The new friend.

Last Thursday night, starting at about 2 PM and ending about 3 AM, about five to seven inches of the white stuff fell over Central and Southern Indiana.

This would, under most circumstances, be a dull story. It’s not like I live in the Congo, where five to seven inches of snow would be a clarion sign that the earth had fallen off its axis and was poised to plummet into the icy, unfeeling void of space. Indiana, classified by a crudely-drawn climate map of the US I’d crafted when I was in grade school clearly shows that Indiana falls into the “temperate grass/woodland”, or the infected wound yellow-green majik-marker portion of the map. So, you’ve loaded up a big colon-full of “what the hell’s your point?”, right?

Now, letmetellyousomething.

Indiana treats snow like my fellow Italians treat anything that is generally unpleasant: if one is to ignore something and pretend it’s not really an issue for long enough, one, either through Sambuca consumption or Mediterranean genetics, will forget that it exists at all.

As one might imagine, this is problematic for, oh, people who want to do their pesky jobs or go home or eat. You all know a bastard like that.

What happens is this: for hours before a storm is anticipated, and during the storm’s fury, and for days afterward, NOTHING HAPPENS. No plows. No salt, no sand, no weird chemical heat. The snow becomes pressed under the weight of people’s feet and tires into hideous sheets of snot-slick black ice, which grabs your wheels and sends you headlong into a fine little piece of real estate called a “dank drainage ditch”, where your bones will moulder until the spring thaw.
I live on one of the most trafficked intersections of Greenwood, and, listening for five hours on Thursday night, I heard ONE plow, and it was attached to someone’s private pickup truck.

Quitting time on Thursday came amid reports from other intrepid home-goers that the roads were nearly impassable at any appreciable speed. I thought, “Surely this would suggest that I, being from the cruel Arctic wastes, will be able to benefit from my underutilized winter survival skills to navigate my way home.”

Either a) that was, in reality, the whispered, rank-breathed voice of the Hooved One or b) I am functionally retarded.

By the time I got out to my car, more than five inches of wet, clumpy snow had encased Orhan. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t weave a nearly visible tapestry of unspeakable obscenity as I hacked into the frosty shell that formerly was my vehicle, but let’s face it: I was shrieking like a gibbon who’s just learned to freebase.

Considering that it took nearly fifteen minutes to drive a half-mile, I should have cut my losses and gone back downtown to give manual pleasure for a place to stay. I was emboldened, however, by the idea that the highway, as opposed to the streets of Bloomington, would have been salted and plowed and might allow me safe passage.

*deep inhale from nearly crushed Fanta can containing a rock of crack the size of a hen’s egg*

The short of it is that I made it to the enchanting village of Martinsville, which - as you may recall, was where the largest Midwestern Ku Klux Klan congregation existed until (startlingly) recently. As I watched a Toyota Camry slide off the road into a ditch, followed closely by a four-wheel-drive Ford F-150, I thought: this is the end of the road, bucko. My tires are two years old, I am tired and I’ve thrown up in my mouth so many times that acid has consumed three of my back molars, and look, there’s a hotel right there. I have money (for once), and since I would not like to spend the holidays dead, I decided that a night in Martinstucky would be in fine order.

I lurch into the parking lot, jump out of my car and hurl myself onto the sweet, firm earth. Watching me from within her eighty-five degree heated glass-enclosed perch, the proprietress clumsily stubs out a Misty Ultra-Light 120 Menthol into an ashtray that, at one point, may have either been a flamingo or Macauley Culkin, and prepares for my imminent arrival.

“I suppose you’d like a room, mister” she hisses, her hunter’s vest-orange, three inch-long nails tapping a sinister staccato onto the faux marble counter as I stomp my shoes clean. “I ain’t got many lef’, what with this here weather.” I reassure her that I’d be willing to take just about anything as long as it wasn’t recently cleansed as a crime scene. She looks pointedly over her horn-rims and I look down at my shoes and shuffle my feet, humbled by the fact that she could very well have consumed me through some of her smaller pores. She looks at the computer screen for an eternity and says “Well, I have a room. It’s smoking, though.” I assured her that I didn’t mind; after all, it would only be a matter of time before I’d need a hit of that sweet, sweet crack-y goodness – a fact I didn’t share with her lest she ask me for some. She gives me the little card key and gestures expansively down the hall toward my room. “One-twenty-three, all the way down, last door on the right. And tell Wanda ‘Hi’ for me.” She laughed bitterly and lit up again, turning up the volume on what appeared to be a VCR recording of an episode Young and the Restless. I didn’t know what the eff she meant about the whole “Wanda” thing, but needless to say I was wired like a jungle-cat on meth when I opened the door.

The room was small and dank, as I’d anticipated. Nicotine was caked on the wall like someone had applied it with a trowel. There were two double beds in the room, one of which had a headboard which was hanging at a crazy, slanted angle from the wall. Utterly devoid of even the banal, mass-produced art that can be found in every hotel from Passamaquaddy to Barrow, the room smelled (other than of stale, years-old smoke) of desperation. It is no wonder to me that minor celebrities go to hotels to get nude and hang themselves. I made a point to look up to see if there was a rafter, and, seeing only yellowed stucco, I sighed in mild relief.

Now, as you all are aware (well, if you read this damn thing), I used to work in a hotel. I know how these places work. I know what gets really cleaned and what only gets a wipedown, and yes, the stories about comforters is hella-true. I decided to poke around a bit.

*Now comes the part where, if you were in an audience in a movie theater, you’d shout at me that I was effing insane to do this because you all have the ‘secret’ knowledge of what I’d find. Neither I, nor the people in the movie, can hear you: you are wasting your sweet breath, bitches.*

I open the closet. Inside, I find an iron and a small ironing board and some hangers. Then I crane my neck to look at the shelf above. There is the cellophane “ripcord” to a pack of smokes (surprise? Um, no) and a little empty packet that, at one time, contained two pills. I use the hanger to poke the packet and see that it was once was the repository for two Active XXX pills, which (according to the back) heighten sensation in a man’s male member and allow him to “erupt like a burning volcano” at the height of climax.

I lower the hanger and place it back on the pole and shed a single drop of brine from my left eye. Someone very recently had a profound sexual experience – most likely culminating in the production of vast amounts of man-magma- in this very dank little room, after which the partners perhaps lit up and went to Flavor Country, and the elfin room attendant didn’t remove evidence of this occurrence. Immediately I began to wonder what other evidence of this blessed event was to be discovered while I was simultaneously fantasizing about a nice, cool Purell bath. My glaze was broken only when a very soft, husky female voice coming from the vicinity of the bedroom broke the profound silence.

“Hey. Hey you. The fatty standing over there by the closet. C’mon over here and ‘set’ a spell.”

Wanda!

Apparently, Wanda is a dead hooker. Found in my room clutching a bottle of Ripple and with enough cocaine in her bloodstream to kill a musk-ox, Wanda wasn’t found by the staff for three days because they honored her “Do Not Disturb” sign.

“I was terrible sad”, Wanda wept from under my bed, where she’d crawled in her last moments because it was warm. “But now I’m not. In Hell, ladies like me get free drinks all day, every day!”

I listened to her for about a half hour as she talked about some of her more interesting johns (“Bitch, there was this mo’fo who shed like a pound of skin on his bed”) and her childhood, which was spent in a quiet Illinois town known primarily for hosting a Corn Princess Pageant. When she was done, I asked quietly:

“Dead Hooker Lady, what do you wish of me?”

She replied that she was lonely and looking for someone to talk to. We spent several hours chatting, but at about eleven o’clock our conversation began to run dry. She whispered “Turn that TV on to channel 31, I think Dirty Dancing’s on again.” I turned it on to Dirty Dancing, watched Patrick Swayze mock coitus with a young woman with a vastly large nose and prepared for slumber. As I got onto the bed with the messed-up headboard, she spoke for the last time.

“Sleep on this other one, crackah. Those last folk be effin’ real hard on that one.”

It wasn’t such a bad night. I learned that ladies of the evening really do have souls and feelings, even when they are deceased. More importantly, I learned that $3.50 can buy you a drug that, once ingested, will allow you to produce sheer buckets of the seed of life. Glorious.

The next time I ‘blog I shall be in the motherland of East/Central Maine; pictures of my leap into the frigid North Atlantic shall follow shortly.

Until then, I remain,

Domonic