Waylaid

by Ed Lin

  The main reason why my father had wanted the hotel was because he wanted to have his own business. Like all his classmates from Taiwan who had come to the U.S., he had been passed over for promotions at the civil-engineering company he’d been working at. His boss had told him his English wasn’t good enough, but after a few months with some text books, my father found out that none of the engineers, including his boss, really knew proper spelling or grammar. He ended up making a lot of corrections in the firm’s reports. My mother told me they’d given him a bottle of champagne when he left, which he poured out in the street before throwing the bottle into the gutter.

  After we moved into the hotel, my father was usually covered with rust or flakes of rotted wood. There were burn holes in his pants, holes that corresponded to scars on his skin. He’d slip into the crawlspace because of a leaking pipe or a sinking bathroom floor and solder and nail away, surfacing only for food before heading back down. I would join him down there sometimes, but my main job was handling the front desk. My father never wanted to deal with customers. Unlike my mother, he was embarrassed about his English, though his was much better than hers.

  When the hotel filled up in the summer, we could just lock the office door and put the closed sign in the window. When the fall arrived, we had to scrounge for business. We needed to keep the office open and unlocked to get all the business we could.

  The bulk of the business during those times was the three-hour rental.

  On the weekends, during the school year, my mother would lay down a folded comforter behind the counter for me and set an alarm clock by the bell. She would leave the office light on, telling me to turn my head and close my eyes, and it wouldn’t keep me up. Late nights were prime john time, and if the light was out, they might think the place was closed and go to another hotel or use our parking space. My mother was too tired from watching the office the whole week while I was in school and needed to catch up on sleep on the weekends. As a woman, I’m sure she also didn’t relish the thought of being in the same room as the cock side of the money equation.

  Sometimes I just couldn’t sleep, even if no one came all night. When that happened, I would read the letters sections of sex magazines, which I could easily hide in the folds of the comforter when I heard a customer coming in.

  I first saw the letters in an issue of Hustler I found cleaning rooms when I was about seven. When I was with my mom, she’d throw out all the porn right off the bat, making sure to rip it up in front of me. But that time I found it under the bed and shoved it under my shirt before she saw.

  That magazine had an article on how to find hotels that charged hourly rates. It recommended going to non-chain hotels close to train stations. Or you could pick up hookers by the train stations late at night and they would know which hotels to go to. A fuckhole wasn’t only a cunt; it was also a place to hole up and fuck. Like our hotel. After reading the article, I wondered how much it would cost for me to get laid with a hooker, and how much money was in the cash drawer.

  When I was 10, a john I was renting a room to told me he was picking up girls by the New Jersey Transit station in nearby Asbury Park. The prostitues wore short skirts and long coats and carried open umbrellas.

  After all my years at the hotel, I’d never seen any hookers — not their full bodies anyway. They wouldn’t prance around the parking lot afterwards, trying to pick up more tricks. The most I ever saw was a dim face between the dashboard and sunblind of a car pulled up outside the office. Sometimes they’d be smoking or fixing their makeup.

  The john told me they were $20, $5 extra to fuck them up the ass and $5 more for swallowing. So a room and a no-frills prostitute were $40 in total.

  “It’s worth it to get laid, isn’t it?” he asked, as he filled out a registration card, moving as fast as he could make up the information. He was wearing a dark brown corduroy jacket, a grimy button-down shirt, and dark slacks. Silvery hair cascaded into the gap between his lobster-red neck and his loosened collar. He looked like he was about 50.

  “Are they pretty?” I asked. He laughed.

  “I’m not looking for Miss America, but they’re pretty for black girls. The white ones are kind of ugly.”

  “How good is it?”

  “How good is it? It’s great. It’s like following through on a good clean punch.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “What does it feel like…” He was smiling. “Look, kid, just give me the goddamn key.”

  I fell asleep once with the fifth anniversary issue of Celebrity Skin over my face and didn’t hear the alarm go off. It was a lot softer than a BING! The clock alarm went on for so long, my mother got up and came into the office. I hadn’t fully awoken when she swatted my face with the rolled-up magazine.

  “You go to hell, you look at these pictures!” she screamed, kicking at my shoulders as I scrambled to my feet.

  “I was just reading the letters!”

  “You go to hell! Where did you get this from!?!?”

  “I got it from cleaning the hotel rooms!”

  “You don’t touch this anymore! You go to hell!” She never said anything more about porn mags, and I continued to add to my collection. But from that day on, I would bring only my school books to read at night, leaving the magazines in my room. That way, she wouldn’t have to see it.

  I once asked my mother why anybody would want to rent one of our hotel rooms for just three hours.

  “They tire from driving,” she said. “They want lie down and take little nap.” We were distant enough to let that howling wind of a lie exist between our worlds. And it let me know it was okay to lie to her, too.

  Late Friday was big for hourly rentals. The husbands could always say they were trying to finish up some work at the office before the weekend.

  At one in the morning, there were about a dozen rooms that had to be cleaned to be rented out again.

  I yawned and rubbed my eyes before picking up a plastic bucket in each hand and followed my mother out the office door. She held a bundle of folded sheets, pillowcases, and towels. My mother had a mop of straight black hair that dangled down to her shoulders. As we walked along the curved part of the U-shaped driveway, the light from the outdoor spotlights reflected in the smooth crescents of her hair.

  When we got to 11A, my mother knocked on the door to make sure the occupants had left.

  Once upon a time, 11A had been 13, but then it had been changed so the rooms on the odd-numbered wing went from 11 to 11A and then to 15. Nobody wanted to rent a room 13. Like they wouldn’t get lucky or something if they did.

  My mother opened the lock with the master key and turned to look at me.

  “You have everything, right?” she asked. I nodded and shook the buckets.

  One of my buckets held spray bottles filled with bathroom cleaners, air fresheners, and rug cleaners. A worn toilet-bowl brush dangled over the side of the bucket, the bristles pressed flat against the battered wire rim.

  My other bucket was packed with soap, rolls of toilet paper, and sheaves of sanitary labels. The soap bars were slender white rectangles embossed with “THANK YOU” on one side, like we were thanking our customers for taking a shower and trying to be clean. The soap lathered up about as well as a Lego block and would break into pieces if you tried to use it more than once. Our toilet paper was so thin, you’d feed fingers up your ass.

  Each hotel room was basically the same except that some of the black-and-white televisions had rabbit-ear antennas and some had inverted wire coat hangers. They all had a simple desk, a night stand, and a chair made of pressed wood. Push on any of the furniture the wrong way and it would splinter apart. There were burn marks on the desks and night stands, even though each room had chipped-glass ashtrays. The two windows had shades as heavy as burlap. When they were closed, they blocked out sound and light and the view of the parking lot.

  The beds consisted of flimsy metal frames and creaky box springs with broken slats of wood topped with
a doughy mattress. Two limp pillows slouched against the pressed-wood headboard. Some of the headboards had stickers on them with instructions on how to operate the vibrating motor for a quarter, but the motion devices had been ripped out and thrown away long before we’d owned the place. The wall-to-wall carpeting looked like every marching band in the country had dragged flour sacks of grime across it. Every color in the carpet had been corrupted into a different shade of dark green.

  The bathroom tile wasn’t much better, but at least we provided soap and clean towels. We weren’t classy enough to have vials of shampoo because we ordered from the economy section of our supplier catalog. Only the standard and luxury sections had shampoo.

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub and scrubbed at the gunk in the shower with the toilet brush, shaking a can of some no-name imitation of Ajax so that it snowed into the scummy tub. I scrubbed again.

  I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was straight like my mother’s, but about twice as thick. It stuck out sideways at odd angles like clumps of crab grass. My eyes were bloodshot and my face looked old and tired.

  I finished with the toilet and slipped a paper label around the folded rim and seat cover. I shook the toilet brush into the sink, then scrubbed it against the edges of the sink and the faucet handles.

  My mother had been stripping the sheets off the bed. When she stopped, I turned to see what was the matter. She was looking at a dark spot on the mattress and frowning.

  “We have to flip this one,” she said, nodding her head towards the stain in the other lower corner. I pulled at the seam of the fabric until I could get a good hold on the thick, mushy mattress, then helped her wrestle it off of the crooked bed frame. Most of the mattresses and bed frames were from a demolition company that would strip everything out of a house before pulverizing it.

  Soon the mattress was turned upside down and pushed back into place. There were dark brown stains — all near the same area as the wet one — on this side of the mattress, too. Some were oval-shaped, some looked like warped coffee-cup stains, and others looked like little amoebae with several pseudopodia. They were dry, though, and that was all that was important. My mother unfurled the new sheets and threw them on top.

  The wet comestains were now on the underside of the mattress.

  I drew an X on June 1 in green magic marker. Another day over. Two more weeks until school was finished. The calendar was stuck on my wall with a plastic green pushpin. Each month featured a different field of flowers with, “THANK YOU, Amboy Linen Services Inc.,” printed in off-white across the bottom of the picture. Tulips in April. Roses in November. June had daffodils.

  A calendar I kept in my Erector set box also had daffodils for June, but they were strewn across the stomach of a naked brunette, her legs spread and ending in two spiked heels that looked like they would snap in two if she tried standing. Luckily, she was lying down in the back seat of a Cadillac on what looked like a really sunny day. I lay back in my bed and drew my knees up. I balanced the centerfold calendar against my thighs and dropped both hands under the waistband of my briefs.

  I caressed, kneaded, and pulled. I could feel some tautness in the skin, but I could tell I wouldn’t be able to come this time. As soon as that thought entered my mind, the stiffness melted away, leaving my cock small and limp. I could keep rubbing and stroking, but it wouldn’t do any good. Once, I was so desperate and had tugged so hard, that it started bleeding, leaving me with a chain of tiny scabs on my cock for a week.

  Sometimes it was easier to come if I used a picture from the hard-core magazines, which were printed on heavy stock. Those girls liked it when you came in their mouths or on their tits. But they didn’t look very pretty, not as pretty as Playboy or Penthouse girls. They had tiny scars on their necks or chests and lines around their wide-open mouths and eyes. Acne on their body. The soft-core magazines had better looking girls — with makeup, pretty smiles, painted nails — but they wouldn’t do too much outside of posing. They wouldn’t even finger themselves.

  It was important to jerk off. Vincent told me you had to jerk off before every date because if you didn’t, you would come early and the girl would get pissed off.

  That was bad. I saw enough ads for stay-hard creams to know that coming early was embarrassing, even worse than not being able to get it up, since if you couldn’t get hard, the girl wasn’t sexy or wasn’t doing enough. I was never limp when I saw a centerfold.

  Jerking off helped build up dick control. If you were good, you could ball about a half hour. Then if she was sexy enough, you could get hard again a few minutes later. How many times did the johns get to come in three hours?

  I wanted to get good at masturbating, but I could only do it about three or four times a week at most. I kept a pack of towlettes and Burger King napkins under my bed.

  There would be nothing to clean up today, though. The skin felt a little raw, so I withdrew my hands and turned on my side, the centerfold calendar slipping off the bed.

  A tiny rattling sound at the ledge by my window caught my attention. It was the radiometer, a solar toy I’d bought on my fourth-grade class field trip to Thomas Edison’s lab. Everything in the lab had been preserved exactly the way he’d left it when he died. A giant dried-out elephant ear hung from one of the lab’s walls. It looked like a fun place, one where you could make something new instead of just fixing broken things again and again. It didn’t look anything like my father’s basement workshop. The gift shop had been right next to the lab, and I’d used eight quarters I’d slipped from the soda machine’s change box to buy the radiometer.

  The toy was made up of four diamond-shaped panels suspended on a wire and looked like a miniature weather vane sealed in a glass bulb. One side of each panel was painted white, and the other side was painted black. When sunlight hit it, the device spun because the light reflected off the white side of the panel and was absorbed by the black side. The black surface warmed up more than the white one, and since gas molecules recoil faster from the hot surface, the vane would spin. The brighter the light, the faster it would go. In the early mornings, the toy would turn slowly, shakily. By the early afternoon, it spun furiously, making tick-tick-tick sounds as the radial vector of the axis grew and the toy scraped against the insides of the glass bulb.

  I’d wanted a radiometer ever since seeing a picture of one in my science textbook. I liked reading that book, which had a solar eclipse on the cover, because it explained things. Why amputated frog legs jumped when hooked up to a battery. How a prism broke up white light into colors. Best of all were the chapters on the planets. Looking at the picture of the earth rising from the moon in the glossy-pictures section made me want to shoot up into space. I wanted to be an astronaut so bad, I sent away for some freeze-dried ice cream so I would know what the food was like. I sent a $20 bill from the cash register to mail order five rations, but I never got anything.

  I didn’t want to be anything else. Not a policeman, not a fireman. I wanted to go out into orbit. I figured that by the time I was old enough to join NASA, we’d probably already have space travel.

  Being out there, it would always be night, there’d be beautiful lights all around, and I would know the peace and serenity of heaven. But my dreams of floating weightless were always interrupted by the BING! BING! BING! That little bell going off put your life on hold. You heard it and you hopped to it. It didn’t matter if you were eating, sleeping, reading, or shitting. “BING!” and you’d open that door and smile and say, “Can I help you?”

  Then I realized that here I was thinking about what I was going to do when I was all grown-up, and I hadn’t even fucked anybody yet.

  I was one of the smartest kids in school because I was forced to grow up in a business environment. I made change. I read the newspapers in the office, and when I finished those, there was nothing else to read but my science or my literature textbooks. I also handled credit-card transactions, which were a pain.

  First, I had to
look up the card number in a booklet issued monthly to make sure it wasn’t reported stolen or missing. The booklet was about a quarter of an inch thick with pages as thin as onion skins. Then I had to call in the card information and the transaction fee. The operator would read a 10-digit authorization number, which I had to write on the slip. I never had to deal with a stolen card, but a lot of cards were rejected for nonpayment. I had to tell people I couldn’t rent rooms to them as I tore the slips up in their faces. It was a good thing that I was a fairly big kid.

  Other kids looked up to me because I could put on my front-desk demeanor and assert authority. Also, I was five feet eight inches and 120 pounds in seventh grade. I couldn’t stay after school for stuff like spelling bees or wrestling practice, though. My mother would be tired from watching the office the whole day, and I would have to take over for her. Anything else I wanted to do I had to get done during school hours.

  I had friends in school, but a lot of kids were nice to me because they thought I could get them a room to party in. I’d get invited to go drinking in the woods, but there was no way I could go. I had to stay in on weekend nights to meet johns and clean their rooms after they checked out. Besides, my parents wouldn’t want me out drinking.