I wouldn’t mind if all rooms – no matter the place, private or public – had a laminated, free-standing list of each item in the room at hand, and how much one would be involuntarily charged if he or she decided to borrow any given item forever. This weekend, I plan to begin by making just such an object for my own place of residence. Should anyone take my Marina del Ray bathrobe, that’s no problem. So long as their credit line is greater than forty dollars.
There’s something great about standing in a hallway that is equal parts corporate and domestic, standing in nothing but your trunks outside your very own door, dancing because you are both wet and cold as you wait for someone to let you inside your own temporary residence. You dry off with a towel that you quickly discard, cause there are others, and they’ll change them all tomorrow if you put a pre-made message on the doorknob. In the meantime, go ahead, try to wash the pee-chlorine smell from your hair, you’ll still smell like Holiday bathroom till you get home.
There is no age limit on hotel fun. You are in an economically-priced hotel; nobody really expects you to be mature, sophisticated, or responsible. The long carpeted corridors, with well-placed vending machines and iceboxes, beg us to chase one another across the building. To dive from elevator to elevator, staircase to staircase, in search of nothing really, aside from the laughter that arises when one realizes he hasn’t chased another wet and hardly dressed person down an absurdly long hallway in quite some time.
Hotels are easy to get on top of. The trap door in the boiler room seems to be often unlocked. And even if the building is three stories tall, and surrounded by taller, even less interesting hotels without windows, there is something altogether exhilarating about standing alone, on top of a hotel and saying to yourself, “I am illegally atop the Marina del Ray Holiday Inn Express, more than twenty-five feet from the ground, and at this moment, everything that everyone else is doing is far less interesting, probably.”
Hotels are such an adventurous, romantic backdrop for our finest memories because we don’t have to be responsible for any of our actions in the making of such spectacularly ordinary stories. Go ahead, get kicked out of the pool area for having a humpback-whale-impersonating contest, just don’t tell anyone your room number or your real name. Go ahead, steal the robe, just be sure you steal it from someone else at the pool area instead of your own room. Go ahead, push all the buttons in the elevator, if they beat you up it’s illegal. Meanwhile you can actually provide a legitimate reason for visiting each floor, even though it’s nobody’s business to ask. Go ahead, knock on all the doors, there’s a stairwell round the corner. And if you’re lucky an arcade, a bucket of ice, and a Butterfinger.