Good morning, campers. It’s Monday at 5:45 AM on the West Coast and I feel about as much like working as you do. As a manager, however, I don’t mind making you sit up and do a little something for a couple of minutes.
It occurred to me late last week, as I sat at a desk in my lovely room at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, how many hotels I’ve stayed at in this business life over the many, many years. I thought I might tell you about a few, and then ask you for your tales of horror, pleasure and wonderment.
I remember the hotel in Morgantown, West Virginia, where the Corporation had its retreat for the assorted lifers, short-timers and tormented souls who occupied functions very much like mine in locations from Pittsburgh to what was then called Bombay. I believe the corporation owned the place, which was why they put us there. It was dank, but clean. There were two of us in a room. You’ve never truly experienced psychic discomfort until you’ve seen your business peer in his pajamas.
The “banquet” hall was a large room that smelled of industrial carpet. The scotch, however, was free. Everybody smoked back then, so everything also was redolent of dead cigarettes and cigars, and lots of them. In the room, the curtains were those little jobs you had at a summer cottage, on rings that moved back and forth over a tin pole. There was no minibar. The soap was tiny. We held our big meeting in a huge room that had nothing in it but a high stage and folding chairs. The chairman and his girlfriend, who was the head of communications, got up on the stage in matching velour jumpsuits and told us how much they valued our function. A good portion of the audience was having its first drink of the day, for breakfast.
I remember a hotel in Fresno. The bed would have provided years of study for a phrenologist. The room smelled like the one in Morgantown, only exponential. Outside, in the parking lot and down the street, huge trucks were parked, laden with sleeping truckers who didn’t want to pay the $29 for the room. They offered breakfast in the morning. Cold cereal and powdered milk.
Why was I in Fresno? I think I got tired of driving and didn’t want to risk a sleepy entry into the gigantic megamaze of San Francisco at a very late hour the night before. The TV had only three colors, red, pink and a green that will always stay with me as the color of despair. The soap was tiny.
The hotel at the airport in Sacramento, was a place that could, I believe, give you the DTs if you didn’t have them already. I slept over the covers. The towels were tiny. I don’t have to tell you about the soap.
The penthouse suite at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas! Or was it the Mirage? No, I think it was the Hilton. I wonder why I can’t remember. The bed was on a platform and the drapes were huge, both vertical and horizontal, and worked with the switch of a button near the headboard. At night, you could open them and see the entire strip all lit up like Rome, burning under Nero.
The minibar could have fed all of Caesar’s legions. There was a full kitchen and a massive plasma screen. I got lost in the bathroom for a couple of hours, and then found my way out. I have never lived in an apartment that was quite that nice. Made me feel better about losing that $647 at the tables.
Another room in Vegas is now coming back to me. No minibar. Murphy bed. Sadness and the stench of loss. Could have been the same hotel, but you know, a different floor.
A big, sumptuous room in Amsterdam somewhere! Very nice bed. Lots of curtains. Bedposts. View of a reeking canal. No internet in the room. No room service. Great bar downstairs, though, filled with very big business types, European style. Crisp. Lots of briefcases. Smoking. Big dark drinks in crystal tumblers. Had to work on the bill with them for about an hour. Lots of weird overcharges. Very Amsterdam, if you don’t mind my saying so. Of course, my feelings could be colored by the fact that I was robbed in the train station there. My advice? Don’t talk to strangers, no matter how friendly or confused they seem. But that’s another story.
The St. Regis in New York. Big, puffy bed. Lots of in-room service. Gorgeous plasma screen. Shockingly opulent amenities. They give you a butler. I have never been buttled. Still haven’t. Was sort of ashamed to ring for the butler to buttle me. Still, the availability of my very own buttler who could be summoned with the push of a button did not fail to impress me.
And then there’s my home away from home when I’m doing business in LA, the Four Seasons on Doheny. The bar is a human pageant. One night I saw Al Sharpton, Charlie Sheen and a fistfight between two agents, all in the space of an hour. Great food. Huge martinis. When I arrive, they always recognize me, greet me, say, “Welcome back!” Sure, it’s hooey. But you know how it is when you’re on the road. Everything is magnified, the good and the bad.
What do you remember?
