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I was thinking.
I had to stay in hotel recently because I was in a city where I have no friends or nook
that I've hollowed out of the ground, up in the hills, where the shepherds hear voices,
and where the police have already warned me about standing in the same spot in a bus station
for eight hours, so every city in the world, and I suddenly realised as I was staring up
at the stucco ceilings listening to the hum of the same fifteen minutes of CNN repeating
itself punctuated by the muffled banging of doors, as if I was living in the most tedious
deleted scene from Ground Hog day where Bill Murray's next door neighbour plays four of
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music LPs simultaneously, that my room had no kettle. What the cocking
*** I said to myself as I sat up to make sure there wasn't some hidden tap or vent
or replicator. Well how the hell am I meant to drink my Malcolm X Tea now City View Hotel?
I can't even boil water and I'm not mixing it with good Dr. Pepper, that stuff doesn't
come cheap you know.
I don't think I've ever had a nice time at a hotel – not to say I haven't been to some
nice ones, but I've just never got into one and said oh yes there's the bed, there's the
floor, there's the TV with the remote control glued to the wall, and there's the safe I'll
inevitably seal my passport, money, and trousers into even though I wasn't leaving the room,
and conclude that yes, yes this is exactly what I want and it totally is worth spending
five times as much on per day as it would cost to rent an entire house. I know I sound like
an air raid siren that's been stuffed with grape sandwiches, as what I've just described
is exactly what you want a hotel room to be, but God they're depressing; it's like waking
up in the morning to find you've turned into Al Gore. Most I can't remember at all, but
the worst one was a place in Lucknow that was ostensibly really nice because they had
an air conditioning unit and walls all the way to the ceilings– not a place I wanted
to stay but everywhere else was booked because that's how hotel scams work you chumalumas.
It was clean and tidy and the only weird thing was they had a sit down toilet that looked
like one you might find Henry the 8th sitting on reading a copy of The Sunday Sport, but
that didn't really bother me because hell yes, toilet paper, and you can't call me a
whiner if I'm happy about there being toilet paper, but my experience at Swastika Inn,
yes it was called that, was ruined when I sat down to take a dump and realised that
no I wasn't sat on a toilet bidet combination, but, and are you ready for this...
a pig on the other side of the wall had stuck its head through the hole and was licking my *** as
I was taking a ***. I was pretty annoyed, they could have asked me if the pig room was
alright first.
But you know what I probably had a better time there talking to the weird concierge
who had dyed his hair and fingers bright orange and whose only job seemed to be pretending
not to watch MTV in the lobby for glimpses of cleavage and sideboob, than I did when
I was accidentally employed and sent to New York, propped up in a swanky suite room in
a hotel on Madison Avenue. Sealed off from the random steam vents, yellow cabs, and guys
telling each other that they're *** walking here by eighteen stories and inch thick Plexiglas
I remember wishing they'd just let me make the booking myself because a half price if
you sleep on the pool table type hostel would have done me just as well and I could have
used that money to not have a job with.
There's something I find quite terrifying about walking into a room you know is in a
building that is full of rooms that are the exact same, as if the CIA watched Men In Black
and couldn't work out how to replicate the memory eraser so they spun it around and just
erased everything else from a person's life. I don't know what I'm really griping about,
it's not as if I want there to be any traces of the thousands of people who must have slept,
fornicated, vomited and defecated all over my room for hire – I get why they're neutral,
I just find them inescapably sad, like a wedding dress in a charity shop or an old gym teacher
whose getting on a bit so they've started making do geography.
People go on about how awful motels are, with a raccoon in the pool and rooms filled with
people pretending not to be alive, but at least there's some sort of grimy feeling there;
I had to live in one for a bit when I was pretending to not exist for tax purposes,
and at least I knew where I was when the staff would get tweaked and play destruction derby
in the parking lot at four miles and hour - not in the parking lot - or when Old Mr Nedich would shoot out his
lights because he couldn't be bothered to reach for the switch, or when they showed
me the pole in my room. Those sort of *** stain motels are kind of fun if you know you're
not going to be there for the rest of your life, which tragically many do not, and at
least there's community – stay at a travelodge on your own, I dare you. Decked out like a
budget version of the hotel room from 2001 with all the lights off and the corners sanded
down, they're the saddest places on earth – with windows that face brick walls and
don't open because as the duty manager said to me, 'we've had a few more suicides than
usual.' Jesus Christ run me the bath and get me the hair dryer.
Just A Thought.