Hotels of North America

  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.

  I can feel, in the sometimes stilted conversation between myself and the child, the future when we will not talk as well or as easily as we usually do now, when she will ask questions about why I have lived the way I have lived, and I won’t be able to answer, except to say that I have lived the way I knew how to live, hic et nunc. I am a father who wanted at all costs to keep his daughter away from bedbugs. And that is something. Her mother has the pies to bake and the blankets to tuck around her, that song of femininity that no father can give, and what have I but some meager store of words that have fogged up the windows of progress and distracted a few people over the years? They are the same words that I have always used, and now they are careworn. Okay, bachelorettes. ★ (Posted 3/22/2014)

  The Guest of Honor, 131 Cricket Hill Road, Lakeville, Connecticut, February 6–7, 2010

  KoWojahk283 and others have accused me of failing to review bed-and-breakfasts on RateYourLodging.com, and I must admit that this charge, as distinct from many other charges I have detailed elsewhere, is in fact true. I have not reviewed any bed-and-breakfasts. And the reason is simple: because I hate bed-and-breakfast inns. What’s the problem with B&Bs, as they are often called among the types of people who prefer these inns? First, there is the issue of throw-pillow abuse. It is as if the throw pillow were a sign of affluence. There must be some kind of bed-and-breakfast trade association where the various owners get together and compete on how many throw pillows they have in their various rooms. The second problem, as is widely known, is the scented product called potpourri. Why is it that potpourri is so uniformly understood as the solution to the olfactory problem of the B&B? Potpourri is meant to cleanse the air of any human residue and to render neutral even the most foul-smelling traveler so that he seems to hail from a knickknack shop in Sedona, Arizona. That everyone has agreed that this one particular smell—of orange, sandalwood, lavender, cinnamon, and a hint of cocoa—is the idealized scent of human exchange is bizarre. There’s a desperation to the brutal efficiency of the potpourri solution.

  The third, and biggest, problem of the B&B, however, is the breakfast itself. In a way, I’m being facetious here,
because everyone will admit that the food at these breakfasts—The honey comes from our own apiary!—is some of the best food you are ever liable to eat. It’s not that the food is bad. I could probably put away forty-five hundred calories at one of these breakfasts and go back for more. The issue with the breakfasts is the human conversation. I would subdivide this conversation into two separate categories. The first of these categories includes the conversation you must have with the innkeeper herself. The innkeeper, though she is pleasant, is worried that you are a barely concealed sociopath, and when she allows you into her house, she makes especially sure to lock the doors that lead to her private residence. She has the local authorities on speed dial and is on a first-name basis with these local authorities, and all her conversation, no matter how simplistic or unsophisticated, can be understood as exploratory, in which she is attempting to make a quick but reliable mental-health determination. So when the innkeeper says, Such a shame about the rain!, you can bet that she doesn’t really mind the precipitation, especially if she has already taken an impression of your Visa card, but is instead trying to judge how the precipitation might affect your own mien. And when she asks a couple of leading questions about your reasons for being in the area, she breathes an almost palpable sigh of relief when she realizes that you are touring. The prattle of the innkeeper, then, while a colossal waste of your time, is not to be understood as anything but legitimate research. The same cannot be said for conversation track two, conversation with other persons staying at the bed-and-breakfast establishment. It is of the utmost importance that you establish, with these other persons, a reputation for ill humor and an absolute inability to be lucid before a certain hour. You can allude to a chronic dependence on caffeinated hot beverages. Sometimes it is useful to produce a pill jar containing medication. Whatever the technique, it is essential that you do not begin conversation with the other couple, however mild-mannered they appear, lest you should begin to discuss other bed-and-breakfasts (almost as if the bed-and-breakfast is capable only of creating an environment in which one must endlessly lobby on behalf of the bed-and-breakfast as institution), or fastest routes from Boston to the Maine coast, or prettiest churches in the neighborhood, or most spectacular weekends spent leaf-peeping. Upon making conversation, it is further possible that you will have to exchange e-mail addresses with the couple or that they will invite you to dinner that night at a farm-to-table restaurant in the vicinity. This is why abysmal hotels in the Midwest where the only thing you can have for breakfast is Wheaties are somehow superior to the B&B experience, because at least there you don’t have to explain.

  To summarize, these are the three main problems of bed-and-breakfast establishments: throw pillows, potpourri, and breakfast conversation, and the fourth problem is gazebos. And the fifth problem is water features. And the sixth problem is themed rooms, and the seventh problem is provenance (who owned the inn before and who owned the inn before that, and who owned it before that, and what year the bed-and-breakfast was built, and how old the timber is in the main hall), and the eighth problem is pride of ownership, because why can’t it just be a place you stay, why does it always have to be an ideological crusade? And the ninth problem is excessive amounts of regional advice. And the tenth problem is the absence of telephones. Even if you aren’t going to use the telephone, you want to know that the telephone is there. And the eleventh problem is price. There is no bed-and-breakfast that you can see from the interstate that says $39.95 in a neon sign above it, and although you can really sleep peacefully in the bed-and-breakfast if you are the sort of person who can be comfortable in the presence of a superabundance of pillows, that rush of uncertainty and danger that you get from the motel by the interstate is absent.

  Well, given the feelings described above, you are probably wondering why I would go to a bed-and-breakfast after all this. And to speak to this question I have to speak of the way in which I met K. In the more than two years that I have been working as an online reviewer of hotels, I have never told you this very pertinent detail about my personal life, and that is the way in which I met K., the love of my life (even though it appears, at the time of this writing, that I am still in a hotel by myself, trying to avoid using the bathroom down the hall, which is exactly how I described it in my review of yesterday). It happens that about the time my ex-wife and I signed the relevant documents related to our parting, I went to a local ashram, which I had learned about from a flyer on the bulletin board at a local health-food provider, whose aisles I was wandering aimlessly because I had nowhere else to go. There in the foyer, among the advertisements for home-birth classes and guitar lessons and clutter clearing, I saw a flyer for open classes in meditation and thought-cleansing. I noticed immediately that whoever had written the copy for this advertisement of meditation and thought-cleansing did not have a real grasp on the kinds of marketing language that would drive a person into a class on meditation and thought-cleansing, and so I resolved that I would offer my services at the ashram in the hopes that I might serve in some kind of official function.

  I marked down the address, and then on the day of the meditation and thought-cleansing session, I took a bus over to the neighborhood in question. (I’m leaving out the precise address of the ashram, because I would prefer that the kindness of the ashram remain a kindness unknown to the likes of TigerBooty! or KoWojahk283 or WakeAndBake.) I had no intention of meditating and did not believe my thoughts were in any need of cleansing. My idea was to petition the monk or monks about the advertisement, but I turned up at the ashram a little bit late, and because I was late, I had no choice but to sit in on the class. There was a flurry of activity around me, as some people with shaved heads indicated where the seating pads were and helped me to find a place. The sensei, or howsoever he was called, was giving his little talk, and it was about the course of thought, which, in the view of the sensei, was about flailing in the dark, lost, and the goal was not to think at all but to create some free-floating stasis in which one’s thoughts were like billboards and you just drove on past them and didn’t order the product. This seemed like a good plan, and quaint, as I’d heard many people saying things like this thirty years ago, but the plan was also difficult for me because of the pitch I was going to make about how the advertisements they were using for the ashram could be improved.

  I had so many good marketing ideas, but then in the middle of the sensei’s lecture I must have begun listening to him. We were supposed to have our eyes closed, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a woman next to me, with dark hair and modern racial chemistry, who was wearing some rather fetching yoga pants and a black T-shirt and who seemed to be in deepest concentration. Apparently, cleansing my thoughts was making me forget my mercantile purpose, and instead I was thinking about the woman, but even in this area I was prey to the oceanic intonements of the sensei, his half-Japanese muttering, because somewhere in the middle of the hour, which seemed more like seven or eight hours, I began either to drift off or to feel some sense of well-being, which I guess implies an absence of worry about money, and perhaps there were fifteen minutes or so of thinking about only the woman, and then maybe there was a period, an elevated echelon, where I felt the stirrings of something that, to my horror, corresponded with what was being described by the sensei, that is, the beginnings of contentment.

  It would be reasonable to ask whether these were actually cleansing thoughts or something closer to mind control, but given that there was time left on the clock for that day’s class, I could not but give in, and off I went, and I would say, as readers of the Rate Your Lodging site might be aware, that I have trouble getting my thoughts to decelerate. Does anyone else have trouble with that kind of thing? It was sort of a miracle for me to find that the sensei and his voice had now receded beyond the waves of meditative space, and I was finding that actually the quiet was agreeable, and even the slight knee pain was no real nuisance, and that it was as though I were the skiff, and the cares of my life had been le
ft behind in a cooler on a dock, and now I was dropping the lines and setting out onto the pond. The pond’s shores withdrew as I rowed, and now I was in and of the current, and the current was strong, I no longer needed to row at all, and the pond had become a lake, and above the lake, dusk fell into its painterly tonalities.

  And this was how I learned that I was of the ocean. I was the clock coming to a stop, I was the strings that don’t get played but just vibrate sympathetically, I was the nest awaiting its fledglings, I was the coming of night, I was the bicycle cresting the hill, I was the music box, I was the windmill turning with no one around to watch, I was the tree in the forest, I was the choir whose individual voices could no longer be distinguished, I was the clouds after the storm, I was the table awaiting its cornucopia, I was the bed awaiting its sleeper, I was the book passed from hand to hand, I was the reverberations of the muezzin having called the city to prayer, I was the hand waiting to be held, I was the ropes for the climb, I was the hammock out back, I was the song of the songbird, I was the old sand washed to the top of the new in the sequence of waves, I was the teardrop in the moment of being wiped away, I was the aerodynamics of the bumblebee, I was the stairs up to the proscenium, I was the cage door swinging open, I was part of the other people in the ashram, I was starting to feel that I was the other people in the room, though I was the unlikeliest person in the room to have had this beginner’s luck in the meditation and cleansing thoughts, and I didn’t have time to think about that, I could see the woman in black and feel something coming from her toward me, as if we were one together, though at the moment, I also felt this way about any number of other people in the room, like the guy with the gray comb-over and the lavender headband. I felt one with him and his callused feet, and with the anorexic woman in the corner wearing sunglasses, with her gallon-size jug of water; I was one with all of them.