Stuart Page's Blog - Posts Tagged "hotel-dusk-room-215"
Hotel Dusk//Living in a Hotel
Can a hotel become a home? I ask this question of the three employees of Hotel Dusk, a rundown motel in the desert, and they each give me their own take on the matter. Dunning, sharp-eyed, muscular, tight-lipped, the owner of the establishment, rubs his chin thoughtfully. “Well, the hotel is a liminal space, of course,” he tells me over a glass of bourbon. It is of excellent quality. He prides himself on the spirits he keeps in-house. This is telling, though I don’t immediately realise it. “You’re in-between here and there, home and not home. Isn’t that right? Like an airport, it can’t be comfortable for very long, though I can give you more than a bench to sleep on." He smiles. "That’s something, ain’t it?”
The jukebox is playing a jazzy little number I don’t recognise. It plays for over ten minutes before the handsome bartender, Louis, switches something livelier on. Dunning gets to his feet, and reverses this decision. The pair get into an argument, and the bartender exits. Dunning continues, “A hotel becoming a home… You can sit in your favourite armchair and watch the game all you like, know your way up and down the hotel corridors with your eyes closed, but for as long as you’re here, you’re still in-between point A and point B. There’s no fooling yourself. It’s a hotel. That’s the point. You’re A-, or B+, maybe, depending on the quality of the food. Of course, we’re the former, here. Tell that to your readers, won't cha?” Dunning smiles, then he makes his way behind the bar, and suddenly he’s pouring me a drink, and examining the reflection of the overhead lights in the glass bottle. He continues, "what I should say is, and I don’t like to say it, but it’s true, living in a hotel is like being in purgatory. You’re waiting, waiting, waiting. I’m waiting…”
“What for?”
“Hmph.” He crosses his arms, and looks at me like a door locked shut. “I don’t have to be waiting for anything. Sometimes, people sit under bus shelters because they’re cold. They don’t have to be waitin’ for a ride."
Rosa is the maid and the cook. She has a big smile, and even bigger arms. She is charming yet intimidating, like a mother of five. She hasn’t stopped working all day. Even now, so late in the evening, she interrupts our conversation to dust a shelf with a duster that she pulls out of nowhere. “What happens to a person when their work becomes their life… That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t that right? You can’t fool me,” she says with a wide smile. “Well, you could go ahead and ask any banker, manager, troubled artist, anybody, any adult across the states who doesn’t know when to take a holiday, rather than me.”
“Most people don’t usually live where they work,” I say.
“Oh, but they do,” Rosa counters. “Maybe not physically, but do these people ever clock out of the office of the mind? Well, I do. Living here has nothing to do with it. I work long hours, though as soon as I return to my room, I’m as good as gone. I’m the opposite of an over-worker. You won’t catch me doing overtime. By the time midnight comes around, I’ve left the hotel, figuratively speaking, and you won't catch me here until sunrise. Yes sir. That’s Rosa. A free lady. No doubt.”
Louis doesn’t return to his station behind the bar until both Rosa and Dunning have left for the night. We chatter about little nothings until the time falls away. We share a couple of drinks. When I finally ask him the same question I asked of his senior colleagues, he only laughs. “Come with me a minute," he says. I follow him into a dimly lit corridor. We are somewhere behind the kitchen, opposite a laundry room. He lets me into what appears to be a teenager’s basement hangout. It is his bedroom. Louis' own personal slice of the hotel pie. Posters of scantily clad women decorate the grey walls. Cigarette packets litter the bedside table, beside a large radio. A cardboard box waits in the corner, as if Louis is moving in, or moving out. “Do you prefer your one night stands at home, or in hotel rooms?” he asks me.
“What’s the difference?”
He smirks. “At home, you gotta clean the sheets afterwards. In a hotel, though, you pay some loser a dime to do it for you.” Without another word, we remove each other’s clothes. He presses me up against one of the cold walls, kisses me up and down my jawline, my neck, and my collar, then he bends me tenderly out of shape on his unmade, single bed. When we’re done completing each other, he wipes us down and changes the sheets, then he holds me tightly beneath his fresh bed covers and asks, softly, for a tip. He laughs. I laugh.
I’m sure all of this is an answer to my question, in some small way, but I am unable to say for certain what that answer is. This hotel…
For a second, I almost feel at home.
The jukebox is playing a jazzy little number I don’t recognise. It plays for over ten minutes before the handsome bartender, Louis, switches something livelier on. Dunning gets to his feet, and reverses this decision. The pair get into an argument, and the bartender exits. Dunning continues, “A hotel becoming a home… You can sit in your favourite armchair and watch the game all you like, know your way up and down the hotel corridors with your eyes closed, but for as long as you’re here, you’re still in-between point A and point B. There’s no fooling yourself. It’s a hotel. That’s the point. You’re A-, or B+, maybe, depending on the quality of the food. Of course, we’re the former, here. Tell that to your readers, won't cha?” Dunning smiles, then he makes his way behind the bar, and suddenly he’s pouring me a drink, and examining the reflection of the overhead lights in the glass bottle. He continues, "what I should say is, and I don’t like to say it, but it’s true, living in a hotel is like being in purgatory. You’re waiting, waiting, waiting. I’m waiting…”
“What for?”
“Hmph.” He crosses his arms, and looks at me like a door locked shut. “I don’t have to be waiting for anything. Sometimes, people sit under bus shelters because they’re cold. They don’t have to be waitin’ for a ride."
Rosa is the maid and the cook. She has a big smile, and even bigger arms. She is charming yet intimidating, like a mother of five. She hasn’t stopped working all day. Even now, so late in the evening, she interrupts our conversation to dust a shelf with a duster that she pulls out of nowhere. “What happens to a person when their work becomes their life… That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t that right? You can’t fool me,” she says with a wide smile. “Well, you could go ahead and ask any banker, manager, troubled artist, anybody, any adult across the states who doesn’t know when to take a holiday, rather than me.”
“Most people don’t usually live where they work,” I say.
“Oh, but they do,” Rosa counters. “Maybe not physically, but do these people ever clock out of the office of the mind? Well, I do. Living here has nothing to do with it. I work long hours, though as soon as I return to my room, I’m as good as gone. I’m the opposite of an over-worker. You won’t catch me doing overtime. By the time midnight comes around, I’ve left the hotel, figuratively speaking, and you won't catch me here until sunrise. Yes sir. That’s Rosa. A free lady. No doubt.”
Louis doesn’t return to his station behind the bar until both Rosa and Dunning have left for the night. We chatter about little nothings until the time falls away. We share a couple of drinks. When I finally ask him the same question I asked of his senior colleagues, he only laughs. “Come with me a minute," he says. I follow him into a dimly lit corridor. We are somewhere behind the kitchen, opposite a laundry room. He lets me into what appears to be a teenager’s basement hangout. It is his bedroom. Louis' own personal slice of the hotel pie. Posters of scantily clad women decorate the grey walls. Cigarette packets litter the bedside table, beside a large radio. A cardboard box waits in the corner, as if Louis is moving in, or moving out. “Do you prefer your one night stands at home, or in hotel rooms?” he asks me.
“What’s the difference?”
He smirks. “At home, you gotta clean the sheets afterwards. In a hotel, though, you pay some loser a dime to do it for you.” Without another word, we remove each other’s clothes. He presses me up against one of the cold walls, kisses me up and down my jawline, my neck, and my collar, then he bends me tenderly out of shape on his unmade, single bed. When we’re done completing each other, he wipes us down and changes the sheets, then he holds me tightly beneath his fresh bed covers and asks, softly, for a tip. He laughs. I laugh.
I’m sure all of this is an answer to my question, in some small way, but I am unable to say for certain what that answer is. This hotel…
For a second, I almost feel at home.
