By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, early, the sounds of chainsaws echoing through the otherwise quiet streets of Port Royal. This morning I have my coffee — Starbucks’ Morning Joe — and the Wall Street Journal.
This morning, the Wall Street Journal tells us there is “Room to Complain at Hotels” in these post pandemic days. Complaints range from pools that are closed, empty shampoo dispensing bottles in the shower and signs telling guests to go easy on the waffles and scrambled eggs at the complimentary breakfast buffet.
All of this coincides with a 9.3% increase in room rates nationwide and “double digit percentage increases” in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Atlanta and New York City.
The complaints are mostly tied to the staffing — that is the lack of housekeepers to clean the toilets, change the sheets and vacuum the carpets. Apparently guests got used to these problems during the pandemic. But now, when they are paying $300-$500 a night, they’re annoyed.
Last month, we drove to Stamford, Conn., where my son, his wife and our new grandson reside. Regrettably, we waited to reserve a room but eventually found a vacancy within a few miles of where my son and his family live. The motel — which I will not name — was characterized by the smell of cigarette smoke and came with black mounds (in the carpet) that looked like they had repeatedly defeated acetone enhanced industrial solvents.
Normally we would have walked out — we’ve done that recently — but there was some kind of coup attempt going on in Russia and I was desperate to get the details straight from Wolf Blitzer.
The motel room did come with a toilet that would flush occasionally – and to be fair there were Frito/Dorito dispensing machines in the lobby – but the dark, low-ceilinged hallways were instantly depressing, reminding one of Hitler’s besieged bunker in Berlin.
My wife and I began to argue about whether or not our past sins deserved this kind of divine, Old Testament retribution. Surely we did not deserve a night in this dank, stained-carpet hellhole. But I had managed to turn on CNN and we had used the temperamental toilet and it was only one night.
“A night in this room won’t kill us,” I said, as I watched Wolf introduce his panel of experts.
“I’m not so sure” Susan replied.
Susan and I have seen worse.
Some years ago we shared a bleak, Walker Evans-worthy room in a hotel in South Georgia. The “suite” featured a single, unshaded light bulb hanging over an iron-framed bed reminding us of the photographs taken by Evans and published in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Recollections of that particular night eventually became a long-form monologue that I often delivered at dinner parties.
But that South Georgia night happened when we were young, had little money and when there was adventure to be found in vomit- and semen-scented rooms that gave one tactile, three-dimensional access to the Great Depression.
As we sat of the bed and watched the functioning television the revolution in Russia began to sputter. Each expert — impanelled by CNN — saying, “We don’t have much information.” None of them, however, saying, “I don’t have a clue.”
These oil-anointed, foreign policy shamans know that if they want to stay on CNN — if they want to maintain their robed role on Wolf’s Sanhedrin — they have to know more about the Russian coup than we know. And so we got, “My sources in the Intelligence Community tell me that this insurrection is going to make Vladimir Putin very, very angry.”
Based on this insight, I decided that I could leave CNN’s “Breaking News” and go into the lobby for an orange-tinted snack.
“Who knows, Cheetos paired with Diet Fanta just might take the edge off of our sorry situation,” I said to my stunned wife.
After some effort, I did acquire a small bag containing about 15 Fritos but discovered that my magnetic key card no longer had sufficient magnetism to open the door.
I confronted the clerk — seated behind bullet proof plexiglas — who re-magnetized my key. But by the time I got back to Wolf and his panel, it was apparent that Vlad would hang on to his throne.
The next morning, we declined to make our own waffles, racing instead through the lobby and into our Honda. We got onto the Cross Bronx Expressway, over the George Washington Bridge and onto the 14 lane-wide grandeur of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
