23: Door Dilemma

It’s only been 2 weeks but every hotel blurs into one.

The town is of no importance. The day is irrelevant. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Super 8, a Comfort Inn or a Holiday Inn - they’re all clones.

The brain works on blood. After riding all day, it’s all in my legs. Just as well there’s no sex life on tour.

Remembering a new room number is about as easy as walking a straight line and reciting the alphabet backwards after a couple of six-packs. The clerk could tell me a dozen times and I will forget it a dozen times before I walk away from the desk.

With eyesight like mine, I can’t see what’s been written on the key envelope – so now I’ve taken to writing it myself in BIG numbers. Glasses would help, but not a lot. Even when I can read it, I still forget in the second it takes to look up from the envelope.

I have pushed my bike to each end of a corridor and back before repetitively sliding the cardkey in the door with the number from last night’s room – because, after using it several times last night, it’s familiar - then returned to the desk to report today’s key faulty, got a new one and repeated the sad process.

Sometimes the door does open – not because of my key, but because the stranger in the room comes to see what’s going on.

In the movies, that stranger would be a seductress like a young Lauren Bacall with a smoldering cigarette in a holder between red lips, dressed in a translucent nightdress with a hint of dark lingerie. She’d be holding a glass of chilled champagne and I, naturally, would be a smartly dressed black and white Humphrey Bogart; but taller.

In real life, I am encased in black shorts and yellow shirt, my hair is molded into helmet vent lines and I am wearing sweaty gloves. I smell the way I look, I probably still have sunglasses on and am holding a bike. The door is opened by a fat businessman or a scrawny redneck, either of whom who stare as if I am from Mars. If he’s unlucky enough, we’ll meet again later.

Forgetting the room number is as easy as forgetting what town you’re in. That happens too. As I said - it’s a blood thing.

There is a large degree of torment in every day and perhaps blotting out the small things is the brain’s way of softening the pain.

Or maybe it’s Alzheimer’s.