I stayed in a motel once.  It was March of 1994 and it had one of those shaky beds.  I’m not really into that freaky stuff, so I declined to insert my quarters into the slot.  (But I can’t say I didn’t think about it.  Huh.)

The room smelt like murder.  It reminded me of my childhood.  Growing up in West Texas, murder was as familiar as fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.  I remember one time I smelled murder in the bathroom at the YMCA.  I was taking a break from swimming and I smelled it.  It smelled just like that motel room.  (But I didn’t know that at the time because the YMCA thing was in ’66 and I couldn’t tell the future.  Yet.)

I got sick of the murder smell in my motel room.  I opened some of the packets of free shampoo (they were like ketchup packets placed delicately on the side of the bathtub), and smeared them on my pillow, the dusty TV screen, and under my nose to cover up the smell.  It was shampoo by JADE.  Real nice stuff that smells like a bouquet of daisies covered in bumble bees.  I really like it a lot.

The lighted sign outside the motel that buzzed and snapped with the bugs advertised “FREE COLOR TV”.  I was excited.  I loved color TV.  I expected a Zenith or something with a crisp picture, but instead I got an old wood paneled one with the UHF dials that “tuck, tuck” when you turn them.  I watched a new episode of Baywatch and some reruns of Let’s Make A Deal in a fuzzy excuse for color.

The bath tub was clean, the towels were not.  They gave me two sets with my room.  I guess they thought I would have a lady with me.  Or a hooker maybe.  I had neither.  One set of towels was ripped and slightly brown.  The other set had touched the brown ones and had become brown by association.

The lock on the door was busted so I had to secure myself via the dinky chain on the door.  My guess was that the lock broke during a struggle that led to the murder in the air and/or the brown on the towels.  I hoped I was wrong, because I didn’t want to get murdered in the motel with the shaky bed and the fuzzy color TV and the brown towels.

I knew I was safe though.  Since the YMCA thing, I had learned to tell the future.  I knew that I would not become the new smell of murder that night.  I would walk out of that motel room at 7:30 the next morning with a bag full of complimentary JADE products and the understanding that I would return to that motel again exactly 15 years later to become the reason the lock was broken.

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