Her face wrinkled and sagging looks old though she’s not. Lobby smells like smoke. Hits them immediately; he loves that smell; don’t you love that smell, darling, he says to his wife. Nothing like that smell. Small crowd of people waiting to check in, more like a group. “Damn, this is going to take all night.” The manager and the wrinkled lady punch stuff on computers, staring at screens. They say stuff to the people in front of them. Hockey team staying in one wing. Small little dog behind the counter chilling on the floor. Kind of dog you’d expect to live with wrinkled face. Woman wearing pink lipstick. She smiles when he looks at her dog. She punches the keys. Her voice rasps. The constant sounds of wet tires and wet road, where splashing never ceases, reflect disconsolate eternity, contentment and even resignation. The sounds of motion and finality. The end of time and the beginning, Buddha’s om and war, there’s the splitting of the atom, there’s the hiss before you die, the sound of the road between heaven and hell.
Motel 6, Super 8, Holiday Inn, Howard Johnson’s, The Candlelight Motel. Long, low and skinny. Two floors. Line of doors. Suppose you call that a balcony. Stairs to your floor open your door. Park the car below. Smoker lady asks the people in front of them: “Do you mind the second floor?” No, they don’t mind. They want the AAA discount. Man says, “Make sure you give us that discount.” Pay with plastic. Park in front of your door. The best part. When motels really picked up that was the best part. Auto Inns. Interstate hums steadily behind them. Cars and trucks and trucks and cars all night forever. It never stops. Barring nuclear war it’ll never stop. Gas shortage won’t stop it.
Big trucks bomb by; cloverleaf and onramp and exit ramp and small diner over there. Diner’s neon pink. Pink stands and sings in the night sky. Big haulers ball south to Florida. Huge ballers blaze north to Illinois. Massive maulers pull their rigs into the motel parking lot. Sometimes they sleep in the lot; often they sleep in the motel, grab a shower man do they like the shower, order pizza. Once a trucker offered a grubby hitchhiker a shower and some ordered-in pizza. They sat on separate beds and watched TV. Then the hitchhiker thanked the trucker and left into the freeway night. Once a hitchhiker waited in the office lobby of a latenight motel for his uncle. Uncle picked him up and drove him on the freeway into Los Angeles. City is the best and greatest freeway truckstop motel city in the world. Pull your car up to your door and move your luggage in and watch TV. Life doesn’t get any better. Visit the smoker in the office lobby. They punch computers. Pay on plastic. Pink lipstick and little dog behind the counter.
The motel sign, the big one you see from the freeway, that tall telescoped pole, stands above the long skinny building two hundred feet. Some trees around so the sign has to be extra huge to be seen from the freeway. Begins to drizzle on them. They pay on plastic and admire the small dog then stop to get a coke out of the soda machine in the hallway. Slots the dollar; the coke bangs and jostles and descends to the small mouth. He reaches for it. “Pool’s down the hall on the left,” Smoker in the office lobby. They didn’t have trunks. “We never bring our trunks,” his wife said to him. Damn.
The two walk out to their car. Drive a green Chevrolet, Lumina I think. What matters is that you see a boxy, square, green American car in the lot. They hop in the car and drive around a strip of bushes to their wing of the building. It drizzles. The day gray and trucks bomb south and north and their tires make wet spray, constant slick sounds. Large vehicles going places. Large truck idles in the lot. “Dirty Idle” sticker on the door instead of Clean Idle. You have to own your freedom. They find their door and park in front of it. 141. “That’s our door,” he says to his wife. They don’t have much. Traveling light. She forgot her bathrobe. “Shit, I forget my bathrobe. Did you bring your bathrobe?” she says. “Nuh-uh,” grunts back to her. He forgot his trunks. He looks at someone entering their own door down at the end of the wing. The others hurry; they scurry into their door and shut it tight. Like it’s sketchy or something. Like the partiers, dumpster pissers and crack smokers threaten. Another woman steps from her van to her door quickly. She doesn’t look up; she disappears. Large rig blares its horn at some teenaged drivers. The blast fills the wet night. Some truckers sitting on stools at the counter of the diner drinking coffee. They talk to the waitresses. The waitresses local women, all middle-aged, one of the ways to feed your family out here. Remember the line in Reservoir Dogs when they argued over the tip. Our man looks at a door cautiously open next to his then quickly close. Curtain of that room moves ever slightly in the corner. One of those. He stares at the spot. His wife calls for him to get his ass in here. He moves, stands in his doorway, ponders their green car, and grimaces at it. He doesn’t like his car. Doesn’t even know how they ended up with that car, that kind of car. He shuts the door behind him. This is his favorite part.
Kicks his shoes off and cracks open a beer. Throws the bottle cap toward the trash and misses. The trash can, a small one, stands regally on the end of a long table and desk that houses the dresser, some shelves and a dormant TV. He grabs the remote and quickly assesses its functions. He gazes at its buttons, rubs his thumb over the control pads, smiles with satisfaction at its feel. “Good remote,” he says to his wife. He turns on the television. He takes a sip. He burps. He begins flipping through the channels. Only has thirteen channels. “Goddamit, this thing only has thirteen channels. We pay this money and only get thirteen channels? Shoulda gone Ramada.”
“We can’t afford Ramada.” she says. “Overpriced anyhow. All you get for that extra twenty dollars is real towels, couple a mints, and fifty channels. Still gotta pay for movies and the internet.”
He agrees. He flips through the channels. Sports channel college swimming. “All they’s got is swimming. Who watches this? Does anybody watch swimming?”
“I watch swimming,” she emphasizes.
“Well, excuse me for living,” he says. He chugs his beer. Walks over to the counter. Cracks another, slides over to the far bed, and tosses the cap to the basket again. He misses. Two caps on the carpet. “You wanna beer?”
“No.”
Because of the rain you really hear the tires of passing vehicles on the nighttime interstate. He sits on the far bed, one near the window. It sags. Okay, they sag, the bed and the window. And the walls. The bathtub. Two square beds. Two identical square beds. Curtains with a pull rod. You grab the white rod and pull. The curtains appear to be made with the same material as the bedspreads. Orange and brown with weird swirls. No idea where they make such bed covers. “Where are these goddam beds made?”
“I’m supposed to know? Probably Asia.”
“They feel weird.” He circles his hands on the nasty fabric. “They always feel weird. I don’t like how they feel on my legs. Makes me squirm. I don’t like to squirm,” he says. Sips his beer. He lines his empty bottles on the floor next to the wall. Reaches over and pulls out the night stand’s drawer. Looks at the Bible. Makes him feel good. Not that the Bible existed there for guidance or strength, but that it was there at all. The nation could not function without Bibles in those drawers nor could he and therein lay his comfort. Takes his socks off; grabs a foot and brings it up as close to his face as possible and sniffs. Then smells the isolated sock, a classy inhale, the quest for self-knowing, existential sock. He walks across the carpet and sniffs his boot. He shrugs and watches a Texas sheriff bag a bad guy. He watches some girl touch the wall in a swim race and raise her arm jubilant, all swim cap, goggles and huge shoulders. She hugs the girls in the neighboring lanes one at a time - lifetime’s culmination. “Female athletes always hugging each other. Most of them are gay. Do you think most of them are gay, baby?”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s great to see women athletes. All you do is say stupid stuff. Why do you always say stupid stuff?” She begins undressing. She imagines a world filled with transgender swimmers but keeps it to herself.
“I don’t say anything stupid. You do. Besides, look at them hug. And they’re kissing! See, they’re kissing! Christ. They’re all lesbians, every one of ‘em. What’s going on with this world?”
“I’m taking a bath.” Disappears into the bathroom. The bathroom’s white. She hears the television still. She keeps the door cracked, runs the tub hot. She stuffs the overflow drain with toilet paper. Hot water steams the bathroom, the mirrors, the air, her glasses. Places her glasses on the counter. She pees. She doesn’t flush. She lowers the lid so she won’t catch urine whiffs while soaking low in the tub. She never flushes her pee. If it’s yellow let it mellow. Saving the world one flush at a time. Waste of water she always says. Climate solutions, even eradicating war. The tub fills quickly, much quicker than back home. She likes that. “Tub fills real quick,” she yells to the other room.
“What?”
She can hear the TV still.
She lowers into the hot water slowly. Sucks in her breath sharply. Soon she’s in and her skin flames instant red, lines where the water laps her chest and ribs, around her knees-as-islands. She begins to sweat. Her forehead wet with sweat, dripping down her nose, down her neck, the edges of her hair. She loves to take baths, even in motels and hotels. She moves the shower curtain and bunches it into one corner, the corner away from her. Hint of mold to the white shower curtain. She doesn’t care. This isn’t Ramada. This is a budget motel. Thirty nine ninety five out there on the road, out West. You can pull your car right up to the door. 141.
She can hear the television still, and an occasional comment that she can’t tell whether directed to her or to the TV or to the wall. She doesn’t answer. She learned long ago not to say “what?” all the time. He always replies, “nothin’, I wasn’t talkin’ to you.” She doesn’t ask anymore.
He flips through the channels, a revolution. He sits on the square bed, removes his clothes, leaving his socks, and sits nude under the covers. He spins the remote like a drum stick. He drops the remote and picks it up; he sips his beer and drops a third bottle on the floor next to the wall next to the other bottles. His clothes slung on the other bed. The other bed remaining made, though they occasionally sit on it or lie in it or throw stuff on it. He yells out to her, “you wanna order a pizza?” She hears him, contemplates not answering, and yells back, “No, we already ate and we don’t have enough money. Besides, you don’t know who delivers.”
“Pizza’s delivered anywhere. This is America. If I’m in Alaska I want a damned pizza delivered. I could be sitting here, naked, in Alaska, in the middle of the woods, and I get a hankering for pizza then I’m gonna have one delivered. This is freedom. It’s universal, it’s a civil right.”
“That’s nice, honey, but no pizza.” She sighs and places her feet up on the tile wall. Feels cold for a second. She’s sweating and her heart’s beating and she thinks she’s going to pass out. She likes it that way. It’s like a sauna, she tells friends about her love of bathing. “You just sit there and sweat,” she’d say to those friends.
Her husband would always ask, “Why are you always taking baths? All you do is sit there and sweat. It’s not like you get clean or anything. You should take a shower. Sometimes I wonder about your parents.”
He wasn’t getting any pizza. He stands up, puts his pants back on, not his shoes, and walks into the hall. He strolls down the hall. The hall bright and white and quiet. Orange doors extending for a mile. He manuvers in one direction and comes to a door with EXIT suggesting above it. Nothing. He returns down the length of the mile-long hall past the laundry room and beyond the pool. The pool’s indoors, dark and quiet. No swimming after nine. The pool right next to the interstate. He looks through the glass of the pool room and watches cars and trucks and vans and minivans fly by the now to the beyond. Zoom zoom whoosh whoosh they fly by and because of the rain he focuses on their tires. A wet sound, a cascade. He likes it, this right here, this moment, the spirit of this present song.
He turns and locates the candy machine. He choses Snickers and Mars and some peanut butter cups. He steps to the neighboring machine and, using free will, chooses a coke. The bubbly syrup bounces and jostles and falls to the narrow mouth. He pulls it out, pops it open and sighs an ‘ahh’ to the carbonation and sugar as if he were paid to market this particular product. He burps loudly. No one in the hall; it’s quiet. Alone with his soft drink in the land of the free.
He eats the candy bars. “You want a peanut butter cup?” he asks his wife, poking his head in the bathroom door, noting her pink body, flowing sweat and matted hair.
“No.” She doesn’t look up; her eyes closed and she keeps them so.
“You’re red,” he declares. She doesn’t reply. One leg on the side of the tub, the other on the tiled wall, arms above her head, resting folded. She breathes calmly, slowly, and sweat beads on her chest, drains from her forehead, crests her upper lip and she tastes the salt of the earth. He looks at her body in the water. She’s getting old, he thinks, and look at those, flat against her chest now, almost to her stomach. Jesus, he says. He ponders her some more. It’s hot in there, like a sweat lodge, like the time he passed out back in the day, peeing and farting on the hot tub edge and his girlfriend at the time thought she should call 911 but she didn’t and he was glad because by general rule he avoids the authorities. He eats the other peanut butter cup while the chocolate beads and melts.
Takes off his pants again, slides under the covers, the TV persistent, and roams through the channels. Occasionally he comments; occasionally he laughs; occasionally he exclaims loudly “that’s bullshit.” He cracks open another beer.
His wife unplugs the tub and sits in it until the whirlpool drains. Sits in the empty cauldron for a while and looks at her down body, at her legs, her stomach. She doesn’t like her belly any longer. She pulls at it. She thinks about some infomercial she saw in the last motel that told her to reach down into herself and find the energy to work on her abs and thighs. “What are you without tight abs and thighs?” the women on the screen asked her. She didn’t know and still doesn’t. She sits in the tub naked and slowly dries off; then stands and snags one of the towels. The towel, as fabric in the world, is hard, crisp, abrasive. Plus it’s only half-sized. “They don’t even have real towels in this place,” she yells out to him, “They’re all half-sized.”
“Told you we shoulda stayed at Ramada or Sheraton. They’ve got towels and bathrobes. We could do it in style I’m telling you.”
“We can’t afford them and never could. We’ll never afford them.”
“Now-now, we will. Just watch. As soon as I buy a lottery ticket we’re gonna be rich and we can stay at any damn hotel we want. We can stay at the Astoria, baby. I’ll take care of you.” He stares at the screen. She stands above him and looks at him, closely, observing, seeing. She steps in front of him, in a flash breaking his connection with the television, and finishes her walk to the heater. The unit long on the far wall, on the wall under the window, doubles as an air-conditioner in the summer. She turns the air-conditioner on, still red from the tub. He shrieks at her, not taking his eyes off the screen, “You turning on the airconditioner in winter? What the hell is this?”
“It’s hot in here. Way too hot. It’s always too hot in these places. The dry air. I can’t breathe. I’m dying. We need some air ,” she said.
“I’m cold and I’m shivering over here, can’t you see, and trying to watch this show. If you don’t mind.”
She leaves it on Cool and dances over to the other bed. She throws his clothes on the back of a chair. She sits on the bed and doesn’t pull back the covers, which they tell you because of all the gross humans you simply must do. He gets up and turns off the airconditioner and turns on the heat. He sits back in bed, gets under the covers, and sips some beer. She stands up, marches in front of the television, temporarily in the quickest of seconds breaking his line of sight, to the heating unit the airconditioning unit the whole fucking wall thing, and turns it off. “There, how’s that?” she says.
“Fine.” He flips through the channels. A commercial. He watches it for a second then switches. Texas Ranger kicks some guy. Our man watches it for a second then switches. Swimmers spring into the water it’s a start of an exciting race! He watches four strokes- it’s the butterfly- then switches it. He says, “They’ve got some Chinese woman who may or may not be a woman on Arizona’s team and they all use steroids anyhow and look at their goddam shoulders.” He buttons along. Local news doesn’t interest him. Somebody bombing somebody doesn’t interest him. The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders hold zero interest for him. They’re getting skankier, he says, skinny and gross and all that make-up. It’s not like the old days: look!, that girl’s anorexic. Gross, he says and flips. Laugh track laughs at some guy who cracks a joke and it fails to interest him and he surfs some more. “Only thirteen channels,” he cries. He gazes at the remote again, holds it close to his face, as if to reveal some secret key that would enable him to materialize thirty more channels.
Outside the rain picks up and he hears the sound of trucks on the freeway and thinks of how much longer they have to go and he says “there’s never anything on.”
“You never watch one thing. You’re always remoting around and never let one show grab you. You don’t delve. You’re like all other guys.”
“At least I don’t stop on trash. You’re supposed to just absorb it as a whole. Remoting is the experience.” He finds a cowboy from Wyoming bouncing around wildly, madly, on a two-thousand-pound bull. The bull swings back and forth and twists with all its might and hops and slings and bends and pounds the dirt. The cow-dude rides and rides for all he’s worth, like his entrance to heaven depends on it. He holds the rope tightly, wound around his gloved fist, and our man yells “yee-ha!” and holds his arm in the air and bounces on the bed and spills a little beer in the process but not much and the man rides the bull like crazy and the two-thousand-pound beast jerks left then twists right and its balls jangle like balls often do and they too swing and bang. The bull’s horns, of course, clipped some, but the black beast twists his head and aims those horns like swords of death and it would make his day, his life, if one of those horns impaled his tormentor, this weird ape riding his back, the bastard, his oppressor. The bull bounces and kicks then kicks again violently and the rider loses control and falls off into the dirt.
Rodeo clowns rush to the scene. The cowboy scrambles. He wears a protective vest. The clowns stand in the bull’s way and the bull charges two of them and the clowns split and the bull charges after one and then he caught one. He pops the clown in the ass, doesn’t punch him or impale him or even smack him, but lifts him into the air and flings him. The clown, to the delight of our motel man, flew straight into the air as if launched on a trampoline, flips twice, backwards, in the air, and comes down hard on his ass though he tried valiantly to get his feet under him like a cat but not a cat fails. The clown, though, bounces up and jogs to the wall and receives a standing ovation from the crowd and claps on the back from the cowboys and fellow clowns and I understand those rodeo clowns are some kind of fraternity.
“Now, see!” our motel man screams at his wife. “That’s why I flip around. Because you see that shit. If Idda stayed on that Texas Sheriff and those guns Idda never seen that. You wouldn’t-a seen it either. And I know you like it. I know you do.” He switches from the rodeo, pauses at the swimmers and says “where’s goddam basketball?” and skips past the news guy showing jets bombing somewhere. He sips his beer.
His wife stands up and grabs herself a beer still naked. “I wish we had bathrobes. How come we don’t have bathrobes?”
“We’re not really bathrobe types, that’s New York City.” he says. Rains outside and he listens to trucks and he loves the hissing interstate. He stands up and gives her the remote in the process, walks over to the window and peeks past the curtain just so- he was still naked- and looks at the diner’s neon standing in the wet night. “You want to go over there and get some pancakes and eggs?” he asks.
“No.”
“How about some coffee or some chicken noodle soup. There’s lots of trucks over there, means it’s good. Always eat where the truckers eat, that’s what my daddy always told me. Let’s get some chicken soup and some meatloaf or a club sandwich.”
“No.”
“Damn, baby, what’s-a matter with you? Don’t you know it’s Saturday night? People are out. And we can soak some of this local flavor and see some truckers and weird latenight waitresses. We get to see a local establishment, baby, and talk to some people.”
“No. We don’t have any money and I’m tired. Besides, we’ve already eaten. Now sit your butt down and watch some TV with me. And drink that beer. Close the curtains.”
He lets the corner of the curtain fall. The hanging material feels odd and looks like the bedspread. He turns the heat on low and crosses the carpeted floor and slips into bed, under covers with his wife, and says “here, now, give me the remote.”