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.
