Letter

I’m staying in a hotel in downtown Chicago. I’m here because there are still holes in the walls and ceiling of my kitchen. At first, I was irritated that the contractors hadn’t finished by the agreed-upon time, but then decide to turn it into something I’ve never done; I’ll be a tourist in my own town.

I’ve lived in Chicago since 1990 but never stayed in a hotel here. Why would I? People do that sometimes for anniversaries or holidays. It’s a chance to change perspective on the familiar. To see a place you know well as if it’s brand new.

I didn’t grow up staying in hotels. Campgrounds were more my family’s speed. As soon as I had a say in it, I stopped sleeping anywhere without walls and a roof. I’ve mentioned my feelings about nature here before. So, because they weren’t part of my reality, hotels retained a fascination.

Looking out the window of my room, I realize that the intersection is one I drew before. A few years back a writing professor commissioned a large drawing for his office of this very spot. In my drawing, I’m looking north rather than west (as I am now), and I used Google Streetview freezeframes rather than my own eyes. But it’s the same place.

I chose this hotel because when I drove cab there were always picketers outside its doors. They were there the entire nine years I drove. Then, a year or two later, they disappeared. I don’t know whether the labor dispute was resolved or the union just gave up. I always wanted to know what it looked like inside.

The building is from the late 1800s. Judging by the wall fixtures and furniture, there was a remodel sometime in the early 60s which has been left to wither. Aside from cheap flatscreens and taped-to-the-wall signs, there’s not much to peg this place to 2022.

The little restaurant that serves guests breakfast just off the lobby is deserted. Occasionally, the waitress calls orders to a coworker across the empty room. One woman handles the tables, the other, room service. In an alcove decorated with faux brickwork, I see the cook darting in and out of view. Out the dusty window, through harsh winter glare, I look at Grant Park. There’s a disconnect between inside and outside. It’s as if I’m looking at today out there from a room that’s long ago.

I’m on the seventh floor. One time, I decide to take the stairs. Most hallways on the floors below are barely lit. On the third floor, the stairway ends. I walk through a pitch black hallway to reach a different way out. It’s not quite the Overlook, but there is certainly an abandoned vibe. Not many people are staying in this enormous place. The emptiness is palpable.

There’s a long history to artists living in hotels. Some of Matisse’s best pictures were done in them. Henry Miller lives exclusively in flophouses throughout Tropic of Cancer. I can see the appeal. I’ve been pretty productive here. It feels a bit like skipping school. Not that anyone checks up on me when I’m home, but this feels even more incognito.

I’d change some of the furniture, but other than that, it’s refreshing not to be surrounded by all the crap I chose and love. I’m looking forward to being in it again, but I won’t forget this room, where I felt like a stranger, in the best way possible.

[Saw a play about a bathroom tiger and stop-motion animation about a cursed house.]

I haven’t been alone on my trip west. My copilot’s been dead over forty years and he’s scary as fuck. I’m writing this in a motel room in Weatherford, Oklahoma and have driven well over three thousand miles over the past five days. Robert Moses has been along through the majority of those miles.

I’m roughly halfway through Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It’s a relentless and thorough accounting of a public official who used every trick in the book and invented many of his own to impose his will on those he came into contact with. He’s known best for building bridges and roadways and parks, but his greatest skill seemed to be leaving a trail of destruction wherever he went.

I listen to his exploits from the hills of Iowa, through the nondescript taiga of Nebraska, and into Colorado as night falls. More accounts of scorched earth follow the next morning as, outside the car window, nature is showing off by throwing one dramatic mountain in my way after another. I sit through a traffic jam that lasts a couple hours, the road glutted with skiers, as Moses is forcing the hand of mayors, governors, and the odd president to get what he wants.

He keeps riding shotgun all the way till I hit the lights of LA and tags along as I ride back east through the nonspaces of eastern California and Arizona, on to New Mexico.

I take a break from the monster every five or six hours and listen to music or silence. But it feels like he’s still in the passenger seat, waiting patiently——as he never would, were he alive——till I turn his story back on.

Even now as I sit in this motel room, I know he’s waiting. Because he knows I want to know how his story ends. Whether the author ever finds out what really drove the man, aside from some animal zeal for monopolizing power and control. Were all those bridges, roads, and parks worth the damage and pain he inflicted to realize them?

I wonder if Moses will stay in the Hertz lot when I drop off the car at Midway or get on the Orange Line and follow me home? I know he hated the subway, so maybe there’s light at the end of this tunnel.

I’m sitting in a t-shirt by a pool behind a house in LA. I like visiting other people’s houses, especially when those people are related to me. I’ve seen three of one brother’s houses and this is the first one of the other’s. House-owning has been a bone of contention between myself and others. I just don’t get why anyone would do it. Of course I’ve been very lucky with landlords, but I’m very happy to rent and have never considered the other thing. Seems like a nightmare of endless chores and responsibilities. I lived with a woman once who was very proud to own her home. For a time there was talk of us buying a house together. But I could never see the point. It was one of the reasons we broke up.

If I play my cards right, I will never even own a car again. The knowledge that, once I return from my Western sojourn, I can drop the vehicle I’ll have put over four thousand miles on and never think of it again, is immensely satisfying. The whole concept of ownership feels more and more suspect as the years pass.

I learned about Swedish Death Cleaning before leaving on my trip. It’s a thing I’ve been talking about for awhile but have never had a good name for——the idea of leaving as little mess as possible for friends and loved ones when you pass. A goal has crystallized lately of having nothing when I’m ready to go. To leave an empty room. The Swedes have branded and marketed my wish.

This is the polar opposite of what our society is geared for. Ownership is the American Dream. It’s a dream that reminds me I’m a foreigner. I wish it was as simple as becoming an ascetic. A monk in a bare cell. The trouble is I keep making things. Generating more and more crap that will have to be disposed of one way or another, sooner or later.

It’s an impossible situation. Perhaps that’s the human condition: wanting one thing but doing the opposite.

I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to own things. If I did, I’d be out of a job. It’s mostly an internal thing. I can’t shake the image of an apartment full of paintings, books, records, and worn furnishings that no one will want. Workmen hauling it all away to the landfill.

A friend and I visited an apartment like that a couple weeks ago. The dead woman’s nephew invited us to pick through her studio and take whatever we wanted. She’d made art for probably fifty years and, judging by the amount of unused supplies, planned to work for fifty more. This stuff cost her many thousand dollars but to the nephew it was just garbage to be rid of so he could put her place on the market.

At least, when my time comes, whichever relative draws the short straw won’t have to sell my house. They’ll thank me for being a lifelong renter.