In the Hotel 6-12

They moved me into a room on the first floor.  I like it a little better because it’s faces the court yard but I guess it used to be a storage room for years.  I mean, for years and years. So it's kinda got an unfinished vibe to it, which I kinda like, but it's been a storage room for so long, it's hard for workers to remember it's not a storage room.

Today one of the Indian house keepers told me that he put his cart in my room.  I’m exactly sure why that happend, the guy speaks enough English to tell you something like that, but not quite enough to explain something like that.  He was really nice about it when he told me so I wasn’t even mad.  He somehow made me feel good about having a housekeeper cart in my still unorganized room.  This guy could rob me at gunpoint and I would be at peace with it.  I think at the end of the conversation I thanked him, as if to say I’m happy that he had chosen my room to put the cart in, but I’m sure he just did that out of habit.  Kinda like “What’s this?  Oh, yeah, David moved to this room.  Well... Guess I’ll just push this cart in about three feet from the door and call it a day”

So, today I organised my room a bit and hung out with the cart.  Took some soaps.  Then the Indian wife come and gets the cart.  The women tend to speak less English.  Like a 20 vocabulary.  After that I thought I could get some sleep, but about 2 minutes later the Indian guy knocks and asks for the cart.  I think I thanked him for waking me at some point and went to bed.  

The Diamond Mine Paradox

The storm was suppose to miss South Michigan by a hundred miles but it hit.  Michigan weather, that’s how it goes.  A thick blanket of virgin snow covered everything.  It weighed on the tree branches and power lines.  The blanket glittered under the street lights like powdered diamonds, something so much more beautiful than the stars on a clear night.  This was not a clear night, the night was dark where the street lights were out.  The roads, under the lights and into the dark, were compacted.  A flat, steril, compacted white cotton that stays silent when being trended over... but over other piece of land, the snow softly crunches and crimps with every step.

There’s a parking lot.  It’s shared by a few hotels and restaurants, it’s stays lit by dull peach street lamps.  Here there is still power but like the rest of the town a still silence that instills peace.  There is no sound except the hum of diesel engines.  The diesel engines are machines yet they hum not robotenessly.  There is something about the tiny explosions that happen in the engine blocks that is lively.  The trucks that house them are big, meaty, utilitarian machines.  All running.  Yet they hum peacefully in the white.  

These trucks, painted white with dirty ice-snow build up around the tire wheels have green and yellow logos that uniformly placed on them.  They read “DAVEY”.  Davey Tree Service is a big outfit, it’s a national chain that deals with trees, specifically their limbs when they become a nuisance.  On this night these trucks had to come from all over, two, maybe three states away.  They fill up the parking lot and run in idle so that the engines don’t freeze.

It’s a boon for the hotels, they are all full in what is normally a slow season.  So full of workers and home owners who had lost power that they have no vacancy left.

Outside a Davey truck stands Rich Jordan, sipping on a cheap cup of coffee from a styrofoam cup.  A man in his 40s, scruffy checks with a mustache  that has grown over his lips.  A fellow employee from Indiana, his home state walks up to him smoking a cigarette.

“You get a room?!” asks the coworker.

“Shit man, they told me I had a room, I work all day and then the hotels me their sold out” Rich pulls a Winston cigarette from his pants pocket and lights it.

“Fuckin’ Sue.  You’d think she could get her fat ass up and book some God Damn rooms”

“She didn’t even need to get of her chair to do that.  All you gotta do is pick up a damn phone”

The two men exhale their cigarette smoke and under the lamp lights and in the cold air the smoke looks as solid as the snow... then it dissipates.

“Yeah, well I guess Jim is sleeping in his truck tonight”

“Yeah, I think I am too.  Fuckin’ forgot to grab my long johns.  What a time to forget those”  Rich shakes his head and pulls another drag from his cigarette.

“You going across the street?” asked Rich’s coworker, referring to the bar and grill on the otherside of the street that lines the parking lot.

“Naw, if I gotta get work all day and sleep all night in the damn truck, I better get to it”

“Alright, buddy” his coworker slaps Rich’s shoulder “don’t snore too loud, you’ll break the damn windshield”

Rich’s coworker walks off into the darkness and to the brightly lit bar across the street.  There, inside, even more Davey employees sit belly up to the bar, drinking tall domestic beers while they swear in their gruff, raspy, deep voices, talking about work stuff over the loud top 40s music blaring over the speakers.  He can see it without being there.  He’s been there many times in the past.  Too many time... all the time in the past.  But not any more, he’s been drink free for five years.  Instead he finishes his cigarette and exhales one last puff of smoke.

Rich watches the cloud dissipates underneath the parking lot street lights.  It’s cold out so he bends his knees several times to get the blood flowing.  The denim jeans are stiffer in the cold and brush up against his legs and he bends his knees.  Normally he wouldn’t feel the jeans but this time he forgot his long johns.  The denim is cold but he bends them a few more times to prolong having to have to go into the cab of the truck.  Eventually he realises he has to enter the truck.  There is no more cigarette left and no reason to keep squatting.

For a moment, Rich thinks about all the work ahead of him in the next day.  Removing tree limbs so that some other guys could then bust their asses off to restore the power lines in the surrounding area.  To the places that make him work so hard- he resents this yet he knows it’s also what gives him a paycheck.  removing tree branches, a gig he should have gotten out of years ago.  Years ago, drinking helped to make the job easier.

“Fuckin’ Sue.  She better make sure I got a room tomorrow, this is bullshit.  I’m getting old.  Too old for this shit” he thinks as he enters and lays down in the front seat of the truck, warm from the idling diesel engine.