Hotel Lobbies

Posted on May 17, 2003 in Book of Days Strange Vacations

Note: This is twenty-ninth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: You’re in a hotel lobby.

In. Put down the paper with the information, hand over the gold card, sign, get the room key, and nod as the clerk shows you the map where your room is, talking the entire time as if you’re an infant who needs to be shown the way to the bathroom and how to flush the toilet. Then get out, fast, because you didn’t come here to loaf about like a shaved pretender in some grand hotel or a leather-jacketed drifter who’s come for the candy machine. You’ve seen the brochures for the local attractions many times before because they’re not local — they’re in every hotel, motel, and KOA Campground on this side of the country and there’s nothing new under the flourescent tube suns to be found there.

What you came for is in the room: the bed. Cable television. The cups shrouded in clear plastic. Towels folded neatly and stacked in metal rings so that you can tell, instantly, the washclothes from the face towels, the bath towels, and the mat. The cups shrouded in clear plastic. The big mouthed ice bucket. The thumb-sized bottle of shampoo. The soap that smells like every flower that ever bloomed and like none of them at all.

The lobby is for the clerk who’s too dumb to get your jokes about computers. If you could take an x-ray of the head, you wouldn’t be surprised to find several layers of bone grafted to the inside of the skull, a shield against understanding any statement or any request more intellectual than “Where is the ice machine.” The clerk will point and look at you as if you are the dumb one.

Desk clerks have no gender as far as I am concerned. They all wear the pale blue shirts, the red ties, and the navy sports coats. The management keeps the extra heads and the hands in the backrooms. You can’t imagine them living in the place. There must be storage for them, somewhere, perhaps in the basement off the room where they run the boilers and wash the towels.

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Note: The big question: Am I going to keep doing this?

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a place you know, but not well.