The Aloha Motel

If this hotel room could tell its story, what would it reveal? What secrets lie behind the cigarette smell deeply lodged in the carpet, the burns in the bathroom linoleum, on the microwave, on the toilet seat. Why did I choose this hotel that makes me feel as if someone is continually exhaling in my face? Did i think it was the apppropriate backdrop for this scene? The curtain opens on a young wife fleeing her appartment after rifling through her abusive husbands backpack for her green card, passport, work visa, and social security card (he has been keeping them from her because he doesn't want her to work, go to school, drive the car, or ever be out of his supervision). Did this hotel seem the appropriate place to inform the audience that she speaks very little English, knows almost no one in the states, and has very little money, no place to stay, and so of course winds up in a place where the comforter could easily be confused with an ashtray? I try not to let my feet touch the ground as she shows me on her digital camera (for which the chord, along with so may other items, is now gone to the site of her flight, to which she cannot return for fear of more bruises or losses of consciousness) pictures of her husband, a boy really from Washington, not much different from so many I know. How did this happen? I try to ignore the carpet, it's smells and colors, and yet find myself remembering a night 17 years ago when I attended a room party in southern California. Just as i had officially declared "dead head" I crossed the track to a party definately labeled "punk rock." I think a drummer I met that night, then dated for a summer, and I had sex in the bathroom, but I think we were both too drunk to accomplish the deed or know if we had. Did I sleep on the floor of that beer sodden place? Looking at the carpet here so many years hence, I shiver to think I may have and hope that even then I knew better.