BVA: Before Venti Americano

Back around 1981, our motel put a Keffe Coffee Bar in every room. It was just a pot for boiling water, which you would pour into a styrofoam cup of instant coffee. If you were road-weary and looking for something to pry open the eyes, it was probably a welcome beverage. But by age 12 I was a coffee snob, grinding my own chicory-blend roast and drinking it in a mug from New Orleans. I wanted nothing to do with the Keffe Coffee Bar, and treated it with scorn and derision.

Until I took one with me to college. Because being the only guy on the dorm floor who can boil water in his room made me Mister Popular. I take it all back, Keffe Coffee Bar. How can I undo all the mean things I said about you? How can we heal our damaged relationship and move on?

I Am The Keymaster

"Drop in any mailbox, we guarantee postage." Did this really work, and was it cost-effective? Absolutely yes, and absolutely no.

When we got keys mailed back to us, they would arrive wrapped in a piece of taped paper with a postmark stamped on it. While you made small talk with the mail man ("Whaddya got, Stan?" "Got another one for ya there." "Oh yeah, people sure are forgetful. How's the wife?"), you went into the cash drawer for the quarter to pay the COD charges. That was the cost of the key, since the tags were cheap and the labor to make them was free (I ground the new keys myself). So why bother? Because it made the panicked guest feel better to know that when they discovered the key in their luggage days later, all they had to do was find the nearest mailbox. We ate the extra cost so they wouldn't freak out and do something crazy, like drive the key hundreds of miles back to our motel to return it. Yes, it happened -- honesty can make people do strange things.

photo from flintexpats.com

Motel Musings: Toiletries

My family’s motel had complimentary bottles of shampoo in the bathrooms, but they were not for the guests. They were for me. Forgetful lodgers would leave half-empty shampoo bottles, and I would inherit them. Growing up, I never lathered with the same shampoo twice, but I used every type of the stuff imaginable, culled from the vast inventory of partial bottles my mother kept beneath the kitchen sink. The worst is when I would grow attached to a particular brand -- if I found Prell did wonders for my volume, it was all undone by Head & Shoulders a few days later. It saved us money, but destroyed any chance I had at hair consistency.

For a HOTEL take on toiletries, visit Hotel Me More.

You're A Lifesaver

At our motel, we had a swimming pool with two life preservers. These were "for emergency use only," as a stern sign warned, but guests would take them down and engage in all manner of horseplay. If I or my mom saw it, we'd march out there with fingers a-wag. "It was for their own safety," we would tell them, my mom convincingly and I obnoxiously (I was a kid ordering people around!), and they would sadly hang the life preservers back on the wall. But in over a decade, I never once saw someone reach for a life preserver in an emergency and have it not be there because it was being enjoyed. There may be a moral here about not putting off happiness just because you're worried about something bad that may never occur, but I think a bigger lesson is this: If you give a child of nine the power to reprimand adults, he will grow up full of himself.

Paging ACME...

The motel where I grew up had a street at the front and twenty miles of desert in the back, and as such, we were overrun with pests. But this plague was not in the form of roaches, or bedbugs, or mice, or rats, or louses, or waterbugs, or silverfish.

It was roadrunners.

Being the state bird of New Mexico, you would think this nimble and noble fowl would conduct itself in a dignified manner. But here is what the roadrunners would do at our motel, several times a week:

They would come in off the desert, wander into one of the rooms whose doors were left open by the maid for airing out, hop up on the bed, poop, and leave.

Where's a coyote on a rocket sled when you need one?

The Lost Art of Barter

Sometimes folks would stay at our motel, but they would not pay with legal tender. They would pay with something called "barter," a good or service offered in exchange for the room rental fee. This is not something that can often be done at your larger chain hotels, but it was perfect for us. Because one of the folks we would barter with was the Meat and Fish Guy. I don't know his actual name, or who he worked for, but he always came through town with a big freezer truck full of frozen, shrink-wrapped meat, and he always used said meat to pay for his room. My favorite was the Chicken Cordon Bleu, and in case you were wondering, the only way to make a chicken cutlet stuffed with ham and cheese any better is to shrink-wrap it first.














Image from instructibles.com

Any Club That Would Have Me As A Member...

When I was 7, I stumbled upon a cache of promotional items at our motel for the "SLEEPY BEAR CLUB," a kind of children's cult centered around the ursine mascot for the Travelodge chain. The Sleepy Bear Club Kit consisted of a ring, a button, a postcard, an iron-on patch, and a membership card. I was only able to hunt down the postcard online, shown below -- I also owned the plush Sleepy Bear pictured, and he was my best friend:

I persuaded all my human friends to join the Sleepy Bear Club, which of course they did (free swag), but once I had them in my power, I lorded it over them. If they displeased me in any way, I would threaten them with banishment from the SBC. Won't share your Charms BlowPops? Well, maybe I don't share my Sleepy Bear Club rings! Won't scoot over on the bus so I can sit down? No iron-on for you! This went on for a good week, until a friend of mine named David who'd had enough yelled, "I don't care about your STUPID junk!" And with that, my power instantly dissipated. I realized if I did not have fear, I did not have anything.

Except my plush Sleepy Bear. Rosebud!

Good Eatin'

While I still have Tom's Candy on the brain, I found some wrappers from my favorite 70's candy bars at the Candy Wrapper Museum. First up, "Full Dinner":








As a youth, was I duped into believing this candy bar actually constituted a well-rounded meal? Indeed I was. The deception continued with "My Buddy":






Oh, you may SAY you're my buddy, but when I've grown ill from eating you and my mouth is smeared with filthy "choklat," where are you then? Some friend.

Vending, Part 1

As a youth, I lived in room 101 of the Travelodge in Alamogordo, NM. Right outside my bedroom were several vending machines -- one dispensed ice, one Coca-Cola, one Tom's snacks, and one Lance snacks. I was not a slim child. This is the Tom's logo I grew up with:

Now Tom's has a new logo and a hip new attitude. Their website touts BIG CHANGES! I don't know if anything has really changed -- the hot fries are probably still delicious -- but I enjoyed reading the company's history. SPOILER ALERT: Tom and Lance are now legally married. After all those years of being side-by-side, I wonder who made the first move?

UPDATE: Since first posting this, Tom's has taken down their website, and I couldn't find the hip new logo anywhere else online. Was this change brought about by the Lance/Tom wedding, or was it a direct response to the posting on this very website? While I refuse to speculate, it was definitely the latter.

Family Resemblance

People have said to me, "You grew up living with your mother at a roadside motel in the desert? Isn't that like...?" And I smile and shake my head and say, "It wasn't the same at all. I was never into taxidermy."

VACANCY

I would love a "VACANCY" sign for the window of our house.

It would remind me of my youth -- many families had signs outside their homes that read "Casa Ortega" or "The Jacobsons" or "Please Curb Your Dog," but the sign outside my home read "VACANCY." There was no need to have an "OPEN" sign, since you were always open, unless you turned on the "NO" in front of the "VACANCY," in which case you were still technically "OPEN," you just didn't want to be bothered. One could argue (and one has) that having a "VACANCY" sign outside your non-motel house would invite too many inquiries from would-be lodgers. To that I say, "That's what the 'NO' is for."

Image: A National Acrobat