Sleeping at the Granby Motel

       The Granby Motel is located on Salmon Brook Street in my hometown of Granby, CT, and has been there for as long as I can remember. Considered a dump back in the 70s, its rooms were still always full of traveling salesman, truckers, and tourists who took an unfortunate wrong turn off the main highway, finding themselves with no other place to sleep. My friend Debi worked there cleaning guest rooms while she was in high school. Another high school chum, Beth, recalls attending a party in one of the shabby rooms, and it must have been a pretty good party, because there was not much else to remember about it.
       I visit Granby every year when I go up to New England, and try to see as many friends as I can while I'm there. This year I had lunch with my first grade teacher, Shirley Ryan, attended the Farmer's Market with my friend Lenny DeGray, went  hiking with Bill Rogers, (brother of Debi, who used to clean the rooms) and then headed over to the Cambridge House to have dinner with girlfriends I have known for over 40 years.
       Usually I stay with a friend or relative while in Connecticut, but as I drove into my old stomping grounds this time, my rental car went straight over to the Granby Motel. Knowing it was an utterly ridiculous idea to stay there, I convinced myself that it was the practical thing to do at the time. It was right down the street from the restaurant, it would give me some time to myself, and I wouldn't have to mooch off my usual cronies. When I went to the office to check in and get my key, the motel owner, who was from India, gave me a card to fill out, with a space to write in my credit card number. I shook my head, no way am I leaving my credit card number laying around the Granby Motel. I asked him to please run it through the machine, as we modern business owners do these days. He grumbled a bit and pulled the dusty credit card machine out from under the counter.  I guess most of their customers pay with cash.
       I smelled Indian food wafting through the office. "What are you cooking back there?" I asked. "It smells delicious." "Indian food, " he says, without looking at me. "What kind of Indian food? " I ask again. "Indian food," he says as he hands me the key, a bored look on his face. I grab the key and walk down the sidewalk to my room. The first fiasco of the day, or perhaps it's the second if you call the credit card thing the first fiasco, is that the key doesn't work in the lock. There is a young girl cleaning one of the other rooms and she helps me with the key, jiggling it around in the lock for several minutes until the door finally opens. I make a mental note not to have any drinks at the restaurant that night, as I would never be able to get back into the room.
       I step into my room at the Granby Motel, for the very first time. Heavens, if the motel was a dump back in the 70s, in 2012 it is a shit-hole, at best. The place is clean, though, I can smell bleach and Comet, and some sort of disinfectant normally used at nursing homes. But the room itself and everything in it is probably 50 years old. (And even if you vacuum or steam clean a 50-year old thread-bare carpet, it's still a 50 year old carpet.) Excited to see just how more awful the motel can get, I wander around the room, checking every little thing. And not to my surprise, each item in the motel was either broken, soiled, or battered beyond belief.
       The television came on but I could not change the channels. The fluorescent lights were yellow and dim. The lamps over the beds were missing light bulbs. The beds were lumpy. The sheets were clean, but incredibly dingy. The pillows were so flat and lifeless, that when stacked upon each other, they were no taller than four slices of Wonder bread. The fossilized air conditioner was too high up on the wall for me to reach. The upholstered chairs were covered with horrible stains of God-knows-what-and-I -don't-want-to-know-what. In the bathroom, the right sink faucet didn't work. The left one did but there was no hot water coming out of it. The toilet seat was broken. The bathtub drain was clogged. The windows wouldn't open. The crumbling ceiling left flakes of plaster in the bottom of the tub. The mirror was glazed over with years of reflected morning-after hangovers. And if the main part of the motel room was dim, the bathroom lights were so bright I felt like I was in an interrogation room at a police station.
       But there were two good things about the Granby Motel, besides its convenient location. There was a lovely backyard, that was off-limits to customers. But I went back there anyway after dark, to watch the moon rise behind the pine trees, and mostly to kill time while I was getting up the nerve to sleep in the lumpy bed. And the other good thing was that staying at the Granby Motel gave me something fun to write about when I got home from my trip.
       So that's what I'm doing right now.