Snowbird Gothic Stories 5 - "Connecting Door"
“Connecting Door” is about 80% true.
It was inspired by one particularly loud evening at a hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where I spent long stretches while recording dialog for Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Blazing Angels. The hotel was half a block up from the pier; I could look out the window and see the lights of the ferris wheel all night long. Down below, the beautiful people walked past, to be gradually replaced by the shuffling homeless once the hour got late and the bars closed and the urge for privacy beat the urge to be seen out and about.
During the course of my stays there, I developed a strong suspicion that one of the desk clerks had a thriving side business going whereby he’d mark rooms as rented, then shuffle them off privately for “parties” of various illicit sorts. I do know that I’d hear a lot of screaming from some of those rooms, but a call down to the desk was generally met with “i’m sorry, there’s nobody in there.”
Which, of course, is where the story came from. If there’s nobody there, then who’s making all the noise? And if they’re not there, then they don’t have to bend to any rules - polite behavior, polite rules, polite language, Thou Shalt Not Kill...you get the idea.
The first thing anyone says about the story, generally, is a mention of the profanity. When it first appeared at Pseudopod (read by the marvelous George Hrab), I was told that I’d shattered the site’s record for profanity in a single piece, and I’m fairly certain my mark still stands. Whether folks got why there was so much cursing on the other side of the wall was a bit fuzzier; it’s always fun reading comments ascribing utterly erroneous (and usually disparaging) motives for a creative choice.
For my part, I’ve spent far too much time in hotels, and they’ve always struck me as anonymous, consequenceless spaces. Guests, especially business travelers, try to build antiseptic spaces around themselves, defined by the walls of their rooms, and don’t interact with anyone if they can help it. You’re gone tomorrow, so why worry about annoying the people next door whom you don’t know, whom you’ll never meet, and whom you’ll never see again? Turn up the TV, have loud sex, party, and the hell with the guy in the next room because why should you voluntarily accept restraints on your behavior for the benefit of some schmuck you’ll never see?
And so that’s why the story is littered with so much cursing. It the evidence of the unseen breaking of the compact all travelers share, the real proof that none of the rules apply. And once that taboo falls, for the rest, it’s just a matter of time.
Travel safe.
