Morrison Motel
By
Victoria Roskams
The R&R-ers had started to rock up as early as 1972. Not rest and relaxation: Don didn’t deceive himself that anyone came to the Alta Cienega motel, perched modestly as it was at the intersection of two constantly teeming highways, for that. No, these guests, who had started checking in back in 1972, not long after Don had taken over, and who had since then persisted as a steady if infrequent stream, once every three or four months, always asking for room 32, always, were in search of rock and roll. Well, they ain’t gonna find it here, Don thought, the first time he checked in a couple with overgrown hair, vacant stares, and lousy posture. But they kept coming. Leather jackets kept appearing on the other side of the entrance’s frosted glass; snakeskin boots kept treading coolly over the yellowing lino; the air in the tiny lobby was eternally cloying with the scent of ever-renewing cigarettes. They never spoke the name – just asked for room 32. Even the ones whose voices had a ring of habitually assumed insouciance, the most accomplished of drawlers, dropped their voices to a reverent whisper as they said the words “room 32”. Some had asked Don, with barely concealed fervour: “That is the right one, isn’t it?” Don had kept a diplomatic silence and sent them on up. Well, it had been the right one for the last couple of strung-out indistinguishables, so, sure – probably it was.
Himself, Don was more of a Frank Sinatra guy. You knew where you were with Frank. Yeah, that was more his speed, none of that creepy fairground music he’d hear drifting from room 32 after checking in another pair of visitors. He’d even taken to playing Sinatra over the speakers as he sat at the welcome desk, pencil and log book on standby, coffee in hand, eyes idly wandering over the passing traffic. As he told his wife Carol: “No one gives a better welcome than Frank. You walk through those doors, you hear Frank, what are you gonna do but stay?” Privately, though, he admitted that he hoped the glitzy onslaught of Sinatra’s singing might prove a deterrent to some of the guests – namely, those freaks in room 32.
It was the strangest thing, but over the years, as the visits continued, he’d had to start searching the guests on arrival and confiscating, if found, any pens, pencils, crayons, paint sets, graffiti cans, anything that might be used to mark the walls of the room. Don was under no illusions that he was running a classy joint, but he couldn’t have people drawing on the walls. He’d found the first one after the first pair of strange leather-clad guests had drifted out late in ’72: “From LA to Père Lachaise – we’ll never forget you. RIP.” Well, that was alright – if they’d never forget, then they wouldn’t mind Don scrubbing away at the biro marks and wiping the wall clean again. It wasn’t like their sentiment would disappear with the writing. And a nice blank wall was better for the next guests – it was just better that way. But the next guests had been even worse. Don could only think of the Manson Family as he opened the door to room 32 and found all four walls smattered with red paint – he had laid a tentative finger on it and rubbed slightly – yeah, it was definitely paint. This many years spent running motels had acquainted him with the texture of blood stains. The letters, thrown in a careless zigzag across the walls, had said: “THE LIZARD KING RIP.” As Don had told Carol, you had to be okay with getting this kind of clientele, but it hadn’t made it any less troublesome when he had had to dust off a ladder and cart it up to the room so that he could scrub off every last hint of red from the walls. It really wouldn’t do to have red in his rooms: it was known to be a very angry colour.
Luckily, the hopeful inhabitants of room 32 submitted without complaint when Don instituted his new ‘search and confiscate’ policy. He supposed they were just so intent on staying in that room that a little pat-down wasn’t going to stand in their way. Hell, maybe it even added to the mystique of the whole thing. Maybe they were reporting back to the others: “Yeah, you can stay at the Alta Cienega, pretty cheap, only thing is there’s a guy who searches you on the way in and takes away your pens. It’s, like, a whole thing.” The weird thing was, even after he had started searching the guests, the walls would still be covered with markings after their stays. At first, he thought they must be taking desperate measures, using cigarette ends, keys, maybe even their own blood, anything to leave any kind of imprint on the walls, the bedframe, the desk, the closet, the windows. But it wasn’t just burns and scratches and smears. All of those surfaces wound up covered with ink too: messages, marriage proposals, poems, curses, invocations, symbols, pretty esoteric stuff Don thought, and scrawled images that made his head dizzy to look at.
The latest time, he had spent hours in the room with a bucket and mop, straining to try not to read, nor even look at, if he could help it, the mass of ominous missives he was wiping away, only for another couple to book into the room the next day. Don had duly searched them – it had been difficult, but necessary, to get his hands into the pockets of those tight leather pants, Carol would understand; and as for their bags, there had been plenty to turn a blind eye to there, but he had managed – and thrown a couple of thick black marker pens onto the pile with the others. He placed a tube of mascara and an eyeliner pencil under lock and key while solemnly outlining the motel’s graffiti policy, and then led the undeterred pair up to the room, poky and cavernous but clean, which was all a normal guest could ask for. That was at 11pm. An hour later, Don was resting with his feet on the counter, allowing Frank Sinatra to coast him over waves of calm, when he became aware of an insistent, needling sound from upstairs. It nagged and nagged, musical notes tripping and falling over themselves in frantic disarray. It was like some nightmarish carnival: the needle jumping constantly on the bossa nova’s groove, forcing it into a stuttering excess which gathered intensity as Don made out the sound of a man yelping – he couldn’t be sure, but – something about a woman getting high. And then, he thought, something about “the other side” – yeah, that was it, “the other side.”
As Don told Carol later over a tired cup of coffee, this wasn’t much in itself, although he’d rather “fly me to the moon” than this vague stuff about some other side, wherever that was, but some folks like that nowadays. No, the strange thing was that when he’d been in to the room after the couple had checked out, the walls were covered once more with writing and drawings, the disarray even worse than that of the music he thought he’d heard. “But it was totally pristine when they went in,” he said to Carol, puzzled, “and I’d taken everything from them, even their eyeliner.”
The next couple who checked in gave Don more of a clue about what might be going on. Not that they spoke the name – none of them ever did – but they were, compared to the zombies and drones who had checked into room 32 before, unusually talkative about their endeavours.
“Huxley says, if we could only open the doors of perception, we could see the entirety of reality for what it really is,” said the man, looking out from under a fringe of dark curly hair.
“So we wanna open those doors of perception,” said the woman, brushing aside her own fringe of dark curly hair.
“No better place for it,” said the man.
Don got up from behind the counter. “I hope you won’t mind me checking your bags and pockets for any pens? It’s purely routine,” he assured them, beginning to rummage through their ramshackle sacks, “a policy we’ve introduced since we began to get a lot of graffiti.” A biro, doubling as a bookmark inside a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Collected Works, joined the pile.
“You should find everything to your liking,” said Don, leading them up the narrow stairs, “the room was freshly scrubbed clean just yesterday. Here we are.” The door creaked open: white walls, white bed, only a few stains on the carpet. All as it should be.
As he was closing the door, the woman caught Don by the arm and asked: “Say, do you know if anyone has held a séance in here before? Or will we be the first…”
Nonplussed, Don shook his head, descended the stairs, and turned up the Sinatra. A familiar, earthy smell might well start to drift down to him before too long – sure, he expected that – but a séance? It was too stupid. Did these people really think that the spirit of rock and roll still lived here? And if it did, if it was lying somewhere in that room, spreadeagled on the bed, hanging off the curtains, suspended batlike from the ceiling, why did they need to summon it? Surely just being in the room should be enough. Hell, he didn’t know: he didn’t listen to any of that. He couldn’t understand the pull of that music which seemed to attack you with every single note, driving harder and faster, harder and faster, until your eyes were clogged with the screeching fuzz – it wasn’t music, it was the sound of someone going crazy. And what he heard coming from room 32 that night was even worse: some kind of organ rollicking around, up and down like a teetering ship on a stormy sea, up and down, up and down. God, and it was endless, folding in on itself and folding out again, and then the man would shout: guttural yelps, more like a dog than a human. Then a period of calm, a low growling that rumbled like a threat in the motel’s very walls. Then the yelps again. Then warnings of fire. FIIIIIRE…
And the warnings had been right enough. Bleary-eyed and uncertain, creeping slowly into the room the next morning, Don found not just a new set of scrawls on the walls but a great wide patch of scorched carpet, about the same width as the double bed, with flecks of peeling paint on the ceiling suggesting that the flames had licked all the way up there too. Next to the peeling paint, a message in red ran: “We couldn’t get much higher RIP xxx.” The rest of the messages consisted of just one name, just three letters, spelled out again and again, along with the three letters RIP, all seared onto the surfaces like a series of burnt offerings. Strange that the fire alarm had never sounded. Still, as Don told Carol later, it was kind of a relief to have an excuse to shut off room 32 for a while and accept no guests. He was in for a much quieter few weeks while the room was closed for maintenance. Séances, my ass, thought Don. What’s real is just what’s in front of us. Sure, I don’t know how these walls keep getting covered with this stuff, but I know I can get them clean again. Soap, sponges – that’s real.
One night, about a week later, Don was counting the passing trucks when he found his ability to keep count hampered by a noise from above. It was an organ again, jumpy and jittery, thrusting around in a way that made Don’s heartbeat feel all irregular. He tried breathing calmly to set it back to its normal pace, but the attacks continued, getting louder and faster. A scream, and then a voice tore through the air.
Come on, now, touch me babe
Can’t you see that I am not afraid?
It couldn’t be coming from room 32. No one was allowed in. But it had been a quiet night at the motel and there were no guests in any of the other rooms. It had to be room 32. As Don took slow steps up to the next floor, the music took a sudden turn, swooping down and around, growing more baroque and more grotesque, leering, reaching out of the darkness.
I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky
For YOU AND I…
Now that he was in the corridor, Don could make out another beat besides that of the song. It was the same rhythm, yet distinct: its thrusts moved in time, but issued from somewhere else, the sound not of wooden drumsticks but a wooden bedframe. And the screams were not just part of the song: joining with the rough barking was a series of faster, higher sounds, a woman breathing out in such quick gasps that she could barely have time to fill her lungs in the intervals. The sound came to Don from the dim reaches of his memory. He had never heard this music before, but this sound – not for a while, sure, but once…
Approaching room 32 through the din, he steeled himself and brought down the door with a kick. The noise stopped. The room was empty, blank, devoid even of the singed patch of carpet left by the previous occupants. The bed was neatly made and the walls were blazingly white. Only when he had looked around several times in amazement did Don spot a lone piece of graffiti, in the corner by the bed. The handwriting was small and precise, not like the crazed daubings he had found in this room before. He had to clamber onto the bed, crouching on all fours, and crane his neck to read what it said. It was Carol’s handwriting.
“Jim –
Oh boy, did you light my fire…
Best sex I’ve ever had!
RIP”
Victoria C. Roskams writes short fiction about the arts and the uncanny: exploring the strange lives and afterlives of artists and artworks. Beyond fictional writing, Roskams pursues academic research interests in various kinds of writing about music, especially the intersections of fictional and non-fictional writing, and with a focus on the nineteenth century. Roskams lives and works in Oxford, and can be found on X/Bluesky @VRoskams.
By
Victoria Roskams
The R&R-ers had started to rock up as early as 1972. Not rest and relaxation: Don didn’t deceive himself that anyone came to the Alta Cienega motel, perched modestly as it was at the intersection of two constantly teeming highways, for that. No, these guests, who had started checking in back in 1972, not long after Don had taken over, and who had since then persisted as a steady if infrequent stream, once every three or four months, always asking for room 32, always, were in search of rock and roll. Well, they ain’t gonna find it here, Don thought, the first time he checked in a couple with overgrown hair, vacant stares, and lousy posture. But they kept coming. Leather jackets kept appearing on the other side of the entrance’s frosted glass; snakeskin boots kept treading coolly over the yellowing lino; the air in the tiny lobby was eternally cloying with the scent of ever-renewing cigarettes. They never spoke the name – just asked for room 32. Even the ones whose voices had a ring of habitually assumed insouciance, the most accomplished of drawlers, dropped their voices to a reverent whisper as they said the words “room 32”. Some had asked Don, with barely concealed fervour: “That is the right one, isn’t it?” Don had kept a diplomatic silence and sent them on up. Well, it had been the right one for the last couple of strung-out indistinguishables, so, sure – probably it was.
Himself, Don was more of a Frank Sinatra guy. You knew where you were with Frank. Yeah, that was more his speed, none of that creepy fairground music he’d hear drifting from room 32 after checking in another pair of visitors. He’d even taken to playing Sinatra over the speakers as he sat at the welcome desk, pencil and log book on standby, coffee in hand, eyes idly wandering over the passing traffic. As he told his wife Carol: “No one gives a better welcome than Frank. You walk through those doors, you hear Frank, what are you gonna do but stay?” Privately, though, he admitted that he hoped the glitzy onslaught of Sinatra’s singing might prove a deterrent to some of the guests – namely, those freaks in room 32.
It was the strangest thing, but over the years, as the visits continued, he’d had to start searching the guests on arrival and confiscating, if found, any pens, pencils, crayons, paint sets, graffiti cans, anything that might be used to mark the walls of the room. Don was under no illusions that he was running a classy joint, but he couldn’t have people drawing on the walls. He’d found the first one after the first pair of strange leather-clad guests had drifted out late in ’72: “From LA to Père Lachaise – we’ll never forget you. RIP.” Well, that was alright – if they’d never forget, then they wouldn’t mind Don scrubbing away at the biro marks and wiping the wall clean again. It wasn’t like their sentiment would disappear with the writing. And a nice blank wall was better for the next guests – it was just better that way. But the next guests had been even worse. Don could only think of the Manson Family as he opened the door to room 32 and found all four walls smattered with red paint – he had laid a tentative finger on it and rubbed slightly – yeah, it was definitely paint. This many years spent running motels had acquainted him with the texture of blood stains. The letters, thrown in a careless zigzag across the walls, had said: “THE LIZARD KING RIP.” As Don had told Carol, you had to be okay with getting this kind of clientele, but it hadn’t made it any less troublesome when he had had to dust off a ladder and cart it up to the room so that he could scrub off every last hint of red from the walls. It really wouldn’t do to have red in his rooms: it was known to be a very angry colour.
Luckily, the hopeful inhabitants of room 32 submitted without complaint when Don instituted his new ‘search and confiscate’ policy. He supposed they were just so intent on staying in that room that a little pat-down wasn’t going to stand in their way. Hell, maybe it even added to the mystique of the whole thing. Maybe they were reporting back to the others: “Yeah, you can stay at the Alta Cienega, pretty cheap, only thing is there’s a guy who searches you on the way in and takes away your pens. It’s, like, a whole thing.” The weird thing was, even after he had started searching the guests, the walls would still be covered with markings after their stays. At first, he thought they must be taking desperate measures, using cigarette ends, keys, maybe even their own blood, anything to leave any kind of imprint on the walls, the bedframe, the desk, the closet, the windows. But it wasn’t just burns and scratches and smears. All of those surfaces wound up covered with ink too: messages, marriage proposals, poems, curses, invocations, symbols, pretty esoteric stuff Don thought, and scrawled images that made his head dizzy to look at.
The latest time, he had spent hours in the room with a bucket and mop, straining to try not to read, nor even look at, if he could help it, the mass of ominous missives he was wiping away, only for another couple to book into the room the next day. Don had duly searched them – it had been difficult, but necessary, to get his hands into the pockets of those tight leather pants, Carol would understand; and as for their bags, there had been plenty to turn a blind eye to there, but he had managed – and thrown a couple of thick black marker pens onto the pile with the others. He placed a tube of mascara and an eyeliner pencil under lock and key while solemnly outlining the motel’s graffiti policy, and then led the undeterred pair up to the room, poky and cavernous but clean, which was all a normal guest could ask for. That was at 11pm. An hour later, Don was resting with his feet on the counter, allowing Frank Sinatra to coast him over waves of calm, when he became aware of an insistent, needling sound from upstairs. It nagged and nagged, musical notes tripping and falling over themselves in frantic disarray. It was like some nightmarish carnival: the needle jumping constantly on the bossa nova’s groove, forcing it into a stuttering excess which gathered intensity as Don made out the sound of a man yelping – he couldn’t be sure, but – something about a woman getting high. And then, he thought, something about “the other side” – yeah, that was it, “the other side.”
As Don told Carol later over a tired cup of coffee, this wasn’t much in itself, although he’d rather “fly me to the moon” than this vague stuff about some other side, wherever that was, but some folks like that nowadays. No, the strange thing was that when he’d been in to the room after the couple had checked out, the walls were covered once more with writing and drawings, the disarray even worse than that of the music he thought he’d heard. “But it was totally pristine when they went in,” he said to Carol, puzzled, “and I’d taken everything from them, even their eyeliner.”
The next couple who checked in gave Don more of a clue about what might be going on. Not that they spoke the name – none of them ever did – but they were, compared to the zombies and drones who had checked into room 32 before, unusually talkative about their endeavours.
“Huxley says, if we could only open the doors of perception, we could see the entirety of reality for what it really is,” said the man, looking out from under a fringe of dark curly hair.
“So we wanna open those doors of perception,” said the woman, brushing aside her own fringe of dark curly hair.
“No better place for it,” said the man.
Don got up from behind the counter. “I hope you won’t mind me checking your bags and pockets for any pens? It’s purely routine,” he assured them, beginning to rummage through their ramshackle sacks, “a policy we’ve introduced since we began to get a lot of graffiti.” A biro, doubling as a bookmark inside a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Collected Works, joined the pile.
“You should find everything to your liking,” said Don, leading them up the narrow stairs, “the room was freshly scrubbed clean just yesterday. Here we are.” The door creaked open: white walls, white bed, only a few stains on the carpet. All as it should be.
As he was closing the door, the woman caught Don by the arm and asked: “Say, do you know if anyone has held a séance in here before? Or will we be the first…”
Nonplussed, Don shook his head, descended the stairs, and turned up the Sinatra. A familiar, earthy smell might well start to drift down to him before too long – sure, he expected that – but a séance? It was too stupid. Did these people really think that the spirit of rock and roll still lived here? And if it did, if it was lying somewhere in that room, spreadeagled on the bed, hanging off the curtains, suspended batlike from the ceiling, why did they need to summon it? Surely just being in the room should be enough. Hell, he didn’t know: he didn’t listen to any of that. He couldn’t understand the pull of that music which seemed to attack you with every single note, driving harder and faster, harder and faster, until your eyes were clogged with the screeching fuzz – it wasn’t music, it was the sound of someone going crazy. And what he heard coming from room 32 that night was even worse: some kind of organ rollicking around, up and down like a teetering ship on a stormy sea, up and down, up and down. God, and it was endless, folding in on itself and folding out again, and then the man would shout: guttural yelps, more like a dog than a human. Then a period of calm, a low growling that rumbled like a threat in the motel’s very walls. Then the yelps again. Then warnings of fire. FIIIIIRE…
And the warnings had been right enough. Bleary-eyed and uncertain, creeping slowly into the room the next morning, Don found not just a new set of scrawls on the walls but a great wide patch of scorched carpet, about the same width as the double bed, with flecks of peeling paint on the ceiling suggesting that the flames had licked all the way up there too. Next to the peeling paint, a message in red ran: “We couldn’t get much higher RIP xxx.” The rest of the messages consisted of just one name, just three letters, spelled out again and again, along with the three letters RIP, all seared onto the surfaces like a series of burnt offerings. Strange that the fire alarm had never sounded. Still, as Don told Carol later, it was kind of a relief to have an excuse to shut off room 32 for a while and accept no guests. He was in for a much quieter few weeks while the room was closed for maintenance. Séances, my ass, thought Don. What’s real is just what’s in front of us. Sure, I don’t know how these walls keep getting covered with this stuff, but I know I can get them clean again. Soap, sponges – that’s real.
One night, about a week later, Don was counting the passing trucks when he found his ability to keep count hampered by a noise from above. It was an organ again, jumpy and jittery, thrusting around in a way that made Don’s heartbeat feel all irregular. He tried breathing calmly to set it back to its normal pace, but the attacks continued, getting louder and faster. A scream, and then a voice tore through the air.
Come on, now, touch me babe
Can’t you see that I am not afraid?
It couldn’t be coming from room 32. No one was allowed in. But it had been a quiet night at the motel and there were no guests in any of the other rooms. It had to be room 32. As Don took slow steps up to the next floor, the music took a sudden turn, swooping down and around, growing more baroque and more grotesque, leering, reaching out of the darkness.
I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky
For YOU AND I…
Now that he was in the corridor, Don could make out another beat besides that of the song. It was the same rhythm, yet distinct: its thrusts moved in time, but issued from somewhere else, the sound not of wooden drumsticks but a wooden bedframe. And the screams were not just part of the song: joining with the rough barking was a series of faster, higher sounds, a woman breathing out in such quick gasps that she could barely have time to fill her lungs in the intervals. The sound came to Don from the dim reaches of his memory. He had never heard this music before, but this sound – not for a while, sure, but once…
Approaching room 32 through the din, he steeled himself and brought down the door with a kick. The noise stopped. The room was empty, blank, devoid even of the singed patch of carpet left by the previous occupants. The bed was neatly made and the walls were blazingly white. Only when he had looked around several times in amazement did Don spot a lone piece of graffiti, in the corner by the bed. The handwriting was small and precise, not like the crazed daubings he had found in this room before. He had to clamber onto the bed, crouching on all fours, and crane his neck to read what it said. It was Carol’s handwriting.
“Jim –
Oh boy, did you light my fire…
Best sex I’ve ever had!
RIP”
Victoria C. Roskams writes short fiction about the arts and the uncanny: exploring the strange lives and afterlives of artists and artworks. Beyond fictional writing, Roskams pursues academic research interests in various kinds of writing about music, especially the intersections of fictional and non-fictional writing, and with a focus on the nineteenth century. Roskams lives and works in Oxford, and can be found on X/Bluesky @VRoskams.
