Sordid Hotel View

These days run away like horses over the hill...In tired, sardonic quarters we all wait on the cross, laughing and loathing it all because that is all you can do in the end. Summer heat will not dismiss itself in this festering swamp outpost on the outskirts of Interstate 10. It is a Monday afternoon and we are cooped up in a hotel room facing a freeway lined endlessly with strip malls and homogeneity.

In a corner of the room, not so much a suite but not exactly a dump hums the cold monotony of the hotel's air conditioning. The curtains are drawn. The room is dark and silent. A half drunk bottle of Spanish brandy sits on the table that houses the television. Sordid thoughts crowd the small living space. The main occupant, a degenerate soul awakes from a nap, his mind is crusty and lethargic. He longs for an encounter with the blonde girl down the hallway. He has just finished one and is not satisfied. She left without saying goodbye, her conscience swellling, her pussy throbbing, her nylons maladjusted. He assesses himself as scum, for a moment he is an unnerved by this realization, then he rethinks that he is nothing worse than any other brute animal and most certainly no different than any other man. He curses the culture that engendered this brief encounter with guilt, it is not he who has the problem with base instincts, it is them and it is a con because they want a monopoly on the pleasure of satisfaction that comes from appeasing one's instincts. "Yeh, fuck them".

Odors of fried food and cigarettes linger from the carpet to the walls. The minority cleaning staff cannot cleanse the vice of the room's assorted guests. Room 211 is violated as is 208 and 217 and probably every other god-damned room in the joint. He considers ordering porno after he eats because he knows that his counterpart ain't coming back and the chances of screwing the blonde down the hall are negligible mostly because she is a good girl with a boyfriend and a deluded sense of monogamous propriety. The hand ain't so bad but there is something to be said for all that is wet and gooshy. "Bunch of suckers", he surmises. "You can get all the dick and cunt you want but it is always the same and you are always looking around even if you are generally content with them as human beings, but it is always the same dick and cunt. Another Puritanical con-job. Cripes, I'm hungry."

The sad creature cracks a 16 ounce can of Old Milwuakee's Best and begins to guzzle. His mind is rife with punk rock and desperation. This is the way of the world. It is a path beset by a horrific malaise. He takes another deep gulp. The beer is skunky and grotesque. Cheap and metallic. This is not hyperbole, this is reality. This is suburban cosmology. Thoughts of the blonde traverse his worn, pickled mind.

"Is it any better 2600 miles away in Los Angeles, that terminal point before California descends into the cold, aquatic abyss called the Pacific Ocean? Florida is the land of the expatriated scumbag.

He opens the "Holy Bible" placed by the Gideons and opens it to Genesis 1931 and reads about drunken incest and thinks about biblical justification for both behaviors. Either the author is a drunken pervert or Yahweh is or both. A threesome with pops after imbibing some wine from the plain of Zoar. What the hell do they put in that shit? Is that some crazy cosmic brew batched up by God? This could just as well as be a trailer park in Arkansas or the storyline of a nineteen minute clip of porn on the internet. Hermetic cave sex, now the story of Rustico and Alibech doesn't seem so original. God damn it, even Dante stole from the authors of antiquity.

Turn to a random page and behold "The New Testament of a Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ". Written in the style of the Queen's English, nice touch, maybe adds a residue of class to the ancient biopic of the radical carpenter and his twelve clams. Laughter is a cheap gag, especially when reading about thorns and blood and Satan and idiots squabbling in ancient sandlots. Compound that with some beer and rock n' roll and you have a hell of a scene.

"Hi, I am in Room 211 and I need a seven o'clock wake up call. Yes sir, we can do that for you, anything else? Yeh, do you know where I can find some hookers around here? Forget that, how about some room service, you guys still open for requests? Uh, yes sir, what would you like? Well a grilled ham and cheese on white with an order of fries would be mighty fine, thanks."

About twenty minutes later he hears a knock at the door hoping that the hotel offers prostitution service free of charge as a perk for frequent travelers instead a middle-aged, medium-sized black man stands in the hall with a cart full of food. He signs the bill and gives the black man a three dollar tip. "Thanks guy", he says. "You're welcome, sir".

The food is under a tan plastic cover. It is hot and greasy. He grabs a beer out of the fridge and orders some porn. The feast begins. The orgy commences. It's typical smut, college sluts gone bananas. He leaves it on for background noise, maybe he'll rub one off later if he's into it or if he's really bored. The sandwich is surprisingly delicious. The yellow of the cheese congeals to the pink of the ham, moist inside, the bread is crispy and buttery. The fries saturated with salt, the beer soaked in grains. He feel his insides burning, a fresh coating of grease slides down the esophagus and fills his stomach. The beer cools it down, the acids do their dirty work, inside it stews and mixes like vomit but god-damn does it taste great.

He ponders all of the two-bit sycophants and ass kissers in the group. How sad, how fucking sad, what a preposterous behavior. What a cowardly behavior. All this in a training seminar. Indeed, it is a seminar with the experienced, the laboriously privileged who have endured insufferable boredom at the hands of institutionalized learning and rotted away under dull fluourescent tubular luminescence for at least a decade. That is too long in a human lifetime. A good eighth of one's life sitting, waiting, hoping, dreaming, fucking, and buying all for the chance of another banal chapter. It ain't much of a living at all, far closer to dying. But how those parasites raise their hands and chime in, feigning interest in organizational policy and legal provisions.