{"id":25613,"date":"2026-07-10T07:28:04","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=25613"},"modified":"2026-07-10T07:31:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:31:57","slug":"how-to-survive-motel-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/moans-from-the-condiment-fridge\/how-to-survive-motel-6\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Survive Motel 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI 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\u2026 There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself\u201d –Sam Shepard. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Five in the morning is when they are most active. Either they\u2019re 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\u2019ve come to the conclusion that it\u2019s the way I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders that gives them the courage to introduce themselves.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m them. Any place I\u2019ve ventured into has never felt like home, even Boston, the city of my birth, doesn\u2019t feel like home. I\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019s silly albums. Who wants to live like that?<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople call me Shelly,\u201d 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, \u201cGerry.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019m neither, nor are half the people I see. Labels, all of us.<\/p>\n

\u201cI walk up to people all the time,\u201d Shelly said with a tall boy of PBR in hand. \u201cI\u2019m just a friendly guy,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou can come over for a beer any time.\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded and thanked him for the offer, knowing that I\u2019d never accept a beer from a stranger. My day is starting, Shelly\u2019s? It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s worst part doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t carry a blade because of criminals. Most criminals I can trust to a degree. Ex cons don\u2019t bother me, but I can\u2019t trust a person strung out on a meth gazing at me with helpless helicopter eyes.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m not on the lookout for a group of people who steal cars or crack safes, I\u2019m 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\u2019t called their siblings in over a decade. They are God\u2019s lying apostles.<\/p>\n

I watched a skeleton, scrawny meth-head scope out Gary\u2019s room last week, a mechanic down on his luck and living in Patel\u2019s 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\u2019s face. The week before I saw him in front of McDonald\u2019s begging for change.<\/p>\n

\u201cYo, my dude, you got a dollar?\u201d he asked me, eyes twitching.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t eaten in days. I\u2019m so hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m here for a two-dollar iced coffee; I\u2019m broke but I\u2019ll see what I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGod bless you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I handed Meth-head Donnie a sack with two cheeseburgers inside. He took it from me, but he didn\u2019t really want it. He gazed into the letters, McDonald\u2019s, the abyss. The eternal bite taken out of a soul forever damned.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t need these,\u201d Donnie said, trying to hand me back the sack.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou said you hadn\u2019t eaten for a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m allergic to McDonald\u2019s\u2026 You got a dollar? Or five dollars?\u201d His body rattled.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cFuck you anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

I noticed Meth-head Donnie standing behind the bushes. If he was in the military planning an assassination, he would\u2019ve 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\u2019m not sure if he ever got into Gary\u2019s room, but later that evening from the second-floor balcony I heard Gary shout, \u201cSomeone stole all of my underwear!\u201d<\/p>\n

People emptied out of their rooms and walked over to Gary\u2019s door. Other people\u2019s 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\u2019s tighty-whities. \u201cUsed drawers for sale! I got used drawers for sale!\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

The entire night I had to listen to her sing, followed by sex moans, then back to the singing. I\u2019m not one to infringe on other people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are a few ways to survive long-term in Motel 6. The rooms don\u2019t have microwaves, nor fridges. If on a one or two day stay, I bring food from Devin\u2019s or I buy food from work and bring it back. If lucky, if I have stashed enough, I can afford Sonny\u2019s BBQ, Arby\u2019s or McDonald\u2019s, 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!<\/p>\n

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\u2019s luxury hump hump motel. At first, it was my way of saving money, then it became a habit, a way of life.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s 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\u2019ll eat whatever I can get my hands on. Years back, I read in a magazine that it\u2019s called The Alfred Hitchcock Diet. Hitchcock\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Our growling stomachs have become our way to protect ourselves. (I include myself because, I, too, am a long-term resident of Patel\u2019s Motel with the statue of an embarrassed looking blue horse in front of the motel.)\u00a0 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 \u201cdad.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t allow deplorables like me to obtain anything easy. \u201cArtist? Fuck you!\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll never return from, it doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

A good way to survive is to join a gang. There\u2019s the Jesus gang singing praise songs outside their rooms on the first floor. They walk around playing acoustic guitars shouting, \u201cAll the praises,\u201d \u201cGlory be,\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s my Jesus.\u201d 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, \u201cAre you a believer?\u201d 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\u2019s back. You can\u2019t get rid of the guy; he\u2019s like a severe case of Journey\u2019s Greatest Hits.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cMister, for those burgers I\u2019ll suck your balls dry.\u201d 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, \u201cI\u2019ll take that bag from you, and make you suck my balls while I eat what you paid for.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

After five months of surviving purely on disgust and a boxer\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019t care if leave to spend a few days at Devin\u2019s house. They know I\u2019ll be back. Motel 6 is my purgatory, in real time. I\u2019ll be the next YouTube celebrity void of dignity. Call me Gerry the Cancer. All I need to do is get completely meth\u2019d 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!<\/p>\n

Life\u2019s been hard, especially as I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll never read, but I\u2019ll tell people I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, man, you got a light?\u201d Shelly says to me with a cigar hanging from his mouth.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Call me Gerry the Cancer. All I need to do is get completely meth\u2019d 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4069],"tags":[5000,5001,5002,4998,5003,4999],"class_list":["post-25613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-moans-from-the-condiment-fridge","tag-eagles","tag-journey","tag-meth","tag-motel-6","tag-motel-life","tag-u2","writer-frank-reardon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25615,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25613\/revisions\/25615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}