The Dark Side of Camelot

It is no secret that I am fond of cheap motels. Not because they are pleasant, but because of what the walls could tell, if they would. Stories of drunken travellers and sordid affairs that still linger in the musty hallways. Sordid stories of love found, and broken, of a worn out roughneck falling asleep in the arms of a middle aged barmaid while the test pattern blasts a beacon of light across the room.

Cheap hotels are the keepers of secrets and the nurturers of dreams, as road warriors put in for the night for a room that can be had with a couple of green slips of paper with pictures of Andrew Jackson on them and a not-so-subtle surrender of data into the data mines of the NSA.

One of my favorite cheap motels, in Amarillo, is the Camelot Motel. It's a broken down shadow of what it once was, a remnant of the mother road, one that surely must have played host to families with the means to afford a room overnight. I can say with fair certainty that in its heyday, the eyes of every kid under the age of 12 must have lit up when Mom and Dad pulled that old Nash Rambler into its parking lot.

We've stayed there our share of times; most recently on the pre-Christmas shopping trip when the rain was coming down hard and we knew we couldn't take the Acura home because it was after dark and the headlights long since ceased to work. It's a serviceable motel for what it is, and it always seems to attract its share of patrons.

Tonight I saw the dark side of Camelot. The wings of the hotel fold around into a "U" making a modern sort of keep for derelicts and drunkards, and as I was travelling alone, I got my ticket punched to the dark side of the hotel. It looks like a place that's seen not a few police visits, and the hoods of at least two cars were open as their owners cussed over a 40 and tried to restore them to running condition under the glow of the parking lot lights.

But seeing the dark side of this shell of a hotel (the second floor is no longer open) won't deter me from returning. It is what it is, warts and all, and I'm happy to lend to the walls the story of an IT guy on a stayover working the scraps of jobs that he can get in order to make a go of things.