Checking In

I can see why the horror writers have a thing for hotels. They're anonymous places where anything can happen to anyone.

Hotels have lost their wayward flavor, but they still retain that creepy anonymous feeling. Right now I'm in a Buffalo airport hotel room, passing the time and waiting for yet another plane flight in my life's history of plane flights. This is a hotel, not a resort.

The temperature outside is a little above freezing, and the temperature inside feels about the same. This is because, as a room attendant friend once told me, the stewards always turn the temp down to 65F when they're done cleaning a room. Apparently cold air feels "cleaner" than warm air. It gives guests the false impression that the room they're entering has never been lived in, eaten in, screwed in, or slept in before.

Hotels are creepy. Psycho used this, and Stephen King has turned to it a couple of times (The Shining, 1408). King has mentioned hotels so many times in his interviews that I know he's obsessed with them. 10 years ago, he said that he still checked under the bed in hotel rooms. He also said that a hotel room was the scene for him becoming a horror writer.

Early in King's career, he was sitting in a hotel room telling his agent a book idea. His agent frowned and said he didn't want King to become known as a horror writer: bad market. King assured his agent that it was okay, being a horror writer was what he wanted to do. Looking back, they were both right: horror writers weren't cool until King came along, and really they still aren't; name another horror writer not named Stephen King that has smashed the mainstream market.

Hotel rooms don't scare me, but they do give me the heebie-jeebies. I try not to think about all the things that have gone on in here. Over the desk there's a mirror, and I can see myself typing this. How many people have sat at this desk and contemplated blowing their brains out, leaving their wife, asking the hooker for another handjob? There's an internet connection below the mirror. How many people have plugged in and watched porn, written a love letter to their secretary, surfed the dating market looking for something better than their husband?

The hotel I'm in now isn't without a sense of humor. There's a gym loaded with exercise equipment, but it's directly opposite the smoking rooms. Every gym rat that works his layover abs into submission must walk into the hallway and want to barf when the Marlboro Man open his hotel room door.

I once heard a girl tell her friend that she loved having sex in hotel rooms. I didn't ask why, but I guess it has something to do with anonymity, like voyeurism in reverse. Or maybe it's just because she doesn't have to clean the sheets.

Modern hotels have taken some of the anonymity away. The phone has my name on it: SEAN BERRY, in big digital letters. They must have popped up while I was checking in. I wonder whose name was there yesterday, or last week? I know someone was here, because the room steward goofed: there was a grimy coffee stain on the bottom of the coffee pot, and I had to rinse it off in the bathroom sink.

These days, hotels have microwave ovens (the one in this room sounds like a plane taking off when I reheat my coffee), internet connections, and fifty channels on the TV. There's videogames, new-release films, and five sports channels. The restaurants have bars that serve pina coladas, and everyone has a nametag, make-up, and the most welcoming smile that $12 an hour can buy. And it still feels lonely.

I wonder what it was like in the old-old days. Back then, when you closed the door to your house and got in your Chevy to head across country, that was it. You didn't hear from anybody unless you called them person-to-person, and that was way too expensive. So hotels in those days were the loneliest places on earth. If the hotel had a diner, you might meet someone to talk to, but for the most part it was just you, the highway out the window, and last week's smell of cheap cologne. Great perks meant an ice machine located beside a Coke dispenser.

Sportscaster Vin Scully has said that he never got used to it: that loneliness on the road. Hotel after hotel, and trains to ballparks. That was his summer, every summer, for years. No internet, no cell phone, no satellite TV, no distraction. He always hated the loneliness.

Try as they might, hotels will never feel like home because they are what they are: places for people to crash, but never stay. Hopefully. And that's where the horror writers step in...