I'm a Stranger Here Myself (6 page)

Something I have long wanted to do is visit the Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo, California.

On the face of it, this might seem an odd quest since the Motel Inn is not, by all accounts, a particularly prepossessing establishment. Built in 1925 in the Spanish colonial style much beloved by restaurant owners, Zorro, and almost no one else, it sits in the shadow of a busy elevated freeway amid a cluster of gas stations, fast-food outlets, and other, more modern motor inns.

Once, however, it was a famous stopping place on the coastal highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A Pasadena architect named Arthur Heineman gave it its exuberant style, but his most inspired legacy lies in the name he chose for it. Playing around with the words
motor
and
hotel,
he dubbed it a
motel,
hyphenating the word to emphasize its novelty.

America already had lots of motels by then (the very first apears to have been Askins’ Cottage Camp built in 1901 in Douglas, Arizona), but they were all called something else—
auto court, cottage court, hotel court, tour-o-tel, auto hotel, bungalow court, cabin court, tourist camp, tourist court, trav-o-tel.
For a long time it looked like
tourist court
would become the standard designation for an overnight stopping place. It wasn’t until about 1950 that
motel
achieved generic status.

I know all this because I have just been reading a book on the history of the motel in America called
The Motel in America.
Written by three academics, it is a ponderously heavy piece of work, full of sentences like “The needs of both consumers and purveyors of lodging strongly influenced the development of organized systems of distribution,” but I bought it and devoured it anyway because I love everything about motels.

I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open. It is just one of those things—airline food is another—that I get excited about and should know better.

The golden age of motels was also, as it happens, the golden age of me—the 1950s—and I suppose that’s what accounts for my fascination. For anyone who didn’t travel around America by car in the 1950s, it is almost impossible now to imagine how thrilling they were. For one thing, the national chains like Holiday Inn and Ramada barely existed then. As late as 1962, 98 percent of motels were individually owned, so each one had its own character.

Essentially they were of two types. The first type was the good ones. These nearly always had a welcoming, cottagey air. Typically, they were built around a generous lawn with shady trees and a flower bed decorated with a wagon wheel painted white. (The owners, for some reason, generally liked to paint all their rocks white, too, and array them along the edge of the drive.) Often they had a swimming pool or swings. Sometimes they had a gift shop or coffee shop, too.

Indoors they offered measures of comfort and elegance that would have the whole family cooing—thick carpet, purring air conditioner, a big TV, nightstand with a telephone and a built-in radio, gleaming bathroom, sometimes a dressing area, Vibro-matic beds, which gave you a massage for a quarter.

The second kind of motels consisted of the appalling ones. We always stayed at these. My father, who was one of history’s great cheapskates, was of the view that there was no point in spending money on... well, on anything really, and certainly not on anything that you were mostly going to be asleep in.

In consequence, we generally camped in motel rooms where the beds sagged as if they had last been occupied by a horse and the cooling system was an open window and where you could generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek, the sound of splintering furniture, and a female voice pleading, “Put the gun down, Vinnie. I’ll do anything you say.” I don’t wish to suggest that these experiences left me scarred and irrationally embittered, but I can clearly remember watching Janet Leigh being hacked up in the Bates Motel in
Psycho
and thinking, “At least she got a shower curtain.”

All of this, even at its worst, gave highway travel a kind of exhilarating unpredictability. You never knew what quality of comfort you would find at the end of the day, what sort of small pleasures might be offered. It gave road trips a piquancy that the homogenized refinements of the modern age cannot match.

That changed very quickly with the rise of motel chains. Holiday Inn, for example, went from 79 outlets in 1958 to almost 1,500 in less than twenty years. Today just five chains account for one-third of all the motel rooms in America. Travelers these days evidently don’t want uncertainty in their lives. They want to stay in the same place, eat the same food, watch the same TV wherever they go.

Recently, while driving from Washington, D.C., to New England with my own family, I tried explaining all this to my children and got the idea that we should stop for the night at an old-fashioned family-run establishment. Everyone thought this was an immensely stupid idea, but I insisted that it would be a great experience.

Well, we looked everywhere. We passed scores of motels, but they were all franchised to national chains. Eventually, after perhaps ninety minutes of futile hunting, I pulled off the interstate for the seventh or eighth time and—lo!—there shining out of the darkness was the Sleepy Hollow Motel, a perfect 1950s sort of place.

“There’s a Comfort Inn across the street,” one of my children pointed out.

“We don’t want a Comfort Inn, Jimmy,” I explained, temporarily forgetting in my excitement that I don’t have a child named Jimmy. “We want a
real
motel.”

My wife, being English, insisted on having a look at the room. It was awful, of course. The furnishings were battered and bare. The room was so cold you could see your breath. There was a shower curtain, but it hung by just three rings.

“It’s got character,” I insisted.

“It’s got nits,” said my wife. “We’ll be across the road at the Comfort Inn.”

In disbelief, I watched them troop out.

“You’ll stay, won’t you, Jimmy?” I said, but even he left without a backward glance.

I stood there for about fifteen seconds, then switched off the light, returned the key, and went across to the Comfort Inn. It was bland and characterless and just like every Comfort Inn I had ever stayed in. But it was clean, the TV worked, and, it must be said, the shower curtain was very nice.

I believe I have just secured definitive proof that America is the ultimate shopping paradise. It came in a video catalog that arrived unsolicited with the morning mail. There, among the usual diverse offerings—
Titanic, Tai Chi for Health and Fitness,
every movie ever made by John Wayne—was a self-help video called
Do the Macarena Totally Nude,
which promises to guide the naked home viewer through “the hot moves of this Latin-influenced dance that is sweeping the nation.”

Among the catalog’s other intriguing offerings were a documentary called
Antique Farm Tractors,
a boxed set representing the complete oeuvre of Don Knotts, and an interesting compilation entitled
Nude Housewives of America
(volumes 1 and 2), depicting ordinary housewives “doing their daily chores in the buff!” And to think I asked for a socket wrench for Christmas.

My point is that there is almost nothing you cannot buy in this remarkable country. Of course, shopping has been the national sport in America for decades, but three significant retailing developments have emerged in recent years to elevate the shopping experience to a higher, giddier plane. They are:

•Telemarketing.
This is an all-new business in which platoons of salespeople phone up complete strangers, more or less at random, generally at suppertime, and doggedly read to them a prepared script promising a free set of steak knives or AM-FM radio if they buy a certain product or service. These people have become positively relentless.

The possibility that I would buy a time-share in Florida over the telephone from a stranger is about as likely as the possibility that I would change religious affiliation on the basis of a doorstep visit from a brace of Mormons, but evidently this feeling is not universal. According to the
New York Times,
tele-marketing in America is now worth $35 billion a year. That figure is so amazing that I cannot think about it without getting a headache, so let us move on to retail development number two.

•Outlet malls.
These are malls in which companies like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein sell their own lines at discounts. In many cases, outlet malls are not malls at all but rather whole communities that have been taken over by outlet stores. Easily the most remarkable of these is Freeport, Maine, home of L.L. Bean.

We stopped there last summer on the way up the Maine coast, and I am still trembling from the experience. The procedure for a visit to Freeport is unvarying. You creep into town in a long line of traffic, spend forty minutes hunting for a parking space, then join a crowd of thousands shuffling along Main Street past a succession of shops selling every known brand name that ever was or will be.

At the center of it all is the L.L. Bean store, which is huge. It is open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. You can buy a kayak there at 3 A.M. if you want. People apparently do. My brain is beginning to hurt again.

•Catalogs.
Shopping by mail has been around for a long time, of course, but it has proliferated to a degree that is just beyond astounding. Almost from the moment we arrived in America catalogs began plopping unbidden onto our mat with the daily mail. Now we get perhaps a dozen a week, sometimes more—catalogs for videos, gardening implements, lingerie, books, camping and fishing gear, things to make your bathroom a more stylish and convivial place, you name it.

For a long time I tossed these out with the rest of the unsolicited mail. What a fool I was. I now realize they not only provide hours of reading pleasure but open up a world of possibilities I scarcely knew existed.

Just today, along with the aforementioned nude macarena brochure, we received a catalog called “Tools for Serious Readers.” It was full of the usual assortment of blotters and desk organizers, bed lights and lap trays, but what particularly caught my eye was something called the Briefcase Valet, a small wheeled trolley that sits about four inches off the floor.

Available in dark or natural cherry and attractively priced at $139, it is designed to alleviate one of the most intractable office storage problems of our age. As the catalog copy explains: “Most of us are faced with the same nagging problem of what to do with our briefcase when we put it down at home or in the office. That’s why we designed our Briefcase Valet. It holds your briefcase up off the floor, making it easier to insert and retrieve things as the day progresses.”

I especially like those last four words, “as the day progresses.” How many times have I gotten to the end of a working day myself and thought: “Oh, what I’d give for a small wheeled device in a choice of wood tones to save me reaching those last four inches!”

The scary thing is that often these descriptions are written so artfully that you are almost taken in by them. I was just reading in another catalog about a fancy kitchen accessory from Italy called a
Porto Rotolo di Carta,
which boasts “a spring tension arm,” “stainless steel guide,” “crafted brass finial,” and “rubber gasket for exceptional stability”—all for just $49.95—when I realized that it was, in fact, a paper towel holder.

Obviously the catalog couldn’t say, “No matter how you look at it, this is just a paper towel dispenser and you would be a sap to buy it,” so they must try to dazzle you with its exotic pedigree and technical complexity.

In consequence, even the most mundane catalog items boast more design features than a 1954 Buick. I have before me a glossy book from another company announcing with undisguised pride that its flannel shirts feature, among much else, gauntlet buttons, extra-long sleeve plackets, two-ply 40S yarn construction (“for a superior nap”), boxed back pleat, double stitching at stress points, handy locker loop and nonfused collar, whatever all that may be. Even socks come with lengthy, scientific-sounding descriptions extolling their seamless closures, one-to-one fiber loops, and hand-linked yarns.

I confess I have sometimes been briefly tempted by these seductive blandishments to make a purchase, but in the end I realize that given a choice between paying $37.50 for a shirt with a superior nap and just having a nap, I will always go for the latter.

However, let me say right here that if anyone comes up with a Totally Nude Macarena Socket-Wrench Home Work-out Video with handy locker loop in a choice of colors, I am ready to place my order now.