Behind the scenes.
Motels.
I wanted motels.
One type in particular.
The type where an old drunken, sun-worn lady hangs by the pool, which no one sane would enter, with her fifth gin of the morning while the fat middle-aged balding man on the second-floor balcony shouts obscenities at her and the ashes from his shortened cigar fall into the laundry cart the cleaning lady is pushing below.
The type where the ice machine rattles on the other side of the carton-thin wall, where the fluorescent light outside flickers all night and the neon VACANCY sign loses a letter every few seconds.
The type where someone three rooms down appears to be conducting business best left unexplained and you instinctively check that the deadbolt works before taking your shoes off.
The type where the room carpet is so filthy that actually, you need to wear shoes at all times.
That kind of motel.
When developing the project, I genuinely thought it would add some charm to the experience.
A touch of cliché to fit the bill.
In thirty-plus years of traveling, I have slept —or failed to sleep— in enough strange places and shared my bed with enough varieties of wildlife to consider myself reasonably adaptable.
So, what's a bug in a motel? What's a dirty carpet? Right?
In theory, no biggie.
Reality changes after a few weeks on the road.
Drive 250 miles, mostly on back roads. Get in and out of the car all day. Walk around. Talk to people. Stand in dust. Stand in heat. Stand in rain. Carry the cameras. Keep track of the rolls. Keep track of what happened, of what nearly happened and of what you were thinking while something else was happening. Then do it again tomorrow.
By evening, charm has dropped off the list of priorities.
You want a room. A decent one.
A hot shower with actual pressure. Somewhere to put the cameras down without adding another layer of dust to them. Somewhere to sort the rolls, wash a shirt in the sink, write down whatever survived the day in your head and check tomorrow’s road.
Mostly, somewhere to stop moving for a few hours.
All right, an okay room will do. Nice is perhaps asking a lot for sixty dollars. I know that.
Choosing the damn thing starts at home.
Once I have an approximate route, I break the road into days and see where each one might end. Miles are a poor measure for this project. A hundred miles on an interstate and a hundred miles on the roads I tend to take are two entirely different equations. Time works better.
Roughly half a day of driving leaves enough space to actually see things, talk to people, get lost, lose an hour, lose three, and let whatever has to happen, happen.
Some days are longer. There are places where the next thing is simply a long way from the previous thing. When that happens, I usually compensate somewhere else. A shorter day after it. I remember, Texas. Two or three nights around Big Bend to compensate for three days of pure driving. Landscape stretched to infinity. Some room in the schedule for the inevitable disappearance of the schedule.
Once the days are roughly divided, the motel towns emerge.
Some are intentional. Houston was Houston because I wanted to go to NASA. Stonewall because I wanted the rodeo. Others have no particular reason to be there. The line simply happens to reach them at about the right time. I like those.
Miami, Oklahoma found a place on the itinerary largely because I liked the idea of going to Miami, Oklahoma… What would it take to visit every Miami of the States? And there goes my mind again. Gotta pull the leash back to the itinerary at hand.
So I book every motel before leaving home. All of them.
I don't want three o'clock in the afternoon to come with another decision. Which town? How far? How much? Is that neighborhood all right? Should I stop here? Another fifty miles? That one looks decent. That one looks suspiciously decent.
Why is that one only sixty-two dollars? Why is the other one a hundred and nineteen? Why did someone write BEDBUGS!!! in capital letters?
My head produces enough questions without outsourcing additional work to Booking.com. So I deal with it beforehand.
I know there’s something vaguely absurd about sitting in Belgium trying to predict where I will want to stop on a Wednesday evening somewhere in New Mexico months later. But it gives me a mental safety net.
I also know I don't need one.
If a booking vanished, I would find another room. If there were no rooms, I would find another solution. I've solved considerably more complicated accommodation problems in my life. I simply prefer having that question closed. The room exists. The address exists.
At some point during the day, however much the rest has gone sideways, there is a known destination waiting at the other end. Everything is settled.
Now the plan can go screw itself.
The whole point of arranging the accommodation so carefully beforehand is that very little needs to remain arranged once I am there. Stop when I feel like stopping. Stay when something deserves staying for. Turn because a road looks interesting. Knowing where the bed is removes one decision from all that.
Of course, choosing the bed in advance still requires choosing the bed.
Which brings us to reviews.
I hate reviews.
Apparently we have reached a point where eating a sandwich, buying a toaster or sleeping one night somewhere requires consulting the accumulated verdict of several hundred strangers first.
And motels are where my principles become somewhat flexible. Because BEDBUGS!!! does get my attention. Then, naturally, I start wondering about the person who wrote it.
Were there really bedbugs? How many? Did she actually see one? Was it something else? Was she just furious because reception refused a discount she thought she deserved? Does she routinely use capital letters? What else has she reviewed?
And there goes five minutes of my life investigating the psychological reliability of a stranger because another stranger owns a mattress in Oklahoma.
This is why reviews drive me mad.
The rating itself interests me even less. The supposedly meaningful distinction between 7.2 and 8.1 exceeds my mathematical understanding of human disappointment.
Pictures are no more helpful.
I used to photograph professionally for clients who needed places to look good. I know what a lens, a crop, the right angle and a conveniently closed bathroom door can achieve. If the carpet isn't in the picture, I assume the carpet had a reason for staying out of the picture. And there is a limit to how much I want to know anyway.
The internet loves telling us ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO.
Usually in capitals. I don't need all I need to know before I go. That sounds exhausting. A large part of travelling is still supposed to involve finding out when you get there. I want enough information to avoid obvious stupidity. I don't want to consume the place before reaching it.
The motel needs to exist, be approximately where it is claimed to be and preferably contain no insects capable of carrying my luggage away. Beyond that, surprise remains acceptable.
Price is less philosophical. Price matters.
The original version of America. Exposed, unposed. was significantly more ambitious and significantly less intelligent.
I would buy an RV in the United States, turn part of it into a portable darkroom and travel continuously for a year.
Fifty states. Fifty weeks.
It lasted beautifully as an idea. Reality dealt with it quickly.
Logistics, insurance, maintenance, darkroom water, the vehicle itself, the cost of keeping the whole thing moving; eventually the romantic little travelling laboratory began looking like a full-time job designed specifically to prevent me from taking photographs.
The project became what it is: something done over years, in segments.
Two practical questions followed. What do I drive? Where do I sleep?
The car deserves its own story. The answer to the second question was obvious.
Motels. I wanted them anyway.
Airbnb never really attracted me for this. Too domestic. Too involved. Too much pretending, for one night, that somebody else's apartment is somehow mine.
A motel is cleaner conceptually. Arrive. Sleep. Leave.
Sixty dollars is roughly where I try to keep the average. That number moves, naturally. Some nights cost more because the market says they cost more. Miami is Miami (in Florida anyway). New Orleans is New Orleans.
Other nights I deliberately spend more because I can already see, while planning the trip, what the day will probably do to me.
A rodeo means dust. Dust on me. Dust on the cameras. Dust everywhere dust can reasonably get and several places where it cannot. After that, I want a proper shower and a clean room. Romance can resume the following night.
So, occasionally sixty becomes one hundred and thirty. At one hundred and thirty, my expectations change drastically.
My standards at sixty are pragmatic. The door should lock. The bed should be inhabitable. Water should come out of the shower in a direction generally compatible with showering.
At twice the price, I begin developing principles.
There is also an accounting system in my head that makes absolutely no business sense. What can I say? I’m me.
Imagine that, by the time the project is finished, I have spent forty-five thousand dollars on motel rooms.
Forty-five thousand dollars.
For what? A succession of shitty carpets?
I know perfectly well that this is idiotic arithmetic. Hundreds of cheap rooms do not somehow combine into one magnificent forty-five-thousand-dollar room with marble and room service.
Emotionally, I don't care. It still amounts to serious money and I would like something reasonably serious in return. A clean towel would be a start.
The one booking condition I won’t compromise on is cancellation.
I want to be able to cancel the room as late as reasonably possible. A few hours before arrival is ideal. Because I know me. And I know the road.
The motel is there to give the day an endpoint, period. If something happens and I want to stay, I stay. If I move faster than expected, I may keep going. If the entire premise of that day's itinerary turns out to have been stupid, I reserve the right to abandon it. A room I booked months earlier should hardly get a vote.
Cancellation has saved the system more than once.
It is probably why booking everything in advance works for me in the first place. I have certainty with an escape hatch.
By late afternoon, though, assuming the day has approximately survived its original shape, that abstract booking begins turning into something very real.
An address in the GPS. A shower. A bed.
I can drive a long way once my head has decided where the finish line is. Fatigue matters, obviously. Mood matters too. Some days another fifty miles feels like nothing. Some days fifteen feels like another galaxy. Still, once I can picture hot water and a bug-free mattress, resilience improves sensibly.
Enter the parking lot.
You learn things from a motel parking lot. Or think you do. I look at the cars first. Mostly battered pickups? Fine. A couple of shiny new SUVs? Encouraging.
For a while I thought that was a useful indicator until remembering that plenty of people will finance a shiny new SUV they can barely afford, even if to park it outside a crappy motel.
So much for that system. So, I look at the people. Yes, this involves judgement. Assessment, I prefer to call it. There is a difference. No value system; just a scale.
Mostly I look beyond the motel itself. The street. The neighboring businesses. How the place feels when I drive in. Whether leaving the car there with everything in it triggers an internal alarm.
The cameras matter less now than they once would have in the past.
During the wildlife years, I travelled with bags containing massive equipment. Obvious camera bags. The sort of setup that screams “hit me” from across a parking lot. No messing about with that.
Now I carry a schoolboy knapsack, a beat-up travel bag and, inevitably, some Dollar General or Walmart plastic bag containing whatever accumulated that day.
Nothing says local quite like a Walmart bag. Nobody pays much attention to me.
Reception.
Sometimes check-in happens through bulletproof glass and an intercom. At the other end of the spectrum, some motel lobbies seem to have no clear line between reception desk and family life.
I've walked into more than one with dinner reaching me before the receptionist did.
This time, curry tickles my fancy. Even before the colors on the wall, the pictured divinities and family photographs behind the desk. It smells good enough for me to forget for a minute that I am tired and that the moment before, I was just dreaming about the sub waiting on the passenger seat with a Bud can to end this very long day.
Right there, I’m wondering what it would take to get myself invited behind the counter and share a meal with the family.
Three generations seem to be running the place at once. Grandma tends reception. Grandpa is conducting a fairly serious test of the lobby sofa, eyes closed, snoring. Someone is sweeping outside. A young girl, with much gold around her neck and wrists, operates the key-card programmer while simultaneously being instructed by grandma on how to use a booking application running on a computer that may well predate her.
Her little brother is doing his homework at the end of the counter. Until the computer refuses to cooperate. Then everybody gets involved. Grandma tries again. The young girl tries. The boy looks up from his homework.
I try to help and make matters worse because somewhere in the exchange grandma appears to need my birth date, which she does not seem to understand and won’t find in the last visa page of my passport either. In all fairness, I’m not sure this is even what she asked me because I have no clue what she says. Our respective accents don’t seem to find common territory to make a deal.
In the meantime, I look around, pretending she didn’t ask anything and letting her —them— figure it out. I’m done with my day.
On the walls, the Taj Mahal, Ganesh —the multi-armed elephant divinity, and the many family portraits in various traditional garments. After some time, the colors don’t hurt the eye anymore. I even think about a picture, but that would require further discussions and explanations. Why? Who are you? Where is this going to be published? When? The camera stays in the bag.
On the counter, next to the business cards and the latest TripAdvisor trophy, the flower rangoli that welcomes guests.
The family gives up on the uncooperative computer and mom is called in to help. Hands half-covered with ingredients that remind me how hungry I am, she colors the keyboard, and finally a room is assigned to me.
Grandma is still talking.
Get the key card.
Check the room numbers. Spot yours.
Park the car.
You’re almost there.
But the great American motel is frequently much less picturesque than I hoped.
For all the personality a motel can display outside the room, the chain version inside is often built from the same kit.
White sheets. Dark fake-wood headboard. Grey vinyl or beige carpet. Microwave incorporated above a miniature fridge. HVAC unit under the window. Two queen beds despite being alone. Three pillows on each, none quite right. A desk lamp with a USB socket and one framed photograph making a timid attempt at local identity. Change Oklahoma for Louisiana, Texas for Florida, and much of the room survives untouched. Close the curtains and geography becomes theoretical.
But one night, I got exactly what I was looking for. And then some.
I spent an entire involuntary night inside somebody else's domestic catastrophe. I wanted a scene. That's a scene.
They arrived soon after me. Didn’t see them, but got surprised when freshly out of the shower, I hear the connecting room door’s lock rattle. I manage to grab a towel and wait for whatever’s going to come through the door.
Thank God, nothing.
I guess they were just checking the deadbolt as one should do. Just unusual to do it on that door. Suspicious people? Never mind.
And then it starts.
TV screaming. Them screaming over the TV. I don’t really get what they argue about. If the walls don’t isolate the noise, they do seem to protect some privacy after all. So, I get to enjoy the overhearing concerto without the subtitles. At some point —is it an hour later or two?—, it calms down. For a minute. It resumes with another tone of voice, so to speak. Only one voice now. Got it; a phone call. A call at comparable volume to settle somebody else's problems while apparently having enough of their own. For now.
Don’t ask me how it works, but I still hear the cans being opened. Psshhit. And that hissing went on at a very regular frequency. All through the night.
I lie one wall away hearing the entire operation. No sleep tonight. What am I going to do about it? Well, the question really is what is there to do about it? I came to nothing as a conclusion. So I spent my night finding comfort in the thought that if they are screwing my rest for one night, they’re mostly living a screwed life themselves. Or at least, that’s what I secretly hope. Sorry, I’m only human.
And then the next morning, I get the grand finale.
I had the whole night up to unpack, repack, redesign the packing strategy of each bag three times. Watch “silently” College football. Wash a shirt or two. Google how to bust a door open and smash people’s face open in stealth mode within nine second (spoiler alert, you can’t) and eventually countdown minutes for two and a half hours. So, I was more than ready to leave the place and hit the road at dawn.
I’m in the car. In front of my room. Staring for a minute at the yellow garbage pick-up truck on my right, knowing perfectly well it can only be theirs. Some things don’t need explaining; you just know. Multiple thoughts involving knife and tires come to mind but I manage my inner voices.
She comes out.
Of the room on my left. Why didn’t she park in front of her own room for Pete’s sake? Yes, even that irritates me at this stage.
I look straight ahead. No anger. Just blankness in my mind. She goes by. Looks through my windshield.
And that look says: “Don't you fucking dare.”
She knows I heard.
I know she knows I heard.
She knows I’m leaving.
And for one second the whole previous night is contained in a look through a windshield.
Thankfully, most nights are duller. Once the door closes, nobody asks anything of me and nothing much happens. After a day spent taking in everything around me, that has value.
That’s when I sometimes switch on the TV.
I don't have one at home. Never really did. But after a full day with local radio filling the enclosed space of the car, there are evenings when I want something I can look at without having to listen to it.
Invariably, I seem to end up with either Top Gun or the eight-hundred-and-somethingth rerun of Gunsmoke.
One evening, I cannot remember where, I was sitting on the edge of the bed watching soccer for a change, without really watching it. I had every intention of taking my shoes off. Apparently even that was too much for the level of energy left in me.
I just sat there, staring at the television like a cow watching trains go by. Nothing in my head. Simply enjoying a moment going by without having to do or think about anything. Then a fly appeared.
There is probably no need to explain why it annoyed me. It's a fly. Annoying people is the whole business model.
I grabbed my Longhorns baseball cap and went after it. What happened next was somewhat familiar. Instincts kicking in. Slow down. Watch it. Remember it can see you coming from almost anywhere. Wait until it lands. Don't rush the shot.
For somebody who had been too tired to remove his shoes thirty seconds earlier, the adrenaline had returned quickly.
Then it landed on the television screen. There. Focus. Easy. One shot. And I didn't miss.
The shot, I mean.
The fly was already enjoying itself on the window. The television hadn't been so lucky though.
Let's just say the screen was substantially thinner than I had assumed. I will, however, use this opportunity to commend the University of Texas for the structural integrity of its merchandise.
So now I had a smashed television in a cheap motel room. That's about as far as rock'n'roll gets for me that day. I sat there looking at it for a moment and made a decision.
I was going to be an asshole.
I walked back to reception and told the guy, with just enough irritation, that for the price of the room I could at least expect a television that worked. I didn't push it. Didn't ask for anything. Didn't make a scene. “I don't care anyway. I'm not here to watch TV.” And off I went, looking sufficiently busy to suggest that the matter was beneath me.
Weeks later, back home, I checked the credit-card statement. Nothing. No television.
That room I remember. Most distinguish themselves less dramatically. After enough nights, you start recognizing types.
The room where the door needs a shoulder.
The AC unit with two settings: Arctic expedition and deathly silence.
The recently renovated room where investigation reveals that the renovation consisted of taps, two lamps and a determined quantity of grey vinyl flooring.
The room that smells suspiciously fragrant. Sometimes, I do prefer dirty. You know what you’re dealing with. And at least it’s honest.
The machine making ice at a volume normally associated with roadworks.
The curtain that closes almost fully.
The bathroom fan you switch off after ten seconds because steam became the lesser problem.
All this becomes familiar. Floor level took longer.
I had never given much thought to whether I wanted the ground floor or the second floor until someone behind a reception desk asked me.
Second floor, I said. I mean, why not? The view on the highway must be grand from up there.
Halfway up the stairs with my bags, I discovered why not. Apparently my equipment had become considerably heavier since the car. Or I had become older.
Either explanation worked. Ground floor next time. Good decision.
Until the shower from the room above began evacuating through my ceiling. Not dripping. Flowing. The floor became a pool. I considered complaining. Then I considered what complaining would achieve. At best they would give me another room. I had already unpacked; no way. So I avoided that part of the floor, went to bed and voilà. Who cares? It's a motel.
Which brings us to towels.
One day in Florida, I watched Mae wipe coffee from the floor after a cup incident. She used one of the white bathroom towels.
I must have looked at her in a way that communicated some concern because she immediately said: “Oh don't worry, they bleach the hell out of 'em!”
I had never thought about it. Then, unfortunately, I did.
Of course they bleach the hell out of them. Hundreds of rooms. Towels used for all the normal things towels are used for and, clearly, several things towels were never designed to experience. Collected. Washed. Dried. Folded. Put back into circulation before the next stranger arrives.
Once you start thinking about hotel towels as objects with a history, it's probably best to stop thinking altogether.
From that day, I paid slightly more attention. In fairness, only once so far has a towel actually smelled strongly of bleach. Not quite the aroma you're looking for immediately after a shower.
Mae's remark also opened a door I would have preferred closed.
What else gets cleaned that aggressively (and more importantly what doesn't)? Sheets, presumably. Pillowcases. Towels. Then what? The bedspread? The remote? The switches? The handle of the hairdryer nobody uses (well, for obvious reasons if you know me, I don’t care about that one)? The coffee maker that only makes steam starts looking suspicious. And the carpet has already pleaded the Fifth.
There are subjects where knowledge improves life. Motel-room hygiene may have limits.
Whatever.
After enough rooms, you develop rituals.
The cameras come first. Table if there is one. Dresser if there isn't. They go down before anything else does.
Then come passport, wallet and car key. Same place every night. Those three things don't get to participate in the mess that follows.
Clothes get thrown over the chair. Shoes come off. Whatever food has survived the day lands wherever there is space. Within twenty minutes, half the room looks as though I have occupied it for a week. Then the shower. Everything else can wait. Whatever grime the day has put on me goes down the drain and I start feeling human again.
Clean, I can start dealing with the equipment. The cameras get their turn. Dust off the bodies, lenses checked, whatever needs attention gets it while I still have enough energy to care.
Exposed rolls get sorted and numbered. Fresh rolls get into the knapsack in the order I want them the next day. I don't want to be digging around trying to remember where I put the Tri-X when something starts happening.
Then come the notes.
Usually, they spread across the bed. Scraps, words, half-sentences come out while I still understand the fragments I wrote or remember the thought that produced them. A word written three hours earlier has sometimes already lost the context that made it obvious at the time. Dates get added. Pieces get sorted, generally while eating whatever sandwich passed for dinner.
By now the anonymous motel room has become my territory for a few hours. Part of it looks like a teenager has been living there unsupervised. Part of it could pass a military inspection.
The chair is buried under clothes. Towels are wherever I dropped them. Shoes, somewhere between the door and the bathroom. Food packaging accumulates in and around the bin (I’m a terrible shooter). The bed may disappear under papers. But the cameras are lined up. The film is sorted. Passport, wallet and car key are exactly where they belong. The bags are ready.
One last look at tomorrow's road. Then, finally, a few purposeless hours.
Next morning: breakfast.
“Breakfast included” has never persuaded me to book a motel. Most mornings I am already gone before breakfast even exists. The good light doesn’t wait.
On mornings when I am still there, however, the word breakfast proves elastic.
At one of the cheapest motels I've stayed in, I watched the girl at reception take a couple of slices of industrial bread, put them into plastic bags and store them in the fridge for later.
On the counter sat a handful of cereal portions for the three guests likely to show up, some milk that could probably have made better use of the fridge space occupied by the bread, and a coffee pot containing something lukewarm and brownish.
Breakfast.
Define breakfast.
And yet the girl was lovely. Cheerful with everyone. Helpful. Doing what she could with whatever she had to work with.
Which made the whole thing harder to mock.
The television is usually on too. The safest possible television. Nothing likely to make one stranger turn to another and begin a sentence with, “You know what the problem with this country is...”
Nobody needs Facebook comments live over breakfast.
I have always wondered whether someone consciously chooses the channel with this in mind. Maybe not. Keep the waffles coming and stay away from politics.
Then the room empties again. People disappear into cars. The parking lot wakes properly. Housekeeping carts appear. Doors open. Doors close.
By then I am usually packing anyway.
Everything that turned this anonymous room into mine for one night goes back into bags. Cameras. Film. Clothes. Bits of paper. Whatever I bought yesterday and shoved into the Walmart bag usually ends down in the bin.
Check the bathroom. Check the sockets. Check the bed. Check the floor. Leave the key card somewhere visible. Open the curtains to declare you’re out. Door closes.
Within a short time somebody comes in and removes whatever evidence remains that I was there. Fresh towels. Bed made. Bin emptied. Room reset. Another stranger arrives.
I move to the next one. After enough motels, they begin collapsing into one another. I remember some immediately. Usually because something went wrong.
The ceiling shower. The strange smell. The impossible bed. A receptionist. A parking lot I didn't like. A towel that smelled like a municipal swimming pool.
The perfectly functional rooms disappear much faster. And that may be the ultimate experience.
I started the project wanting the motel from the films. Neon. Characters. A little danger. A carpet with a criminal record. I wanted Americana. I wanted stories.
Today, after a long day on the road, the perfect motel is clean, quiet, anonymous, has good water pressure, working air conditioning and absolutely nothing worth telling anyone about the following morning.
The road should give me the stories.
The motel can keep its mouth shut.
