The Cadillac of Motels

I was seventeen when my parents announced their plan to leave their jobs and buy a motel in Punta Gorda, Florida.

Unbeknownst to me and my brothers, my parents had settled a lawsuit with the chiropractor who had allegedly caused my dad’s stroke, netting something like $120,000. They decided the thing to do with this money was to buy a motel in Florida. Anyone who has spent a few winters in Michigan can empathize with the urge to flee to the tropics; Michigan winters are a bit much for anyone to take, particularly a person suffering from severe depression and the after-effects of a stroke. The motel part of the plan is a bit more difficult to comprehend; I guess my parents figured that they possessed the necessary skills to run a motel, and that they could run it for a few years and then sell it for a profit and retire.

It would be disingenuous to say that the move to Florida completely short-circuited the teenage dream that I was living in Grand Rapids. Still, the move was jarring. The plan was to move during the summer before my senior year, but the

closing on the motel was delayed. My hopes that it would be delayed until graduation, however, were not met. In the middle of October, we packed up our belongings and drove south. After a relatively uneventful three day trip, we arrived at our prospective Shangri-La – a run-down, fourteen unit motor inn off Highway 41 south of Punta Gorda, Florida, with the ambitious and ill-fitting name Cadillac Motel. It was just down the road from a Tae Kwon Do studio and a seedy pink concrete strip joint called Roadhouse 41.

The Cadillac Motel was a long, narrow stucco building shaped like a squat T. In the middle, jutting out toward the highway, was the office, and behind that was a small apartment that served as the manager’s quarters. A series of motel rooms spread out from either side of the apartment. Behind the apartment were two more rooms, which could either serve as additional lodging or as part of the manager’s quarters. My parents were going to live in the apartment and my brother, Ben, and I would sleep in the two back rooms – thirteen and twelve respectively. My older brother, Steve, was lucky enough to have left for college the previous year.

When we arrived, the previous owners – a couple in their sixties named Ray and Beverly – had not yet moved out of the apartment as required by the sale contract. My parents were furious, but short of calling the sheriff to evict the old couple, they didn’t have a lot of options (at this point my parents were still blissfully unaware of how often they would be calling the sheriff over the next several years to evict people). So we moved temporarily into the two adjacent motel rooms that the old couple had thoughtfully reserved for us.

Ray and Beverly had presumably done their best to move out on time, but had been overwhelmed by the amount of crap that they had collected over the course of twenty years running a motel. These people kept everything. We found, among other horrors lurking in various corners of the premises, a bucket full of partially used motel soaps.

The old couple were also slowed down by their imperfect health. Both of them smoked heavily and had a saggy, pallid, corpse-like appearance. Ray was in particularly bad shape. His right leg had been amputated below the knee, and he wore an archaic-looking prosthetic to which an old canvas tennis shoe had somehow been tied by its laces. I probably don’t have to note that this did not have the intended effect of making him look less creepy.

We resigned ourselves to staying in rooms seven and eight while Mr. and Mrs. Peg-leg cleared out. Eventually they did depart, leaving a godawful mess behind – although, having lived for three days in rooms seven and eight, we were hardly surprised that the apartment was not pristine. After thoroughly cleaning the living quarters, my parents moved into the apartment and my brother and I moved into the two rooms in back. For the next ten months, until I could leave for college, room twelve of the Cadillac Motel would be my home.

The fact that my bedroom was a motel room was, rather pathetically, one of the bright spots of this experience. I had my own bathroom, my own color TV, a double bed and a Gideon’s Bible. The lack of Magic Fingers notwithstanding, I had to admit that this room kicked my old bedroom’s ass. My door exited to the breezeway, so it would have been easy for me to sneak out in the middle of the night – or, better yet, to sneak someone in.

These were the sorts of hopeful notions that flitted through my mind as I surveyed the cockroaches scuttling along the baseboards of room twelve. I had left my friends and familiar surroundings behind, but there was something to be said for having your own motel room. And hell, this was Florida, after all. A backwater redneck town, sure, but still Florida. People paid money to vacation in Florida, didn’t they? In any case, it was only ten months. I could survive anything for ten months. I might even have some fun while I’m down here, I thought. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

I was so very, very wrong.

No one should have to change schools a month into their senior year of high school. By senior year, all the cliques have been formed, so if you’re starting from scratch at that point, it’s very difficult to make friends. It’s even harder if you’re not particularly socially adept.

Compounding the problem was that I was a short, scrawny seventeen-year-old: although I was a senior, I looked like a freshman. And by some joke of fate, the curriculum of Charlotte High in Punta Gorda, Florida, required a number of lower level classes that I hadn’t needed to take at Grand Rapids Christian, which meant that half of my classes were “freshman level” classes. So now I was a senior who looked like a dorky freshman, sentenced to suffer through a bunch of freshman classes. Keep in mind that I was also academically advanced; I felt out of place even with kids my own age, to say nothing of those who were four years younger than me.

Still with me? Good. It gets worse. For the previous eleven years, I had attended private Christian schools populated mostly with wealthy suburban kids who were mostly well above the national average academically. Charlotte High, in contrast, would have been a good fit for that albino kid from Deliverance. I honestly believe I’d have felt more at home in Berlin or Bangkok than Punta Gorda, Florida. In Bangkok, people would have expected me to be weird, because I’d be “the American.” In Punta Gorda, I was just weird. Also, in Bangkok I’d have been tall.

So it was that on a sunny day in October, my brother Ben and I found ourselves waiting for the school bus in front of a seedy motel in a redneck town in Florida.

The bus arrived. I took a deep breath. Seven months, I told myself. Seven months, and I was done with school. Another three months of summer after that, and I’d leave for college.

Ben was not so lucky. His sentence was nearly three years. He didn’t have to deal with being brand new his senior year, but in other ways he had it worse than I. Whereas I was small for my age, Ben was ridiculously tall. At 6’5”, he was the tallest kid in the school, despite being only a sophomore. At Grand Rapids Christian, he had been part of the skater subculture, which didn’t exist in Punta Gorda. The closest approximation there was “queer.”

We watched in disbelief and horror as the bus collected progressively more primitive and freakish specimens of humanity. Kids with Slayer T-shirts gave way to kids with Hank Williams, Jr. T-Shirts. Hair styles went from bowl cuts to mullets to feathered mullets. It was 1987, but somehow music and hairstyles had stopped progressing in this region sometime prior to Flashdance. As the bus continued its trek through the swampy inland, I felt like I was touring Darwin’s evolutionary chart in reverse. If I had seen one of these kids at my previous high school, I would have assumed he was wearing a Halloween costume. I hadn’t seen feathered hair since 1983, and I had never seen someone wearing a Hank Williams, Jr. T-Shirt. I had assumed, up to this point, that to the extent that anyone actually wore a Hank Williams, Jr. T-Shirt, there was a universal assumption that it was to be done ironically. But here these people seemed to be the dominant life form. Suburban sophisticates such as I were definitely a marginalized caste – if we existed at all.

The mix of students improved slightly once we got to school; it seemed that the Cadillac Motel was situated in a redneck-heavy area of Charlotte County. Still, the subcultures remained foreign to me. Where were the preps? The punks? The nerds? The skaters? In place of these recognizable cliques were rednecks, metalheads, whores and stoners. The only group that seemed to have followed me to Charlotte High was the jocks, and frankly I could have done without them.

I did my best to navigate this strange environment, trudging numbly from one class to the next. At one point I got lost and ended up walking into my psychology class ten minutes late. It felt like I had opened a door to Mars.

There were maybe twenty-five students in the room, seated in desks facing the front of the room. The desks were facing the front of the room, that is; the students were not. The students were engaged in any number of other activities, such as gossiping, reading magazines and applying makeup. At least three of them were fast asleep. The one thing that none of them was doing was facing the front of the room.

Meanwhile, at the front of the room, completely ignored by the students, stood a balding, middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes who was delivering, in hushed, monotonous tones, what I surmised, from the occasional intelligible syllable, was a psychology lecture.

Is he practicing a speech? I wondered. I had never seen anything like this. At the school I had attended up until a few days earlier, when a teacher stood at the front of the class and talked, the students did this thing where they faced forward and listened. Or at least pretended to listen. Some of them even took notes. You simply couldn’t get away with blatantly refusing to pay any attention to the teacher, to say nothing of drowning out his lecture with your own conversation. What the hell was going on?

I took an empty seat and tried to make sense of what the teacher was saying. He was barely audible over the din in the room. Occasionally he would ask one of the more vocal students to be quiet, and the student would do him the courtesy of whispering for a minute or so before resuming the conversation at full volume. I began to suspect that I had stepped into a psychology experiment, rather than a psychology class. Were they trying to gauge the reaction of the new student to this absurd situation?

I sat at my desk and did my best to pretend that I was in a normal psychology class, despite the fact that this was obviously a very abnormal psychology class. Finally, the bell rang, and the kids shuffled off to their next classes. No one let on that I was being subjected to some sort of joke.

None of my other classes was quite this surreal, but a miasma of resigned apathy permeated the school. There was the occasional star student or young, idealistic teacher, but in general there seemed to be a tacit agreement that the teachers would pretend to teach if the students pretended to learn. The administration was strict about punctuality and the other superficial indicators of order in a way that made you wonder just what they were afraid of, exactly. It was more like a prison than a school; the administration didn’t care what you did as long as you were in the right place at the right time and didn’t stir up the other inmates or shank a guard.

Not all of this was entirely evident that first day at Charlotte High, of course. It took a few weeks to get a feeling for this foreign environment. But even from the first day, I had the sense that the people running this place had pretty much given up.

This notion was cemented in my mind on the bus ride home. I had thought that I was beyond being surprised by anything at that point, but I was wrong. As we neared the Cadillac Motel, the bus made an unscheduled stop at a convenience store called Starvin’ Marvin.

This is odd, I thought. Is the bus driver stopping for gas? No, he just pulled the bus over to the side of the parking lot. A couple of kids ran out of the bus and into the store. They returned a few minutes later, got back on the bus and thanked the driver. He pulled out of the parking lot and continued on his route. What was that about? I thought. What possible reason could there be for a school bus driver to make an unscheduled stop at Starvin’ Marvin? Then I saw a small red packet in one of the student’s hands, and I realized what had happened.

The driver had stopped so the kids could buy cigarettes.