My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Suite Dreams

I recently spent a month on a book tour, living out of hotels. Ed, who joined me for a few days, couldn’t understand why I’d complain about this. The best thing that could happen to Ed is that each day someone would come to tidy his room and pick the towels up off the floor and change the sheets. You might think that Ed, being married, could count upon his wife for this. Unfortunately for Ed, his wife changes sheets the way other people change the oil. I’ve got a sticker on the headboard to remind me when four months have gone by. Shortly after Ed and I met, he told me he could see a faint Mary-shaped outline on my bedsheet.

“It’s a miracle,” I said. “Call the Church! Call the newspapers!”

“Not that Mary,” said Ed.

Suffice to say, I would not last long as a maid at the Marriott. The chain’s founder, J. W. Marriott, believed cleanliness was next to godliness, which possibly explains why there was a copy of his biography alongside the Bible in the bedside-table drawer in my room at the Anchorage Marriott. The book said J.W. would “run his index finger over the furniture, doorsills, and venetian blinds” of his son and daughter-in-law’s home. The biographer doesn’t mention how long the son and daughter-in-law’s marriage lasted, but I’d wager not so very long—two, maybe three changes of the sheets at our house.

Why do I complain about staying in hotels? After all, these were nice hotels, hotels with down comforters and $7 bowls of Cheerios. I guess because it’s not home. Nobody’s home has a stranger downstairs who calls to wake you each morning even though you always hang up on him. Nobody’s home has a wall-mounted hair dryer so loud as to damage your hearing and yet simultaneously so weak as to have no effect on your hair. Nobody’s home has a bed with the sheets tucked so tightly that your feet are pressed flat out to the side. Who sleeps like that?

“The ancient Egyptians,” said Ed, as he slid in beside me. We lay on our backs, saying unknown things in hieroglyphics.

“Do you want to get the lights?”

“You get the lights.” At the last hotel, the lights got me. It took ten minutes to hunt down the switch that controlled the entryway lamp.

Hotel showers are designed by the same sadists who take care of the lamp wiring. Sometimes turning the knob to the left makes the water come out softer. Sometimes it makes it scalding. Some showers deliver a weak drizzle, while others come out as a stinging, gale-force blast. One evening, while soaping my armpits in a Category 3 storm, the shower curtain pulled away from the side of the tub and began billowing like a wet ghost. I’d push it down against the porcelain, and it would pull away again. Water poured onto the floor. Miniature shampoo bottles bobbed in the surf. Suddenly I heard knocking, and a voice I couldn’t make out. No doubt the guy from The Weather Channel. “Go away,” I said. “No interviews today!” It was the maid. I had to stop her. She would see what I’d done, and punish me by setting the clock radio to go off at 2 a.m.

They do that, you know. They’re aware that no one, not even someone with advanced degrees in hotel management such as J. W. Marriott, knows how to work a hotel-room clock radio. You will be forced to yank it from its socket in the middle of the night and hurl it across the room, incurring replacement charges and shame upon checkout. I pushed Casper aside, lunged to the door and locked it. The maid retreated. Then I mopped up the floodwaters and put on my makeup. The hotel had installed special lighting over the mirror that highlighted my eyebags and made me look like Jimmy Carter.

“My fellow Americans,” I said kindly. “It is time to address the problem of inconsistent and downright dangerous shower-fixture design.” Then I had a $7 bowl of Raisin Bran and went out to flog my book.