Corroded Chains
by Laurie Woolever
The chain motel I stayed in last week just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, had a vending machine with Cheetos in 20 of the 42 slots, by way of nighttime dining options. I arrived at 7:00 p.m. and went straight to my room and watched regular cable television with commercials. When I turned on the dim overhead light in the bathroom, I spotted a lone hair, not mine, coiled in the bathtub. I wiped out the stranger’s hair with a damp tissue, and then I took a bath, watched more television, and slept well.
Unlike the nearly-extinct roadside motels of the 1960s and 70s, there’s nothing charming or romantic about a 2024 hotel chain, but maybe it won’t be long before La Quinta and the Holiday Inn Express are replaced by some even-more-cost-efficient-for-the-benefit-of-shareholders building for housing travelers, and we’ll be nostalgic for all those big cheap faucet fixtures and beige tile. As a kid in the 1980s, I knew that the new singles by Madonna and A-ha and Prince on the radio would someday wind up on the oldies channel. But I couldn’t have anticipated satellite radio, iPods, Spotify. The next new thing always takes me by surprise.
I woke up at 7:42 a.m., opened the blackout curtain, and found that the morning sky was still dark. I hadn’t expected that, and was overcome by a sudden, irrational fear. Was the world finally broken?
I was reminded of Astoria Borealis, the night between Christmas and New Year in 2018, when an electrical fire at a power substation near my home changed the color of the sky, from black to a horrible blue-green light. For a few deeply weird minutes, no one knew what had happened. The power in my apartment kept browning out. I opened a window. Neighbors called out to each other from their open windows (“Are you seeing this?” “Does anyone know what’s happening?”) until someone from the NYPD took to Twitter with a plausible explanation.
It turned out the motel was located on the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. By 8:15 a.m., the sun had come up. Maybe I’ve been living in New York for too long.
Breakfast was rough, even by the rock-bottom standard of my low expectations. Three timid and elderly little muffins huddled around an injured danish in the center of a smudged plexiglass box. The coffee was watery, the eggs were powdered, and a half-empty bottle of Menard’s brand ketchup stood in for individual Heinz packets.
On the drive from the motel to the airport, I saw a campaign sign affixed to a tractor trailer. It said: “Trump isn’t perfect but he’s better than the alternative.”
Today is Election Day. I keep reading advice about managing election anxiety, recalling the overwhelming panic and despair of early November 2016, at least for those of us who had been so naïve as to expect a different result. That the sun continued to rise in those days was only the smallest consolation.
On Election Day 2020 I was staying with my aging parents, one who hadn’t been able to walk for years, and the other recovering from spinal surgery. Caretaking was a good distraction from the news.
Since then I have achieved once-unthinkable career goals, and I have fallen in love. I’ve visited Rome and Paris and Mexico City, and I’ve eaten tres leches cake at least three times. Still, the purest happiness I’ve felt in the past four years was that Saturday morning when the race was finally called, for not Donald Trump, on the heels of his legal team’s press conference in Pennsylvania at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping shop, between a dildo store and a crematorium.
It was a warm day, the windows were open, and I could hear my neighbors happy-shouting and carrying on. Hundreds of people gathered on the car-free Open Street and just, like, smiled at each other, talked about the stress of waiting to know, and the sweet relief of knowing. We couldn’t anticipate January 6, 2021, and we couldn’t imagine the new Groundhog Day of November 5, 2024, with dirtbag Giuliani shamelessly rolling up to his Florida polling place in a car that no longer belongs to him.