A sleepless night thanks to economy hotel rascals
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Spending the night away from home is supposed to be better than sleeping in a shopping cart, at least according to the hotel chains.
The mattresses are expensive, the rooms beautifully appointed, the coffee imported. The television is top quality, with more remotes than you can even use in a 24-hour period. The towels are fluffy and numerous. In some places, the toiletries include not just soap and shampoo, but also mending kits, mouthwash, bubble baths, scented oils, perfume samples and personal grooming aids such as cotton balls, clippers and nail files. High-speed modem access for laptop computers is available in all the decent hotels you might bother to stay at.
Unfortunately, even the best rented bedroom cannot overcome the basic problem with sleeping on the road--other people. I spent a night recently out there alone and remembered why I hate hotels.
My most recent foray occurred at a well-built, solid-walled hotel in the Bay Area. My first inclination that things weren't going well was the homeless man camping out in the garden area, complete with the requisite brown paper bag. I phoned the front desk about the situation and got the feeling that this problem was beyond the employee's scope of concerns. He promised that someone would get back to me. I never heard from the desk again.
Piling into bed and turning off the lights at 10:15 p.m. seemed reasonable, but the folks in the room next door on my left apparently were young and deaf, for their own MTV extravaganza began to vibrate through the walls at about that time.
I rolled over, turned on the air conditioner fan to drown out the thumping, and fell asleep. At 1:40 a.m., the screaming started. Wild yelling and laughing from some woman who thought the man in the car two balconies below her was a jerk or a friend--her slurred speech was indecipherable, especially over the revving of his car engine, which apparently was not working right and needed 35 gallons of gas flooding the carburator every minute or so.
She slammed doors, ran down the hallway, and he gunned the engine until you could almost hear the screaming, high-pitched whine of the fan belt. Between Norman Bates in the lobby and the Three Stooges in the room next door, it was turning out to be a hell of a night.
Just about the time Romeo and Juliet finished their balcony scene and he roared off into the night, someone else came home on the other side of me with their entire family in tow. Apparently every member of the family found it impossible to walk without hitting the walls regularly, and all four of them needed to flush the toilet, get a drink, and jump into the beds so that the headboards banged against the wall and they could giggle.
It was finally about 4:15 a.m. when they settled down for a long winter's nap. I turned over, fantasizing about what the wolves who raised them must have been like.
Their alarm clocks began going off at 6 a.m. I vaguely heard them removing the wall art on their way out around 7 a.m.
By then, the guy directly overhead, (possibly grossly obese and limping) had woken up and begun to move. Each and every step registered as he lumbered back and forth, seemingly making separate trips for his socks, underwear, pants, shirt, undershirt, shoe, other shoe, tie, tie clip, hat, coat, overcoat and briefcase. Plaster gently snowed from my ceiling.
Raising Cain at hotels is obnoxious. Room rent does not involve sole ownership of the property and party rights as well. Running up and down the halls disturbs others, and screaming "Stella" does not win one an Academy Award, no matter how good the Brando impression is. I wish hotels would give guests written warnings that one complaint would be cause for immediate eviction.
I fully intend to sleep in my clothes next visit, just so that I can get out of bed and immediately pound on the doors of each and every raucous lout, yelling obscenities just before I Super Glue their room door shut. Revenge fantasies are sweet.
E-mail Deborah at DTHollis@svcn.com, in case she is asleep and can't hear a phone.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
