Waylaid (2 page)

added, “Is your mother in?”

“Hold on a sec,” I said. I turned off the Atari and walked back into the living quarters. I went into my parents' bedroom and shook my mother awake. It was 11 now, about time for her to get up, anyway. I could tell by the motel's log that she'd been up until five renting rooms, but six hours of sleep was more than enough. Today was going to be another busy day for the hotel, and there were rooms we needed to clean. In a few minutes, my mother was fully dressed and in the office. I heard an exaggerated but brief greeting exchanged amongst the three of them.

I shut the door to the office, feeling the heat of the living quarters. I followed the worn path on the livingroom rug, between a lopsided couch and a bare TV stand, back to my room. Talking to Vincent had made me think about this girl from school I liked, Lee Anderson. She had blonde hair and green eyes and was so cute, I couldn't help but look away when she caught me staring, which was about every two minutes. Even though she was just 12 like me, I could tell that Lee was going to be a perfect girl when she grew up. She was already past a B cup, and she had long soft blonde hair that curled at her shoulders. Her body was growing in all the right places, and she was looking pretty damn sexy.

When we were in fourth grade together, she'd drunk beer from her Thermos and couldn't wake up after nap time. Maybe things would go easier for me if I got her drunk again. Beer could make a lot of things possible.

But I got the feeling she liked me, too. Maybe she had a speck of dust in her eye the day I thought she winked at me. So what if it was. She was definitely going to be mine. I felt warm each time Lee smiled or said my name. She'd probably let me get into her pants sober. Get my dick wet.

I pulled out my Monopoly set and took an issue of
Cheri
from under the game board. I reread the letters.

Women driving, walking, or sitting alone were dying to get naked and suck and fuck.

Some mornings I woke up with my own hand wrapped around my cock.

The hotel had been beautiful once, back in the 1950s.

I knew because I'd found a box of old color pamphlets in the crawlspace that ran under the complete length of the hotel. The pictures were in soft, faded colors — the blues were baby blues and the reds were pink. Flying wooden ramparts painted gleaming white connected the tips of the two parallel wings of the hotel like a big suspension bridge. Voluptuous cars iced with chrome looked like they could have driven out of Arnold's parking lot on “Happy Days.” Men wore suits and hats, and women had scarves and gloves.

Three decades went by. It was the 1980s.

The ramparts were now rotting in stacks in the thickly wooded area that pressed up against the outside of the even- and odd-numbered wings. The hotel was laid out like the letter U with the office at the bottom. An asphalt driveway ran the entire inside length of the letter, from the four-lane interstate highway that lead to the beaches to the office and then back.

The big cars had been replaced by beat-up Datsuns and Thunderbirds that crawled around the parking lot like insects with a leg or wing torn off.

Men had ditched their suits and hats and women, their scarves and gloves. Now everyone wore a unisex uniform of t-shirts and jeans, or bathing suits and cut-offs in the summer. Their faces were desperate for sex, for love, for another smoke; men with a few days of stubble, women with uneven layers of makeup. Their hard eyes and harder mouths would only loosen up with booze or some pot.

I don't remember much of life before the hotel. I was born in New York City, but we'd moved out to the Jersey shore and bought the place when I was eight. The sellers were a white couple with a son about my age.

I remember racing slot-cars with that other little boy while our parents talked about the details of the sale. The hand-held controllers smelled like blown-out birthday candles as they heated up. If you didn't let off on the trigger on the turn, the car would fishtail and flip off the track. Our parents were talking in the kitchen with the door closed. I couldn't hear what they were saying as the cars whined around and around, but I could see them through the plate glass window. My father was standing at the dining table, sleeves rolled up. He was slightly shorter than my mother, with a ruddy complexion that made him look like he was drunk or really mad, but he was never in either of those states. He had curly black hair, which was a little unusual, but his eyes and wide cheeks tagged him as Chinese. He was pouring over the blueprints of the hotel, examining the structure and soundness of the plan and figuring out how salvageable the hotel was in its current state of disrepair. Was that when my parents hammered out the details of renting out rooms to hookers and johns?

The main reason why my father had wanted the hotel was because he wanted to have his own business. Like all his classmates from Taiwan who had come to the U.S., he had been passed over for promotions at the civil-engineering company he'd been working at. His boss had told him his English wasn't good enough, but after a few months with some text books, my father found out that none of the engineers, including his boss, really knew proper spelling or grammar. He ended up making a lot of corrections in the firm's reports. My mother told me they'd given him a bottle of champagne when he left, which he poured out in the street before throwing the bottle into the gutter.

After we moved into the hotel, my father was usually covered with rust or flakes of rotted wood. There were burn holes in his pants, holes that corresponded to scars on his skin. He'd slip into the crawlspace because of a leaking pipe or a sinking bathroom floor and solder and nail away, surfacing only for food before heading back down. I would join him down there sometimes, but my main job was handling the front desk. My father never wanted to deal with customers. Unlike my mother, he was embarrassed about his English, though his was much better than hers.

When the hotel filled up in the summer, we could just lock the office door and put the closed sign in the window. When the fall arrived, we had to scrounge for business. We needed to keep the office open and unlocked to get all the business we could.

The bulk of the business during those times was the three-hour rental.

On the weekends, during the school year, my mother would lay down a folded comforter behind the counter for me and set an alarm clock by the bell. She would leave the office light on, telling me to turn my head and close my eyes, and it wouldn't keep me up. Late nights were prime john time, and if the light was out, they might think the place was closed and go to another hotel or use our parking space. My mother was too tired from watching the office the whole week while I was in school and needed to catch up on sleep on the weekends. As a woman, I'm sure she also didn't relish the thought of being in the same room as the cock side of the money equation.

Sometimes I just couldn't sleep, even if no one came all night. When that happened, I would read the letters sections of sex magazines, which I could easily hide in the folds of the comforter when I heard a customer coming in.

I first saw the letters in an issue of Hustler I found cleaning rooms when I was about seven. When I was with my mom, she'd throw out all the porn right off the bat, making sure to rip it up in front of me. But that time I found it under the bed and shoved it under my shirt before she saw.

That magazine had an article on how to find hotels that charged hourly rates. It recommended going to non-chain hotels close to train stations. Or you could pick up hookers by the train stations late at night and they would know which hotels to go to. A fuckhole wasn't only a cunt; it was also a place to hole up and fuck. Like our hotel. After reading the article, I wondered how much it would cost for me to get laid with a hooker, and how much money was in the cash drawer.

When I was 10, a john I was renting a room to told me he was picking up girls by the New Jersey Transit station in nearby Asbury Park. The prostitues wore short skirts and long coats and carried open umbrellas.

After all my years at the hotel, I'd never seen any hookers — not their full bodies anyway. They wouldn't prance around the parking lot afterwards, trying to pick up more tricks. The most I ever saw was a dim face between the dashboard and sunblind of a car pulled up outside the office. Sometimes they'd be smoking or fixing their makeup.

The john told me they were $20, $5 extra to fuck them up the ass and $5 more for swallowing. So a room and a no-frills prostitute were $40 in total.

“It's worth it to get laid, isn't it?” he asked, as he filled out a registration card, moving as fast as he could make up the information. He was wearing a dark brown corduroy jacket, a grimy button-down shirt, and dark slacks. Silvery hair cascaded into the gap between his lobster-red neck and his loosened collar. He looked like he was about 50.

“Are they pretty?” I asked. He laughed.

“I'm not looking for Miss America, but they're pretty for black girls. The white ones are kind of ugly.”

“How good is it?”

“How good is it? It's great. It's like following through on a good clean punch.”

“What does it feel like?”

“What does it feel like…” He was smiling. “Look, kid, just give me the goddamn key.”

I fell asleep once with the fifth anniversary issue of Celebrity Skin over my face and didn't hear the alarm go off. It was a lot softer than a BING! The clock alarm went on for so long, my mother got up and came into the office. I hadn't fully awoken when she swatted my face with the rolled-up magazine.

“You go to hell, you look at these pictures!” she screamed, kicking at my shoulders as I scrambled to my feet.

“I was just reading the letters!”

“You go to hell! Where did you get this from!?!?”

“I got it from cleaning the hotel rooms!”

“You don't touch this anymore! You go to hell!” She never said anything more about porn mags, and I continued to add to my collection. But from that day on, I would bring only my school books to read at night, leaving the magazines in my room. That way, she wouldn't have to see it.

I once asked my mother why anybody would want to rent one of our hotel rooms for just three hours.

“They tire from driving,” she said. “They want lie down and take little nap.” We were distant enough to let that howling wind of a lie exist between our worlds. And it let me know it was okay to lie to her, too.

Late Friday was big for hourly rentals. The husbands could always say they were trying to finish up some work at the office before the weekend.

At one in the morning, there were about a dozen rooms that had to be cleaned to be rented out again.

I yawned and rubbed my eyes before picking up a plastic bucket in each hand and followed my mother out the office door. She held a bundle of folded sheets, pillowcases, and towels. My mother had a mop of straight black hair that dangled down to her shoulders. As we walked along the curved part of the U-shaped driveway, the light from the outdoor spotlights reflected in the smooth crescents of her hair.

When we got to 11A, my mother knocked on the door to make sure the occupants had left.

Once upon a time, 11A had been 13, but then it had been changed so the rooms on the odd-numbered wing went from 11 to 11A and then to 15. Nobody wanted to rent a room 13. Like they wouldn't get lucky or something if they did.

My mother opened the lock with the master key and turned to look at me.

“You have everything, right?” she asked. I nodded and shook the buckets.

One of my buckets held spray bottles filled with bathroom cleaners, air fresheners, and rug cleaners. A worn toilet-bowl brush dangled over the side of the bucket, the bristles pressed flat against the battered wire rim.

My other bucket was packed with soap, rolls of toilet paper, and sheaves of sanitary labels. The soap bars were slender white rectangles embossed with “THANK YOU” on one side, like we were thanking our customers for taking a shower and trying to be clean. The soap lathered up about as well as a Lego block and would break into pieces if you tried to use it more than once. Our toilet paper was so thin, you'd feed fingers up your ass.

Each hotel room was basically the same except that some of the black-and-white televisions had rabbit-ear antennas and some had inverted wire coat hangers. They all had a simple desk, a night stand, and a chair made of pressed wood. Push on any of the furniture the wrong way and it would splinter apart. There were burn marks on the desks and night stands, even though each room had chipped-glass ashtrays. The two windows had shades as heavy as burlap. When they were closed, they blocked out sound and light and the view of the parking lot.

The beds consisted of flimsy metal frames and creaky box springs with broken slats of wood topped with a doughy mattress. Two limp pillows slouched against the pressed-wood headboard. Some of the headboards had stickers on them with instructions on how to operate the vibrating motor for a quarter, but the motion devices had been ripped out and thrown away long before we'd owned the place. The wall-to-wall carpeting looked like every marching band in the country had dragged flour sacks of grime across it. Every color in the carpet had been corrupted into a different shade of dark green.

The bathroom tile wasn't much better, but at least we provided soap and clean towels. We weren't classy enough to have vials of shampoo because we ordered from the economy section of our supplier catalog. Only the standard and luxury sections had shampoo.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and scrubbed at the gunk in the shower with the toilet brush, shaking a can of some no-name imitation of Ajax so that it snowed into the scummy tub. I scrubbed again.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was straight like my mother's, but about twice as thick. It stuck out sideways at odd angles like clumps of crab grass. My eyes were bloodshot and my face looked old and tired.

I finished with the toilet and slipped a paper label around the folded rim and seat cover. I shook the toilet brush into the sink, then scrubbed it against the edges of the sink and the faucet handles.

My mother had been stripping the sheets off the bed. When she stopped, I turned to see what was the matter. She was looking at a dark spot on the mattress and frowning.

“We have to flip this one,” she said, nodding her head towards the stain in the other lower corner. I pulled at the seam of the fabric until I could get a good hold on the thick, mushy mattress, then helped her wrestle it off of the crooked bed frame. Most of the mattresses and bed frames were from a demolition company that would strip everything out of a house before pulverizing it.

Soon the mattress was turned upside down and pushed back into place. There were dark brown stains — all near the same area as the wet one — on this side of the mattress, too. Some were oval-shaped, some looked like warped coffee-cup stains, and others looked like little amoebae with several pseudopodia. They were dry, though, and that was all that was important. My mother unfurled the new sheets and threw them on top.