Breakfast in Bed – UB40 & Chrissie Hynde
Or (for slow Dusty goodness): Breakfast in Bed – Dusty Springfield
Roland’s Navajoland Tours / Bed & Breakfast. The sign, and the well worn four wheel drive in the front yard, set the owner’s priorities. We stand warned. Still, we figure, everybody has to sleep sometime – even Roland. My friend Silke and I have been driving through Utah today, starting in Moab and meandering down to Arches National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park, The Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks State Park, and Monument Valley. Instead of heading all the way down to Grand Canyon, as our ever changing itinerary suggested this morning, we came to a screeching halt in Kayenta, AZ – I for one am definitely queasy from the sensory overdose that smacked me in the head somewhere between Delicate Arch and the Three Sisters. We are in Navajo country, and we are done.
Somehow, the droopy faded sign in this droopy faded front yard in this droopy faded town caught our nature-weary eyes. I imagine how it might have been, once, the colorful and attractive call to travelers from all across the globe; today, the sign is just tired. It looks like it wants to go home, curl up and die. On closer inspection I realize that it probably never was a very attractive call to anyone from anywhere, but somehow, between the burnt-out van and the blue-eyed husky panting on the porch it really ties this particular yard together. I find the sign oddly comforting. Silke is not so sure.
Sure enough, I am voted most likely to go inside and inquire after any vacant rooms. The dog drums her tail on the porch two times as I pass her, announcing my arrival. I open the porch fly door, expecting to step into a lobby – or at least some kind of entrance – but instead I find myself blundering straight into the middle of a living room where two men and a woman are glued to a Spanish soap opera on the biggest flat screen TV I have ever seen. Had the Mormon settlers put their minds to developing home entertainment systems instead of, well, settling, this TV still would have been a serious contender today.
‘Uh… Hello, good afternoon,’ I stammer, slightly taken aback by all this invaded privacy. The woman looks up and shoots a slightly puzzled yet friendly smile. The men glance at me and almost immediately turn back to the screen. Nobody gets up. ‘Hi, I was wondering if you had a room for two for tonight?’ The taller man looks up again, his eyes boring straight into the more ill lit corners of my soul. ‘Huh?’
‘Yeah, uhh… the sign said… You are a bed & breakfast, right?’ I try.
- ‘Yeah?’ the man asks. He must be Roland.
- ‘Uhh, yeah, great, I mean, I hope you have a room available?’ I am caught in quicksand, fidgeting my way to an accelerated death. It seems like the man has no problem whatsoever with leaving me dangling. The woman retches extensively, belches much to her own relief, and smiles at me again. The second man reaches into a big paper bag, spreading sickly waves of lukewarm buttery popcorn smell across the room. He stoically stares at the screen, where a highly attractive couple appears to have received some tragic news; their quiet desperation lasts until they fade to black and into a commercial break.
‘You want a room?’ the tall man leaps up and towards me with surprisingly feline grace. Up close he is really tall. I find myself craning my neck a little to look him in the eyes. His grey ponytail stretches about as far down his back as I imagine his treelike arms can reach when they squeeze the life out of a black bear, or, say, pick up a solid marble washbasin and hurl it through the window of a mental hospital. I blink. He doesn’t. ‘Yes, please, for two. Preferably with two separate beds!’ I tend to get over-cheery when ill at ease.
- ‘60 dollars,’ says Roland.
- ‘Uhhh… okay,’ I say. ‘Do you have Wi-Fi?’
- ‘Huh?’ Roland neither looks nor sounds puzzled, but something in the way his shadow shape-shifts across my face tells me he doesn’t know what the hell I am talking about, but he suspects it’s something menacing and threatening, like spreading wildfire maybe.
- ‘Internet, do you have internet?’ I explain. Roland just stares at me.
- ‘She means for the computer,’ the woman unexpectedly comes to the rescue. ‘We don’t have internet but you can tap into our neighbors’ Wi-Fi from here,’ she says as she turns to me and back to him. ‘Roland, show the lady the room.’
- ‘We don’t do breakfast,’ says Roland – he must have mulled it over and decided, way back when, that ‘Bed & Breakfast’ has a nicer ring to it than and ‘Bed & Get Out’ – and that settles that. I hobble after him down the hallway to our designated room. On the wall, in the size and shape of one of those old-fashioned tiles homely people sometimes put up that say Home Sweet Home or When God Closes A Door, Somewhere He Opens A Window a sign is put up. It says, Do I Look Like A People Person To You?!
We haul in our bags to the threesome’s bored amusement, and ask for a key to the room when we go out – this to the hilarity and mild contempt of all three, although the woman, to her credit, tries really hard not to show us her mild contempt. ‘What do you need a key for?’ she says. ‘You don’t need a key. It’s just us here.’ And on that note we head out for dinner and entertainment. We soon realize that Roland’s front yard is probably the most entertaining feature of Kayenta and its vicinity. But then, just like that, we find a tiny cinema at the end of the mall strip boasting Date Night and Green Zone, both starting in about half an hour, and decide on Date Night – after we grab a quick bite to eat at a place called the Amigo Café.
I wolf down my enchilada; Silke manages a little more dignity as she efficiently attacks her fajitas. We arrive at the cinema five minutes after the indicated starting time of our show. The girl behind the counter looks up and says, ‘You are late.’
- ‘Yes,’ Silke says, ‘we know, but could you let us in? We don’t mind that we are missing the commercials.’
- ‘Sorry, we aren’t showing Date Night at all tonight. We already turned down 2 other people, who were two minutes late. You are now the only ones here to see it – and there has to be a minimum of 4 people for us to show it,’ says the girl. To Silke’s suggestion that we just buy 4 tickets so the minimum requirement is met, the girl rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not sure if we can do that,’ she says. What she means is: goddamn city folk, think they can buy their way out of a mountain lion’s attack. Not on my watch. Silke, ever the reporter, is unfazed. ‘Let us find out together if it’s possible. Can we talk to your manager?’ The girl rolls her eyes again, sighs ostentatiously, then picks up a walkie-talkie. ‘Shelley? I have two… ladies here, they want to buy 4 tickets to Date Night so we show the movie. I already explained that they are late.’
Two minutes later, another girl, she can’t be much older than 15, scrambles into the lobby, looking extremely uncomfortable at the sight of the two of us beaming back at her in high expectation. ‘So, can you show the movie if we buy 4 tickets?’ Silke booms. The girl shrinks back, but stands her ground. ‘No, I’m very sorry but we can’t do that. You are late.’
- ‘Well, that shouldn’t matter since we are the only ones coming in to watch it – right?’ Silke pauses for confirmation. But no. The girl struggles to explain that they really cannot make any exceptions for anybody, because if she would make an exception now, tomorrow the place would be overrun by customers wanting to have their own private viewings of shows and surely we could see how that would be a bad thing. We look around. There are exactly 10 people in the entire theater – including the two of us, and a ticketing/counter staff of 4. The town of Kayenta and all its livestock combined couldn’t overrun this theater’s restroom in a stampede. We end up watching Green Zone viewed on a screen decidedly smaller than Roland’s TV.
It’s not bad, but half an hour into it I find myself wondering why Jason Bourne has joined the army, pondering how hand-held camera work always makes me feel a bit iffy and then knowing full blast that I will not make it to the end of the night without throwing up extensively.
I make it back to Roland’s B&B, where I puke my kneecaps out with all the decorum I can muster, next to the left rear tire of Roland’s 4x4. I must be suffering from Stendhall effect – nature’s majestic beauty has simply overwhelmed my underdeveloped sense of splendor. Silke thinks it might have been the enchilada. Or maybe the two packs of Twizzlers I’ve been munching all day instead of lunch. ‘Did you know that men can go infertile when they eat too much of that shit!’ she throws in there when I come up for air. I didn’t.
Roland’s place looked dark and deserted from the road, but as we work our way through the yard we hear the sound of muffled laughter. I half expect to find Roland and the woman dancing around the living room wearing our underwear as little party hats, while the other man does something arts-and-craftly with our passports. But no. Roland and his friend are still watching TV, sitting in pretty much the same spot as when we left them, only this time around they are watching a basketball game. They curse, and clear their throats, and belch and retch and are generally having a grand old time. They vaguely nod in our direction as we wish them a wonderful night.
I figure a hot shower is all I need to get me back on track. Upon turning on the tap, the water runs abundantly for a minute or so – and then fizzles out to a mere cold drizzle. I put my clothes back on, head to the living room and stand there for a bit, waiting for a break in the game before disturbing Roland and his companion. Johnny Cash’s mum might have told him to always be a good boy and never play with guns, but at the other end of the world my mother told me to first ask nicely before touching anything that isn’t yours, and always be polite. And at all times wear fresh underwear in case you get hit by a bus on the way to school – where I come from nurses and doctors apparently won’t touch traffic casualties with a 60 foot pole when there is the merest suspicion of skid marks.
So I say ‘Excuse me sir, I believe the shower isn’t working. Would you be so kind as to take a look?’ The men look at me as if they smell something vaguely nasty, like lukewarm popcorn butter. ‘I might be doing something wrong…’ I add.
- ‘I’m sure you are,’ says Roland, but then he shrugs and gets up to horse-whisper the shower into a hot stream of submission. When we drive off at the break of dawn the next morning, I find no trace of my projectile vomiting of the previous night. Nature must have opened up and swallowed it whole, her sense of splendor completely underwhelmed by my contribution. We are, after all, in Navajo country.
