Monday, August 08, 2011
It was, for all intents and purposes, a spur-of-the-moment decision. Adriane and I had briefly discussed going someplace out of town for my birthday weekend but hadn’t zeroed in on any details apart from the possible destinations of Santa Cruz and Monterey.TYLER If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?
JACK Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.— Fight Club
It was around 1 p.m. Friday when the idea began to take hold and our scramble for accommodations began. After a couple of failed attempts to bid for a room on Priceline.com, Adriane spotted a “featured deal” that was within our desired price range and in close proximity to those places we were interested in visiting.
Salinas, California, is the birthplace of the Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, and the Travelers Hotel, which was offering us a room at $70 a night, is located downtown, a block and a half away from the National Steinbeck Center. It was pure coincidence that this weekend should also mark the 31st Annual Steinbeck Festival, which may in part explain why the Travelers was the only place in town that could offer us two nights instead of only one.
When we first entered the lobby around 9 p.m., we were met by a smell of chlorine so strong as to be off-putting. My first impression was that it might be necessary to cover any of myriad other odors that lay in wait, but Adriane observed that it was coming from the adjoining Mexican restaurant, which, having closed for the night, had just had its floors mopped.
An older Indian man greeted us with a smile when we arrived at the registration window. This was not the desk clerk but a handyman who was just making a call on the office phone. He gestured to us that the clerk would be with us shortly.
The clerk was a younger, 20-something Indian man, Americanized and without much of an accent. A cautious, nervous sort, he seemed somehow apologetic, explaining his math as he wrote out our registration by hand and looking up at us with eyes that were giving us every opportunity to cancel right then and there and make a run for it. As he checked us in, he explained where we might find dinner nearby at that late hour, told us of some of the events taking place in Monterey County that weekend, then volunteered to guide us up to our room.
We could have found the room on our own, but admittedly the layout of stairwells and rooms resembled more or less a rabbit warren designed by M.C. Escher. The carpet running throughout the hotel corridors was dark brown with an orange crisscross pattern. One imagines that it might have been selected for its ability to hide all manner of unpleasantness.
By the time the desk clerk opened the door to our guest room, we were already screwed. Adriane’s Visa card had been swiped and processed, and to back out then would likely have meant a $155 donation to the management and a three-hour return drive to whence we came, given the improbability of another vacancy nearby.
The walls of our guest room were painted mint green, while the doors and trim were dark brown. Banish from your mind this instant the stylish, Martha Stewart Collection connotations this color combination implies. In any event, the paint clashed with the navy blue carpeting and the flammable bedspread and matching curtains of many colors.
While our guest room contained a sink, a medicine cabinet, and a bag-lined 5-gallon bucket in lieu of an actual trash can, there were no private bathrooms in the building. Rather, on each floor were two community bathrooms with shower and sink1 and two community toilets — one each for “gentlemen”; one each for “ladies.” As we were not warned in advance that the management did not provide toilet paper in any of these facilities, my larcenous beloved took it upon herself to liberate a roll from the ladies room of the restaurant and brewery to which we repaired for dinner after check-in.
The wall-mounted television did not work. Neither, presumably, did the other four televisions that the management was apparently storing in our closet. However, the room did contain a full-size refrigerator, which, remarkably, was operational.
The closet itself was a walk-in, but there was not a single hanger in sight. If we wanted to hang anything, it would have to hang from one of four coat hooks. The room’s lone dresser either was intentionally designed to have two drawers under a cubby that could double as a bookshelf, or it was simply missing its top drawer. One drawer contained a small ashtray, the other a Gideon Bible.
Our street-facing windows had a broken latch and were held shut only by inertia. One need not be a particularly agile or graceful cat burglar to have accessed our room from the fire escape a few feet away. (One saving grace, perhaps, was the streetlight that stood sentry directly across from our windows.) Furthermore, our curtains could not be drawn completely closed, so we had to pin them together in the middle with one of Adriane’s hair clips.
Saturday night, Adriane and I went to a late movie up the street just so we wouldn’t have to return to our room any earlier than necessary. Upon exiting the theater, we were crestfallen to discover that it was only 11:13 p.m.
In all fairness, I should note that Adriane and I once stopped to sleep a few short hours at a Motel 6 in Meridian, Idaho, which charged us the same $70 rate and failed us in just about every way imaginable.2 Here, then, in the interest of equanimity, I will say a few nice things about the Travelers Hotel:
- Despite the general skeeviness of the room itself and a mattress on which one could feel pretty much every individual spring, our sheets were clean, and I did not experience even psychosomatic itchiness by imagining an infestation of bedbugs in the hotel.
- Despite a slow login process, the hotel’s Wi-Fi signal — its only truly modern amenity — was consistent whenever we needed to access it.
- Despite the total inability of the bathtub in the gentlemen’s community bathroom to drain, leaving me ankle deep in water after only a few minutes under the shower nozzle, the water itself was blessedly hot.
The Travelers Hotel is the sort of place for which words like “dump,” “fleabag,” “squat” and “flophouse” were originally coined. It no doubt served as a boarding house at one time — perhaps it still does — and one can easily imagine so-called lives of quiet desperation being eked out, drowned in cheap liquor or cut-rate heroin, and eventually snuffed out in those squalid mint-green rooms. If I hadn’t been on an unplanned weekend adventure with the woman I love, whose company makes everything brighter, I might have started feeling such dark impulses myself.
1 For the record, I have twice before stayed in so-called “European-style” or “tourist class” hotels in which guests shared bathrooms: at the Belleclaire Hotel on New York’s Upper West Side and at the Ace Hotel in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. Any misgivings I may have had about the arrangement were quickly forgotten, thanks to the cleanliness of the facilities and the complete sense of privacy I enjoyed at both hotels. Travelers Hotel, on the other hand, illustrates perfectly why “hostel” and “hostile” are homophones.
2 You may read Adriane’s review of that 1-star experience here, under the headline “Absolutely Heinous.”
