“I don’t agree with him on that one,” my stepmother said. “It was wrong, and I don’t think he should have done it.” Usually she took my father’s side in these discussions. Not this time.
My father owned a small motel on the South Carolina coast for 15 years or so. He sold it in the 1990s, but for years he would tell us harrowing and uproarious stories. Owning and managing a small inn is harder, I reckon, even than running a restaurant. The motel never closes. The guests, with all their strange habits and idiotic demands, never leave. There were 77 rooms. Something can go wrong at any time, day or night, and you can never fully depend on the people you hire to keep watch while you’re away.
Dad was in extremely poor health before he died in February, and he was unable to talk for long, but one memory seemed almost to give him his old strength. Four unchaperoned 18-year-olds checked into the motel. Already this was against policy, which required chaperones for anyone 21 or younger (it was advertised as a “family motel”). But the boys’ parents made the reservation and checked them in, then left them on their own. “Some time after midnight,” dad said, “they’d gotten pretty drunk and started hollering and making a racket and firing off bottle rockets.” The night manager phoned to say that guests were complaining about some crazy drunk boys screaming and threatening people.
Dad was mostly a peaceable man, but in those days he could be provoked to rage. He arrived at the motel early the next morning and stormed into the boys’ room. It reeked of alcohol and smoke and there was a sizable hole in one of the walls and ash burns on the upholstery. They were all there, asleep. He ripped the covers off their beds and told them to get out and get off the premises, they weren’t welcome there, and he’d already called the police to ensure they left without incident. “One of them wanted a refund for the two or three more days they’d paid for. I told them no, hell no, they weren’t getting a refund, now goodbye.” All this happened in 1986 or 1987, but I could see it still irritated my father to think his guests, the people who had entrusted themselves to his care, had been poorly treated.
The four boys piled their bags on the edge of the motel property and waited for a cab, but dad’s rage wasn’t spent. He approached them outside and kicked the pile of bags into the street.
In a few minutes, one of them came back into the office and said he’d left his wallet in the room. “I told him I cleaned out the room myself and his wallet wasn’t there. He said he wanted to go look for it himself, and I said hell no.” By this time a police officer had arrived and my father agreed to let the officer, but not the boy, search the room for the wallet.
“But I knew he wouldn’t find it,” he said. “It was in my pocket.”
I looked at him in shock. My stepmother groaned.
“Yessir. A couple hundred dollars in it. Credit cards too.”
After the officer emerged from the room without the wallet, an argument ensued but to no result. The four boys had nothing to do but leave. They didn’t quite leave, though, as my father remembered. They went across the street and waited for two or three hours. “I thought they were going to jump me,” he told me. “But eventually they did leave.”
What about the wallet? “I took the couple hundred dollars from it and put the money in our maintenance account, and got rid of the rest. Shredded the cards and burned it all.” He said this defiantly, as if expecting an argument. I didn’t argue, but he kept talking as if I had. “They’d torn that room up,” he said. “A couple thousand dollars in damage. But that wasn’t the worst of it. A horde of guests stormed out and said they’d never stay there again. These were people who’d been coming a long time, and they weren’t coming back.”
“That money wasn’t yours to take,” my stepmother said.
“That’s my point,” dad wheezed. “It was mine to take.”
She said they had argued about this many times before. I guess he was wrong, but I can’t help admiring him for still caring about those guests, 30 years later. The four boys must be in their fifties now. I wonder what they’d say.
