you kids wanna see a dead body?
Sherry and I went to Guelph Saturday night for a Buck and Doe/Jack and Jill/Stag and Stagette/Mare and Stallion/Air and Space party for my friend Katie and her fiance Joe. We dropped off Cloey with Sherry’s mother and hit the road…
SOUTHBOUND!
To the Royal City, where the Parkview Motel overlooks something that the locals call a park but that we recognised as a cemetery.
Seriously, Guelph. It doesn’t even have a swing set.
Some of our friends shared a suite at the Hampton Inn, and it was okay, if you like well-appointed, clean, non-sketchy, LCD-television-equipped accommodations. Our room at the Parkview Motel, however, was the greatest motel room on the face of the planet.
I suspected this from the moment I called to book the room, but the first evidence appeared at check-in. In the motel office there was a wireless router mounted on the wall, with a placard above it with some inscrutable symbols made out of matchsticks affexed to it. I glanced at it without comprehending and proceeded to sign on the line. Sherry, however, stared until it made sense. The matchsticks were representing empty space, and the empty space on the placard was representing the word “JESUS”. I cannot explain it to you in any other terms. The motel people were playing Escherian games with their evangelism.
Instead of motel-style door hardware that locks automatically (and can stand up to repeated use) our room was equipped with affordable-tract-housing-grade doorknobs. No automatic locking. Lots of give. No feeling of safety. The door opened to a small room with a queen bed, a huge CRT television suspended from the ceiling in the corner with what looked like coat-hangers, and a surprisingly spacious bathroom. Sherry opened the window, which had no screen and opened out into the back alley. It was here that we found paradise.
There was weathered asphalt in the shadow of the scrubby trees growing in and on and around a rusting chain-link fence. To the left, an electrical transformer box surrounded by a low cinder-block wall on which the local teenagers had spraypainted bizarre, symmetrical geometric figures in blue. These were one-eyed, three-horned creatures, or perhaps cows post-UFO-mutilation-event. We stared for a moment, sitting on the table in the room with our heads out the window. The asphalt was home to weeds and litter and a single, empty 1.5 litre wine bottle lying on its side and a crumpled magazine, lying open, the previous day’s rain still evaporating from its pages.
We watched the magazine flap in the light afternoon breeze for a moment. We saw a page filled mostly with text and a a picture of a man grimacing and mugging for the camera. The headline was partly obscured by a fold but we could make out “—-ck Palahnuik —-terview” at the top of the page. The page flipped over to reveal a cartoon drawing of a nude woman crouching next to the bed on the floor of a seedy motel room. She seemed to be saying something, but the magazine too far away for us to see the caption printed underneath in italics.
“Playboy, probably,” I said.
We threw our stuff on the bed. Sherry brings an extra pillow whenever we spend the night anywhere. She claims it’s because motel pillows are gross—and the pillows at this motel had cigarette burns in them—but it’s really so she can use one pillow as a barrier between her and my drunken self. I throw my elbows when I’ve been drinking. And I drink when I’m in Guelph.
As we left to meet our friends, we saw a half-dozen local teenagers turning from the sidewalk into the alley behind the motel. They had a big evening ahead of them, smoking marihuana cigarettes and reading the articles behind the greatest motel in the world.
