gives me both keys and I go upstairs. I prefer the Honeymoon Suite and go downstairs to return the other key to Tasha.
‘If you have any questions,’ she says, taking my credit card, ‘don’t hesitate to ask.’
‘What’s the meaning of life?’
‘Love, Happiness, and Art,’ she replies without hesitation.
‘But if you have love, aren’t you already happy?’ I suggest.
‘Oh, no, love is painful,’ she says with a pained smile. It turns out she is a local artist, as is her boyfriend.
I go up in an old elevator, along some narrow corridors where no attempt has been made at ‘decor’ and let myself into the Honeymoon Suite. It’s a big-piped, disjointed corner. It smells of old cigarettes, the curtains are tattered, but the antiques are real. There’s a living room, about twenty-five feet by fifteen. In the kitchen there’s a massive refrigerator which has the fat, rounded, confident lines of forty years ago. If you tipped it over and put fins on it, you could drive it. The bedroom has a king-size bed and off it a bathroom that was once grand but now has a chipped birthmark-coloured bath with one of those shower heads where the water comes at you like ten different squints. Such a room in New York would cost $500. It’s a room where drugs are done, a room for provincial whores with a tendency to fall on their tits after a few drinks. It’s perfect and I’m happy.
I leave the hotel and wander along the street looking for a restaurant. I’m in the downtown area of a typical small town. Once the centre of commerce, it has been abandoned for the suburbs, for strip malls and modern office buildings with convenient parking. Too late, the community has realised the value of having a heart. Although parts of it have been recklessly knocked down, this remains the most beautiful part of town, with old red brick factories and warehouses waiting to become lofts and boutiques. At the moment, though, it’s still in transition. The shops that have survived, a stationer’s, a small department store, are dusty and understocked. Here and there you see a tall, pointless wall, a survivor of demolition, painted with a large fading advertisement in lettering from the Thirties, ‘Virginia Carriage Factory’ or ‘Pepsi-Cola 5 cents, Fountains and in Bottles.’
A few blocks away, I find The Street, the one where development has taken hold. There are shops for tourists and several
bars. I look in the window of one and see a short but fat congaline thudding around between cramped tables. Few sights are more pitiful and depressing than fat middle-aged drunks dancing like teenagers, but I am immune and walk away smiling. I go by some antique shops, a health-food peddler, a pawnshop, and a restaurant called Awful Arthur’s. Now I’m at the end of the street.
I turn around and go eat at Awful Arthur’s, crayfish and melted butter served by a waitress who went into the Navy to study medicine but didn’t like it.
‘Now I’m thinking of animal training,’ she tells me. ‘You know, like Shamu at SeaWorld, and dogs and so on, too.’
My guidebook tells me there were several Civil War battles in the Roanoke Valley. In one of them Union General David Hunter was forced to retreat up nearby Potts Mountain and 700 of his horses died of exhaustion. It took the local people a week to bury them. On the top of Mill Mountain, just outside of town, is a 100-foot-tall illuminated concrete-and-steel star which can be seen from sixty miles away on a clear night. It symbolises ‘the friendliness, industry and civic progress’ of the town. Because of this Roanoke is sometimes known as Star City. I don’t know about the industry or civic progress, but, as far as I can tell from the cabdriver, Tasha, and the would-be whale trainer, it certainly is friendly.
A squad of students—they look like students anyhow, in fact they look like students of the late Sixties—hang around outside. One of them, a white guy with frizzy, colourless
‘If you have any questions,’ she says, taking my credit card, ‘don’t hesitate to ask.’
‘What’s the meaning of life?’
‘Love, Happiness, and Art,’ she replies without hesitation.
‘But if you have love, aren’t you already happy?’ I suggest.
‘Oh, no, love is painful,’ she says with a pained smile. It turns out she is a local artist, as is her boyfriend.
I go up in an old elevator, along some narrow corridors where no attempt has been made at ‘decor’ and let myself into the Honeymoon Suite. It’s a big-piped, disjointed corner. It smells of old cigarettes, the curtains are tattered, but the antiques are real. There’s a living room, about twenty-five feet by fifteen. In the kitchen there’s a massive refrigerator which has the fat, rounded, confident lines of forty years ago. If you tipped it over and put fins on it, you could drive it. The bedroom has a king-size bed and off it a bathroom that was once grand but now has a chipped birthmark-coloured bath with one of those shower heads where the water comes at you like ten different squints. Such a room in New York would cost $500. It’s a room where drugs are done, a room for provincial whores with a tendency to fall on their tits after a few drinks. It’s perfect and I’m happy.
I leave the hotel and wander along the street looking for a restaurant. I’m in the downtown area of a typical small town. Once the centre of commerce, it has been abandoned for the suburbs, for strip malls and modern office buildings with convenient parking. Too late, the community has realised the value of having a heart. Although parts of it have been recklessly knocked down, this remains the most beautiful part of town, with old red brick factories and warehouses waiting to become lofts and boutiques. At the moment, though, it’s still in transition. The shops that have survived, a stationer’s, a small department store, are dusty and understocked. Here and there you see a tall, pointless wall, a survivor of demolition, painted with a large fading advertisement in lettering from the Thirties, ‘Virginia Carriage Factory’ or ‘Pepsi-Cola 5 cents, Fountains and in Bottles.’
A few blocks away, I find The Street, the one where development has taken hold. There are shops for tourists and several
bars. I look in the window of one and see a short but fat congaline thudding around between cramped tables. Few sights are more pitiful and depressing than fat middle-aged drunks dancing like teenagers, but I am immune and walk away smiling. I go by some antique shops, a health-food peddler, a pawnshop, and a restaurant called Awful Arthur’s. Now I’m at the end of the street.
I turn around and go eat at Awful Arthur’s, crayfish and melted butter served by a waitress who went into the Navy to study medicine but didn’t like it.
‘Now I’m thinking of animal training,’ she tells me. ‘You know, like Shamu at SeaWorld, and dogs and so on, too.’
My guidebook tells me there were several Civil War battles in the Roanoke Valley. In one of them Union General David Hunter was forced to retreat up nearby Potts Mountain and 700 of his horses died of exhaustion. It took the local people a week to bury them. On the top of Mill Mountain, just outside of town, is a 100-foot-tall illuminated concrete-and-steel star which can be seen from sixty miles away on a clear night. It symbolises ‘the friendliness, industry and civic progress’ of the town. Because of this Roanoke is sometimes known as Star City. I don’t know about the industry or civic progress, but, as far as I can tell from the cabdriver, Tasha, and the would-be whale trainer, it certainly is friendly.
A squad of students—they look like students anyhow, in fact they look like students of the late Sixties—hang around outside. One of them, a white guy with frizzy, colourless
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