Notel Motel

I’m a sucker for motels. I love ‘em! I often wish I was a white guy traveling salesman in the 50s and 60s so I could witness motels in their heyday.*

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I imagine myself driving in my 1958 Chevrolet Emasculator, on Route 66, listening to Whitey McCracker & The Honkies (best music outside of Pat Boone. Much easier on the ears than those punk kids with their Rock and Roll or those damn beatniks with their bongos and jazz cigarettes!) As the sun sets in the west, I decide to pull over at a roadside diner to get a cuppa joe and eat the blue plate special (typically dry ass turkey with red-eye gravy, or warmed-over meatloaf that was conceived in Satan’s own oven many decades ago and is now old enough to vote) while looking over the day’s sports scores (go L.A. Sharks!).

After dinner, I’ll amble across the gravel parking lot to the adjoining Motor Hotel and bar. I’ll gulp three or four scotches (neat) and suck down half a pack of Pall Malls. Then, when my loins are suitably girded, I stagger over to the check-in counter and get a room key from Gus (or Mac, or Hank, something like that) and meander to my cabin, Room 5. I walk in, enjoy the splendor of the gleaming majesty that is American craftsmanship, design and execution, before peeling off my smelly 1950s loafers and falling face first on a quality bed with good, clean sheets. Dead to the world.

I wake up in the morning, make my way back over to the diner for three cups of coffee and my usual morning porterhouse steak with whiskey syrup. Then it’s back on the road on my way to Toledo. I hear only good things about that place and feel it would be a great market to sell door-to-door lock-picking kits.

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Doesn’t that sound like fun?! That’s the life for me man! Long, lonely, monotonous days on the awesome highways and byways of the U S of A, and lonely, monotonous nights in tiny, horrendously maintained places where the wretched go to die. Throw in the occasional hooker (missing AT LEAST two teeth) and large quantities of gut-rotting booze and that’s living the American dream!

I know what you’re thinking, “Josh, motels are gross, you’re gross, and I think much less of you now for learning this about you, and I didn’t even think that was possible!” To which I say “Fine, then you’re not invited to my birthday party at the bowling alley this year.”

Let’s break down the attributes of your average motel. We’ll name it “The Discharge Inn”:

-It’s dirty (starting off vague and general here).
-The sheets haven’t been washed since snap bracelets were a thing.
-The walls are so thin you can hear somebody thinking in the next room.
-The pillows are oddly damp.
-That one light just won’t turn on and it makes that corner of the room exist in eternal darkness.
-What’s that sound?
-The bathroom contains its own ecosystem.
-The tap water is yellow and chunky.
-The bathtub just growled at me.
-Oh, hi Norman Bates.
-Seriously though, what is that sound?
-The carpet goes up to my ankles. Are carpets supposed to grow like hair?
-Listening to other people having violent, brutal, animalistic sex does not a good lullaby make.
-A free, secondhand high from the copious amount of weed overtly smoked everywhere.
-Plenty of free, preused condoms at your disposal.

And so on and so forth. And I have to admit, all of that is true. And worse. And that’s why I LOVE MOTELS! The more it looks like the scene of some grisly murder/suicide, or like a coven of CHUDs live there, the better.

I have been known, in the past, to just take pointless, random road trips. I hop in my car, point it in any direction and just go. My only rules are: 1. No Interstates, 2. No particular destination, 3. Motels when possible. This leads me to some very off-the-map places. At the Lakeview Motel, in Fannettsburg, PA, I met a curious collection of inhabitants. Lakeview was a cabin-style motel. The weird thing is that, of the dozen or so cabins that were there, all were occupied, yet I was the only customer. You see, everybody else just lived there. On my left side was a middle-aged woman, to my right was her daughter and granddaughter, (both grandmother and daughter worked at the honkey tonk behind the motel. I’m not entirely sure how living at a motel works. Do they have mailboxes? How does rent work? We may never know. Oh, and by the way, there was absolutely no lake to be viewed at all. Lies!

Once, a long time ago, I heard on the radio that according to the rules of salesmen on the road, that they’d buy porno mags, “use them” and then stuff them under motel mattresses for the next traveling salesman to “use.” Of course, I had to see if this was true. Six years later, after checking under mattress in dozens of motels, I finally found what I had been looking for. At some shitty motel in Battle Creek, Mich. (Sadly, I also discovered that there were three giant holes in the mattress created by a somnambulistic smoker. I was stuck in that room for a week.) Yes, I touched the magazine. No, I did not have direct physical contact with it. I went full on HAZMAT when I touched it, much like the Kardashians’ laundress does when handling their underwear. And also yes, the pages were sticky.

Anyway, that’s enough grossing you out for today. I’m on my way to my annual road trip, this time to Breezewood, PA., the “Town of Motels”.

Now where did I put my blacklight?

*And to drink at work and sexually harass and debase women AS GOD INTENDED!