“Ever since I got shot in the face I can’t eat bagels.”
This is a quote I heard, not a quote I said. I remain with an unshot bagel-eating face.
When I used to travel solo, I loved looking for the cheapest motels I could find. My philosophy was the same as Lenny’s from The Simpsons; “Please don’t tell anyone how I live.” Oh, the tragedies of hand-fixed bathroom from $26 motel rooms! Once I found a place with a telephone switchboard, and interior decor last seen in Coal Miner’s Daughter.
I’m trying to be better, and not getting the absolute worst, cheapest, least safe most atrocious place I can find. But it keeps happening anyways.
One of my true vices in life is breakfast; I will hit a free breakfast bullet like a cyclone, trying to get one (or two) of everything. And this used to be one solid way I could avoid the dirt-cheap (with accent on the dirt) places: they didn’t offer free breakfasts. Only family establishment do! Maybe with a lobby that smells like the in-ground pool! And one of those cartoon maps of the region! This also helps me avoid what I consider to real road-trip horror stories, which are the dumps that charge as much as a nice place.
This last weekend in Cleveland (“come look at both of our buildings”), my luck ran out.
My first motel was, uh, under construction. One doorway way blocked by rubble, like a video game mechanic telling me not to progress any further. Half the doors in the hallway were wide open, lights on inside. (“Welcome to the Silent Hill Motel [insane laughing].”) My door didn’t work the first 10 times I tried: did you know there are some magnetic keycards you have to “jiggle”? Once inside, I smelled ghost smoke, and found a slot for straight-razor disposal, which just filled up an interior wall cavity.
That motel had was a bad breakfast. There were powdered eggs swimming in water, next to microwaved sausages also swimming in water. The steam tray had been there in the lobby the night before, its cover permanently dripping with uncleaned condensation from last night. There were bran flakes (with nary a raisin on site) but no milk. There were little powdered donuts, ice cold to the touch. A Soviet-era powder dispenser scattered creamer powder in a half cup of coffee: no tea, no decaf. Please don’t ask me what week that coffee was brewed, or what year.
I had a new hotel for Saturday and Sunday, but put the wrong location name into the GPS. The incorrect hotel I went to was a very swanky place, with jazz playing and a dimly lit hotel bar to the right. I approached the desk and after a few minutes apologized to the clerks, realized they couldn’t find my registration because I was in the wrong place.
My reservation was crosstown, at [MOTEL NAME REDACTED BUT JUST CALLED IT THE WORST MOTEL IN CLELEVAND, WHICH HOOBOY IS SAYING SOMETHING].
“Sir!” the man behind the counter said, placing his hand over his heart. “I cannot allow you to go to that…that PROPERTY!”
Uh-oh.
In his Frasier Crane way, the hotel manager tried his best to dissuade me from checking in across town. This nice hotel was, ahem, clearly fully booked, but another one down the street might be open..? There’s no mention of how much this cost: I don’t want to spend $300 a night on top of whatever I spent on the free-breakfast place because Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs feels it’s in a bad part of town.
But the more he talked, the more I realized he may not just be white-guy-to-white-guy trying to tell me I’m not staying at the Ritz. He started me actually worrying. A worry I wouldn’t be able to put to bed until I myself was put to bed in the new motel.
Only one time with skeevy motel rooms did I ever feel unsafe, and that when I realized just how many people were living in the motel, not renting. Oh, huh, I’m staying at The Florida Project. If that was the case here in Cleveland, maybe I’d actually leave.
I ate a tremulous dinner a quarter mile away, looking around at my fellow Burger King patrons. They all look like normal people! In a normal neighborhood! With well maintained houses on the side streets! Frasier was just being elitist, I decided: this place would be fine.
Approaching “the property,” I drove through a parking lot that can only be described as bombed out: there was a 35-foot-wide two-foot deep crater, perpetually filled with water, despite it not having rained for days. A woman who inhaled cigarettes like crazy and expelled curses like crazy was talking on her cell phone outside. Inside, two guys were trying to pay part in cash and part on their card.
I recognized their type, their layered clothes, their beat-to-hell footwear the dull acceptance that nothing would ever go right. They were road crew guys.
In my mind families love a free breakfast, but road crew guys love it even more. In 2 minutes they can shove food onto a plate, maybe microwave or toast a baked good, get a free coffee: that saves them a trip to 7-11. And they do this around 5:30 am since they’re either arriving or leaving work at odd hours. And working so far away from home building roads they get a per diem, including food and lodging. And the way to spend the least of that (while not sleeping in their truck) is to find a dingy motel with a free breakfast.
I think like a road crew guy, it turns out. All I need is one of those handheld STOP signs that’s a SLOW sign on the obverse.
This place’s room again smelled like ghost smoke, but so cheap there were no plastic cups (hey, those are expensive). There was no working elevator either, and no sign for a staircase: you just had to find it. The second floor reminded me of some 1970s grindhouse films I saw about bank robbers who hide out in Mexico. Most everyone I saw up there was having a long conversation with raw audio on speaker, in the middle of the night, a conversation about nothing going onto its third hour.
The free breakfast was a really dark experience, in that there were no lights in the breakfast room. Not no lights on: no lights: no lamps, no overhead fixtures, just the light from the hallway, and a dorm-room minifridge if it was opened. That fridge did contain a gallon of whole milk, I’ll give it that.
There were things labelled Fruit Loops, but Froot Loops are bold garish colors. These resembled dead Muppets. There were four Aldi-branded oatmeal packets, again no decaf, and bagels that looked like casters that came from a closed-down insurance agency’s filing cabinet.
Two uncomplaining guys were making breakfast as best they could when I arrived. Both looked like the father from CODA: long scraggly hair, longer scragglier beards, bodies seemingly made out of resin and sticks and twine. All those clothing is either safety-vest yellow or camouflage. If any of these road crew guys decided to claim they’d been lost in the wood for a year, they’d probably get away with the story.
One guy was toasting his lollipop-sized rock-hard bagel, and said he liked eating a bagel every morning.
“Ever since I got shot in the face, I can’t eat bagels,” the other guy said. I grabbed my food and left.
Upstairs, over breakfast, I heard the sheriff’s office knocking on the door two down from me. Someone was having a psychotic break: I watched them wheel him in a gurney into an ambulance.
Okay, maybe Frasier had a point.
After talking with a friend who’s a vacation planner, I realized I had my hotel amenities completely inverted. The MORE expensive the hotel, the LESS LIKELY they’ll have a free breakfast. Free breakfast implies VALUE, not LUXURY. Expensive places cater to business travelers with expense accounts and thus don’t care. Families do, which is why they will risk their kids getting shot for a chance at one of those 85-pound waffle makers where you flip it over like an industrial laundry machine.
Looking up reviews for this place, which maybe I should have done beforehand, I found “Do not stay here,” “Sleep in your car instead” “What a dump” and “Worst hotel in America” {all real reviews]. Somehow this was like three steps up from what thought was Cleveland’s “cheap” hotel!
Cindy’s picking my hotel for the next trip. I trust her decision-making skills, which is to say I don’t trust mine at all anymore.
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
In honor of my attempts for a pathetic free breakfast, Breakfast Club week! Here’s Molly Ringwald’s Claire as Princess Leia.
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
Here’s the cast of Spider-Man: Homecoming= re-enacing the Breakfast Club poster. Note for all who try this: you have to pose ON A TABLE since otherwise there’s no room for the Judd Hirsch among you to put his other.
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
Closest I could come.
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
They actually say breakfast club! Like a breakfast club, which surely existed before the movie, is trying to reclaim the first-definition throne! I just don’t see it happening.
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
APRIL 4-6: AWESOME CON — Washington DC
MAY 16-18: FAN EXPO PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia, PA
OCTOBER 17-19: BALTIMORE COMIC-CON — Baltimore, MD