This is sick. I have stayed in various and assorted hotel rooms for about 2,345 days of my life. I tried counting up just the trips. If anything, I’m underestimating it. Most of them were business. Some were pleasure. Some were both and some were neither. All of them looked a lot alike. Variety is not generally prized in hotel room design.
In my twisted tour of hotelry (some were technically motels at the time), I have become acutely aware of the random behavior patterns of hotel room transients, having walked down a lot of funkily carpeted hallways in these human file cabinets.
Why is the toilet paper so thin in a room that costs $320 a night? Are they trying to match the thin sheets on the rock-hard bed with the neck-breaking pillows? Why are there cigarettes burns in the no smoking rooms? Why do hotel towels feel like number 2 sandpaper?
What are those stains on the carpet? Does the same person buy those hideous, flowery-looking bedspreads for every interstate hotel in America? What are those stains on the bedspread? Does anyone ever sit in that lonely chair in the corner, or is that just used to toss clothes on? What is that stain on the chair? Why is the TV circa 1989? What is that stain on the screen? And what exactly is that smell? The “hotel smell?” Is it like “new car smell” with stains?
My family checked into a hotel in Tulsa where someone had been cleaning fish in the tub. Brim. There was the hotel east of Calgary that flooded in the middle of the night, causing all of the balconies to pour like waterfalls. There was the Miami hotel with the humidity so thick water dripped from the ceiling like a cave. There was the Boston hotel with the amorously loud couple in the next room who sounded like the same amorously loud couple in hotels in New York, Dallas, Kansas City, Myrtle Beach, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Cleveland, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Baltimore, Destin, Houston, New Orleans – these moaners were clearly following me.
I lived for a year in a room the size of a closet, at the Paramount Hotel in Manhattan. I have leaped from hotel windows in earthquakes, but have never tossed a TV from one, although I did stay in a room on Sunset Boulevard where Led Zeppelin tossed TVs onto the beautifully drugged people below while their friends roared down the halls on choppers. My stay was tame. In San Francisco, there was a dangerous looking hair in the tub that seemed like a leftover from the summer of love?
Christopher Walken, asked to see my watch during breakfast in a Hollywood hotel (yes, I thought of the scene in “Pulp Fiction”). I have shared elevators or breakfast proximity in that same hotel with Peter Boyle, Hall & Oats, Boy George, The Fine Young Cannibals (yeah, the 80′s), Gabriel Byrne, Terry Bradshaw, Britney Spears (I think) and about a dozen actors and musicians that I knew were famous but not famous enough for me to attach a name to the face.
At Shutters on the Beach, in the lobby, I had one of my shoes snagged by one of the children of Sean Penn and Robin Wright, and Penn brought back my shoe and apologized profusely. Sean Penn bringing me my shoe ranks up there with Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly ramming me with his Hummer in Venice Beach.
At 5 a.m. in an LA hotel, I got a call from a sultry woman who dialed room 515 and talked really nasty – for an hour. A friend told me that the mysterious woman has been making these random calls to hotels for years. Oddly, no stains in that room. Go figure.
