Confessions of a Catholic schoolgirl
By Jeannie Perry
My guilty pleasure is staying in hotel rooms.
My earliest memories of hotel rooms are when Edie would come for a visit and stay at the Holiday Inn at the base of Buttermilk, back in the days when Holiday Inn was a fancy hotel in Aspen. My sisters and I would show up to her room and hold relay races in the endless hallways covered in burnt orange, mustard yellow, and lentil brown carpet. Then Edie would hand us a stack of quarters, necessary to start the “wibble bed.” (In the 70s there were beds with vibrating mechanisms in them. Good times.) Our Gran was Edie’s best friend and in the years after Gran’s death Edie became a very close friend of the family. She was one of those people who wasn’t related but might as well be; a fixture at holidays, birthdays, family gatherings. She always wore lipstick (like Gran) and she smelled good (like perfume) and, most importantly, she never ran out of quarters.
Nowadays I’ll drive down to Denver to visit family, see old friends, or just for fun: a professional sporting event, live music, art show… and I’ll stay in a hotel. I have a gazillion relatives who live there, not to mention my in-laws all live in Denver and my oldest friends from high school. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school in Denver, and I’d bet most of the women from my graduating class would still take me in for a night; depending on how awkward I was willing to make it.
Sometimes I’m staying literally blocks away from them. But as a houseguest, I can’t stand over the sink in my underwear eating French fries, dripping ketchup all over the place, as I scroll through social media. (Ok, so maybe I have more than one guilty pleasure.) Which is why I will hem and haw, make excuses, tell each one I’m staying with the other— all for the comfort of sleeping as long as I want in a bed that smells of bleach. It’s one of my deepest secrets.
When my best friend was hit by a car and spent a month in the hospital in a coma, I stayed in hotels. Not in a hotel, as in, I lived next door at the Residence Inn & Suites for a discounted rate. No. I stayed in a different hotel each time I drove down to visit her, running my credit card up into the impossible-to-pay-back range. I spent my days reading Pam Houston out loud in her hospital room and my nights watching Sex and the City reruns alone in my hotel room; bingeing on the guilty pleasures we used to indulge in together. Except now I did not feel guilty, just a little empty.
Gone were the days of sharing a room with two queen beds, a stocked mini-bar, and an all-night movie marathon including movies we’d seen a hundred times. We would spend hours drinking, smoking, and talking— mostly talking. A best friend who shared her every thought and knew me as well as I knew myself is one of my most valued treasures from this life. Through thick and thin, throughout the years, we would meet up at a hotel somewhere and spend the night catching up on our lives; often watching the sunrise through surprised bloodshot eyes and a haze of smoke in the room. Best friends since the summer before senior year, when we lived out of hotel rooms on a school trip to Australia and discovered our kindred desire to escape the chaperones and check out Sydney’s nightlife…
I don’t know if it’s solely because we went to an all-girls Catholic high school, but that sure didn’t help when it came to curbing our teen-angst wants and desires. Whether we were sneaking out of the art room window to grab a smoke or driving to Boulder to attend fraternity parties on the weekend, we left no pleasure unturned. Consequences be damned, we were young at the carnival of life and determined to ride all the rides. Guilt may have shown up later, but by then we were in the next county.
Even into my twenties, I romanticized the dark pleasures. I quit school to work in record stores, embracing music that made me feel like I was living on the fringes of society. These memories surface from a dark and murky pool. A dark and murky pool that I dipped my toes in, waded even, holding my skirt up, but never fully submerged myself, i.e., I never tried heroin. I abhorred anything conventional and acquired the tattoos and piercings to prove it. I tried my damnedest to snuff out the good girl guilt and sought sullied pleasure wherever I went: from dive bars to drug-infused festivals to living in a van (before that was a thing.) Until I learned that you can go too far; and without the guilt (a.k.a. conscience) to keep the pleasure in check, run the risk of burnout, or worse— being hit by a car while crossing six lanes of traffic at night.
I think about that night often. I think about how fragile life is; how quickly we can go from drinking margaritas on the patio to lying on the pavement with paramedics cracking our chest open to massage our heart back to life. I think about my best friend walking the tightrope of guilty pleasures and losing her balance that night. Leaving me here to eat room service in bed while watching the show Big Little Lies (Gods— she would’ve loved this show!)
As I get older, I can feel myself losing that devil-may-care attitude towards life. Now, when I unpack my suitcase in my hotel room, it’s two-thirds clothes and one-third supplements. I no longer need to visit the ice machine more than once a night, and I generally wake up before housekeeping knocks— hell, sometimes I even beat them out the door. In the mirror above the sink I see an adult with no facial piercings, and I don’t chase my guilty pleasures from town to town anymore. Instead, I choose pleasures that benefit me: escaping in the woods to hike not to party, writing instead of whiskey in the afternoon, chocolate over coke. But given the chance, when I pass one of those roadside motels with a café/bar that shares the parking lot, I can always find a reason to stop for the night.
Jeannie is a writer, publisher, and fixer living in the Roaring Fork valley. She wants to be a hermit (with wifi) when she grows up.