Local Voices: Midnight at the Oasis -- Part One

I am chaperoning a Middle School Band festival. Yes, I know. Living the dream.

Seriously, it is a thing I am happy to do, and I took off a day of work just to do it. I think it is fantastic that there are this many 13 and 14-year-olds who are in to the arts and wear their self-proclaimed band geekiness as proudly as a letter jacket. They are me 30 some-odd years ago. I was looking forward to it. There was to be music, bonding time with my son and his friends, and I was promised that all I had to do was transport the kids from point A to point B and the rest of the time was mine. I brought work with me. I listed ideas for articles and blog posts hopefully in a purple notebook. I brought two books, in case I finished the first one.

The festival is in Athens, which is the home of the University of Georgia. It is a great college town, funky and fun, and less than an hour’s drive from my house. Because there are late nights and early mornings, we are staying in a hotel. There are seven kids, only four of which (including my own) I have met before this trip; one band director, who is quite literally half my age and one third my size; and another mother, who is about my age, and, well, my kind of person, only I didn’t know that before I got here. I wish I did. Things would have been different.

After the first afternoon’s activities and evening concert, we went to check in the hotel. It wasn’t one I was familiar with, but I’m not familiar with that much, and seeing as how the band director graduated from UGA about twenty minutes ago, I figured she knew where/what it was and I wasn’t worried. Most chain hotels have a certain standard, and I’m not that terribly picky.

I piled my son, two other boys, and a girl in my car, and we headed to the hotel with directions from the GPS. We drove by it the first time, even though the GPS was yelling at me that we had reached our destination. I guess I refused to see what was plainly in front of me. We pulled in a parking lot, and the girl asked Siri where our hotel was. Siri said the same place. Well, I thought, maybe we missed it. We turned around and drove by again, this time with the children and Siri yelling at me, and the kids adding that they were pretty sure they saw Gabby’s mother’s car.

I pulled in to a place that might have been a television set from a police drama. The lobby, once you got past the plexiglass window with the speaker, roundhouse kicked you in the face with the odor of stale cigarettes. Our seven little suburban kids, sheltered in their upper middle class residential neighborhood, had never seen such a thing. They were visibly shaking.

I wish I could say the rooms were better than the lobby suggested. We took three flights of crooked concrete stairs up to a sloped landing, trying not to kick over an anthill of cigarette butts. The two girls I was in charge of and I shouldered the door open.

The heat hit me first. It was a living, breathing thing, thick and viscous. The ‘climate control’ unit was not running, but it was set on ‘heat’. Or maybe ‘autoclave’. I turned it on “air conditioning” and set the temperature on 68. I’m not sure that ever did anything, but at least I felt like I was trying.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to get back in the car and drive home and let everyone sleep in my living room. But, I didn’t want to freak out the girls, so I kept a smile plastered on my face. I didn’t want to seem like a snob, so I said nothing to the other mother or the teacher. I know I’ve gotten soft in my old age, and my income allows me to avoid certain discomforts and hold to certain standards. The toilet seemed relatively clean, despite what we decided (for sanity’s sake) were ‘rust’ stains at the bottom of the drain. The edges of the bathroom floor were crusted with mold and black stuff and fuzzy stuff that might or might not have once been hair. I didn’t look too closely. The beds seemed cleanish, if you ignored the cigarette burns in the bedding and the eau-de-unfiltered-Camel in the pillows. I’ve been primitive camping, and I can tell you there are fewer bugs and less dirt on the side of a mountain.

I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t. I was in charge of my two girls and the three boys in the room next door, all of us on the third floor and it was 11 o’clock at night. I went to check on the boys. They were boys, They were making fun of the condition of the hotel, but didn’t seem disturbed by it.

I was wrong. Oh boy, was I wrong. (Stay tuned for Part Two)

Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor. For more updates and the latest information on Lori and her writing, please visit www.loriduffwrites.com