My Worst Lodgings

Jeffrey Meyers

Hotels range from luxurious to decrepit, from comical in Fawlty Towers to horrific at the Bates Hotel in Psycho.  Centers of mysterious guests, crime and espionage, of glamorous liaisons and deceitful lovers, they all have stories to tell.  In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was young and the going was good, I traveled throughout the world.  I made some unfortunate decisions, either by trying to find the cheapest place or when desperate to get anywhere to sleep.

America, Silver Springs, Maryland.  Several bleary-eyed, zonked-out drug-dealers repeatedly pounded on our door to sell narcotics at increasingly bargain prices, and could not be persuaded to leave us alone.  Rural Tennessee.  The East Indian manager came into our small motel room to fix the flickering and snowy television screen.  His whole extended family followed him, with pressed-palm greetings and wiggling affirmative heads, and managed to stay with us until they had watched their favorite program.

In posh Santa Monica, California, where I’d lived for two years while teaching at UCLA, I came upon what the maître de chambre called “your basic room.”  It had no soap, window curtains, shower curtain nor toilet seat, and boasted a slightly leaking water bed and unobstructed view of the parking lot.  The National Park in the Rocky Mountains was extremely cold at night and had an unheated cabin.  I’d never been a Boy Scout, found no kindling and could not light a fire in the wood-burning stove.  The manager had disappeared into the warmth and comfort of his home.  Forced to leave in the middle of the night, we defrosted, slept in the car and kept the heater on at full blast.

Even posh hotels were problematic.  At the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, the comfortable cottage was so far away from the kitchen that the lavish breakfast, carried by a long-distance runner, arrived under a silver dome, stone cold and inedible.  The expensive Essex House on Central Park South in New York was also dysfunctional.  I disrobed, stepped into the shower and discovered there was no hot water.  I tried to call for help but the phone was broken.  So I descended to the lobby with bathrobe and bare feet to make my complaint in person.

Mexico, Puerta Vallarta.  Rats entered through the perforated breeze-bricks above the door and silently ate my daughter’s new bean necklace.  We insisted on changing rooms, and either the familiar rats followed us or we were pursued by a different cadre of rodents.

Europe, Moscow.  My passport, suspiciously stamped “On Official Business for the U.S. Air Force,” alerted the authorities.  In the Hotel Metropol, I noticed that the heavy ceiling light fixture had been changed while we were out and was now bugged.  An elderly woman watchdog was permanently placed at the end of the corridor.  Amsterdam.  The extremely thin partition between the rooms made the loud and frantic sexual activity, with strenuous grunts and moans of satisfaction next door, both intrusive and stimulating.  The next morning the indefatigable stallion appeared, looking thin, pale and weak.  The hotels in Coimbra, Portugal and Accra, Ghana were dead quiet when we innocently checked in and went to sleep.  But noisy crowds and blasting, ear-crushing music from the cunningly concealed nightclub beneath us began at midnight and continued without stopping until 3 A.M.

Asia.  We were the only tourists in the remote town of Moulmein, Burma, where George Orwell had shot the elephant.  There was no drain in the shower, which overflowed and formed a little lake on the bare concrete floor.  The sleepy staff ignored my complaints and was not inclined to staunch the flood.  In Taipei, Taiwan, we muddled the Chinese name of a highly recommended hotel and mistakenly stayed in a whorehouse.  Bugs crawled suspiciously up walls, and I had to barricade the door with furniture to prevent drunken sailors from breaking in.

Before the massacres and the killing fields, we visited the jungle-covered statues and monuments in Angkor Wat, Cambodia.  Our outdoor dinner was interrupted by a biblical plague of locusts, which flew into our food and down our open shirts.  Little boys with plastic bags caught the beasties and took them home to be fried and eaten.  I used newspapers to seal up the door and windows of our room, but I forgot to stop the plughole in the sink.  A mass of locusts crawled in, flew around and were slashed by the wooden arms of the revolving ceiling fan.  When I got out of bed my bare feet crushed their crusty corpses.

Our sojourn in Kashmir, India, began in a highly touted houseboat on Lake Dal.  But invaders kept swimming up to our boat and climbing onto the deck to sell us tacky trinkets.  I insisted they all leave, yet one old man remained crouched in the corner.  “Get him out of here,” I shouted at the owner.  “Please, sir, that is my father.”  Lunch, served by several waiters, was poor.  The servants threw the leftover food out the window and we watched it float away.  My wife assumed a superior memsahib manner and feigned illness, and we made our escape.

In the taxi to the Maharajah Palace Hotel, the driver declared, “in Kashmir, the only straight things are the trees,” and warned us that the Maharajah was “a cheating hotel, the hotel cheat.”  The desk clerk claimed that the vast Palace, with absolutely no one in sight, was fully booked.  We sat in the garden, ordered cold drinks and pondered our next move.  We were approached by the obsequious manager, who inquired if everything was completely satisfactory.  We explained the situation and finally realized that the clerk had expected a bribe before he would allow us to enter.  We secured a room, paid for with black market rupees, and sent for the laundry price-list.  The same cheeky clerk claimed they had no such list and suggested an extortionate price to wash our clothes.  I stormed downstairs, pounded heavily on the counter and, as the manager appeared the clerk conceded, “Yiss, yiss, we are having.”

Not all the hotels were dismal, and I splurged twice on luxurious accommodations in superb locales.  The Hotel de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest corner of Spain, was built for pilgrims in 1499 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, and located in the main plaza next to the cathedral.  It had a grand entrance, and silent monastic rooms around a shaded gallery and central garden.

In 1920, D. H. Lawrence had rented the Villa Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily.  The exquisite town, with a mild climate, is strung along the spine of a hill overlooking the sparkling Ionian Sea.  In 1963 I stayed there at the San Domenico Palace (unfortunately with my mother as roommate), transformed in 1896 from a 1430 convent into a luxury hotel.  Perched on a rocky promontory, it has views of Mount Etna and the ancient Greek theater.  It’s now a super-luxury hotel with suites up to $5,000 a night.