Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Dyer Geoff

Author:Dyer, Geoff [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-17T20:00:00+00:00

The Despair of Art Deco

The only time I have ever seen a dead body was in South Beach, in the heart of the Art Deco district. It is possible that seeing a dead body there has had an undue influence on my view of Art Deco; but it is also possible that Art Deco has had an undue influence on my view of the dead body. The two are related, I think.

We flew to Miami from boring Nassau and got a bus to South Beach. It was a Sunday, the sidewalks were crammed with visitors, but finding a hotel was not difficult because it was a Sunday and visitors who had come for the weekend had already checked out of their hotels. We checked in at the Beachcomber, a nice-looking place on Collins in the heart of the Art Deco area. That is a pretty meaningless remark, I Know. Art Deco, after all, means nice looking, or, more exactly, not as nice as it looks. Our room at the Beachcomber, for example, did not look quite as nice as the facade of the Beachcomber but it still looked pretty nice. An Art Deco lamp shade bathed the Art Deco sheets in an amber Art Deco glow. When we drew back the curtains the Art Deco spell was broken. The window was cracked, grimy, and the surge of dusty sunlight revealed a damp patch spreading across the carpet from the bathroom wall almost to the centre of the room. Then a mouse raced across the marshy carpet and squeezed, with difficulty, under the skirting board of the cramped and mouldy bathroom. Dazed stood on a chair and, with no trace of emotion, said, “Eek! A mouse!”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said.

“You mean you’ll try to get a discount on the room?”

“Exactly.”

I went out to the ponytailed fellow at reception and asked if we could change rooms because there was a mouse in our room, in the room we were in at the moment, and we would prefer a room without a mouse or, if no other room was available—

“Welcome to the tropics,” he said. He didn’t shrug. There was no need. His voice shrugged. As it happens, we had just come from the tropics, where we had not seen a single mouse, and so I said, “This is not the tropics.” Although the mouse was not a problem for me, I went on, my girlfriend was “freaked out by it.”

“Freaked out?”

“Yes, freaked. As in ‘Eek!’ ”

“Whatever,” he said, handing me a Key to a room on the first floor. “Take a look at that one.”

It was nice, I said when I went back down, but it was not made up. Next he offered to upgrade us to a larger room, room 15, if I remember rightly. That was nice too, but somebody had been smoking in there, I explained, and it smelt smoky.

“Try 13,” he said, handing me another Key. I was beginning to wonder if any rooms were occupied. As it happens, 13 was—by a woman, French, I think, sitting on the toilet.

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