Prisms by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2022-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

THE MOTEL BUSINESS

Michael Marshall Smith

I did not mean to get into the motel business. It came about when I was thirty-two because I got divorced and my ex-wife kept the house and after a while I realized I was hemorrhaging money on by-the-week rooms and so I put most of what I had left into a ramshackle property isolated on a bluff above the ocean a couple miles north of Santa Cruz. It was small, old-fashioned, L-shaped, and had once been a popular destination but become less successful after bigger and far nicer hotels were built in town and so it was eventually abandoned for several years. At the time I was semi-regularly drinking in the same bar as someone on the town council and he assured me that if I bought the place and vaguely implied I would be running it as a motel but in fact turned it into a private residence nobody on the zoning commission would care. Soon after I completed the purchase he lost his seat on account of complicated long-term financial wrong-doings and it turned out he was wrong about that—and other things, including the idea that his wife would continue to turn a blind eye to his relentless philandering—but by then I was in escrow and it was too late to back out and so I wound up owning a property in which stray dogs would not voluntarily abide and yet which had to be inhabited as a motel or not at all. I was un-happy about this but I was unhappy about pretty much everything in my life at that point so the situation didn’t seem remarkable. I was stuck. I knew that. Caught between where I’d been and where I was going. I had no idea where that might be. So I just kept on.

I had a little money left after I’d taken ownership, cash I’d intended to spend on turning the place into a spacious and comfortable place for me to live. Instead it went on repairs and some modifications and bringing the place up to code. I paid a contractor to fix the parts I knew would be futile or dangerous for me to attempt but did the rest of the work myself, including rewiring. I learned as I went along. I became that guy. After a while I found I enjoyed the process, or at least that it was fairly successful in distracting me from the well-worn tracks of disillusion and impotent rage that my mind was prone to run around. My budget was small and so I made a virtue out of necessity, scouring yard sales and thrift stores and even using materials and furniture that people had left out on the street. I bought a bunch of old clock radios, put one in each room. I found a cache of Bakelite bedside lamps. I tore up the carpets and rough-sanded the floors. Each room ended up a different color, based on what paint I could buy cheap that day.

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