By Eric Le Roy
“Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.”
– Tom Stoppard
Human beings stop at many points of connection. What they discover at these watering holes of the spirit defines the glory and carnage of their lives. I’ve watched people disappear into the dark and reemerge sometime later, as I have, and probably to many of the same places – in substance, if not in name. We carry different maps in our coat pockets, but they are often the compasses of impulse, and not a way home.
We also bear the cargo of our minds: the luggage of memory; the deck of cards we use to play the here and now; and the half-formed contracts we draw up to manipulate the future into signing on the dotted line. A lot of lucky charms and hocus pocus to go with the screwdriver and the ‘game face’. I, for one, am seduced by the lofty silence of bridges as seen from a distance so that whatever noise the traffic is making is blotted out; country train tracks, weeded over and with no sign of trains; and the high windows of secluded city hotels where the glint of the sun makes the windows into shields there to block some quiet madness in the room.
I have come to think that daydreams are the true reality. Millions of ordinary holiday-makers to the side, hotels and motels are also the friends of people with disorderly minds. Places where daydreams come true.
These establishments suggest a mess of things to a variety of people. Take trees, for example. I understand that a tree looks different to different eyes. To some, nothing but an obstacle to a planned business park. To others, firewood. Or a tall, knobby house full of living things. A maze of colors for an Impressionist painting. A metaphor for life, from root to leafy branch. Likewise, a motel by the side of the road may seem innocuous to some, but acts as a trigger to others. My thesis here is that these temporary lodges can be places for people to release many of the ghosts inside them that they would be afraid or ashamed to do otherwise. The hotel/motel is a halfway house for a spirit with an identity crisis.
It all depends on what you look for in these ‘escape rooms’. For instance, there is not a single person I have ever seen, much less actually met, who did not leave some mark on me, even if nothing more than a swift and soon vanishing impulse of Yes or No. A group of corporate men leaving a meeting is not interesting; Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” is. Compare:
I think it’s because the first photograph, while depicting living human beings, nevertheless lacks ‘life’. The second one, a painting made back in the days of Henry VIII, seems open to the touch. The room invites us in; all we have to do is step off the precipice of ‘reality’ and dive into the dreaming part of our mind – or is it some universal mind? The men from 500 years ago are waiting, with quizzical but not unfriendly expressions on their faces. They want to hear our opinion and know what we think; therefore, they are interesting.
By the same token, pictures of nice houses in residential areas just outside the city don’t interest me in the way that enigmatic hotels and motels do. Compare.
So what am I getting at here? A decent citizen might say to me, “Man, you really dig that squalor, don’t you?” And I do. But it’s not all about fantasies peopled with drug dealers and sleaze-nymphs from dark parts of the common city soul. It’s because I know that some of me is light and some of me is dark. And the darkness controls the light, even though it may seem the other way around.
Consider that Shakespeare made the theater a metaphor for life: “All the world’s a stage, and all its men and women merely players.” True enough, but what about all the strange behavior going on backstage? Did he think of that? I’ll bet he did, but he let characters like Lady Macbeth and Iago do the talking. Maybe it’s just me: decadent and full of the refulgent orgy-cravings of the truly depraved (now the goofy absurdities of old age), but I’ll wager that no more than 40% of life is lived on the proscenium; the other 60% in the wings and further back.
If you look at paintings by Degas and the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, you’ll catch a whiff and a glance of what I mean. And finally, my incorrigibly corrupted experience tells me that most of what goes on in the symbolic ‘dark’ of behind closed doors is not for the puritanical or faint of heart. It is, rather, for those who see the human soul for what it is: not entirely a vehicle of obedience to various morals and laws, and certainly not something devoid of kindness, but also the thing of a wilder substance: something dancing, wailing, singing, gesticulating always; it is revealed in the swirling movements of the dancing girls, and also in that statutory lecher, likely thinking lascivious thoughts beneath his pretense of restraint, observation, and decorum. They live, briefly, in a hotel room, top floor, in my dream. God has many mansions; I have many tenements.
In Toulouse -Lautrec, you will see the reality of unreality unfold in the Moulin Rouge. You will see the people, each an animated mannequin behind a mask, a thinly veiled cruelty buried in their gaiety, all manipulating the scene. Actors on a stage. But, too, you can feel the sordid dressing rooms reeking behind the masks. People of hotel rooms.
Grace among the creeps; sensual movement on nubile ballerina legs, admired by scavenger predators. That’s the way it is. One recalls Baudelaire. Illusion: agreed-upon ‘reality (the performance) and Truth: the frenzy behind the scenes (and out the stage door in the back leading to the streets) where the players take off their hoods and become who they are. Some like this reconnection; others continue to hide. Houses and well-equipped apartments are for people who have made up their minds about certain things; hotels and motels exist for ambivalent people, those who find places where acting becomes reality. The daydream aroused to life.
For some reason, the idea of hotels (everywhere) and motels (especially in America) evokes this sense in me. I think it’s because they are not ‘homes’, and were never meant to be, even if some people stay on and on until it must seem like home. (Trailer parks are like that, too: normally shabby, they have ‘just for now’ written all over them, but some people die in the doorway.)
Transient people think transient thoughts. All sorts of things come to mind, many of them sexual. The English Rose who goes to Italy expressly to be ‘violated’ by the swarthy motorbike greaseball who mutters Roman swearwords under his breath as he conquers her. What is it? A colosseum lion devouring a Christian? Or the granting of desire-fulfillment, usually by an insightful ‘victim’ who understood the desire from the first moment it was felt. Terms of endearment.
OR – do we speak of a business leader of bone-hard morality and inflexible demands on his sons and daughters, a family man in all respects, who – wonder of wonders – finds himself in a room in some bleak place in the city, getting rammed by a strap-on queen who tells him he is a piece of shit while he begs for mercy – the same starched dude who will stop to purchase a vegetarian takeaway to bring home to his wife and kids. Were this alternate reality known to other pillars of the community, can you just imagine the expressions on their faces? Even if in him they recognised themselves?
No. I am not laughing at these people. In fact, I rather like them, like them better without the role-playing for public consumption. But I understand that they can’t do that onstage. They have to live in this world. The guest house waits.
So let’s start with people who really do have homes, and who go away from time to time. Vacations, business trips, temporary sanctuaries for emotional distress, places to escape the violence of exes and pursuit by the cops. At home, wherever home is, they’re one thing, these actors. Maybe not a good thing, but at least distinguishable to those who have to deal with them on a regular basis. When they get somewhere down the road where they can ditch the performance, they sometimes look for a rabbit hole that can open from the inside out. Again, I may mention that this proposition has been borne out by my own experience.
Of course, most people just book the reservation, park, enter, drop their suitcases, go out, ride or walk, eat, return, fuck (or have ‘intercourse’ maybe), shower, and sleep. Whether it’s a weeklong stay in a 5-Star Citadel of Civilization or a Building on a Street with a Sign hanging out the front, it’s still a mecca for those of a fugacious disposition. In the nice operations, ‘Housekeeping’ cleans the rooms every morning when you wander out to the pool; in the crummy joints, they change the sheets and pillow cases when you leave for good. They need to get rid of the dried slobber and bubble gum cum, often still glistening like the eyes of the Children of the Corn. Still, whether it’s gilded sofas in the lobby or broken TVs and air conditioners that rattle like hell but emit no cooling air, it is as possible to remain anonymous in one as in the other. For many, that’s the very idea.
American lore is full of hotel and motel stuff. They form the theme of two of the finest books I have read, “Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In Seize the Day, the hotel operates as a place of stifling oppression, where Tommy Wilhelm, a chronic failure in life, is forced to confront his father, the hardcore success, Dr. Adler, and where each day he is reminded of and reproached for his ineptitude.
The hotel, ironically called Gloriana, is where Tommy must confront his broken marriage, unemployment, and general accumulation of bad choices. It is also where he meets the shyster, Dr. Tamkin, who cons him out of his last money. The father makes ostentatious use of the sumptuous dining room and massage rooms, shaming Tommy by implication. The hotel is a prison disguised as a pleasure ground for paying guests and permanent residents, and it is in this prison that Tommy struggles to avoid mental collapse and despair. Therefore, it is not a home or ‘guest house’; it is purgatory.
In Lolita, the confirmed pedophile pervert Humbert Humbert, a seamy imitation of aristocracy and breeding, uses the mother of 12-year-old Dolores Haze as what she is, a needy woman in search of love (god forbid !!) to abduct her daughter, whom he deliciously renames as ‘Lolita’. The two embark on an aimless odyssey on endless American highways, stopping each night at a roadside motel, where Humbert, amid many soliloquies, again and again ravishes his adolescent victim. It may offend some people if I suggest that the saving grace of the book is that Humbert, in his vile debauchery, actually worships ‘Lola’, but only in the sense that the novel is moving in the direction of rock bottom loneliness and the twisted attempts at love people resort to when they suffer from both emotional and physical homelessness.
In other words, like it or not, it is entirely possible for an older man, ‘sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal’ (Yeats), to fall hopelessly in love with the captive he knows he is debasing. In fact, the way Nabokov describes some of those motel evenings, I know that I want to make love to Lolita too. (Or is ‘fuck’ the right word?) I want her as much as Humbert Humbert does. Should I deny it? And be ashamed? On the public street, yes. In the motel room, No.
Apparently, one of Nabokov’s themes is to show the emptiness that seems peculiarly American – the lack of connection that the open road, symbol of American freedom, actually reveals. Humbert’s ostensibly ecstatic moments with Lolita in fact underline this unresolvable desolation. Humbert is a wicked man, disdainful of the cultural wasteland where he finds a new cubicle every evening just so that he can fuck an adolescent girl. He is an eloquent rotter. A dilettante ‘in love’ with his own degradation, ‘spending’ himself night after night in the nubile repository of his fantasy.
And what about her? In this Age where everybody is a victim, it is surely sacrilege to suggest that Nabokov is more profound than mere Victimology. I also run the risk of suggesting that Dolores enjoyed getting raped. So I won’t, because rape is what it was, and I don’t think she was keen on it. Nevertheless, I would proffer that every eventful relationship, however dysfunctional, is a dynamic of some sort in which there is a morsel of clandestine agreement.
It is precisely this tension that makes Lolita a classic rather than a ‘shocking’ potboiler. Lolita understands her own level of control, the mere child that she is. And she also senses that she will soon be free. It doesn’t mean – and in my view it would be a mistake to think so – that she doesn’t enjoy some of that experience. I think she does. Curse me if you will, but I think that she is secretly in touch with her inner skank. I base this on the belief that all of us revel, in a perverse way, of course – but true – in an occasional stopover at sweet Hell on our long, feet-aching trek that constitutes a pilgrimage toward Heaven. If nothing else, it helps us polish our spiritual glass and readjust our ‘moral compass’.
The chain of motels up and down the road has little to do with that joyous Willie Nelson song, although it evokes Kerouac, somewhat, an alcoholic, romantic vagrant, tearing back and forth across the country with his manic friend Neal Cassady. Pioneers or lost souls? But, anyway, what has this got to do with Tom Stoppard’s quote?
First, it comes from his 1982 play “The Real Thing”, and one of his themes is how a lot of our so-called emotions are often performance-based. For centuries, satirists have been lampooning the blatant falsehoods on which society is largely based. The play isn’t about hotels, and the line, typical of Stoppard, sounds like a throwaway, just something flipped off spontaneously and without a lot of thought. English repartee, which is often biting in its underspoken virulence.
Nevertheless, the line sticks in the imagination, at least in mine. It seems to be about ‘moral dislocation and suspended consequence’, as one critic put it. And, what, pray, does that mean? I think it means that hotels and motels are liminal places where normal rules of behavior no longer apply, and where actions stimulated by ‘unacceptable’ emotions can be played out in private. Moral boundaries can be discarded – for a while, anyway – but ‘for a while’ is usually enough. Plenty of time to lose the disguise and put it back on. And it should be remembered that murders happen in these rooms as well as orgasms.
I would suggest that there is not a lonely person in the world, homeless or to the manor born, who does not respond, at least in his/her mind, to the signal from a building that says Hotel. On a city street, the mysteries of that city promise to be possible behind the door to your room. Companions can be found.
Hotel rooms are designed to be used, vacated, and reset. Every guest leaves traces, but those traces are soon wiped away – and that too is part of the design. Whatever acts were committed there don’t seem to “count”; hotel rooms are like theatrical sets: what happens there is performed, intense, but fleeting. Hotels and motels are halfway houses where the rules say ‘behave yourself,’ but if you don’t, it’s ok, no one will know.
I am not going to lie to you. The reason this topic appeals to me is that, in my day, I was also a ghoul of the cheap hotels, a denizen of the roadside cockroach inns. I have waited for crack cocaine to arrive, and I have performed unrestrained sexual acts on women who knew the crack was on the way.
I remember a place in Jacksonville, Florida, where I used to go. People who knew me as Professor Le Roy, would never have guessed that the man who was quoting Keats in the morning was slavering over a street woman’s genitals before sundown. And wanting more. More, until the money ran out. And then spending the night shivering in that room, alone, the party over, the ‘collateral’ gone. The woman gone too, probably looking for more ‘luck’. Who could blame her?
I built an intimacy with those places because I knew, I secretly knew, like a hobo in the street knows the railway station, that this was where a part of me belonged. Wherever it came from, genes or Jesus lost, I relished my nights in wicked places, and damned near all of them were hotels and motels. That’s why they will always have a special place in my heart. It’s because in those rooms, I could forget all obligations and appearances, and do precisely what I wanted.
I wrote this poem on the subject, and will close with that.
Motels
They have their own memories
doffed by what swerves
in off the side of the road,
then fades from stripped sheets
charwomen bundle next day —
Smeared recollections,
such as eavesdroppers carry
away: gloating and frustrated,
a smudged version of how it was,
before morning’s hurried vagaries,
the disappearing acts of faces.
From fetal to yoga
imposture abed, I sit thanking great colorless
curtain ruffles on which light
glances but cannot penetrate.
I do nothing for a while.
Outside, fierce gummy miles,
already sweltering on asphalt, hiss.
Ghost of the accident-prone
waver in the bushes.
Screwdriver, sun, I’m coming.
