The Journey Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Randal Schaffer

He found the local outlet of a motel chain that had been on the news a few years back as an example of a really bad place to stay. The upside for him is that it was far away from anything else and way off the road.

I forgot to mention earlier... one of the things about him that caused him to so seriously consider suicide. He didn't sleep. Wasn't even really an insomniac, any more than the ocean is a "little damp". He blamed it on his mother's bad genes. She had never slept well, either. So it was important to him to find a place that was quiet. Clean was secondary and amenities were so tertiary that they really didn't even matter.

He pulled into the parking lot, and found the lobby door locked, the desk unmanned.

"Shit."

He started to turn and head back to his car when he noticed a doorbell with a sign, poorly-written by hand that read "Please wring bell for service. Thx." He had a moment to puzzle over the weird misspelling of "ring", and then followed the instructions. Thirty seconds later, he rang again, and then a door opened in the back of the desk, and a very fat man with a face the color of a fire hydrant came out, fastening his belt. He pushed a button on the desk, causing the door to buzz like a pissed-off hornet, and began to gesture frantically with his free hand.

He entered the lobby, and the fat man said "Sorry about the wait... had to take one hell of a dump."

He had a moment to wonder why the fat man felt it necessary to share that particular piece of information with him, and then shook his head, realizing that, in the grand scheme of things (whatever THAT was), it didn't really matter.

He signed the guest card, was told that the room plus tax was fifty-seven fifty per night, with a miserly 10 AM checkout time. He dropped three twenties on the desk. The fat man glared at the bills for a moment, and then, with a put-upon sound, unlocked the cash drawer and doled out his change.

As he turned and headed back for his car, the desk clerk said "Hey."

He turned back around.

"Yeah?"

The fat man said "Buddy... I don't know you and you sure God don't know me, but I gotta tell you. You look like trouble to me, and I don't want no trouble. You give me trouble and I'll put your ass out in a second, you read?"

He looked at the fat man for a few short moments and then said "I'm kind of glad to hear that, as long as you're as strict with all of your customers. There are a lot of things that I want at this moment in my life. Trouble ISN'T one of them." He turned and headed out the door, shaking his head and smiling as the fat man mumbled "Smart ass" under his breath.

As he got his one suitcase out of the trunk of the car and headed up to his room, he wondered why it was that honest people were always called smart-ass. Did it have something to do with the resentment of people who WEREN'T honest?

The first thing that he did... the first thing that he ALWAYS did in a hotel room, come to that, was to cover his hand with one of his clean socks, and then use that hand to remove the top blanket from the bed and throw it in the corner where it huddled, discarded, like the victim of a sex crime, waiting for someone to help it. Hotels... especially cheap dives like this one... NEVER washed the top blanket. Too much expense and trouble. So there was always dust, sometimes jizz and occasionally shit on them. The dust he could live with, the jizz was unfortunate and the shit was just UNTHINKABLE, so it always went into the corner.

He took a quick, very hot shower, and then padded naked back into the room. It was always a bit of an exhibitionistic thrill with him to walk around a hotel room buck-ass naked, as if the ghosts of all of the previous and future tenants were watching him, shocked, excited or bored by his show.

He looked through the drawers in the room, trying to find anything that the other guests had forgotten and the maids (assuming this armpit actually HAD maids) had missed.

The only thing that he found was a Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer. As he started to slide it shut, the Bible shifted and he saw a glint of plastic bag under the edge of it. He reopened the drawer, and moved the Bible, revealing a sandwich bag with a small amount of marijuana and some rolling papers and matches inside. He smiled and shook his head, started to close the drawer on the pot and then thought "You know what? Fuck it."

He was forty-four years old. A week before Christmas that year, more or less, he would be forty-five and he hadn't smoked a joint in more than twenty years. So you know what? Fuck it.

He sat down cross-legged on the bed, and poured the dope carefully into the rolling paper, clumsily and inexpertly rolling a serviceable but far from perfect doobie. Even when he HAD smoked grass, in those dim dead days of 1980 something, he had almost never smoked joints, had almost always used pipes and bongs. So this was not an easy task, and, when he was done, he really felt as if he had EARNED this doob.

He pulled the matches out of the bag, and then folded his arms across his chest, saying "Dear Lord, thank you for this day. For this high that I am about to receive may I be blessed with gratitude. And please bless whatever holy traveler left this little bag of Maui Wowie. Amen."

He unfolded his arms, raised the doobie to his mouth, struck a match to it, and drew the acrid, old sock and feet smelling smoke deeply into his lungs. Since he didn't smoke cigarettes and had been free of the demon weed for so long, his body immediately rebelled with a half-cough, half-retch, but he fought and won, holding the smoke in. He swallowed repeatedly, wanting to keep as much of this as possible. He sure wasn't going to BUY any weed, even now that he was smoking again, so he wanted to savor what he had while he had it.

When he finally released his breath, he was pleased to see that very little of the smoke had escaped alive. He laughed an evil laugh, and then toked deeply again, settling back against the headboard as the high started to settle in. It happened exactly as he had always remembered... his fingertips started to tingle, and then his sinuses went numb.

He grabbed the TV remote and started to wade through the pond of shit that is late night TV as he smoked his joint.

Finally, around three in the morning, his joint long gone, struggling to keep his eyes open, he turned the TV off, set the little bedside clock radio for 6:30, and lay down. He was completely, utterly and thoroughly exhausted, and he knew that he would wake up at 6:30 feeling like someone had beaten the shit out of him with a watermelon wrapped in a pillowcase, but he also knew that if he went to bed BEFORE that point, sleep wasn't happening.

The first time that he woke up, the clock face told him that it was 3:49 AM. He lay and stared at the pattern on the ceiling that the parking lot halogens made through the slats of the blinds, and then drifted back off to sleep.

The second time that he woke up it was 5:37 AM and the day was beginning to dawn outside. He had a moment to panic, not recognizing his surroundings, and then remembered that he was in Kellogg, Idaho headed... well, pretty much anywhere... and then went back to sleep.

It seemed like seconds, or possibly two minutes later that the clock radio clicked on to a static-laden country station. He started the day as he had since he was a teenager... by swearing at the alarm clock as he turned it off, then took a moment to center himself, crossed his arms across his chest and said "Dear Lord, thank you for the sleep. Please bless this day and keep me from getting a flat tire. Thank you and amen."

He dressed in the same clothes from yesterday, reasoning that no one was really going to care, brushed his teeth quickly, zipped up his suitcase and headed downstairs.

The desk was empty again. He looked for and found the "continental breakfast" through the office window, and decided that it really wasn't worth going through the trouble of disturbing the fat man or whoever happened to be on the desk that morning. As he looked at the forlorn doughnuts and slightly pissy-looking orange juice, he thought that these things could really only be called "continental" if you considered "continental" to mean "coming from between somewhere in Arkansas and somewhere in Oklahoma".

He slid the key card into the small slot on the door that said "KEY CARD HERE PLEASE THX" and then started his car and backed out of the lot.

The same fast-food joint that had served him dinner last night served him breakfast this morning, and he was back on the road.