Hotels of North America

  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)

  Sid’s Hardware, 345 Jay Street, Brooklyn, New York, October 8–10, 2008

  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?

  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)

  Cabinn City Hotel, Mitchellsgade 14,

  København, Denmark, August 24, 2012

  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 t
hat 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)