Most Hiltons don’t have bars or restaurants in them. Well, not the ones I stay in that run about 150 dollars a night. And the ones that do aren’t worth writing home about. Fifteen dollar microwaved mozzarella sticks, eight dollar domestic draft beers. Highway fucking robbery. And the gall to do this, considering the hotel is three hundred feet from a Texas Roadhouse. The bartender disappears for a while, only for you to realize it’s actually the front desk lady. Wearing multiple hats, none of them looking good. Exasperated, she gets improperly makes your room key and your cocktail.
My coworker asks me to join him in the restaurant downstairs. I oblige him because he’s funny and a great shit-talker. While everyone else on the team gets their panties in a wad over any little thing, he just shrugs and takes it in stride, considers the OT, calculates how much longer before he has enough for a down payment on a house. I try to keep those kinds of people around. I think maybe the older guys are a little frayed at the ends from a life on the road. A life I myself am desperately trying to keep from becoming a career. The kind you retire from, only to be too tired and physically broken from it to do anything but watch football and complain about people driving too fast through the neighborhood. Every blue collar man just wants some rest. Every white collar man wants a blue collar hobby in his two car garage.
The food is surprisingly good and well-priced. My vodka cranberry is eight dollars and stiff as a board. I inhale half my food before I realize we are the youngest people in the room by thirty or forty years. They all either look half lost, or like they’re waiting for something. An all-white purgatory, with three beers on tap and one 22-inch television fifty feet away. They complain to their spouses, order bud light in a bottle, make concerned comments about how their BMW alarm keeps going off in the parking lot.
It’s the same no matter where I am. I get up at four-thirty for coffee, and there they are. Loafers and pressed khakis, wife and yippy dog in tow. I get off work for the day and they’re checking in, struggling to get out of their new Yukon or Lexus. License plates from three states away. Asking exceedingly detailed questions about the continental breakfast we all know sucks. Trying to get a five percent AARP or AAA discount.
Their omnipresence in rural Louisiana and downtown Asheville alike. At any given time, there are more Baby Boomers in Hilton hotels than in their homes. Confused, I guess, because I’ve never known old people to do, well, much of anything. A foreigner living in a Hilton for a month straight might begin to think old Americans just travel for the fuck of it. The land of milk and honey, 401k’s and Roth IRA’s entirely consisting of Hilton points and Delta SkyMiles.
Old men traveling alone are some of the most dejected looking people I’ve ever seen, rivaling African stone hut dwellers and Caribbean child beggars. Sitting at the bar, speaking only to order another beer. Cleaning his glasses endlessly, calling the bartender “ma’am.” Nearly looking like he’d rather be back in Vietnam, a rainy rice paddy somehow less of a malaise on his mind. Itching to be anywhere other than the in-between he’s found himself in. He and I, both. I’ll try to think of something to say to him, but nothing ever comes.
The malaise known as aimlessness draws the spirit into a thin straw and allows it to simply drip out until the last moment of life. I too find it disquieting, that image of old men at the bar. And so you have to strive to never be that man, no matter the cost.