LOVING MOTELS

Feels American. Shameless, somehow. People I don’t know love motels. People I don’t know love chlorine; hundreds and thousands of people I know and don’t know love motel pools, whirlpools, hot tubs, saunas. People I love, people who love me, those people love room service. The sheer intellectual weight: the idea of a phone, wires, another phone, then food arriving. Preposterous and sexual. Sexy, like those bathing suits you only wear in pools in motels in Montreal, or pools in Shawnee Mission, any pool where no one you know will walk by and know you. Loving motels means loving what has not rooted in your spirit. Loving motels is loving your very own ice bucket, and the special shapes the ice takes, is loving the shining cans of pop sinking through the melting ice, the sound aluminum makes while you pretend to sleep, is loving the hidden air conditioners and the cable TV shows, and is letting no one else, not even someone you love, use your own wrapped bar of soap, or your own little pack of ten-months-old Sanka or the sweet little hot plate that just fits the baby coffee pot. People like me and including me love motels for the white towels which remind us of something large we have lost somewhere. We love the deep shag carpet we would hate at home. We love the key, the number, the simple locks, not like home where locks are hard, needing a hip thrown against the door, the dead bolt really dead, we love the simple key with the simple plastic shape: sometimes a fish, sometimes a smooth, beige oval, sometimes, if we’re lucky, a shamrock, a clover, a doll or a dog. We love motels for letting us drive up, we get our own parking place automatically, then we get love- making that is not connected to our own bed’s history, and besides the white towels we get white sheets which we all love and never buy. We get left alone, we get the feeling of being alone, and we need American to leave us alone in the motels.