Dating Confessions by You "I think that tattoos are ridiculously trashy. I want another one though."
The Nerve Insider by Nicole Ankowski What's new in the Nerve universe. Today: What do hiccups and herpes have in common? Behind the scenes with Stuff Nobody Likes.
"The point of rooms," writes Don DeLillo in a famous passage in White Noise, "is that they're inside. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behavior. It follows that this would be the kind of behavior that takes place in rooms." It follows, also, that this behavior varies according to which kind of room you're in. Hotel rooms, for example, generate hotel room behavior. More specifically still, there is a
sub-sub-set that one might term expensive hotel room behavior, the defining characteristic of which is, in a word, sex.
Of course people have sex in cheap hotels too — and this is precisely why they're such a turn-off: the cheaper the hotel, the harder it is to ignore the evidence of its having been used and abused many times before. In expensive hotels, you are happily oblivious to anything that has ever happened in your room, or is currently happening outside your room; in cheaper hotels, the activities of neighbours are all the time invading your space. And hearing other people having sex is like trying to sleep while listening to someone snore: their doing it means you can't. In a shabby hotel in Amsterdam my girlfriend and I lay awake as the Australian in the room next door gave it to his girlfriend — to quote the poet Michael Hofmann — "steamhammer style." That was bad enough. Then, during a pregnant silence, I heard her say, sweetly, "Have you slimed yet?"
In an expensive hotel, on the other hand, such crudity is kept discreetly at bay. In fact, everythingis kept at bay: thieves, other guests, even that dirty stuff, air. Urban hotel rooms are almost always sealed off from the outside world, cocooning you totally in the ambient hum of overnight luxury. Some rooms, to revert to DeLillo's terms, are more inside than others, and urban hotel rooms are among the most inside rooms of all. Once you're inside one it doesn't matter where you are on the planet, you could be anywhere. More exactly, you could be nowhere. The luxury hotel is a quintessential example of what the French theorist Marc Augé calls the 'non-place' of super-modernity. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe pointed out that the defining architectural feature of the motel — namely that you don't "have to go through a public lobby to get to your room" — played a major part in the "rather primly named 'sexual revolution.'" In international hotels, however, the passage through the lobby is also a passage from place to non-place. By checking in and handing over your credit card or passport you
effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity.
You are no longer Mr. or Ms. Whoever, you are simply the occupant of a room. You become morally weightless. You have no history. The act of the porter carrying your stuff up to your room means that you are, as they say, not carrying any baggage. As a result (I am basing this claim on zero medical evidence) men are less liable to be impotent in a hotel than in any other environment. You are free. If a man goes to a motel with his mistress he cheats on his wife. In a luxury hotel, on the other hand, there is no moral liability, only financial.
The recently-opened Saint Martins Lane, smack in the heart of London's Covent Garden, is an exemplary luxury hotel in every regard. It is extremely, ludicrously expensive. It is also so utterly anonymous that at first you can't see the room numbers, which are to be found not on the door but on the carpet. The rooms are white, the sheets are white (though lights over the bed can be adjusted to impart a discreet purple, yellow or greenish glow to the whiteness), the walls are white, the towels are white. Everything is so white it's like it has been designed as a camouflage for cocaine, that other component of the sex-hotel-money nodality. If certain styles of architecture — courts and police stations, most obviously — are inherently judgmental, this is a style of interior design that acknowledges no moral currency other than American Express. It goes without saying that the rooms are completely soul-less.
The fact that the rooms are also small manifests itself mainly by its implicate opposite: the all-engulfing hugeness of the bed and its Kama Sutra array of pillows. The fact that these pillows spill on to the floor means, effectively, that the carpet becomes an extension of the bed. Then there is the spatially amplifying illusion of a life-size, Schiele-esque mirror. Ah, the mirror! This, of course, is another indispensable part of hotel erotics. The mirror is a virtual porn channel in which fantasies of hotel sex are
simultaneously enacted and broadcast, collapsing the distinction between participant and viewer.
At this point a slight qualification is needed, namely that in some ways a room is more erotic than a suite. A suite subtly revives the division of labor and leisure on which the architecture of the house is predicated. In a suite, the bed is kept separate as an adjunct or option. In a room the bed is all-dominating and unavoidable. However big the room, the bed expands proportionately to fill it up. Since the outside world scarcely exists the bed becomes the world ("This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere," as John Donne put it). You do everything from this bed: you read, write, watch porno, have sex, sleep, make calls . . . Basically, the only time you're not stretched out on the bed is when you're stretched out in the king-size bath which is, effectively, a liquid bed.
Whether in bed or bath you will, of course, be watching TV and if you are watching TV you will be watching porno. At home you want to watch news, sports or documentaries about human rights abuses. If you are watching TV in a hotel, on the other hand, all you want to see are things going in and out of other things in extreme close-up. Ideally — a sense of self-enclosure being a key component of the hotel experience — the porn watched in a hotel room will also be set in a hotel.
If porn is expected in hotels then fluffy white bath robes are assumed. While less revealing than the bikini, no other garment is so suggestive of nakedness. No sooner have you put one on than it starts trying to take itself off. The robe, if you like, is always in the process of disrobing — the noun is
always being stripped of meaning by the verb's seductive prefix.
Even though they are frequently stolen, these robes are theft-proof in that almost as soon as you get them home they lose that fluffy quality. How do hotels maintain robes in that state of perpetual arousal, i.e. fluffiness? Keeping them white is easy. How they keep them fluffy is one of life's enduring mysteries. Do they use gallons of fabric conditioner? Apparently not (I've tried it). The answer can only be: they are not just fluffy white bathrobes — they are fluffy white hotel bathrobes and the style of behavior of which that fluffiness is the vestimentary expression is unique to the place from which they were stolen.
Not only are they fluffy and soft and white — they are also clean. And the chances are that you too are clean beneath your fluffy white robe because everything about a hotel is both clean and conducive to cleanliness (the bath fills up with piping hot water in under 15 seconds!). The sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to — what else? — filthiness.
Ideally, the room is so clean as to suggest that it has never been used. It cries out to be defiled. If the room is, in a sense, virginal, then the act of breaking the seal on bars of soap and other little stealables has something of the quality of breaking a hymen. The phrasing is slightly archaic, but to speak of "taking a room" is, in this context, pleasingly suggestive.
Luxury hotels offer the chance to live — for a while — like an 18th-century libertine for whom life consists entirely of the refinement of pleasure. There is a retinue of servants to clear up the mess, every whim is catered to. A hotel is a chore-free zone, leaving you free — DO NOT DISTURB — to engage in limitless carnality. Every hint of the mundane — even turning down the covers of your bed — is taken care of by other people. What the British writer Adam Mars-Jones calls "treating the facilities to mild abuse" is certainly the privilege of every hotel guest, but major abuse is also tolerated (as long as it's paid for). The rock star's famed tendency — obligation almost — to trash hotel rooms simply takes this to its extreme. Every day is a new beginning. Everything broken can be replaced. Every day the room and its contents are wiped clean of staining evidence and incriminating finger-prints (a fact which, in turn, feeds in to the sense of rampant amorality that is at the heart of the hotel experience). As a consequence your actions have no consequences. This has its dangers, of course.
It takes an effort of will not to succumb to the delusion that the mere fact of being in a hotel room is both prophylactic and contraceptive. While you're there in your extremely expensive, hermetically sealed, totally safe, utterly artificial environment you have no thoughts of anything that happens beyond the room or after you vacate it. In fact you do not have a thought in your head. Simultaneously numbed and exalted by cocaine and money and sex, existing only in terms of appetite, you are an animal raised, suddenly, to a level of pure, barbaric luxury. The world could be on fire and it wouldn't matter. Nero-like, you look out through the smear-free windows at the soundless city which could be any city. No one can see you, and even if they do, it's not you they see. All they can make out is a figure silhouetted in the window: a figurehead and totem of the depraved, atrocious, inhuman sexiness of hotels.
sub-sub-set that one might term expensive hotel room behavior, the defining characteristic of which is, in a word, sex.
effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity.
simultaneously enacted and broadcast, collapsing the distinction between participant and viewer.
always being stripped of meaning by the verb's seductive prefix.
