Motel Time Again

I checked into the first motel I saw. It was on Versailles road, the main artery leading into town from the airport. From the street it looked appealing. But an old neon sign doesn’t always signal a cozy respite for the road-weary traveler.

I should have heeded the warning in the night clerk’s shaky voice and viewed the room in advance. The eroded air-conditioner, burnt carpet, broken table, overpowering scent of poverty and death. This was familiar territory. Most disturbing was the absence of a bedside lamp. I had been looking forward to relaxing in bed with a copy of the following day’s Racing Form.

I walked back out to the car. Shadowy forms lingered outside their rooms and on the lawns. A bare-chested septuagenarian groaned at me from a doorway. The motel appeared to chiefly function as a welfare-level apartment complex, with a couple of rooms set aside for the unsuspecting tourist.

I got in the car and drove around aimlessly. Nothing beckoned. The few open bars were the exclusive domain of the college crowd. Upon my return a police car was exiting the motel driveway. Despite emerging from a spotless rental car I attempted to convey an impression of indigent swagger as I made my way, suitcase in hand, across the lawn, returning to the morbid reek.

No warm water issued from the shower. I left it running and washed my face and hands in the sink. As I did this, the sink quickly clogged up. The shower continued running cold. I grabbed a towel. It looked as if somebody had wiped themselves with it. In a fury, gingerly clutching the filthy towel as evidence, I strode across to the office and rang the bell to no avail. The television drone could be heard but the night clerk did not appear.

It was one in the morning but I wasn’t tired. I toyed with the notion of checking into a different motel or sleeping in the car but found myself somehow sworn to a night in this sty, almost relishing the humiliation. I pulled back the bedspread: the sheet was a huge heart-shaped bloodstain. I charged out to the office again and rapped on the window but there was still no response from the other side of the glass.

It seemed unlikely that I would be getting any sleep, and the following day would be gutted. I barricaded the door with the broken table, lay down on the bed and opened the Racing Form, but lacked the heart to read it. I just lay there, getting up every once in a while to peer through the blinds onto the courtyard. Nothing stirred. That was my first night in Lexington, capital of horse country.

At 7.30 on a Sunday morning, having snatched about two hours sleep, I tried the shower again, letting the water run for about twenty minutes without its warming in the least. I brushed my teeth: the sink clogged up. I tried the telephone: the line crackled so much, due to the ancient frayed cord that it was useless. I stepped out into the spring morning. In the daylight it was possible to discern that the lawn was mostly composed of cigarette butts. Again I attempted to rouse the clerk, and again no response was forthcoming.

Downtown was dull, grey and empty. A sabbath stillness prevailed, the sleepless death of Sunday morning in a small Southern city. It seemed pointless to be there, even more pointless than being anywhere else. It took a long time to find so much as a Starbucks, outside of which a long orderly line of locals stretched onto the street. It was still five hours to first post at Keeneland, and it was back to the old routine of driving around in a state of hateful nausea.

The windows were broken and a dumpster blocked the driveway of the Kimball House, the charming old hotel I had stayed at seven years earlier. In the absence of more appealing options, I dined at a chain restaurant where I ordered eggs scrambled soft. “We can’t do that,” said the waiter. “Why?”—“Because they’re already made, in a big catering bag.”

The motel I had the misfortune of spending the night at was situated on the way to the racetrack. I collared the manager, a large Middle Eastern gentleman, who was finally available in his office, and railed at him. He calmly assured me that the water was running hot. He led me back to the room I stayed in and turned on the faucets. The water was indeed hot. I pulled back the bedspread: the sheets were clean, no bloodstains. It was as if I’d returned to a crime scene to find all the incriminating evidence removed.

“It’s a beautiful afternoon,” said Rafael Bejarano to a punter as he stood outside the jockeys’ room, the sun casting a visor-like shadow across his aquiline features as he gently whacked his thigh with the same whip he’d be thrashing a horse with twenty minutes later in the upcoming race. On a serene afternoon at an unfamiliar racetrack, the jockeys seemed like angelic beings. I played carefully, knowing how down on myself and everything else I’d be if I lost, and stayed ahead all afternoon, sticking around for the West Coast simulcast racing, and leaving up sixty dollars.

My rental car was parked on an empty hillside that had been packed with vehicles six hours earlier. I drove back downtown and walked around, enjoying the Sunday evening calm. A blonde in a convertible screeched around a narrow corner, yelling “I hate this fucking town!”

Too tired to leave this fucking town, I rented a room in a thirty-dollar motel and immediately regretted it. On the other side of the wall, a woman screamed and shouted as if in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Fat bass beats thumped out of a car parked outside the window, and TV racket blasted through the ceiling. I stuffed in the earplugs and eventually fell asleep, to be awoken in the middle of the night when the woman in the next room returned with a paramour, and they proceeded to carry on like a pair of barnyard animals.