BlackNotBlack.com

Hotel Yang, Part 1

One thing about traveling is that, unless you’re rich and stay at 5-star hotels everywhere you go, improvisation is needed. Over the years I’ve slept in more hotels than I can count, and while those on the yin side of the balance—the Rihga Royal in New York City, the Meridien in St. Maarten, and la Bobadilla in the south of Spain—have been excellent, those on the yang side have been horrific. El Salvador, in particular, has been the site of many memorable incidents in hotel history. The country is, I always like to say, the world capital of everything that is fucked-up. Which means, of course, that I'm drawn to it à la moth to flame. On these trips—ten to date—the one guarantee is that nothing will go quite according to plan.

A few years ago at a budget hotel in San Salvador—optimistically called the Happy House—I checked into my first-floor room and noticed a hole in the wall. Hard to miss, really. It was rectangular, maybe two feet wide by a foot and a half high, and easily large enough for various forms of Central American fauna—including humans—to crawl through. I was tired, and not really up to switching rooms, simply because in Central America these kinds of glitches usually require a debater’s persuasiveness and superhuman bartering skills to overcome, but I asked myself: What are the odds a passing murderer will enter my room and gut me while I’m sleeping? Since I’d already met a wandering murderer on those same streets during an earlier trip, I decided the odds were slightly better than busting in blackjack by hitting a soft fifteen. Which is to say, pretty good.

When I returned to the desk the clerk saw me coming and looked nonplussed, at best. He knew I could only be out there to complain about something and had clearly decided long ago that gringos were just impossible to please. His disinterest was so palpable, and was so plainly the result of having dealt with innumerable prima donnas in his day, that if I had been guesting on the Happy House sitcom this is the point at which snickers would have begun swelling on the laugh track as the audience anticipated the punchline of a running gag. His tagline response to my complaint might have been something like: “Ay chihuahua! What do you think this is, the Ritz?”

But I explained with an aplomb equal to his that there was a real problem with the room, not just some roach carcasses or a broken sanitary seal on the toilet, rather something muy serio that required official intervention. Reluctantly, he followed me and I indicated the room with a conjurer’s wave. His reaction was the only honest-to-God double-take I’ve ever seen. His gaze passed unseeing over the hole and came to rest on me with an expression like “And?” Then his head whipped back so fast I thought his neck muscles were rubberized. He cried out, “Ay dios, alguien ha robado el acondicionador.”

Oh God, someone has stolen the air conditioner.

Seems some enterprising soul had walked up to the hotel and pried it right out of the wall. The audacity of such an act is matched only by its ingenuity. But necessity is, after all, the mother of invention, and fifteen minutes of Salvadoran heat is probably enough to push anyone to the brink of air conditioner theft. I forged a love/hate relationship with the Happy House that day, and I sleep there every time I go back to San Salvador. This beloved hotel features in an even stranger story—one involving dogs and the same jaded clerk—but I’ll save that for part two. However, the hole in the wall bit does bring to mind another favorite hotel with strange architectural features, this one in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The hotel is called the Okhtinskaya-Victoria and is situated on the Neva River close to the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge and the Smolny Cathedral. Never have I passed the night at a place that seemed so apt a setting for a horror movie massacre. I could only surmise it was haunted by Cold War ghosts, like a Soviet version of Stephen King’s Overlook from the Shining. It sometimes seemed as if there were no guests, so eerily empty was this giant structure, with its often deserted desk, always vacant dining room, and hallways that seemed to recede into the distance like in a zoom take from Vertigo. The guests I did see stared at me as if I’d escaped from an exhibit at the Leningrad Zoo. For this I don’t blame them—sometimes I look in the mirror and think the same thing.

Perhaps the eeriest feature of the Okhtinskaya was its rooms, which contained wall-mounted radios that I believe were tuned to interdimensional frequencies. These devices, which looked like concept radios made for a 1950 “Designing for the Future” expo, broadcast only sibilant voices, yet so faintly as to be at the very furthest edge of human perception. Not once did a note of music issue from these things, nor news broadcasts, nor anything that could be construed as a commercial—just bizarre Lovecraftian whispers, unchanged no matter if buttons were pushed or the dial was spun. And though the voices formed phrases that seemed at least superficially Russian, they never came through clear enough for me to be sure.

The ingredients were ripe for my disappearance from the face of the Earth. Far away country with an impenetrable bureaucracy? Check. Last minute alteration to itinerary that renders my exact whereabouts a mystery? Check. Empty hotel with few potential witnesses to my abduction? Double-check. And lastly, bad karma from eating a bunny rabbit at dinner? Check-o-lutely. Luckily, I’ve learned at times like this to rein back my (perhaps overactive) imagination by reminding myself that I am a mere insignificance, as value is generally calculated, and if I were rendered to my base elements I’d sell on eBay for three fiddy—before shipping.

Yes!

It’s liberating to be unimportant. And in this case it meant I was safe to continue my travels and stay in even more dodgy hotels, some of which I'll discuss in a later post.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 3:33 PM