Having done a bit of travel with Michael Myself, I can tell you that hotel SNAFUs are par for the course. In fact, when I started reading this account, I wondered if it was one of the hotels we visited on a recent trip. It wasn't, but I'm guessing there are a million of 'em.
Travel . . .
Travel is my life. It’s what I do. My sixteen year old Ford extended van has now traversed over 439,000 miles around the country hauling me to art festivals and gathering unusual and rare woods for my instruments. I’m still on the original engine, knock on wood (yuk, yuk…..get it?). I’m not the Michael Thiele of forty years ago when I, like a lot of my artist friends, slept in my ride. For a very long time, now, I’ve splurged for a motel room at the end of the day. This is of particular necessity when I’m exhibiting at a show. Art enthusiasts are quite interested in meeting and chatting with the creators of the works they came to view and, hopefully, purchase. They are decidedly less interested in smelling any particular artist’s body odor. Can’t say that I blame them.
I’ve spent, quite literally, thousands of nights in motel rooms over the course of my career and thus have experienced the full gamut of what the hospitality industry has to offer. The vast majority of my stays have lacked any noteworthiness whatever. They lie at the center of the proverbial bell curve. The two ends - the really good stays and the sketchy ones - are the ones that adhere to my memory, and primarily the latter.
Last fall, on my trip to Philadelphia for the Rose Squared event, I had made a reservation in Memphis at a property I’d never visited. It was the Red Roof Inn at the Memphis airport. A budget motel, to be sure, I’ve stayed at a lot of these over the years because they are almost always pretty good and dependably quieter than other budget properties.
Let me preface what I am about to recount. It had been about a fourteen hour driving day and had I arrived at almost any earlier time than midnight I would have taken one look and moved on. The one redeeming feature of this stay was the presence of the two signs I encountered in the lobby, shown here. I am not ethnocentric by any stretch of the imagination, but I couldn’t stop laughing at the struggle the obviously non - American born author of these notices was having with the language. I photographed them knowing they had to be shared.
The front counter denizen, a young unkempt fellow with a cigarette cantilevering out from his lips (even though a nearby sign proclaimed this to be a non-smoking facility) took my information and my payment and gave me instructions for clearing the security gate along the fence surrounding the property. Security fence. Heavy duty - wrought iron or maybe steel tubing. I looked up at the building. Two floors. Unwelcoming. Obviously neglected for years. Heavy water stains of condensation emanating from each wall mounted air conditioning unit, brown and wide over the faded white paint applied in some distant past year. All this was easily visible because of the Klieg-like security lights pointed directly at the rooms. Perhaps the curtains would be of the light cancelling sort.
I entered my room, took one look, and headed immediately back to the office to announce that I had changed my mind after seeing the room and to request a refund. The desk clerk had barely opened his mouth to respond when a much older guy popped through a door at the rear of the office and pretty much demanded that I tell him what was wrong with the room because there would be no refund. I described what I had seen. Recently painted, the room had no furniture save the bed which had not been replaced during the current century. Unsleepable. No light fixtures of any description had been re-installed since the painting had been done. The one light even present was an uncovered incandescent ceiling light in the bathroom. There was no toilet paper and no towels. No shower curtain. Perhaps this was their stripped down “economy” room. It was quite suitable, to be fair, for a blind occupant who could hold his bowels for eight hours at a time and didn’t need a shower. I was none of the above.
The old guy relented a bit over the condition of the room, cursing under his breath about the remodeling crew who, he claimed, the owner had hired off the street because he is a cheapskate. Just what I needed to hear at now almost one in the morning. Still, he said, there would be no refund, but he could put me in another room that was for sure complete.
The only item I’d taken with me into the original room was my shaving kit which I’d left on the bed alongside the plastic room key. I told him I needed to get back in to get the shaving kit but had locked the key in there inadvertently. What came next is the God’s honest truth. I swear it. The old guy said that there would be a two dollar “extra key” fee for replacements. I dropped my jaw. The key wasn’t lost, and I was not staying in that room. Just needed to retrieve the shaving kit. He directed my eyes to a sign on the bullet proof window behind which he stood proclaiming the key policy. Said he didn’t make the rules. I became agitated, which he tolerated for a short time before angrily extracting two bucks from his wallet, shoving it in the register and proclaiming, “There, I pay it for you. But only this once. Next time……..”
He let me in to get my kit and then led me to the replacement room, not good but functional. I left at six a.m. for another long day’s drive toward Philly. The show was good. The next Red Roof Inn was excellent and thus not memorable. As bad as the Memphis experience was, if I hadn’t been there life would have less contrast to muse about. There is a reason that every coin has two sides. Thankfully.
