I Haven’t Slept in my own bed for more than a month now. For two weeks, I spent all my nights in hotel rooms as I traveled the country hawking my new book. The rest of the time my wife and I have been residents of the guest room in my parents’ home, because we are transitioning slowly and laboriously from our old apartment in Brooklyn Heights to our new apartment in Manhattan.
We have squeezed ourselves–overweight me and my trim seven-months-pregnant wife–onto a small Murphy bed that could be the setting for a pretty hilarious screwball comedy scene. My parents are wonderful hosts who have made us feel entirely at home. But alas, their narrow bed leaves more than a little to be desired in the comfort department. Indeed, I am sure my patriotic parents would not object to my inviting our American interrogators to spend a night on their Murphy bed so that our nation’s military could acquaint itself with an innovative way of compelling Saddam Hussein to give up all his secrets.
Our own mattress, wrapped in plastic to protect it from lead-paint dust from walls that had not been scraped down for 75 years, awaits our arrival somewhere inside a rabbit-warren of boxes and upside-down furniture at our new place. I miss our regular mattress, of course, but I have to confess I miss the hotel beds that I slept in for two weeks even more.
Hotels are not, for the most part, my cup of tea. Some of the most depressing days and nights of my life have been spent in hotel rooms. They can be among the weirdest places on earth. You arrive, you check in, you tip somebody several dollars for simply doing his job rolling a cart down a hallway, he closes the door behind him and you are–nowhere.
You are rootless, placeless, connection-less. You can’t find a comfortable place to sit–the chairs don’t really seem made for that purpose–so you lie down on the bed in the middle of the day. (Which is never a good idea for one’s spirits.) You could go to the fitness center or the pool, but inevitably you’ve forgotten your sweat socks or your bathing suit.
So you turn on the television, which takes you instantly to coming attractions for the movies available on the hotel’s closed-circuit channel. So you watch them, over and over, progressively hypnotized, wondering if you should take a chance on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Then you see it costs $11.99 plus tax to take that chance, and you disgustedly refuse.
You’re hungry, so you call room service; but they tell you they are backed up and it will take an hour for your order to arrive. And even though you’ve asked for a salad and a Diet Coke, it will still cost the same $33.72 it would have if you had ordered a steak, crème brûlée, and coffee. So you say no, and then–what? Then nothing.
The privacy may seem nirvana-like to some people, but to me it’s more like purgatory. At least it was until this past trip, when my feelings about hotel rooms changed. All I really noticed was how amazingly comfortable and large the beds were by comparison with my parents’ Murphy bed.
In hotels from Houston to Dallas, Los Angeles to Atlanta, the pillows were soft and plentiful, the mattresses thickly padded, the sheets crisp. My parents’ guest room overlooks the astonishingly noisy Lexington Avenue–down which trucks happily bounce along at 3 o’clock in the morning as though they were gymnasts on trampolines. But these hotel rooms were profoundly quiet. My parents’ guest room has a bright and sunny eastern exposure, and at 6:30 A.M. it’s lit up like the Las Vegas Strip. In the hotels where I stayed, blackout curtains kept my room plunged in blessed darkness until the wake-up call.
Indeed, because my generous publisher was picking up the tab, even for room service, somehow that $33.72 charge seemed far less onerous than it might have otherwise. So it was a joy and a pleasure to spend so many days in the very places where I have found myself so frequently depressed.
The best of all was the hotel in Los Angeles. It was ritzy and fashionable, and a bunch of celebrities were staying there because it was Oscar weekend. But mostly what made it my favorite was the presence of another person in my room.
That was my wife, who met me in Los Angeles to spend one of our last peaceful weekends away before the birth of our first child in June. And the best thing of all was that we were able to spend a few nights together without either one of us falling off the mattress onto the floor.
–John Podhoretz
