Hotels of North America

  While the casual reader of RateYourLodging.com could perhaps reasonably suppose that Morse’s painful, isolating disengagement from his wife would not result in a desire for ManilPhil91, that casual reader would lack the tremendous psychological insight that more engaged readers of my reviews have come to possess over the period in which I have been publishing them. Which is to say that everybody has his moment of weakness, where a discussion of economic disenfranchisement and nuclear physics can create a grandiose sympathy for the plight of Asian sex workers—not a sexual desire, it should be said, for ManilPhil91, so much as a Byronesque pathos for sociopolitical disenfranchisement. Which is also to say that the loneliness of the hotel reviewer is sometimes so pervasive, so overpowering, that anyone at hand will do, and if you have to pay certain parties to be at hand, then so be it. And in this particular case, I might add, paying for company created a tuition windfall for a gifted scientist in training.

  The wife, coming upon the scene, insisted that I go downstairs to the main floor of Windmere and take in the art exhibition, which displayed art by the various residents of Windmere. I agreed to this proposal. In fact, there was a docent, or at least an underutilized resident of Windmere, who took us through the exhibition and indicated that all the works were for sale. Naturally I picked up a price list. The work was mostly representational and consisted primarily of the flower arrangements of beginning painters and the occasional nature morte. There was also a great wealth of landscapes. A couple of surrealist paintings were also included, things that had clearly been produced by painters with dementia. All of this work suggested that in the waning days of life, a visual artist will become preoccupied with the acute observation of what is, with the actual appearance of things that will not be seen for much longer. Distortions in the field of what is are perhaps the signs that an elderly visual artist will not come back from the edge of the known world but will topple off into and abyss. I paid two hundred dollars for a painting of somebody’s shih tzu and returned to the room, and while my wife showered she called from the interior of the shower about when we might reproduce. ★★★★ (Posted 9/7/2013)

  Tall Corn Motel, 903 Burnett Avenue, Des Moines,

  Iowa, 50810, November 30–December 1, 2009

  Dear WakeAndBake, I have been impressed with your deep research-related capabilities, with your mole-like ability, given the scanty biographical details that I have allowed through the screen, to track, e.g., my credit rating and the status of my auto loan. I admit, WakeAndBake, that I periodically check my credit rating too, because it has been a problem on occasion. When you posted the number of my credit rating, that most American of data points, in the comments section of one of my earlier reviews, I was unclear on the reason for this particular violation of my privacy, though I did find it faintly amusing when, with a sophomoric self-satisfaction, you noted that last summer my credit rating had gone up two months in a row. I recognize, WakeAndBake, that to others there is a certain dastardly charm to your violations of my person. And the same goes for GingerSnap and her insistence on cataloging all the letters to the editor I have written over the years to various publications, both in print and online, as well as my most embarrassing status updates. It is, in a way, moving to me that you would care enough to look into these subjects.

  However, I take an entirely different view of your dragging my child into this forum. WakeAndBake, the fact that you would dare to write about my child in the comments section is perhaps the most transparent evidence yet that you are a brain-damaged hacky-sack enthusiast and revenge-porn addict who can get out of bed only for a little of the old sadistic fun. I do not know where you got the photograph of my child playing a rental cello. As I do not have the image in question on my desktop, I am a little stumped about where you managed to procure it. However, that is neither here nor there. When you, WakeAndBake, and your like-minded friends accuse me of parental negligence for having failed to mention my child in a review up to this point (and perhaps it’s worth noting that I have hinted about my child on multiple occasions), it can’t but make me want to break your metaphorical fingers one by one.

  Since when is it an obligation for me, or for anyone else in the online reviewing community, to give some kind of inventory about my progeny? Is not my progeny my particular business? Should not my child be free of the guilt by association that is RateYourLodging.com? Exactly how many reviews is she meant to appear in so that you can continue to have your profane obsession with these little reviews that I have been writing these many months? If I do it once, is that enough, or will you then hound me for an additional three times in this calendar year, urging me to include further mentions of my child? Do you have a child, WakeAndBake? Do you have a child with GingerSnap? Have you ever met GingerSnap? Perhaps at one of those online community meet-ups where it turns out that everyone has a club foot and cannot follow the train of any conversation without interrupting to talk about films like Galaxy Quest?

  Okay. Here, in my review of the Tall Corn Motel, I will mention my child to get you off my back, because the Tall Corn Motel is where I was served with the subpoena. I used my credit cards a few too many times, I suppose. Leaving the state, apparently, does not alter the course of your acrimonious separation. Nor does it alter the fact of the estrangement between father and child. But everything that comes into the world, WakeAndBake, whether it is the browned peeling wallpaper of the Tall Corn Motel, or the child wailing out by the Dodge Dart with the flat tire that someone is trying to change in the motor court, the child with the befouled diaper hanging between its legs, everything, and I mean everything, is put in our way so as to provide us with the opportunity to grow and learn.

  By leaving out the child, I have left out paternal anguish about the child, it’s true, but I have also allowed her to live her life unimpeded by representations of her; for example, I have left out her delightful singing repertoire, among which are sections of the musical theater canon, downloaded from her brain with such avidity that one song often will blend seamlessly into the next, each delivered at top speed, often introduced with a count-in—Okay, I know you know this, one, two, three—and off she will go with fragments of something by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, occasionally performing at the same time her floppy musical theater dance. Here she goes, in that floral print dress that she will not take off because she believes that dress confers magical powers, flopping around the kitchen and reaching for the crumbling Toll House cookie on the edge of the kitchen table as though it were possible to sing the entirety of “The Hills Are Alive,” do the floppy dance, and eat the cookie all at once, at least until the end of the first chorus, barely avoiding collision with the stools by the kitchen table, back where I lived with her mother, and, at the relevant moments, spilling a beachfront of crumbs from the Toll House cookie, and then off toward the sofa and the coffee table, flopping still—and you might suspect that a beatific grin is a requirement for the performance, but no, there is on the contrary a dead seriousness to her face, not a look of concentration, but one that seems to believe the preservation of our musical theater heritage is a solemn responsibility—stopping briefly at the coffee table to look over a magazine, there long enough to ascertain that it contains few if any princesses, and then back to the second chorus until the volume of cookie in the mouth prevents reasonable elocution, whereupon my wife gives in to anxiety about the choking hazard and says: Stop.

  I can tell you that I was once turned back at the border of Dubai, where I was going to stay in one of those hotel casinos in order to give a lecture on retiring personal debt. Getting back on the plane was utterly humiliating and professionally devastating, but even that is nowhere near as bad as the feeling of human failure that I associate with the abridgment of my visitation with the child, owing to the enmities and vituperations of separation. Some of you will imagine that the great number of hotel reviews I write are due to some desire to avoid the child, but this could not be farther from the truth. Some of you, those
readers more charitable than WakeAndBake, will imagine that I write the hotel reviews in order to produce an additional income stream to fund the child-support portion of my financial obligations, and this, while partially true, does not tell the entire story. Because it is also true that I travel in the way I travel to find a way to outrun not the child, but my feelings of human failure and disconsolation that are attendant upon my inability to see the child for a full 3.5 days per week. (My tendency to do badly when it comes to keeping up with rent and mortgages and so forth, you see, has at times had a concomitant bad effect on a complete itinerary of visitation with the child.) Sometimes this disconsolation leads to an address that is nearby the child, and sometimes far, far, far from the child, in a town, for instance, where the freight trains are keening past from dusk to dawn, and where one of the most American of interstates, the august I-80, intersects with one of the major north–south routes, I-35, and where there are just enough people to allow for a major drug subculture, some prostitution, some hog farms, feed corn, and libertarianism, along with the worst motels for three hundred miles in any direction.

  I always say, when I am giving instruction in motivational speaking, that you should speak from the desire to heal the most broken part of yourself. You should speak from where you are most wounded, and out of the desire to heal that most hurt part of yourself. Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball? That’s the place that you start from. You start from the fetal ball, and you start with the sense that healing is good and that if you were some kind of totally omnipotent or omniscient being, you would shine down a lot of love on the guy in the fetal ball.

  Now, imagine that you are saying that to yourself, you, the guy in the dingy motel in Des Moines who is opening the door and finding there a suited-up business type saying, Is your name Reginald Morse? To which you reply, Yessir, knowing even then that something awful is about to happen, wondering if it’s too late to retract the yessir somehow and replace it with Actually, I’m Don Smith, Agway regional sales manager, but, no, it’s too late, you have said yessir, and now the business type is saying, You are served, and never has there been a present-tense statement of fact that has seemed so present tense and so factual, yes, you are served, and the little bundle of papers now lying at your feet compels your appearance at a county courthouse in ________. Imagine you are an omnipotent being looking down on this guy and the bundle of papers at his feet. He has done so much wrong, he has tried so hard and failed so thoroughly, he has not loved when he had the chance to love, he has not lifted a finger, sometimes, for the people who needed some heavy lifting from him, he has not called his mother in weeks, even though his mother is still hale and living in a retirement community in Connecticut. (His sister, as his mother is fond of telling him, semiannually, calls regularly.) Yet is he not worthy of compassion? Is this not the place from which to begin speaking now? The Tall Corn Motel of Des Moines, Iowa? And is it not now apparent, WakeAndBake, why I might have preferred to leave the child out of all this?

  I met a police officer at the Top Hat Lounge, across the street, to which I later repaired, and she was unwinding from her shift, and she told this story about the Tall Corn, how there was a sign on a bulletin board in the lobby of the Tall Corn saying For a Good Time, Call…, a sign so brazen, and the police officer and her undercover partner, whom she described as significantly resembling a child molester (but on the side of good), did call the number in question, and the child-molester partner managed to procure a meeting with “Tamara” in the alley behind the Tall Corn. He then donned his Thunderwear, which was a special pair of briefs in which he could frontally install his heat, just about where his manly proboscis lay nested, because this is dangerous work and one must not overlook to include the heat, and he likewise donned a wire, as they say in substandard police-procedural television dramas, and off he went, on foot, to the alley, outfitted with Thunderwear and the proverbial wire, whereupon he began a colloquy with Tamara on a price for services. Various menu options were discussed, including oral for forty dollars, at which point (according to the police officer), the child-molester partner began berating the woman of the evening, the working girl, for giving herself away too inexpensively. Don’t you have any self-esteem? the partner said. Don’t you think you’re worth more than that? There’s no one on this earth who should give away her dignity for that kind of a price, I don’t care who you are or what hard times you have seen. Don’t you have self-respect? Self-respect is worth more than forty dollars! And what can you buy with forty dollars anyway? You couldn’t even get a decent winter coat for forty dollars, for when it gets cold like this. You couldn’t even buy a decent dinner out and a bottle of wine!

  On he went, though this speech was not meant to be part of the buy-and-bust operation. And the working girl, Tamara, took issue with this lecture. She pointed out that the price was fixed by her pimp, and they had been in this business for a while, the pimp especially. He was a prostitution expert, and they (she and her pimp, who perhaps thought of himself more as a dispatcher) did not believe that this was an unusually low price at all but rather a competitive price in this market, which was somewhat glutted with working girls, owing to the regional drug boom. Still, the child molester said, totally off script, I just don’t think it’s right, and she said, Well, you’re free to pay more if that’s what you want, but I’m not doing more than what I already agreed to, and then they set off for the room in the Tall Corn; that is, they headed from the alley around the corner to the room off the parking lot, which she had booked for several weeks (and thus the sign on the bulletin board), and the working girl said, It’s not so bad in here, really, and it doesn’t smell, but don’t take a bath, because last time I took a bath here I got fungus on my back. The tenderness of this advisement—fungus on the back—was lost on no one.

  Now, let it be said, the officer told me, that there was a code, audible upon the wire he had concealed about himself, that was the indication for the lady officer and her cohorts to swoop down and arrest the pitiable and kind working girl, Tamara, and that was when the child-molester officer said, The tuna is in the can, whereupon the swooping was to take place, and why the code was not The snake is in the grass or The worm has turned or The fishing will be good, I do not know, maybe the child molester just liked tuna. You have to admit it’s a pretty great bit of code, and one wonders only how the child molester was able to speak his line in the context of procuring oral favors. Nevertheless, the child molester did say, The tuna is in the can, and they swooped in, and the working girl was set facedown on the pavement of the Tall Corn parking area, and her wrists were cuffed, and in this way yet another prostitute operating out of the Tall Corn was taken out of circulation for a couple of weeks, at least until yet another sweet young thing with a drug problem decided to make some easy money. Yes, all of this took place in the motel where I got my subpoena. ★ (Posted 11/9/2013)

  Norse Motel, 1120 County Road 165,

  Story City, Iowa, December 6–11, 2009

  You know what else can really distract you from your low circumstances? Hotel pornography. I haven’t really had a chance to rate hotel porn on Rate Your Lodging, but I think it’s a significant part of the hotel/motel experience. (However, before I begin, it’s perhaps useful to speak of that disagreeable colloquialism, viz., the noun porno, as in “Last night I rented a porno,” or “There were several good pornos on the television last night.” Porno sounds like it’s Esperanto, and, as everyone knows, the dream of an international language that is simple and easy to use and based on Romance languages is an infantile wish. Esperanto is like giving the world gruel out of a vacuum-packed sleeve instead of actual food. And porno does not describe the brutish need of sexually explicit video products, and so, in my ratings of hotel porn, I will exclusively use that abbreviation, porn. You will find no pornos here. No Esperanto.) Often, when traveling alone, I will walk into a room and feel an overpowering need to defile mysel
f. Nothing says lonely like a brisk six or seven minutes with Candy Store Vixens and some giveaway lotion and a washcloth from the fungally rich motel bathroom, after which the contempt for self will be amplified to a level that is familiar, even comfortable. So hotel pornography is a useful service to have available in a motel, and it was generous of whatever sex addict originally came up with the idea. There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

  So now that we have agreed with the idea of hotel porn and with the importance of reviewing it, what kinds of features should be peculiar to hotel porn, to a clientele that is busy, hardworking, emotionally blunted, ashamed, and cost-conscious? Obviously, the price point for hotel porn should not be too high, should not rise, for instance, to 50 percent of overall lodging expenses, because that will drive off the customers, but it should also maximize the profit potential in what is essentially a compulsive activity. That is, demand for hotel porn among frequent users is inelastic. People who use it need to use it and are therefore willing to pay. Ordinarily, when you purchase pornography, there is a period of getting acquainted where you speed through the film for a few minutes, trying to find a model who is particularly attractive and who is being well employed, and in this getting-acquainted period you can afford to have a film that wastes some of your time, because the thrill of anticipation, when it comes to pornography, vastly exceeds the reward of pornography. And yet, in a hotel setting, narrative exposition is your enemy. The consumer is not going to be engaged with such a film at great length. Therefore, hotel pornography, somewhat uniquely, should have no exposition at all. A hotel or motel that continues to broadcast exposition-heavy pornography is liable to have an angry clientele on its hands, because no compulsive user of pornography in a small-town motel like the Norse Motel is going to sit still for a long dialogue in a doctor’s office in which a bored twenty-one-year-old with a triple-D cup indicates that she might have dropped her insurance card down her brassiere.