Motel Blues

As Willie Nelson once sang, I’ve been “on the road again.” And once again, I’m reminded that not all hotels are created equal.

A while back, I stayed at a hotel which had to be the worst. It wasn’t until the desk clerk handed me a scrub brush that I understood what was meant on the marquee out front, “Clean rooms inside.”

The clerk told me that to receive their advertised low rate for a room I would have to make my own bed. I thought that wasn’t too unreasonable. Then he handed me a hammer and a saw. And speaking of the bed; it was like sleeping on the mattress equivalent of a Venus fly trap. The thing not only sucked me into its mouth it swallowed me whole. You talk about an orthopedic nightmare!

Now, the room I was given wasn’t too bad, except for its size. It was so small that when I smiled my teeth touched the wall. I mean to tell you, I didn’t have room enough to change my mind.

Bugs! You talk about bugs. That was the only hotel I’ve ever stayed in where the bed bugs complained to management about the infestation of human beings. After crawling into bed I immediately grabbed the phone and called the front desk. The clerk asked, “What’s eating you?”

I answered, “That’s what I want to know!”

The hotel restaurant wasn’t much better.

After I was seated at a table, a waitress approached me to take my order. I only like one brand of root beer. So when the waitress asked me for my drink order, I asked “What kind of root beer do you have?”

She said (and I’m not making this up), “Brown.” She worried me.

How this restaurant kept from being shut down by the board of health I’ll never know. The cooks’ idea of a salad shooter was a shot gun and a head of lettuce. The food was so bad the cook wouldn’t even lick his own fingers. Flies would buzz into the kitchen to commit suicide. It got to be so bad that the flies that didn’t commit suicide all pitched in to repair the kitchen screen door. Actually though, I shouldn’t have been surprised about the lousy food. The guy staying in the room next to me told me that I could eat dirt cheap there; and he was right—the dirt was cheap.

Not only was the hotel and its staff unsettling, but the type of clientele housed there worried me too. Just after I checked in, I noticed a man and his son looking over the hotel elevator. Evidently, this family didn’t get out to town very often for these two guys acted as if they had never seen an elevator before. As they were looking it over, an old, grey-haired lady hobbled up and pushed a button on the wall. The elevator doors opened; she stepped into the elevator; the doors closed, and numbers above the doors lit up…2…3…4…5. There was a pause, and then the numbers above the doors lit up in the reverse order…4…3…2…1. The elevator doors opened up, and out stepped a beautiful young blond woman. The father looked at his son. The boy looked to his father, and then he asked, “Daddy, did you see that?”

The father answered, “Shore did, son. Now go git yer mamma: we’ll put her in that.”

Needles to say, I found a new place to stay the following evening. It was a motel just down the road a piece.

Let’s see, what was the name of it? Oh yes, the Bates Motel.