The tardy Arab sheik who was forced to pay $1.52m. for a hotel bill for a mere 50 rooms in Florida, shows that opulence is not dead.
It just takes a little longer to pay for it.
My days of opulence have vanished with the speed of dew from spring time grass but there were days when motels clamoured for the custom of my one-car caravan.
Certainly those were the days when staying at a motel was the acme of travel; when we swanky sultans of suburbia took our tribes to the family room after scanning the night for that caravanserai sign that blinked Vacancy.
Oh, the excitement of the en suite bathroom! The little cakes of soap crying out to be souvenired by ecstatic children! The oh-so-sanitised glasses enclosed in germ-free wrappers and the toilet seat with the impressive ribbon of paper across it proclaiming its purity!
We always cut the rib bon in a touching little ceremony and there was a furious scramble to be first to baptise this sanctum of sanitation.
Heady luxury
There was also the heady luxury of the personal electric water jug and the moment of revelation when the cupboard door was slid back to reveal the inimitable apparatus of tea-making, the tea-bags labelled and stringed, the coffee packets neat and souvenirable and the sugar that would join the great collection back home—the fruits of motel ransacking on a dozen highways
But I must say one felt a surge of opulence.
Everyone took turns to bounce on the beds, and if they had more spring and-give than others encountered it was duly noted in my wife’s travel diary, a kind of Rubaiyat of Roadside Residentials for the motel faithful.
There was the instructions and information folder to be read with growing excitement, with its panorama of the town’s life, the dry-cleaning centre, the Sunset tea rooms, directions to camping grounds, service clubs; its tourist pamphlets, gaudy and beckoning.
But wait, in this magic cave we had yet to consider the radio knobs controlling heavens knows what entertainment: piped music from the office; tapes and tracks to set me dancing in my underpants; the local stations crackling and crowing with homely commercials and country and western or the football teams for Saturdee.
And there would be the black-and-white television with just a bit of ghosting, two figures for the price of one but who cared when, the most riveting exercise of the day was about to take place: selecting break fast.
This became the centre piece of a family council.
No, you can’t have Coke for breakfast. Baked beans and bangers, really child.
Well, make up your mind. Yes, you can have my marmalade containers as a souvenir but only if I have your toast.
One had a feeling of togetherness over that breakfast sheet, what with children climbing on one’s back and shoving their heads under one’s arm to see that the right ticks were made.
Oh, the cereals in their little packets; oh, the eggs nestling beneath the metal lid, for motel breakfasts always arrived under metal lids, giving them an air of mystery.
Continual visits
But first there was the night. The continual visits to the toilet. Children with their heads against the wall to see whether anything naughty was going on in the next room. People wanting the air-conditioner on and off. Peering through the draped windows at the semi-trailers like lighted liners, dieseling down the insomniac high way.
Come to bed. Be quiet. Stop talking. Not the toilet again.
The magnificent lighting of the motel was desperately inviting. Bed- lamps and headlamps, buttons pressed.
Often I retired to the sanitised toilet for a little peace, peering out at my gasoline dromedary sleeping between the white lines designated for parking. I felt warm and secure and opulent until a voice, squeaky with urgency, said, “How long are you going to be there? I have to go.”
Morning broke behind the thick drapes. And then we heard it as a soldier hears reveille. The faint rattle of lids. The distant litany of breakfast, coming closer and closer. The whole family waited. The door knock. Two women bearing trays, a veritable colony of tin lids.
Oh, the wonder of the disclosures Butter in golden foil. Eggs with sunrise centres. Toast wrapped snug in tissue. Little packets of cereals. Should we eat or should we souvenir? There was a purposeful dividing of spoils, the dip and clink of spoons, grapefruit gone in one convulsive gulp, butter-spreading the bedspreads…
The radio announcer at the local station full of weather forecasts and dry-cleaning ads. And Slim Dusty singing.
Later we’d smuggle the dog out to the car as we’d smuggled it in the night before.
We’d nod to the people vacating the next unit and more than once they’d express concern about our children’s terrible colds.
“One poor dear barked all night,” they’d say.
And so we’d load the gasoline dromedary. farewelling the now thoroughly unsanitised toilet, making a last swoop on an envelope of sugar, raiding the letterheads. Our one night in a 1001 nights was over.
But as I looked back at the final devastation, to the talcum trails, the awful desolation of the breakfast trays, the beds that had erupted blankets, there was no doubt where our caravan had rested.
The radio still on, full volume… A child rushing past me for one last twinkle in the toilet.
And when I finally closed the door it always seemed a nice way to go… to the dying gush of gurgling water, the weather forecast and Slim Dusty singing.
Max Fatchen