Chapter 4: Hungry Hotels
One thing that one must understand is that people are most like themselves when they are outside of their comfort zones, and for most people this includes being in transit. People traveling to and fro are at their most human, and the face they wear is one close to their own.
I had been traveling, looking for an instance of haunting. I had looked for hauntings in churches, theaters, places where mankind's energy resonated most clearly, but it had not occurred to me to look in a place that was so obvious. I am reminded of the Overlook Hotel and the Flamingo, a couple of famous literary examples, but I hadn't seen or felt something like that and had no frame of reference for such until that night in Louisville.
I won't name the hotel, nor the desk clerk who confirmed my story. One night during my stay, covering, of all things, the Kentucky Derby, I was trying desperately to get to sleep. I have never had a LOT of trouble with learning to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, but I am a life long sufferer of insomnia and the thumping wasn't helping.
"PACO!" Thump. "Paco! C'mon man! I just wanna talk." Thump again, nearer. "Paco! Dude! I don't even blame you! I blame HER!" Thump.
This went on for about twenty minutes, so finally I got up, put on my robe and looked out my door. There he was, wandering aimlessly up and down the corridor with a bottle of wild turkey in one hand, and a bowie knife, the length of my forearm, in the other. He was shirtless and badly sunburned. He had a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate. His boots clunked on the carpet as he half- stumbled, muttering, calling out for Paco and occasionally thudding his fist, the one with the knife in it, into the corridor wall.
For some reason, I can only claim extreme exhaustion, I was not as alarmed as I probably should have been, even when the man turned around and, seeing me, began asking me if I had seen Paco. I assured him I had not, all the while wondering why the police hadn't been summoned. He'd been at this long enough and was obviously quite drunk.
Then, the man asked me for a cigarette. And, for reasons that aren't very clear to me to this night, I said, "Yes, I do. Come on in and have one and sit for a spell."
Perhaps I was just trying to get the young man to calm down. I had been in enough bars as a journalist to know one salient fact about drunks. The easiest way to get them to calm down is to whisper to them. So, he came in and sat on the corner of the bed and smoked one of my cigarettes. Seeing my laptop, he asked what I did that I needed such a thing. I told him I was a journalist.
That IS more or less true.
"Yeah? Well have I got a story for you," he began. Dale, for that was his name, began to recount his most recent misadventure with a young lady named Trina. Trina had apparently done him very wrong and had run off with his best friend Paco. The details were all very sordid, and I won't really go into them. It was sad. Country songs had been written about less. But, by the time the telling was over, it was four a.m. and he'd smoked the rest of my cigarettes. Humoring him, I asked him if he'd mind if I took some notes. He smiled by that point and waved me on like drunk royalty, and when I turned back, he was gone, the door still closed. The chain still on. I looked out in the hall. He wasn't there. Indeed there was no evidence he had ever been in the hall. No dents in the corridor. No spills on the carpet. The only sign he had been in my room was the full ashtray. I went down to the front desk. The young man there looked up at me with an aggrieved expression on seeing me, and asked me what the matter was.
"I've just had an odd experience."
"Oh...You talked to Dale didn't you?"
"How did..."
"People have been seeing him up there on the fourth floor for years since he died, usually on a Wednesday, almost always right before the Derby."
"...Died?"
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I'll comp your stay."
I went back to my room, but sleep did not come.
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