Fugue State: The Hotel Room

A hotel room that can't be photographed (that you have no desire to photograph) is already a bad room. Upon arriving in a city, the first thing to do is to take a picture of the room, as if to stake out a territory, and photograph your reflection in the mirror, as if to mark your temporary belonging, as if to attenuate the cost, as a testimony of your presence. Or you can occupy the room immediately by making love in it.

|Herve Guibert|

I have no physical or even digital pictures of the hotel rooms that had me over nights this summer, they were without remarkable features. What they had: the chain signage and keycards, the sterile smells, floral bedspreads and threadbare towels, window views of unkempt fields and somnolent parking lots, all of which reminded me of the specific solitude of my travel, my irenic and calm objectives, which wouldn't call for grand accommodation.

What I do recall from bits of the road...

The hotels filled to capacity outside of Jackson, Mississippi because of a volleyball tournament featuring regional high schools. The windows of the cars set with streamers and ribbon, the windows marked with shoe polish and handy paint, bumper stickers denoting proud parents of this or that kind of student/athlete/warrior-hero, the affluence of this American self-absorption.

Better yet, in Kentucky, a hotel lot filled with Corvettes and tag-a-long family vans. The hotel was set across from the National Corvette Museum, the pride of Bowling Green, built in the design of a motor. The widespread lobby conversations among strangers about the makes and the years, the elusive models and other such mythologies.

And there was the Red Roof Inn of Sandusky, Ohio. I am swimming laps in the indoor pool at 7:30 in the morning. Fields of wheat are backlit by the morning sun across the road. There is a famous amusement park nearby and the families visiting are loading up on the free breakfast buffet in the room beside the pool. In that next room, I trade fascinations with a 300-pound mother of three; she watches me swim with confusion or maybe envy and I watch her (in confusion and envy) as she stack two plates full with piles of sausage and scrambled eggs.

And the best of all was the Motel 6 outside of Charleston, West Virginia. I arrived very late at night. The only room left was a smoking room. In I went and the room smelled like a wet cup of spat out chaw. The stench wasn't masked, rather, it was unapologetic which somehow made it better, more honorable. I couldn't believe where I was and was never so happy about something like that. In the morning, I woke up with a smoker's cough laughing. As I left, I saw a maid's cart outside a room down the hall. The door was held ajar and from inside there was a whirring sound. As I passed I peered into the room where she was vacuuming, a cigarette dangling loosely from her mouth while she cleaned another smoking room. And that was West Virginia.