I used to live in hotels. Because I thought it was romantic. Or something. I have an idea of how that sounds, so spare me. I can go on here and reveal that I mean I lived “in” them, as in weeks, sometimes months, eventually for over a year, but – trust me – I know how that sounds, so, again, spare me. I tell myself, and other people, now that I thought it was romantic, but I am beginning to see the lies. They unfold over time like wet newspaper and there’s always a little lie left on the page. Lie residue. Like when you lean against a coin or a metal grill long enough. You can see some of the letters or numbers or the indentation, but then that fades out and you’re just left with skin. Skin and wet news. Wet cartoons. Unreadable crosswords. I didn’t live in hotels because I thought it was romantic. That was the fall guy. It was all I knew. Somehow paying up front kept me from the bigger and truly more horrible lie. A fish refuting the sea. My own seventy-dollar-a-day fish tank. I lived in hotels because I could do nothing and everything at once. Somehow all those days of crawling past the front desk into the laundry-room heat, or the snowfield of cars, those singular days, they became uncountable. I was afraid of life running out on me, So I started counting. I started counting and I lost myself somewhere and it all meant nothing. The hotel is the easiest time a dreamer like me ever does. That is, until now. Until I write about these things now. And spare me. I know how this sounds.
I save movie ticket stubs. I have hundreds. I have divided them up into several different wallets over time, and I find them in jackets that I might not have worn for a few years. I don’t do this because I’m sentimental. When I find one in a jacket and I’m out I usually am finding something for someone and I pull one out. I can retell the exact time of night, where I was, who I was with, what they were wearing and, from time to time, where we sat. I always say it’s because I’m sentimental. But that is also a lie. I am not sentimental at all. I save them because I would have no memory without them. What is the story with the gingerbread house and the pieces of bread left to find your way back? Movie stubs are my way back. My way back to countless bad movies I have digested over the years at the suggestion of a friend or lover. I have never taken anyone to the movies on my own account. I hate the movies. I have never seen one alone. Actually, I went to see one movie alone when I was twenty purely because I had the worst crush on the girl who worked at the counter at this hellhole movie theater and I had a girlfriend so I went alone. I didn’t save that ticket stub. This must be the exception. It was a Spanish film and I fell madly in love with the caretaker of that house – a minor role actually – and I believe I made my home without as much as a second glance at the girl I had come to see. I saw her eyes drifting past me night after night as my lover would roll over to the cool side of the bed and reach for the light. Lying with shoulders back and arms outstretched, the tape leader clicking away on the metal spool.
I would eventually see this same film from the projector room, drowning in a pool of hair and lipstick, peering through the tiny projector-room light box at my Spanish lover. Unknowing idiot college students majoring in farming and English screaming “Focus” in their tired Southern accents. The girl at the theater was not American but not English and she only murmured something inaudible as she came.
Hotels have some secret code, so subtle that it can only be broken if you submit yourself to that kind of routine. In them I have found glamor. I have found power. I have found moxie. The finest being the tall and brutish hotel that sits at the end of Hollywood Boulevard, a stubborn, unchanging coat of windows and soot. A special little hellhole that is unchangeable. Like a cruel fact. As a con man more than an artist, I am obsessed with “fact” because it is unattainable to me, like spirituality for junkies. A pleasant paper trail, a wild-goose chase meant only to throw you off the one that was successfully killing you the last time. I’d much rather chase the carrot an ass full of whiskey and coke than getting all strung out on questions. Questions are far more destructive. There’s no room for vanity in questions, and the hours are crap.
There are no rules to living in hotels but one. Do not drink at the bar. Ever. It implies a relationship. It’s kissing-on-the-mouth, hooker-to-john kinda stuff. Plus they always ask questions. Imagine yourself three or four easy half past ten and you reach for a cigarette and out you pull a movie ticket stub. The mystery just wouldn’t be the same. It’s far easier to tape the Do Not Disturb sign to the doorknob and collect bottles from the liquor store that delivers. If they don’t come in, you don’t have to explain why the prints of Van Gogh or whoever are riding the spare blankets in the closet. It’s just you and the angry word. The truth and the numbers. The counting to one million and the money you’re losing you were never gonna use for anything anyway. That kind of money is best squandered because you have to save yourself from trying to save the world. You have to convince yourself there is nothing between you and these songs, or these letters, or the pieces of paper with numbers of people who told you something nice at the shit-hole bar down the street about your shoes that you just wouldn’t stop talking to. Accent changing back and forth from fake English to pure wasted drunk fuckface.
You can’t save the world but you can save the receipt. Somebody told me that in a taxi cab once and I vaguely remember throwing up out the window someplace in Los Angeles slightly before I checked out for the last time. The car was uttering it’s disapproval, making its way up Laurel Canyon – or whatever canyon – and it wanted to throw a rod, but over all that screaming laughter from these ridiculous girls in the front it had no choice. The stars that spun above me as I hung my head out the window, drooling mouth, were a warning sign from the past. As if they were saying, we have all died, but if only for you to witness now. How pretty a long and spectacular cosmic death it must be. And to go on, and make that kind of noise with light up there in that pool of empty tar, my universe is an asshole, no, an endless sea of assholes at the bar, with movie ticket stubs and a checkout day they will never control.
~ Ryan Adams, New York City
ps. thank you for sharing this with me js.............
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