Something about Hotels

I’m not a wealthy man.  In fact, I’m barely middle class.  I do, however, have occasion to stay in hotels from time to time.  When you’re young, comfort doesn’t seem to matter as much as price, so I stayed in Motel 6 or Super 8 whenever possible.

There’s something evocative about cheap hotels.  You know all kinds of things have happened in these thin-walled rooms with their heavily used furniture.  It depends on how far your imagination is willing to go.

When I attend professional meetings, however, and the company is paying the bill, I stay in conference hotels.  These are a cut above.  They always make me feel like writing.  That hint of aristocratic luxury in the air suggests something slightly askew.  Some obscure haunting.  The sins of the indolent rich.

As paradoxical as life is, such hotels make writing difficult.  I’m not in my usual writing chair at home.  I can’t get comfortable in all this luxury.  Although I’m surrounded by the memories suffused into the walls by the past dramas in this room, or perhaps the ghosts that still linger here, I find the writing just won’t flow.

Ideas, yes.  Were those feet standing outside my door as I sat up in the dark, awaiting sleep to come?  What are those sounds I hear above the white noise of the city?  Is all this luxury hiding something?

My stories about hotels—and they are many—have never appealed to publishers.  There’s something personal, perhaps, about them.  Too personal, perchance.

Off my usual timetable, the writing resists my will.  I jot down a few lines to try to capture the mood.  I want to remember this room.  This air of decayed mystery in the midst of opulence.  Those who stay here may pretend to be immortal, but in their hotel rooms they’re as vulnerable as the rest of us.

The naming of the fictional hotel is always an issue.  I don’t want the reader to be able to trace my steps.  I don’t want to betray the evocative name of the place either.  It was not in vain that the elite named their houses in the days of pomp and lore.

I sit in the hotel chair in the dark, illuminated only by the ghostly light of my laptop.  Others have sat in this chair, in this very room.  Strangers, some perhaps wealthy or famous.  Did they feel the compulsion to write about it as well?  Isn’t this the true crossroad of humanity?