hyatt Regency, which occupies the entire block of the arcade between Superior and Euclid. There’s no way this hotel throws off an abundance of profit; it’s so enormous, and each and every stall of the arcade, on the upper floors, is a room, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them, scarcely occupied, unless maybe there’s a wedding taking place. Hey, wait! That’s exactly right! There
was
a wedding taking place. Beneath the used-car-dealer-size American flag that hangs in the middle of the arcade, there was a slightly zaftig Midwestern girl showing a lot of back and a lot of cleavage, and a Midwestern guy with a shaved head, and there was a whole host of friends, not-exactly-beautiful girls in blue, circulating past the miserable post office and the shoe repair and the knitting-supply store and the travel agency, each of these enterprises the folly of someone loaded with antidepressants who didn’t really need to make money but just liked to have a shoppe in a location with jaw-dropping woodwork and glass and gilded edges; yes, there was a wedding, and some canned violin through the loudspeakers, and a wedding cake standing at the top of the main staircase, a beautiful marble passage up from the ground floor to the second floor—you could walk forty-five persons across that staircase—and here were K. and I observing from the third-floor terrace, like marriage itself was a lower circle of hell than the one we occupied. We had learned about the wedding not from the groups of worried-looking couples entering the arcade just as we were, but from the stack of photocopies at check-in that indicated there was an event in the arcade and that some of us who had spent good money to come and stay at the Hyatt could instead expect music and unrestrained laughter from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m., and that if we were noise sensitive, they would attempt to accommodate us. So said the photocopied handout from the assistant manager, who had probably labored long and hard over the specific wording.

K. advised me that Cleveland had a thriving dance-music scene, as do all hard-luck Midwestern cities, and although I’m not even sure what that means, a thriving dance-music scene, I think it has something to do with very loud and very repetitive music being played near dawn for people who are on self-administered medication, and my anxiety upon reading the flyer at Reception was that there would be a lot of hallucinating people with purple hair vomiting and shouting about the Apocalypse as they ambled around the arcade, but it was not that kind of wedding. We went first to our room for a quick nap and found that we did have an extremely deluxe view of one of Cleveland’s finest multistory parking facilities; our room was nice, that was the best you could say about it, and Meg, at Reception, was kind to put us here in the corner, facing the garage, far from the elevator and far from the wedding, so that we could sleep deeply on the memory-foam pillows, and the thing about our almost excellent room at the almost excellent Hyatt, with its absence of ice machines and its overreliance, decorating-wise, on tan, was that our room made us want to go wander in the arcade and try to get the attention of the Chinese guy who had the pan-Asian takeout place, who was probably just trying to hold out one more year. We hoped he would make us a spicy broccoli and bean curd something or other, but the arcade was closed off during the hours of the event, which the flyer at Reception did not properly refer to as the wedding between Jenny Gartz of Sandusky, Ohio, and William Blunt of Bloomington, Indiana. She had met the groom at a state school where she was studying social work while he was studying sports management. Since we could not go to the arcade, and since we certainly couldn’t wander around downtown Cleveland, because there is no downtown Cleveland to wander around in, there was nothing to do but watch the wedding.