I Gave Oxygen To My Wanderlust
TWP Tilden
©
Copyright 2021 by TWP Tilden
|
 |
During
my very first
sojourn to Los Angeles, all those years back, my nights were spent at
no less a haunt than the Cecil Hotel. Back then, in the early aughts,
memes didn't really exist, conspiracy buffs weren't mainstream, and
“Cecil Hotel” meant absolutely nothing to me. But enter
its name in any search engine nowadays and one can easily click
himself deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of know-it-all YouTube
plagiarists, replete with slick video-editing and tiresome voice-over
narration.
I
clocked hundreds
of miles on Greyhound traveling from New York City to Chicago then on
through Denver, followed by a long connection in hot, tree-less Las
Vegas, where there were no shadows anywhere!
Upon
pulling in to
downtown Los Angeles, I was only too glad to be pointed toward any
budget hotel. A man shrugged and suggested I might try the Cecil. The
outside surroundings were dodgy and the inside surroundings had
suspicious long-term guests but I took the adventurous divey quality
in stride. Daily rates were about $17 plus tax with cheaper 3-day and
weekly specials handwritten on a square of lined paper taped to the
front desk window. It was choice lodging for a backpacker and I
stayed, off and on, for several weeks, visiting San Diego, Santa
Monica, San Francisco, and circling back to the cheap and centrally
located dive.
My
time coincided
with renovations. At some point the establishment started touting
itself as a European style hostel. In addition to the gleaming lobby,
now immaculately buffed to a shine, I was aware of three other new
aspects: the laundry room was nicely refurbished to double duty as a
television lounge (as awkward as that combination is), there were
more young tourists passing through and – BAMM! Right in the
kisser – its new and improved rate: $50! For a bum hotel slash
hostel?!
What
did this new
and improved rate get me? Apart from a shiny lobby, nothing.
The
hotel room
looked the same as before but, now with the seasons changing, I
learned the radiator attached to the wall was non-functioning
(because there was no central heating). Guess that's what they meant
by European style? At any rate, it was, and remains, zero fun trying
to sleep in a cold room. For ten or, say, sixteen, twenty dollars –
ie, hostel prices – one can grin and rough it. But at fifty
dollars, baby, I am not a happy shivering camper. Same as the
radiator, the fatback television set weighing down the dresser was
more decorative than user-friendly. Despite the rate hike it was
still without a remote control – probably the hotel's way of
keeping the Section 8 applicants from hawking the gadgets –
which meant I had to get up and manually change channels like it was
the 1980's.
On
the last morning
I was to check-out I overheard an investor's group as it toured the
premises. According to the tour guide, the hotel had goals to supply
Wi-Fi throughout the building. I hoped the big plans also included
central heating and cooling.
While
the haunted
Cecil Hotel is now officially, and with much brevity, Stay
(technically, Stay on Main) it apparently cannot remodel itself free
of the curse. Even minus the supernatural 'if', infamous Skid Row
remains nearby and its tent city of very scary junkies, insanity
cases, filth and rats is very, very real.
Onward
and upward, I
made my way on Greyhound to Portland, Oregon, where Hostelling
International's H.I. Portland - Hawthorne was cozy hippy in
appearance but corporate in attitude. I had telephoned ahead – phone first!
– from a payphone (because I didn't own a cell phone) about a
dorm room vacancy and was told I had to be literally
thirty minutes away before the bastards would "probably"
hold a bed for me. Great backpacker spirit! Minutes after
I'd
signed in, having stayed awake through their small
litany of house rules, I witnessed a poor fellow, with his
arm
in a sling, feel the full bite of the corporate smile.
While
entering his
John Hancock in the guest register and making small talk with Front
Desk, the new guest happily shared of being off and on in Oregon
since December looking for steady work. “Man, been living in my
car! I'm so glad you guys ––” Whoops,
too much information! The guy behind the counter, inexplicably
dressed like a 19th
Century Scottish golfer, was also the manager and he bitchyly
reiterated the hostel's house rules expressly prohibited "residents"
from receiving lodgings. He would not and did not budge from policy.
It didn't matter either that the distraught customer paid with a
credit card. And just like that, broken arm homeboy was sent back out
into the rain, amid a torrent of profanity and insults which only
made the fancy dress, ephebic manager smirk. Seriously, how scary can
a guy be with one arm tied behind his back, or in a sling, as it
were?
But
my absolute
worst
American
hostel experience was L.A.'s Hollywood Highland Hotel & Hostel
(H&H). A dump. I would never recommend staying at H&H
for
more than a night—if ever.
For
starters, I was
refused a bed unless I booked through hostelworld.com. At the time I
did not own a bank card, and was traveling back from Las Vegas,
Nevada, so I called and asked my white friend, who lived in north
Hollywood, to please book the room for me. Dude got it done without a
hitch. And wouldn't you know: he was not asked to give a credit card
number or told to go through the third-party website. Ahhh, the perks
of being white—even over the telephone!
Now
with the room
confirmed, that was one less worry on my mind as I boarded the bus
departing sweltering Nevada. I counted myself lucky to be paying $25
nightly. I quickly found out that was roughly twenty dollars too
much.
Located
a stone's
throw away from the Kodak Theater smack in the loins of famous
Hollywood Boulevard, the “hotel” and hostel had for its
manager Rico, a lumbering, lowly-educated, uncouth “asshole”
(his words) who, recognizing my voice, greeted me with a constipated
grunt, “Oh. You.” Yeah, me from the telephone. People do
say I should be on radio. Rico struck me as one of those fat human
waste sacks who improbably lands work in interracial gang-bang
flicks, the ones so awful they actually needle you out of fantasy
mode with the thought, she can't possibly be getting paid
enough
for this eye-sore humiliation. I would
not describe the
man as crass or sloppy or ghetto; those adjectives overshoot the
mark. Thankfully, the sloven was inhospitable enough to fill in the
blank for me: “I'm not only surly,” Rico huffed,
quoting verbatim my feedback deposited in the Suggestion box, perhaps
the only slip of paper inside. “I'm an asshole too.” We
all have our talents.
Apart
from that
dreadful hotel employee, entrance to H&H was up a flight of
steep, narrow and creaky, dingy carpeted stairs. Picture shimmying up
a laundry chute with a big suitcase or rucksack. The rooms were
unbearably hot and crowded together with flea market rickety metal
bunkbeds. Many of the other guests were quasi-long term, either
hustling gig works or fledgling aspirants of one passion or another,
as they vied to make it beyond the boulevard of broken dreams. In
fact, some of them “performed” as those cartoon
characters, like Minnie Mouse, Batman, Pirates of the Caribbean's
Jack Sparrow, Shrek, which one sees on the street, and in Hollywood
movies about Hollywood, posing for tourist snapshots.
Internet
access was
coin-operated. (Is that still a thing??) The free breakfast consisted
of white bread slices, coffee and tea, and more peanut butter than
Ben Affleck ate on the Voyage of the Mimi.
Funny
story: Some
years after this disappointing trip I befriended a Japanese boy in
Mexico City. As we swapped stories about our travels around American
cities his face suddenly and fiercely crinkled up at the mention of
“Hollywood Hotel&Hostel.” I instinctively spun
around, expecting to shoo away another Mexican beggar child
aggressively approaching with stickers and open palms. “Oh my
god!,” he gasped, getting my attention and mock gagging. “You
stayed there too?!” Unlike me, the Japanese foreigner had no
problem getting a reservation but, same as me, my new friend found
the place – and especially manager Rico – memorably
disgusting. Damn if it ain't a small, small world after all!
As
a point of note,
USA hostels are the pits. Overpriced, poorly staffed (usually
starting with the owner), inhospitable, racist, and unabashedly cheap
on amenities. They nickle-and-dime guests coming and going; see
themselves as hotels for naive youth who, supposedly, can't afford
real hotels and so the guiding attitude appears to be you get
what
you pay for.
I
was sometimes told
I could not book a bed because the hostel didn't take American
travelers. Racism is so standard in the USA it's not for certain if
“American travelers” is shorthand for American
travelers who look like you. Either way it is a stupid policy
but, tellingly, not an uncommon one in America.
And if I wasn't refused service, then I was almost
certainly
routinely charged a steep(er) key deposit than non-American guests
(and, to be honest, I don't recall coming across very many other
American backpackers).
It
would be great if
American hostelers actually traveled abroad and gained perspective on
how a comfortable,
clean, and affordable
lodging is operated instead of simply nailing kitsch to the walls,
reveling in legalized pot, hitting on female guests, and otherwise
basking in sorry cashcow and/or hippy delusions of worldly cool.
I
am no stranger to life abroad, having traveled, and lived, a fair
deal across the Pond. I visited many of the European
capitals:
Paris, Madrid, Athens, Venice, Vienna, Zurich.... The year was 2012
and, following trips to Istanbul then London, I took the train up to
Edinburgh, Scotland, where, to my surprise, I comprehended the locals
more so than I did almost anyone in London.
On
the Grassmarket,
beneath the grand and imposing Edinburgh Castle, was Art Roch Hostel,
a converted old Salvation Army barracks from way back before The
Brady Bunch
aired with so
many long-term characters who couldn't be farther from salvation if
they died and went straight to Hell. I had never met so many socially
inept and eccentric people under one roof.
This
much could be
said of the three floor structure: it offered great rates and not a
dull moment, and was supposedly owned by the fifth wealthiest
Scotsman at the time, one Malcolm Scott, a useless point of trivia
which never went unmentioned by the long-term guests as though they
and Scott were drinking buddies of a wee dram or pint every now and
again.
Months
later, while
chilling in Berlin, Germany, gobbling down hot pretzels and Radlers I
also got to taste schadenfreude at the expense of
the social
awkwards, courtesy of the following headline, complemented by a
photograph of familiar forlorn faces behind barricaded doors:
BACKPACKERS ARE
BEING ORDERED TO LEAVE HOSTEL [IN 24HRS]
The
self-righteous
characters sought to standoff but, alas, got nothing but the boot!
But
what sort of
adventurer and world traveler could I play at if I didn't head to a
Third World country besides Mexico?
In
Guatemala my friends bypassed Guatemala City and, instead, booked us
into
The Black Cat, a proverbial frat house abroad in Antigua. The city of
Antigua
was exotic,
full of ruins (or just poorly constructed churches), and cobble stone
roads. It was also not lacking decrepit plumbing. While there, the
hostel was without running water for two or three days. Ewww.
Imagine! But the
one thing it went without even longer was customer service. The staff
were not the friendliest and came off like douche bag occupiers.
There was one meathead who bragged on being an American Marine and
always scowled and glowered. Always. It would not surprise me a bit
if the ugly American was among those raving red in D.C. on January
sixth.
With
our bowels finally relieved and having visited a volcano on
horseback, we restuffed our backpacks and said adios to Antigua. One
choppy motorboat taxi later and we had arrived to San Pedro la Laguna
(Lake Atitlán).
I paid $8USD for a dorm room at the Mikaso
Hotel,
one
of the more expensive lodgings in Lake Atitlán.
It
was luxurious with beautiful tiling, plush furniture, big mattresses,
crisp white linen, and sat right on the lakefront (translation: nice
breezes ... gorgeous vista of lake and mountain views) with a private
hand
built dock which many of its guests found enjoyable for reading, sun
bathing, or just dangling their feet into the water.
This
stomp was the complete opposite of The Black Cat. With its many
nooks to sit and read in peace, Mikaso was a classy refuge from the
bustling excess of cheesy
extreme cavalier behavior.
It
was
a little off the beaten path but it was worth it. And, anyway, I
could always hire a zippy tuk-tuk (Shanghai taxi) to get me there
easier. I recall the fare was only about 5Q (Guatemalan quetzales) to
go anywhere around the lake. Five quetzales was less than one
American dollar. Back then that was cheaper than a bag of Dorito
chips!
I
used to love to travel. Airport security and TSA in the wake of 9/11
gradually eroded the fun out of it for me and then COVID-19 put the
smackdown. At least I can say, Been there! Did that! For many years
following college I was restless and wandered as far, and for as
long, as I could. Here is a teeny taste of those early backpacking
years.
(Unless
you
type
the
author's name
in
the subject
line
of the message
we
won't know where to send it.)
Another story by TWP
Book
Case
Home
Page
The
Preservation Foundation, Inc., A Nonprofit Book Publisher