Three Motels By James Hippie

Gary Dincher  CC




Three Motels

 
1.
Amarillo, Texas. My car had broken down and I was waiting for it to be repaired. It seemed to rain the entire time I was in Amarillo, which turned out to be several days. I stayed in the motel room and watched TV. To save money I ate microwave burritos from the gas station across the parking lot. When the rain let up a bit, I tried walking around the neighborhood surrounding the motel but I found it disorienting. I had developed a vague anxiety about being outside; it felt safer back in the room. The job interview that had brought me to Texas hadn’t panned out. I don’t know what made me think I could just pick up and move to a new state. I watched TV in bed with the lights off. It felt like a scene from a movie.
One afternoon I walked to the gas station for a burrito and a Coke and came back with a 40 oz. bottle of beer. I hadn’t planned it. It just happened. Looking back it would feel inevitable, the way all my mistakes felt inevitable from a distance. As I was opening the bottle I was acutely aware that I was throwing away a year and a half of sobriety. I did it anyway. Inevitability.
It was getting dark and it had been raining steadily all afternoon. I went back to the store for more beer, resigned to what was happening. I sat at the window drinking, watching a group of college kids laugh and splash in the motel pool in the middle of the downpour. It seemed like something I would have done at a different time in my life, under different circumstances. I couldn’t envision my life being that carefree again.
I was 28 years old.
 
2.
Elk City, Oklahoma. Car problems again. I dropped the car off to have the radiator patched at a small auto yard filled with rusting scrap parts and car frames. I walked along the highway back to a motel I’d seen on I-40 driving through town. I can’t remember the name of the motel - an old building with a large red-carpeted staircase in the center of the lobby leading to the second floor. I’ve looked for it online and never been able to find it. It’s possible it was torn down years ago, or it’s possible it never existed and I created the memory retroactively, superimposing a picture of a building I saw in some other context into the narrative. That kind of thing happens. Still, I have a memory of buying beer, bread, and cheese at an IGA market and carrying it up the worn red carpeted stairs to my room. 
While I waited for the car to be finished I stayed in the room and drank. Unlike Amarillo it was sunny in Oklahoma, and my room on the second floor overlooked the swimming pool. I sat drinking at the scarred wooden table watching from above while families I would never know swam and played, like an idiot god watching helplessly as his creations exercised their free will and turned their backs on Him. My other memories of what went on in the room are like the motel itself and no longer seem to exist.
 
3.
Bowie, Texas. I convinced a doctor in Oklahoma City to give me a prescription of Antabuse to help get me back to California. He phoned in the prescription to a drug store and suggested I go to an AA meeting. I politely declined. The pills sat in the bottom of my suitcase while I drove in the wrong direction, California 1,500 miles to the west and an open bottle between my legs as I headed in a vaguely southeastern direction. Somewhere outside of Wichita Falls I watched the sun setting in a purple bruise across the sky and the landscape started to buckle and tilt and I was having a panic attack until I realized I was the only vehicle on the road and could drive into the ditch and roll from my car screaming and claw at the red dirt and there would be no one to watch me freak out and I felt stupid. I thought of the Camus quote “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman” and continued driving.
The motel in Bowie was a dump; plywood paneling, moldy carpet, the smell of insecticide and small-town despair. I woke up sweating and realized the window mounted air conditioner had stopped working. I walked outside and saw that it had been unplugged. I plugged it back in and fell asleep, only to wake up again bathed in sweat. I heard a fluttery clicking noise and turned on the light. There were cockroaches coming in through the vent of the air conditioner, which had stopped running again. I got out of bed and started walking toward the door and a cockroach took flight at me - the fucking things had wings and could fly. I grabbed my boots and put them over my hands and ran at them, smashing them against the carpet and walls. It occurred to me that this might be a hallucination and I was relieved when I woke up several hours later to find the remains of the smashed bugs smeared across the walls and countertops.
 
I filled out the motel’s customer satisfaction questionnaire and affixed it to the mirror using the remains of one of the roaches. I collected my things and was back in the car minutes later.
 
I took a pill and started driving West.

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James Hippie is the author of The Punk Called Rock, Terminal Jive, and the poetry collection XX.  His writing has appeared online at Horror Sleaze Trash, Unlikely Stories, Terror House Magazine, and Literary Yard.