Covert Hostel-ity

During my battle with the H word, I have spent numerous nights at various hostels. One of my favorites had always been the Ashland Hostel, a rambling Victorian on the main drag in downtown Ashland.

As a female requesting a private room, I was generally assigned to the attic floor. Here I’d huddle into one of the small rooms under the eaves, where, stooping and crouching, I’d somehow manage to make my bed and run my book business off my laptop.

The hostel, especially in high season, served up a plate of characters straight out of casting central. I could have brought them all with me to Oakwood. Though it would have bummed their bliss. In the warmer weather, Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers lined the basement with their gritty beards, dirty laundry, and food pick-up packages. Sundry other longhairs, thespians couch surfers, progressive families, and organic farm workers headed to New Zealand for the avocado crop hung out to get stoned, do their laundry, burn bacon in the kitchen late at night, take whizzes off the deck, and generally make themselves quite at home.

On this particular evening, I had slept very little the night before, as a couple had entered the room adjacent to mine at midnight and stridently proceeded to bring 4 new lives into the world before daybreak. So I was looking forward to nothing more than curling up in bed for 8 full hours of sucking face with my pillow. As I made for the memory foam, I realized that my room was completely dark—undoubtedly the fuse had blown for the 17th time this stay. The night before, the same thing had happened, and I’d recruited the assistance of Buck, a rough’n’tumble sort who looked like the proverbial graying ranchhand in any John Wayne film, with a moustache and gums for teeth and a method of mastication that spilled food out both sides of his lips like toothpaste from a tube. Though I could tell that he didn’t much cotton to my kind, Buck had gone and flipped the switch for me, filling my attic room with a dim bulb’s full of light that just seemed to make all the difference. So, instead of trying to play “let’s pretend we’re camping,” I figured I’d just go downstairs and ask ol’ Buck if he wouldn’t mind flipping my switch again.

I checked for him in all the usual spots, but everyone with any authority over fuse boxes had apparently hit the down-low. Finally, I tried the basement catacombs, where the TV blasted and Buck sat gluey-eyed before it, watching a loud crime show with a serial-murder theme. “Hi, Buck,” I said. Nothing. “Hey, Buck!” I tried again. Still nada. “EXCUSE ME!” I yelled. He grunted. I told him about lights out. Baretta pointed a gun at me through the screen.

Suddenly, Buck swirled around and glared, “I couldn’t help you with that last night, and I can’t help you with that tonight! There is a general manager here. His name is Manny. You need to go knock on his door and leave me out of it!”

I walked upstairs to Manny the manager’s room, where I knew he was stoned-sleeping, so hadn’t wanted to disturb him. I knocked, knocked, and knocked again, with little effect. Finally, I gave up, considered if I wanted the Robinson Crusoe experience, considered how fierce an advocate I was trying to be for my own needs, and said, “By God, I need to make those lights go on!” I marched straight on down to the basement, screwed up my chutzpah, and asserted toward the kaleidoscope-eyed ranchhand, “I really need your help. Manny is asleep.” Buck turned to me with sheer venom in his eyes. I could tell I had interrupted the crime drama at a very key point, or perhaps he couldn’t tell where the TV fantasy left off and reality with the woman before him began….

“I TOLD you, I can’t help you!!!”

Just then, out of one of the other catacombs stumbled another rancherly type, whose hostility and meth levels were just a notch lower. He glared at me and said, “You need to go find Greg, the night manager here. He’ll know something.” When I asked him where Greg might be found, he told me to look on the top floor. “But watch it…,” he cautioned, with a dire warning in his eyes, “he’s entertaining his guests.”

“Well, I don’t want to bother him, then,” I said. The man took a few steps and careened toward the fuse box, which turned out to be on the wall immediately in front of both of them. As I began to walk away, I heard him tinkering with it. When I reached my room, the light had come on, and I attempted to plug in the space heater to take the chill out of this backwater room the heat never seemed to reach.

A few minutes later, I laid down to sleep. From the adjacent chambers—the scene of last night’s sex marathon—I heard the sounds of three people talking. One voice I recognized as Greg’s. The previous summer we had had several long conversations. Greg was a newly divorced man in his late 50s who resembled a New England college professor. All that was missing was the natty green sweater with the patches on the pockets and the pipe. Smart and likable, nevertheless he seemed at heart craggy and conservative, and I’d wondered what he was doing in hippiesville in the first place. The other two voices sounded husky and female, like those of the 2 bulldykes I’d seen earlier in the day tramping the halls and giving me the eye. (In lesbian lingo, this is a cross between, “I could take you,” “keep your hands off my girlfriend,” and “I think you’re kinda cute, maybe we can sleep together later.”) So I’m thinking, Maybe he just likes lesbians. Maybe the guy is just a major lesbo-hag. I tune in again, to confirm my theory. There’s low, sexy, loverly laughing, chatting, long silences, and a particular little smacking sound that faintly resembles…? Nahhhhh!!!! Couldn’t be.

Grabbing a book, I try to read, thinking that since it’s already well after midnight, their whatever will surely be ending soon. The clock ticks away…my exhaustion grows…but when I lay down to sleep, all I can hear is the sound of three people talking. And talking. And talking. Finally, I give a few raps to the wall. “Would you guys mind taking your conversation somewhere else? I’m trying to sleep.”

I hear giggling and hushed conversation. Finally, Greg says, “I’m sorry. But we’re visiting and will most likely be up all night. How ‘bout if I come over and find you another room?” Next I hear the sound I didn’t want to hear, the sound no one wants to hear when it’s an AARP-aged man and two young females: Greg pulling up his pants and buckling his belt. Alrighty then. A few minutes later, in walks Greg, grey hair piled in messy clumps, sweater on backwards, smiling, tired, confused, yet ardent. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Heidi. But you have to understand.”

I gave him the look of the exhausted and unamused. I would understand just about nothing at 1 a.m.

“You have to understand that I’m visiting with my significant others. And I don’t think we’ll be going to sleep any time soon.” He looked at me with grave sincerity, as if surely I was Earth's most heartless bitch if I didn’t grasp this simple premise.

My general philosophy in such situations is, “Never let ‘em see you sweat.” I find it works well with at-risk children, teens catapulting toward me on skateboards, NJ Turnpike drivers, and 59-year-olds thinking they’re Jack Kerouac in a Paris bordello. And of course, who was I to interfere with the vagaries of love, whatever its permutations? “That’s fine, Greg,” I said, sighing a bit.

Just then, the lights on the whole floor went dark again. Greg suddenly sprung into action. “I will run down and fix those for you. Thank you! I'll get those lights working!”

He had already illuminated so much.

I will say that things were quieter in my new digs: the top bunk, nestled between 2 gentlemen who dared not wake as I had psychically glued them to their beds. We passed an agreeable night, as I tried to neither shake nor stir the cocktail of mental images of what was undoubtedly occurring a few doors down.

I didn’t see Greg for awhile after that. But I did hear that he was “entertaining guests” for several days hence. If nothing else, I admired his stamina. I guess I should be looking forward to my late 50s—and grasping just how significant others can be.

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.]

My New Favorite Sacred Site

The Colestine Valley, in the Siskiyou Mountains south of Ashland, is home to the Tashi Chöling Center for Buddhist Studies. When you first encounter this beautiful Buddhist temple and garden, with a 35-foot-high statue of Vajrasattva, as well as two 20-foot statues of Green Tara and White Tara, you feel fairly certain that you've left Oregon and entered the Himalayas.

Adding to the illusion, you're greeted by primitive-looking woolly creatures, which it's quite possible to mistake for yaks, but are actually alpacas.

Then llamas--the double-L kind. Then deer--lots of babies and their moms.

On October 25, my birthday eve, we drove down to Mt. Ashland and through about 6 miles of gorgeous forest road until we came to a clearing with huge poles of prayer flags flapping in the wind. A 4-story traditional Tibetan temple loomed on the hill in the distance...and a 35-foot Vajrasattva is...well, hard to miss. We walked through the gate into the gardens, then later made our way up to the hilltop, from which we watched a beautiful fall sunset, toured the interior of the temple, and snapped about 500 photos between us.

As visitors, we were in exceptional company. Over the course of the years, many great living masters of Vajrayana Buddhism have visited and taught at Tashi Chöling, including H.H. Penor Rinpoche, Dodrup Chen Rinpoche, Yangthang Rinpoche, and Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche. Currently the center is under the guidance of Gyatrul Rinpoche, a delightful lama whom I met at a Tibetan cultural festival last month.

In 1980, the great master His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche came to bless the land where Tashi Chöling now stands, saying, “Those who practice here sincerely will have the opportunity to obtain the rainbow body.” The temple's scriptural library is said to house more Tibetan sacred materials than anywhere else in the US.

In the photo above are a large grouping of prayer wheels. Tibetans use these chokhor to spread spiritual blessings to all sentient beings and invoke good karma in their next life. I had never before (in this lifetime) turned a prayer wheel, so it means a lot to me to have them in the town where I find myself for now. Until I reach the land of many prayer wheels, a bit north and east of Ashland. I have this slated for sometime after Alaska.

(Though I am ever so hopeful that when I go to Alaska, I'll be able to see Tibet from my house!)

Photo Today

One from the archives...I was flipping through old photos and came across this one, which brings me a lot of joy. It dates back a bit, to a visit we paid to Santa Fe's most famous stupa (the town is fortunate enough to have several), located at the KSK Buddhist Center on Airport Road. This place has so many memories for me. I've shot it as both part of a documentary film and in hundreds of stills, and I've spent many hours in amazement, gazing at its walls and ceiling inside. Truly one of the most awe-inspiring spaces I've ever seen. It was the place that first introduced me to Buddhism, back when I discovered it in 1992. And where I became educated about it, by working in and reading books from its store, Noble Peace.

And the photo of course brings to mind my Tibetan godson, Tenzin Rigdol, who lives in exile in India and has never been able to see his home country.

Two days ago, as I hung the first set of prayer flags in my new house, on the Thai pagoda in the backyard (yes, there really is one), I realized that I'd bought the flags in Santa Fe, thus completing some sort of circle.

And tonight, as I check the clock, I realize that in the city in whose shadow I was raised, it's now 9/11. And I send out prayers for all NYers and everyone else who is still feeling the effects of that day.

Photo of the Day

When I visited Portland this summer, I took a bunch of photos in this warehouse area not far from the Pearl district. I turned a corner, and this woman was sitting so wonderfully poised in her way-cool 60s dress. While my subjects are usually less in the realm of the living, I couldn't resist this bit of street photography. Ah, the punch of those orangey oranges against the neverending expanse of grey and cumulo-storm-o in the Portland sky...

Graver Matters

I never thought I’d be walking around an old cemetery listening to Bonnie Raitt do a sound check, but if there’s anything this year has taught me, it’s that life brings lots of things you’d never expect, suspect, or even inspect. This odd concurrence took place today in Jacksonville, OR, a historic district not far from my new home, which had once gained fame as a gold-mining town, the first Chinatown in OR, and now as an outdoor stage for the ubiquitous Britt Festival, which brings in all kinds of national artists. Like Bonnie Raitt. Now, I’ve seen Bonnie before, eons ago in Albuquerque, and have not been terribly impressed. However, I have to say that she provided a very interesting soundtrack to my cemetery stroll. “Let’s give ‘em something to talk about,” she bellowed. Where I was, no one was particularly chatty. Except for a very annoying woman walking her yellow lab, who insisted on calling, “Here, Skippy!” at the top of her lungs, such to wake the dead. Good thing these guys were sleeping but tight…they’d been under since the mid-19th, some of them.

This landmark graveyard is divided into sections, including those for Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, Improved Orders of Red Men (a fraternal organization with rituals modeled after Native Americans’—of course, the white men “improved” on them), Odd Fellows (odder than white guys parading around as Indians?), and City “fathers” (somehow their moms gained admission, too). I spent a lot of time hanging out in the Jewish section placing pebbles on headstones, as is Jewish tradition to signify that the grave has been visited. Some had so many, some just a few…I wanted to cheer up the ones that hadn’t seen much action.

Today I also confirmed a longstanding theory I’ve had: Jew, Christian, odd fellow, or Suzy homemaker--people generally die close to their birthdays. In this cemetery, the vast majority sought greener pastures within 3 months of their DOBs, most waiting to blow out the candles on the cake first. It was uncanny. So, I guess I should eschew hazardous objects and skydiving trips during late January.

Some of these marble and granite headstones were so artful, it was like visiting a lovely sculpture garden. With lots of wormy corpuses under the art. I was so preoccupied with shooting photos and thinking about their aesthetic that that fact didn’t dawn on me until I got home: Oh, yeah, I was walking around on people’s heads… A unique facet of Oregon cemeteries is that the markers portray lots of images of the natural world, often including mountains, deer, elk, or even turkeys. One looked ever-so-much like a Thanksgiving mural. It was like “Home on the Range” set to marble.

Buddhists are often encouraged to meditate in the charnel grounds, as it is in such places that we most directly experience the mortality of our bodies, the realization that just like the residents here, we will one day cease to exist in our present form, and that love and all earthly relationships are ultimately tied to the whims of time. The crossing of the hour hand from one number to the next or the tearing off of a calendar page, and life can be radically altered or completely cease—in its current form. And thus, we appreciate the time, people, and relationships we do have as they are unfolding before our eyes.

Books and More Books

After being on the road for 7 weeks, I’m now settled down in Ashland, Oregon, where I’m renting a fabulous house with huge vegetable gardens and plenty of fruit trees. It’s a bit like the Garden of Eden, without the fig leaf or that nasty little rib. Not to say that ribs don’t come in handy—I’m quite attached to all of mine.

My current fascinations are Facebook, a highly addictive site that my friend Rachel was nice enough to turn me on to, and bookselling, which is at a peak right now with the academic ingress. I love putting books in mailers and thinking of all the great classes people are taking. Education is such a miracle. Without it, we end up with phenomena such as…well, George W. Bush, for starters…

My biblophilia was piqued recently on the plane rides to and from NM (details about the United Airlines debacle when I’m in a more savage mood). There I polished off most of an amazing book, entitled Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. You can pick it up today on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Outwitting-History-Amazing-Adventures-Rescued/dp/1565125134/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220046149&sr=1-1) for 88 cents, which is the screamingest of deals, as this book is an awesome tale about a young guy’s attempt at literally saving a huge part of a culture. While I was in NM, I kept reading pages of it to Margot, and we both found ourselves tearing up at the passages about elderly Jews handing down their entire lives to the younger generation via these books. My friend Tori taught me most of the Yiddish I know (and it’s stuck!), but even if you’re more than ein bisl goyische, it’s still fascinating.

The other fun site I've happened upon in my quest to find book sales was Bookcrossing.com. This is a community (of 703,000 members!) who leave books in random places so that other people may find them. Each book is tagged with a tracking sticker, so that the leaver can find out in whose hands the book ends up. This reminds me a bit of balloon launches our grade school used to have, when we’d tie tags to each balloon requesting info about how far the balloon had traveled. Bookcrossing is an international effort, so it’s exciting to think that someone from Medford, Oregon, could pick up your book and take it on a plane with them to, say, Thailand, and you could get a hit back from Bangkok. So, my new meditation is…what books most need to be released into the world for the betterment of society? And of course, an answer that springs to mind is one of my very favorites, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. But where to leave it? I’m thinking the front porch of the Ashland Hostel, where so many Pacific Crest Trail hikers congregate. I’m sure it could find a happy home in a backpack, all covered in dirt, gorp, and bug spray, as it should be. I’ll keep you posted on where it ends up…