“I feel like I’ve never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don’t know exactly where I fit in… There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself” –Sam Shepard.
Five in the morning is when they are most active. Either they’re trying to get on the road early and escape the cockroaches and sticky floors of the Hamburg Motel 6 in Lexington, Kentucky, or they live here for days and months on end. I always run into the people who live here. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the way I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders that gives them the courage to introduce themselves.
I’m them. Any place I’ve ventured into has never felt like home, even Boston, the city of my birth, doesn’t feel like home. I’m not sure who to blame for it, a father who worked on the road and took me with him in the summers, or a mother who abandoned me moments after I was born. I can’t entirely say why one place feels like love and the other like mayhem. I never could figure out why risking my own life for anything, even risking it for a fully loaded sandwich, felt easier to me than putting in the work to build a healthy state of mind. It seems to me, the people who are living lives full of ease are people pumped up on meditation douche chills, complete with a closet full of pressed polos, and all of Kenny Chesney’s silly albums. Who wants to live like that?
“People call me Shelly,” The Mexican man with a shaved head said to me at five in the morning when I went outside my door for a smoke. I took a long haul off my Winston and said, “Gerry.”
Everywhere I float around the Motel, I walk with a blade in my pocket. I sleep with it under my pillow, especially if I stay for three days in a row. On longer stays they stick me in a room facing the woods, in the distance the glowing purple and pink lights of a sex toy and lingerie shop lean through the pines. In the back is where Patel, the owner of the franchise, sticks people who stay long term, or people who resemble criminals, drug dealers. I’m neither, nor are half the people I see. Labels, all of us.
“I walk up to people all the time,” Shelly said with a tall boy of PBR in hand. “I’m just a friendly guy,” he continued. “You can come over for a beer any time.”
I nodded and thanked him for the offer, knowing that I’d never accept a beer from a stranger. My day is starting, Shelly’s? It’s also just getting started, but his start is a way to avoid a reckoning. The flies of time have their way with people who start drinking at five in the morning.
I’ve been on the hustle since I arrived in Lexington last January right before a major snowstorm hit. Several days spent with my girlfriend, Devin, then several days at Motel 6. At fifty-two years old I feel like I’ve returned to my younger man days all over again. Motel living in a dozen different states for work, but this time I am doing it to keep myself off the streets. I have work. I get up five days a week and take two buses to the worst part of Lexington, however, Lexington’s worst part doesn’t hold a candle to the crappiest cities around Boston in the 1990s, but there are more addicts nowadays. More meth-heads, tide pod heads, drunks, and heroin addicts. I don’t carry a blade because of criminals. Most criminals I can trust to a degree. Ex cons don’t bother me, but I can’t trust a person strung out on a meth gazing at me with helpless helicopter eyes.
Meth addicts will stab me for a quarter if it brings them closer to a hit. If I leave my room for fifteen seconds for ice, or to get a Coke out of the vending machine, I’m not on the lookout for a group of people who steal cars or crack safes, I’m looking for meth heads. They drip a drool on the pavement; head lost in a bipolar dementia made up of chemicals found underneath a sink and in a pharmacy. They haven’t called their siblings in over a decade. They are God’s lying apostles.
I watched a skeleton, scrawny meth-head scope out Gary’s room last week, a mechanic down on his luck and living in Patel’s luxury penthouse motel with faded blue doors facing the lot. After a few minutes I realized it was Meth-head Donnie. I could tell by the thirty tattoos scattered on his face, like one day, he was facing a fan and from the other side of the fan his dog took a massive shit that flew into the fan and decorated Donnie’s face. The week before I saw him in front of McDonald’s begging for change.
“Yo, my dude, you got a dollar?” he asked me, eyes twitching.
I noticed the little tatts on his face, Hanna Barbara characters. Under his left Temple, Huckleberry Hound. Underneath, Huckleberry was Top Cat. On his right cheek, Ranger Smith, and across from him Yogi running away with a picnic basket.
“I haven’t eaten in days. I’m so hungry.”
“I’m here for a two-dollar iced coffee; I’m broke but I’ll see what I can do.”
“God bless you,” he said.
I handed Meth-head Donnie a sack with two cheeseburgers inside. He took it from me, but he didn’t really want it. He gazed into the letters, McDonald’s, the abyss. The eternal bite taken out of a soul forever damned.
“I don’t need these,” Donnie said, trying to hand me back the sack.
“You said you hadn’t eaten for a week.”
“I’m allergic to McDonald’s… You got a dollar? Or five dollars?” His body rattled.
I took the sack of burgers and walked them across the street and handed them to Maggie, an old soot covered woman who sits on the curb panhandling most of the day so she can try to make enough for a Motel 6 room. Ever since I arrived it has been her job seven days a week. She thanked me and let me pet Claudia, her tiny dog who gave up on life centuries ago. Meth-head Donnie shouted, “Fuck you anyway.”
I noticed Meth-head Donnie standing behind the bushes. If he was in the military planning an assassination, he would’ve been spotted and shot an hour ago, not the brightest knife in the block. After Gary left his room on a bicycle, Donnie jumped through the bushes and onto the Motel 6 parking Lot. His head turning left to right, quickly trying to observe who might be looking. I’m not sure if he ever got into Gary’s room, but later that evening from the second-floor balcony I heard Gary shout, “Someone stole all of my underwear!”
People emptied out of their rooms and walked over to Gary’s door. Other people’s misfortunes were all the people who stayed long term had going for them. I tossed my butt off the balcony and imagined Donnie running at high speeds on Winchester Drive, arms full of Gary’s tighty-whities. “Used drawers for sale! I got used drawers for sale!”
Regardless of the antics, the worst kind of trouble comes from people who stay for a few hours. The cheaters; people in denial that they’re gay; people who use the luxury motel for sex. After checking in one Monday, I walked behind a short and stocky guy who looked like a gym teacher wearing a newsboy cap. In front of him, a tall woman in pink stripper heels, matching tiny pink shorts, fake tanned skin, and hair as big as a woman in a White Lion music video from the late 1980s. My keycard said room 218, they had room 219. I sighed.
The entire night I had to listen to her sing, followed by sex moans, then back to the singing. I’m not one to infringe on other people’s sex lives, this country is puritan enough, so I did my best to ignore them. I tried to write, watch a movie, read a book, but after the loud banging moans, I was forced to listen to a six-foot something woman sing like a character from a live action Disney musical. The next day, the maids spent hours cleaning out the room. Their green faces long, and disgusted. I wondered if the Peaky Blinders wannabe had murdered the woman while I was at work. Or the other way around, the future of musicals drugged him, slit his throat, and took his wallet. The maids continued cleaning for two hours after I returned. No one uttered a word about what took place in the room. I try and listen for answers to what happened every time I walk by the chatty voices coming from the laundry room.
There are a few ways to survive long-term in Motel 6. The rooms don’t have microwaves, nor fridges. If on a one or two day stay, I bring food from Devin’s or I buy food from work and bring it back. If lucky, if I have stashed enough, I can afford Sonny’s BBQ, Arby’s or McDonald’s, all which have drastically gone up in price since we became a fascist state. Fifty-dollar cheeseburgers made of salt and zombie nightmares, sign me up!
On the four-day stays, which happen twice a month, are when food is easier on the wallet. I bring a suitcase for the longer stays. I pack a travel coffee pot and use the hot water to cook Ramen, oatmeal, mac n cheese cups, and of course, coffee. Eating once a day has become a way of living when at Patel’s luxury hump hump motel. At first, it was my way of saving money, then it became a habit, a way of life.
Here’s how it works: black coffee in the morning to curb the appetite. Black coffee at lunch whether off work or at work, also to curb the appetite. At nighttime, I’ll eat whatever I can get my hands on. Years back, I read in a magazine that it’s called The Alfred Hitchcock Diet. Hitchcock’s doctors created the meal plan so the multi-million-dollar director could drop weight. He went from three-hundred pounds, down to two-forty in six months. It’s why I see a lot of skinny people at Motel 6, we all follow the Hitchcock diet to one degree or another. Some substitute grief instead of food. Others. addiction instead of food, but no one staying for several days and beyond eats more than once a day. The ribs have become one loud, obnoxious, xylophone for the boney fingers.
Our growling stomachs have become our way to protect ourselves. (I include myself because, I, too, am a long-term resident of Patel’s Motel with the statue of an embarrassed looking blue horse in front of the motel.) Our stomachs growl to let us know if we must go another three hours without food. They also growl to let us know if a person like Meth Donnie is lurking about, or a murderous stripper trying to make her way from Lexington to Broadway is looking for her next throat to slash. Our stomachs keep us in line, keep us from vomiting on the multi-colored bed spread after a wife left a husband, or a child died in combat, or a daughter who calls her father by his first name instead of saying “dad.”
The plan when I moved to Lexington, and it still is, is for me to get an apartment, but the Supreme Leader of the 1% fascist billionaire state doesn’t allow deplorables like me to obtain anything easy. “Artist? Fuck you!” Everything is a test of my endurance nowadays. First, I must survive living in an open-air prison before I can live in an exclusive studio apartment without furniture. In Lexington it’s Motel 6. Whether you committed crimes on the streets and were just released from a state pen, or like myself, committed crimes in the past that I’ll never return from, it doesn’t matter, first the state puts us in the open-air prison. Fight for your life. Fight for your food. Look sixty-seven years old when you are only thirty-three.
A good way to survive is to join a gang. There’s the Jesus gang singing praise songs outside their rooms on the first floor. They walk around playing acoustic guitars shouting, “All the praises,” “Glory be,” “He’s my Jesus.” The lead acoustic guitarist, a man wearing bedazzled jewelry, a red velvet vest over a pristine white Trump T-shirt, tucked into blue jeans with bedazzled crosses on the back pockets, asks everyone walking by, “Are you a believer?” He refers to himself as a traveling prophet, a wayward youth pastor looking for his flock. Last week Patel had him arrested for jerking off in his car to a picture of Pete Hegseth, but unfortunately for the rest of us he’s back. You can’t get rid of the guy; he’s like a severe case of Journey’s Greatest Hits.
One can hide in the bushes with meth-head Donnie, but no. Or team up with the low-wage workers from out of town, who are looking to cheat on their wives with the other men who are from out of town. Pro tip: If you are like me and find most gangs and groups ridiculous, funny even, then best you carry a weapon. I carry a blade in my pocket. If you can’t handle a blade, then brass knuckles, if not knucks, then a gun. Because if you have a sack of food that you are bringing to your room before six in the evening, well, plan to protect that food with your life. Various gangs are on the lookout or trying to convert you.
If you make it beyond the first wave of gangs, watch out for Faye, a hooker who stays on the second floor and hides a Saturday Night Special in her purse, “Mister, for those burgers I’ll suck your balls dry.” If you make it beyond Faye, watch out for the workers, now wearing rolled-up T-shirts and lipstick, hanging outside their doors like Walpole bitches, “I’ll take that bag from you, and make you suck my balls while I eat what you paid for.” If you make it beyond them, enjoy your food quickly because soon the faceless few will gather outside your window moaning, hoping to catch a glimpse of what it’s like to chew food. Hoping that you have enough compassion left in the tank to throw your fries out on the concrete so they can hover over the salty treats like seagulls.
No healthcare, low wages, food scarcity, city transportation (the horror! Coming to you next column), poverty, addiction, all under one God damn roof. Gangs foaming at the mouth to take what’s yours. Ghosts at midnight hiding in the shadows of the bathroom trying to warn you about who is under you, above you, outside the window, and even stuffed rotting inside of the mattress.
After five months of surviving purely on disgust and a boxer’s mentality, I got a new job, kicked my old one to the curb. The new one will give me health insurance after two months and pays almost two dollars more an hour. Funny, I’m in my early fifties and have been at my job for twenty years. With my skillset they tell me I should be set for life, not rich, but doing a lot better than I am now. Yet here I am paying for my past sins in a prison that doesn’t care if leave to spend a few days at Devin’s house. They know I’ll be back. Motel 6 is my purgatory, in real time. I’ll be the next YouTube celebrity void of dignity. Call me Gerry the Cancer. All I need to do is get completely meth’d up and have someone film me screaming in a parking lot with an enormous jar of figs under my arm, and a sore asshole. Comment section loot here I come!
Life’s been hard, especially as I’ve aged, and sometimes I think about selling out to the polo shirts and gym memberships of the universe. Buy me U2’s deluxe box set with a smooth side of the Eagles and live out the rest of my life in pure luxury sitting on a deck made of fresh pine, and in my home, a bookcase full of ancient thousand-page tomes I’ll never read, but I’ll tell people I’ve read. There will be wine coolers and trips to Greece. There will be karaoke and endless nights spent at the Chinese buffet. There will be reels of me lifting weights and pictures of me busting poses like Tony Atlas.
Over the years, I’ve built tapestries of horseshit in my head trying to convince myself that doing it one time, one shortcut, will be okay. Afterall, I need healthcare, but then integrity walks into my boring motel room with sticky floors looking sexy, and I remember the code I created for myself a decade earlier. A code I try to live by, a code people mock me for. I keep trying to find ways out of the stories the world has put me in to, and the stories I live and create myself. The only way to escape is to throw my body straight into the magma and fully listen to the daydreams of those minds labeled heathen. To be patient with myself, even after a gunshot goes off, even if outside my window two homeless men are fucking in the woods.
“Hey, man, you got a light?” Shelly says to me with a cigar hanging from his mouth.
I light up his cigar; he makes a wall with dry hands to catch the flame. We both stare at the fire for a moment. And just before the illuminating light fades to black, his voice bursts into a toothy, distorted cackle.
