Love and Marriage and… Blood?
Late one night in the winter of 2000, I was threatened to be shot in the face by a motel front desk clerk in Lake Tahoe. It was surprising because all I asked them was, “Do you have a room for tonight?” Their response, through a small crack in the sliding window separating them from unsuspecting would-be guests desperate for shuteye: “I have a large rifle here. And I will fucking shoot you in the fucking face. Get the fuck out of here. Now.”
That was the strangest interaction I’ve had with a hotel employee until last night.
My girlfriend, Heather, and I had traveled to Cleveland from Chicago to spend the weekend with her parents who were in town from Minneapolis to visit some of her dad’s family and the boarding school he attended as a malleable young man. Heather and I arrived Friday night, her parents would pick us up from our hotel the following morning where we’d head out to the boarding school and enjoy stories of her dad’s formative days before the four of us checked into another hotel. Since it was just one quick night, Heather booked us the cheapest, easiest room she could find, a Ramada by Wyndham not far from the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
Our Lyft driver was a slick-looking young guy with perfectly coiffed hair, a car in pristine condition, and a radio tuned to the sexiest slow jams of the mid-2000s. (Who among us doesn’t miss hearing Ne-Yo at every turn?) I still can’t decide if the driver was really committed to his job with a sense of pride so robust it’s often reserved for parody of patriotic Americans or if he was planning on hitting up Cleveland’s hottest clubs once he earned his nut for the night. I mean, the dude was wearing a tailored blazer. Either way, it was a great ride. Five stars, 20 percent tip.
We arrived at a Wyndham eight minutes later. We went to check in. The young woman at the front desk couldn’t find our reservation number. Heather passed her analogue day-planner across the desk to show the woman our reservation number.
“You’re staying at a Ramada. I’m sorry, you’re at the wrong hotel,” the clerk said.
“You can tell that by the reservation number?”
“You have ‘Ramada’ written here.”
“Isn’t this a Ramada?”
“It’s a Wyndham. Ramada Wyndham is, like, a sister property. It’s, mmmm, maybe ten minutes away.”
“Can we walk there?”
“You don’t have a car!?”
“We took a Lyft.”
The young clerk looked worried for a second. “It’s about a ten-minute drive.”
It was late, I was still pretty keyed up from an annoying experience flying in on United, so we opted to grab a drink at the wrong hotel’s bar. Good thing, too, because I didn’t know it, but I was going to require liquid patience for the navigational hellstorm ahead. “We’ll charge it to the room,” I joked to the clerk who laughed, as did Heather. And I was proud of my stupid dad joke going over so well. Over the drink, Heather apologized for the mix up. I meant it when I said, “It’s okay! It happens. It’s an adventure. What else do we have to do tonight?”
Our second Lyft driver was the opposite of Slick Rick we had earlier. He admitted to only speaking Spanish, which was fine because Heather is fluent. The drive should have taken us those ten minutes. Despite a map giving him directions on his phone including voice prompts in his native tongue, despite Heather helping him navigate from the map on her phone and her giving him directions in his native tongue, this guy made more wrong turns than the Democratic Party between 2016 and 2024.
I was crawling out of my skin because I hate being lost. I have a terrible natural sense of direction, and have had countless dreams where I’m driving and cannot find my destination—I just keep looping around and around and around getting nowhere but closer to death. Finally, we arrived at the correct Wyndham property. Sort of. The driver pulled into what looked like an abandoned office building parking lot that was a short walk across a weed field to the hotel. He acknowledged it wasn’t an exact arrival. Before he could offer to drive us around the weed field, Heather said, “That’s okay, we can walk from here.”
But what was “here?” Are we on airport property? Are those houses? Is this a neighborhood? What is that sound? What are those smells? Neither of us are snooty travelers, but this place gave us The Feeling. You know The Feeling: That vacant, but weighted fear that grips your insides and pulls you into despair.
The lobby was bleach white but filthy. Three Indian men greeted us at the front desk. I point out their race because I often have a hard time understanding the Indian accent. It’s just one of those things I’m not good at. The same as I’m not all that good at using Microsoft Excel. (The twisted irony there is that back in the day, when I needed help with Excel, it was an Indian IT guy with a thick accent who was tasked to help me.)
One of the men at the front desk greeted us and began the process of checking us in. As part of his spiel, he gave us what sounded like the usual rundown—credit card for incidentals, breakfast served between 6:30 and 9:30 a.m., and some other stuff I couldn’t make out because it’s hard for me to make out the words when the man’s tongue was being swallowed into his throat with every syllable. Again, this is a me thing. Billions of people communicate this way, I’m just not one of them. Thankfully, Heather is fluent in tongue-wallowed syllables, too.
But there was one line that I did make out perfectly. “Please no bleeding on the bed sheets. It can be very expensive for you because with all the blood, we have to throw them away. But, hey, I get it. I’m married, too.”
One of the other men handed us our key, and off we went to Room 203. The room, like the lobby, was a filthy bleach white. The cinderblock industrial building outside our window and across the parking lot had two huge, bright white lights that flickered on and off in a syncopation that made me think the parking lot may be the scene of some meth-fueled rave for transients, rats, and feral cockroaches. The warning to not bleed on the sheets became more confusing for us when we saw the state of the fresh towels and floormat in the bathroom. They were stained with the dark dinge of foot and sweat dirt.
We crawled into bed, which creaked and popped like Oscar the Grouch’s metal trashcan with every single move we made. And that’s where we tried to understand what he meant when he said, “Please no bleeding on the bed sheets. It can be very expensive for you because with all the blood, we have to throw them away. But, hey, I get it. I’m married, too.”
What kind of blood is he talking about? Period blood? How often are bed sheets being ruined by blood that this is part of the welcome routine? What does being married have to do with bleeding on bed sheets? Why is he assuming we’re married? Are married people into violent period sex in janky motel rooms? Is that a Cleveland thing? Like, when in Rome… When in Cleveland, bang a menstruating woman so hard that you render the linens unusable?
We eventually drifted to sleep. I woke up around dawn feeling icky, so I hopped in the shower. I air dried because, well, those towels were disgusting and I had too much imagination to get past it. Because, again, what the hell was happening in these rooms?
Next on the day’s agenda:
• Check out
• Grab breakfast at the nearby Denny’s. Because an airport Denny’s breakfast is anything but civilized
And that’s just where we’re at today. Which I’m okay with. And so is Heather. But the blood… I need to go down there and ask about the blood. Or not. Because the answer could annihilate any semblance of safety I’ve ever felt staying at hotels.
