Motel Fantasies

We’ve all got our fantasies. One of mine is a little kinky. It involves motels. No, not sex in motels, nor copping drugs in motels, nor Quentin Tarantino-type scenarios in motels. This is more about motel architecture. CHEAP motel architecture.

Not so much in LA. In LA, if you stay in a cheap motel, you’re taking your life in your hands. Sirens will be the only pleasant sounds you hear. You’ve gotta stay somewhere that’s at least $140/night, which can sap your resources pdq. In LA I had to tone it down, stay at the chains, pretend I was a business traveler...

But when I drove a few hours north, to San Luis Obispo, I knew I could indulge this little fetish in ways I had heretofore previously not even considered. For San Luis claims to have INVENTED the “motor hotel.” And with lots of still-extant vintage structures, it can fairly be called a motel mecca.

This lovely innovation occurred back in the 1950s—you know, boom time (for all those under the age of 10, that means a time of relative prosperity)--when Americans had the bucks to make road trips, and a stop squarely between San Fran and LA felt just about right. SLO proudly asserts that the country’s first such place was its Motel Inn--though it was little more than a Spanish-style façade backed by a withering pile of Tyvek when last I visited. Which probably would have pleased J. Edgar Hoover, as he thought motels the hotbeds of Communism. The rest of the country simply considered them hot beds—that rented by the hour.

Anyway, after I’d spent a few nights at another cheap motel, the Travelodge--which lacked defining features except a hugely chemically smell, some cigarette burns on the bathroom sink, and insulation so poor that I slept with the pillow wrapped around my ears for 3 nights so I wouldn’t hear my neighbor’s TV-- I stumbled onto the Peachtree Inn. Which Margot immediately dubbed “the Beachtree,” probably because it had been so long since she’d seen a beach, and anything that was this close to the water must be a relative. Although at first glance I thought I was staring down another El Cheapo, I quickly realized that I'd stepped back into a time warp. The entirely-too-civil owner handed me several large gold room keys (not a plastic card!) and gave me my choice of rooms built around a lovely courtyard. From a massive tree was suspended a large swing. On another patch of green grass were 3 Adirondack chairs in which families relaxed and, get this, read books.

That sold me.

You could sit literally for hours in those chairs, which believe me I did ‘cause I was Kentucky-fried, and stare off into the mountains, read a book, nibble on the cookies and pretzels that were left out in the kitchen all day long, and simply ponder your fate. I felt like I was 10 again, and at the lake with my parents. Except no one was fighting and I wasn’t getting pushed into freezing cold water and tossed into a canoe that leaked.

In the late 60s and early 70s, my family and I had ventured out to nearby upstate NY and PA, and stayed in small motels, where yellow signs boasted “Color TV,” a Fresca machine sat proudly behind the motel office, reservations were recorded with Bic pens on index cards, and a cool stream seemed set to perpetually burble right next to the property. (And people even used words like “burbling” to describe it.) This was that kind of a place.

Every morning I would get up and go to the breakfast room, where they had bad-for-you cereals that my Whole Foods-inured palate hadn’t seen in years, like Honey-Nut Cheerios, which I’m betting no real bee or real almond ever got near. There I would actually talk with the motel staff and guests. You could eat inside, where a radio station played songs Pet Clark never even remembered recording, or go outside on the back deck and appreciate the ever-temperate weather and revel in this kind of spring-morning, good-to-be-alive feeling. I was rabidly content. When I left, the woman at the front desk asked, “Didn’t you check in for just one night about a week ago?”

Truth is, I adore motels. Given the opportunity, I might just live in one for the rest of my life. I love the rituals of motel life--the maids coming around in the morning with their carts full of fresh white towels and miniature soap bars. Love the bad fake eggs and worse coffee at the free breakfasts. Love watching people pack up to leave, and the silence that descends around the property at about 1 pm, when many have checked out and no one new has yet checked in. Deeply enjoy the feeling that I am perpetually on vacation and don't have to worry about the mundane aspects of life. All is neatly contained in one little room, complete with plastic coffeemaker, bedside Bible, color TV, and complimentary shampoo and conditioner.

There’s something slightly decadent about staying even in a decent motel, and something titillating about checking into one that’s a pinch sleezy. I’ll never forget the Broadway Motel in Eugene, OR. Now, I have to say that I find Eugene overall to be rather edgy. The place scares me—it just does. There’s a lot of what my mother used to call “a bad element” hanging around. The Broadway sits right on the main drag as you enter town on your way to…packs of distraught hippies and students hanging out by what seems to be a bus stop at every corner. It’s a macadam blacktop-and-pool, cut-through-on-your-way-home, next-to-the-fried-chicken typa place. For some reason, it was highly rated on Trip Advisor, maybe because by Eugene standards this is the cat’s meow. But after spending a couple nights in an idyllic cabin in the woods, it was one of those joints that made me sigh heavily and say, “It’s fiiiiine. Reeeeeallly. I’ll just bring in my sheets.”

Motels were often built at midcentury and have cool old fixtures, which is why we find them quaint and charming, like Chevys with fins. I liked the gilt-flecked mini-tiles in the bathroom, the old mirrored medicine cabinet, and all the mint green and pink flamingo-like touches that just shriek, “It’s 1958, and my family’s on VACATION!”--even in urban Oregon. (Maybe in 1958, charming Eugene was the cout d'etat of Pacific Northwest vacationland, I don’t know.) I enjoyed a bit less the rocking chair/toilet, the showing-its-age shower, the spots of something black in the grout, and the…well, we’ll just close the door and hope they don’t make their way out in the middle of the night and join me in bed…

It’s good I never travel with a microscope.

So, after inspecting the premises and giving them a good sniff, I concluded that this was probably par for the Eugene course and it was only going to be one night and I wouldn’t be spending much time there anyway and blah blah blah, and took myself into town and had dinner.

On my return, the scenery had vastly improved, as the hot July night had prompted the opening of several doors, mostly of rooms filled with single guys in wife-beaters sitting on their beds in their boxers smoking and watching the tube while running their hands through their greasy hair. I’m never quite sure what this behavior is about—and why beautiful Latinas with long black curly hair and doe eyes don’t make this a similar practice—but I generally conclude that it’s a combination of the heat, Marlon Brando movies, and a desire to score on either the sex or drug fronts. But does this actually occur, and if so, how? Do attractive women go knocking on these doors and say, “Hey, fella, you’re looking really hot with that gut and can of Miller High-Life. Can I come on in and do a little NASCAR with you?”

This shit never happens to me, and I own both men’s boxers and tank tops. I must smoke the wrong brand.

Anyway, it was just hot enough and just July enough that this felt steamy to me. Sensual as a night in Little Italy. I realized that in room after room, everyone in this motel could be having hot motel sex with spouses not their own, packing drugs into pipes, snorting lines off bathroom mirrors, drinking Cuervo straight from the bottle on the old mattress under which they’d stashed hundred dollar bills … The whole thing caught fire in my mind…the illicit sleaze I was embroiled in—well, not really embroiled, but sited somewhere near the epicenter, all this swirling around me, possibly, separated only by an accident of architecture: a thin little motel wall. One well-placed act of God—an earthquake or hurricane—and all of Gomorrah would be exposed before my eyes.

Yes!

And others would be gaping.

But honest to God, for me, it's all about the architecture. I even have co-authored a book concerning Victorian hotel architecture, so you know we're just talking building materials here. The sordid acts that humanity perpetrates in their little cells stacked end to end really holds no fascination whatsoever.

It's all about burbling streams and Fresca machines, and swinging--in a swing on some Astroturf--in a small town that really does bring home a little innocence to an era that holds absolutely zip. I think that's actually a bit more radical than Quentin Tarantino. Some might even call it...titillating.

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[My apologies for the partial repetition from a previous blog entry. This is a chapter from my book.]

Of Cheap Motels and Family Idylls

San Luis Obispo, CA:

American as Eskimo Pie

When I first landed in San Luis Obispo this spring, I felt I’d somehow traveled back in time about 35 years, to vacations I’d taken when growing up on the East Coast. In the late 60s and early 70s, my family ventured out to nearby upstate NY and PA, and stayed in small motels, where yellow signs boasted “Color TV,” a Fresca machine sat proudly behind the motel office, reservations were recorded with Bic pens on index cards, and a cool stream seemed set to perpetually burble right next to the property. (And people even used words like “burbling” to describe it.) And while I’d never classify my childhood as “simple,” these were undoubtedly simpler times than now, when mom and dad are each grinding away on separate cell phones with laptops glued to their bodies, and kids seem to be suckled on iPods and Playstations instead of games where they get to interact with other humans and run around outside screaming.

Does anybody else feel sadness when watching these Age of Distraction families? I can’t imagine children being sustained on this dearth of attention any more than I can envision a tree and bearing fruit while listening to Linkin Park on earbuds. Is this terribly old-fashioned of me? Of course, kids adore things like iPods and Playstations…in the same ways they love other things that are great for them, like Pop Rocks and Kool-Aid. But some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around the times I spent with my grandma and grandpa, when it seemed their whole raison d’etre was having a good game of checkers with me. I suspect that I am not alone in this…And yet, why is it that we’re all so hermetically sealed behind our electronic devices that we allow the human factor to creep in less and less? As Carrie Bradshaw might inquire, Does your creeping in creep me out?

And so it was, tired and alienated and very much feeling the scars of having lived 16 years too long in NM, a place that drove me to my knees, to put it gently...that I landed in SLO after believing I was moving to LA. (That’s another entry for another time.) From the moment I set foot in San Luis, I knew I had discovered a place that was of another era. It was probably the most wholesome, small-town-American enclave I’d ever been in. It practically screamed, “Good Clean Fun!” As I walked around, my mind drifted to one of my favorite old Sean Penn films, Racing with the Moon. If you want to watch an utterly sweet, impending-loss-of-innocence movie some night, you gotta see Sean and Nic Cage (and a very young Elizabeth McGovern) in Racing with the Moon. (It was actually filmed quite a bit north, in Mendocino, but close enough.)

One of the things that first struck me as utterly anachronistic was the lack of chain stores. OK, it turns out there are some, but they are neatly tucked away and certainly, the town rallies against them in favor of local business. They even successfully drove Taco Bell off one of the main drags. A clear case of “Yo no quiero.” Then there was the low-tech aspect. On Monterey, another of the main streets, sit an electrical appliance fix-it store, a stamp and coin shop, and a lock-and-key, all blissfully unharmed by the wheels of more-modern commerce. Indie bookshops that have not been run off by Barnes and Noble or Borders. Four locally owned frozen yogurt stores. Auto lots that sell used Lotuses and ’67 Chevys. An old-fashioned barber, complete with swirly pole. Hey, didn’t they get the memo that in America 2008, you just can’t set up a town with businesses owned by real people??

Another uniquely American touch here: SLO is the home of the first motor hotel, or mo-tel, built in 1925, just when Americans began to have the resources to make road trips, and a stop squarely between San Fran and LA had broad appeal. 

In fact, this is the exterior of that very first motorists’ hotel, the Motel Inn, which is supposedly being restored by the hotelier next to it, though I have a sense that it may end up on the scrap heap. Which probably would have pleased J. Edgar Hoover, as he thought motels the true hotbeds o' Communism. But even Crazy J. Eddie would have agreed that it's a bit of a tease to see the lovely façade from the road, then drive up to a withering pile of Tyvek.

Anyway, after spending a couple nights at another budget motel, the Travelodge, I stumbled onto the Peachtree Inn, which Margot dubbed “the Beachtree,” probably because it had been so long since she’d seen a beach. Although at first glance I thought I was simply checking into another El Cheapo, I quickly realized that, again, I had stepped back into another time warp. The entirely-too-civil owner handed me several large gold room keys (no plastic cards!) and gave me my choice of rooms built around a lovely courtyard. From a giant eucalyptus tree was suspended a large swing. On another patch of green grass were 3 Adirondack chairs in which families routinely relaxed and, get this, read books! In fact, the only person I ever saw in one of those chairs with an electronic device was me…

You could sit literally for hours in those chairs, which believe me I did ‘cause I was Kentucky-fried, and stare off into the mountains, read a book, nibble on the cookies and pretzels that were left out in the kitchen ALL DAY LONG, and simply ponder your fate. I felt like I was 10 again, and vacationing at the lake with my parents. Except no one was fighting and I wasn’t getting pushed into freezing cold water and tossed into a canoe that leaked.

Every morning I would get up and go to the breakfast room, where they had bad-for-you cereals that my Whole Foods-inured palate hadn’t seen in years, like Honey-Nut Cheerios, which I’m betting no bee or real almond ever got near. There I would actually talk with the motel staff and guests. You could eat inside, where a radio station played songs Pet Clark never even remembered recording, or go outside on the back deck and appreciate the ever-temperate weather and revel in this kind of spring-morning, good-to-be-alive feeling. I was rabidly content.

After breakfast, I would walk into town, always taking a different route, discovering the small shops, Victorian homes, railroad tracks, and creek that flowed through the center. People proved generally in a fine mood here, and would smile or say hello as I passed them on the street. (I have to say, I’ve never met so many nice people in all my life. Just purely nice, for the sake of being nice—no attitude, no edge, no resentments, no angst. Definitely not from NYC.) If you can avoid comparing your age with that of the students—who actually seem less self-absorbed than their peers in many cases—you can generally feel quite swell here. And you wouldn’t want to be feeling anything other than swell. Unless you were going surfing, in which case you’d be feeling stoked. And if you weren’t feeling stoked, you’d probably be… down the road about 3 hours, sitting in traffic in LA.

Flagstaff at dusk, December 2007

Near Flagstaff train station, December 2007

I knew when I saw "Towels for Your Windshield" that I was dealing with a REAL motel.

The "Beachtree," San Luis Obispo, CA, April 2008

Cigar store window, Pismo Beach, CA, June 2008

My adopted horse, Andi, who lives in the pasture across the street. A sweet spirit who so badly needs a real home. Anyone got a horse trailer??