Three
Hotel
Menses
I met Hessie Nygaard at a
furniture-painting seminar in San Juan Bautista, California. It was my “self-awareness” period. I was signing up for everything – the more
expensive the better. Aromatherapy,
chakras, aboriginal drumming, yoga, meditation, crystals for weight loss, you
name it. I even did a firewalking thing
on New Year’s Eve. To this day, I have no idea what I was supposed to learn
from that.
So I had this nifty unpainted stool
sitting around, something I had picked up on an impulse at Home Depot, and the
poor thing just sat there in my den for months, butt-naked and dejected. One day I received a flier for a workshop led
by some guy named Miguel Allende, a folk artist from the Chihuahua region of
Mexico. It said Sr. Allende taught this
special layering technique, using all kinds of fiery Latin colors, and I
thought what the hell, at least I’ll
finally get to paint my poor, butt-naked stool. And they were asking a really large up-front
fee, so I knew it had to be good.
I got there the night before, stayed in a
beautiful little bed and breakfast across from the Mission, then woke up bright
and early for some huevos rancheros at a place called Tia Margarita’s. By nine o’clock I was seated in a sunny loft
above the San Juan Bautista Art Gallery, listening to Miguel Allende deliver
his instructions in a clipped Shakespearean accent. It seems that three years after his birth in
Chihuahua, his family moved to Manchester, England. I felt gypped already.
After about an hour, he left us to
create, as he circled the room assessing each person’s work with a practiced
repertoire of oohs, ahhs and hmms. I had
lain down this bright mango base over the seat of my stool, and was feathering
some jungle green around the edges, trying to get a feel for the patterns in my
head. There was a rather boisterous
woman with burgundy hair next to me, working a gorgeous labyrinth of rust and
gray over an antique coffee table. Her
personal energy had been lapping in my direction like water from an overfilled
bathtub, so I wasn’t surprised when she struck up a conversation.
“You are an artist.”
I let out a shy laugh. “Well, I suppose we’re all artists.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean Artist. Capital A Artist.” She aimed a red paintbrush
at me. “I have known a lot of Artists,
and I can’t explain it, exactly, but there’s something that sets them apart as
a species. Even the way their bodies
work, the angle at which they bring their arms to the canvas, the ligature of
their fingers. It’s sort of an
intuition, but it also takes in certain elements of meticulousness, intensity,
attitude... moxy. You’ve definitely got moxy.”
With a continuing smile, I pulled out the
flame red, dabbed it with a small, clean brush and worked a squadron of vees
around the legs of the stool. Hessie saw
what I was doing, confirmed her previous observation with a self-addressed “Oh
yeah,” and returned to her coffee table.
It was the first time in a long time that
anyone had detected anything artistic in me.
Naturally, I was enchanted. At
the mid-day break, we walked out of the studio together and found a little ice
cream parlor just around the corner.
Between bites of pecan praline, Hessie told me about the Bel Canto.
“I had just earned a completely useless
degree in comparative lit from Willamette, and I took a little drive down the
coast, just for kicks. I was checking
out this used bookstore in Hirshfield, a couple blocks from the beach, when I
wandered around the corner and peered up to find this gorgeous hulk of a
building overlooking the ocean. Of
course, physically, it looked like hell – it was built in 1922 and hadn’t been
renovated since – absolutely falling apart, rotten beams, roof shakes dropping
like leaves, peeling paint, smashed windows, gaps in the foundation.
“When I went back to the bookstore and
asked about it, the lady there handed me the front page of the Hirshfield
Courier, and right there it said that the old Hadley Hotel was due to be
demolished unless a buyer showed up in the next two weeks. Well, I immediately looked up the realtor
quoted in the article, and three hours later I wrote her a check – ten thousand
dollars. Then I rushed right back to
Portland so I could borrow enough money to cover it. My friends and family all thought I’d gone loony,
but they also thought it was better that I work on some hotel than comparative
literature.”
She extended her hands palm-up, as if she
were balancing a pair of cantaloupes, and said, “You will note, class, that the
D.H. Lawrence is quite light, at approximately one half pound, and has a rough
rose-colored fabric cover faded in places by drool-stains. The Tolstoy, on the other hand, is a good
three pounds and bound by a sturdy chocolate-colored leather.”
She laughed loudly and unselfconsciously,
then continued with her story.
“The thing was, though, I had curated a
lot of student exhibits for my artist friends in college, purely out of my love
for their work, and I’d done a pretty damn good job, too, I must say. I even got one of them on the cover of the
Salem newspaper – this crazy conceptual guy. He’d constructed cremation urns
from costume jewelry and cigarette lighters and filled them with the ashes of
burned flags from various countries.
Created quite a stir. The real joke is that the ashes were actually
taken from ashtrays in the student pub.
“One of these artists, Marta, became a
good friend of mine. When I told her
about the opera-hotel idea, she insisted on doing a room. She also spread the word. When I opened the
door that Saturday morning, I got not one but a dozen of my favorite artists,
willing to contribute their labor for pizza, wine and due credit. A year after opening, we got a big spread in
People magazine, and the place has been packed every weekend, holiday and
summer vacation since.”
It took me two years and a major
emotional crisis before I actually saw the Bel Canto, and now Hessie was
pushing me to visit her other creation, a cafe and classical music salon in
Portland called – and I swear I am not making this up – the
Rimsky-Korsakoffeehouse. She refuses to
give me the tiniest description of the place, insisting that the only way to
grasp its full glory is to go there in person.
With her schedule, Hessie had only two
days to be with me in Hirshfield, so we made the most of it, whiling away our
mornings on beach hikes, spending our afternoons at the various seafood places
along the waterfront. As far as our
nights went, we spent the first checking out some sappy chick-flick at the
Hirshfield cineplex (two screens!) and the second at Gilda’s, where we enjoyed
a long, sumptuous Roman meal and a few too many cocktails. Evidently, the place was brand-new, because
it was the first time Hessie had eaten there.
It was a really nice place – lots of big
bright paintings on the wall, stunning sunflowers and bowls of ripe fruit like
cleaned-up Van Goghs and Vermeers. And
the tables were intricate mosaics assembled from shards of broken china. A few of the shards were salvaged from those
kitschy “collector’s plates” you see advertised in the Sunday newspaper
supplement. Just under my silverware I
spotted Judy Garland’s nose and the Cowardly Lion’s right ear, right next to
Neil Armstrong’s right foot.
And the menu... the menu was to die for. Actually, to be tortured for, drawn and
quartered for, to suffer a slow lingering demise for. I opted for another pasta/seafood combo,
linguine with blackened salmon and a spicy Cajun sauce. Wow! This was followed by amaretto
cheesecake, and after that a few rounds of Cosmopolitans. Done with her other tables, our waitress, a
leggy Cyd Charisse brunette with the substantial name of Carlotta Catalani, was
soon shanghai’d into our goofy conversation.
“So, Hessie,” said Carlotta, “I know you
love the opera, but have you ever actually been in one?”
“Oh, no, I never had the nerve or the
voice for that. But my son was in one.”
“Really!” I said. “You never told me about that.”
“Well,” said Hessie, pursing her
lips. “Let us just say that it might not
have happened had it not been for the artful conniving of Mama Nygaard. I’m on the board of the Portland Opera,
yuh-see, and I got wind that they were recruiting youngsters for a production
of ‘Carmen’ the following season. I
said, Do not worry about this at all, oh good people and comrades – I will find
for you a chorus of fine ragazzi. So I
scoured the city and a found a pre-existing chorus at a Presbyterian church
right there on the East Side, minutes away from the
Rimsky-Korsakoffeehouse. I went to the
director and said, ‘How’d you like to have your kids in the opera?’ And she
said, sure, and I said, okay, but first you have to give my son Derek a
tryout. Now this is a kid who was
singing along with Luciano Pavarotti records at the age of three, so I knew
he’d do just fine – and he did, and the chorus did just a wonderful job. And I...
became a Presbyterian.”
Carlotta let out a crackling laugh. “You are an undiscovered politician.” Then
she thought for a minute and said, “Hessie, I know you probably get screwy
ideas like this all the time, but I was thinking just this morning that... oh, excuse me a second.”
Carlotta loped off to the register, where the manager, a young man
half her size, asked her to sign a stack of receipts. Hessie, meanwhile, leaned in my direction,
twirling one of those Seven-Year-Itch curls around her pinky, and whispered,
“She’s right, you know. I hear every
cockamamie notion in the Pacific Northwest.
They figure if I can pull off the Bel Canto, I’ll... oh, here she comes.”
Carlotta came back our way and folded her
hands in front of her apron.
“So okay, here it is, and don’t say I
didn’t warn you. I have read that, in
certain Indian tribes, when women get their periods, they are sent off to a
special camp away from the main settlement, so that ‘the curse’ will not
adversely affect the rest of the tribe.
And I realize that this sort of thing sounds like a terrible, hostile,
patriarchal thing to do, but then I got to thinking, Y’know, Carlotta, would
you really mind disappearing for a while during your period? Would it really be
that bad?’ I mean, if you think about it, my body is
already hard at work on this terribly important biological function, having
just everything to do with the very procreation of the species – why should I,
at the same time, have to subject myself to the rigors of the work force? If,
instead, I was sent away for a few days, I wouldn’t have to walk around in
public trying to disguise the fact my female parts were hemorrhaging. I wouldn’t have to suppress all the moodiness
that comes along with it. I wouldn’t
have to be around all those men who don’t have the slightest concept what it’s
like. Why, if I got a really bad cramp,
I could just damn well rear back my head and wail like a coyote, couldn’t I?
“So I was thinking, somebody’s missing out
on a fantastic business opportunity: a retreat for menstruating women. Maybe even a spa! Kind of like the Bel Canto,
only with... a different kind of theme.”
The highly developed marketing portion of
my brain (located just between the fight-or-flight instinct and prostitution)
latched on to this idea like a badger and began to spit out details.
“Bidets in every room. Iron-rich menus – half-price Bloody Marys
around the clock. Sheets, carpets and
towels all in deep scarlet red, so you don’t have to worry about... accidents.
Perhaps a pre-admission PMS lounge with tackling dummies, punching bags
and heavy-firepower video games.”
Hessie’s eyes were growing. “And not a
man allowed near the place – except... except for dozens of buffed servant boys
dressed in nothing but loin cloths, walking around handing out hot towels and
neck rubs.”
“The heck with loin cloths,” said
Carlotta, pulling up a chair. “I’m
thinkin’ tube socks!”
Hessie put a hand to her temple,
conjuring a vision. “Oh! And for the piece de resistance... in the
lobby... a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David done completely in chocolate.”
“With a removable penis,” said Carlotta.
For anyone else, this line of concept
development would lie strictly in the area of joking, but not with Hessie. Her eyes shot back and forth like a tennis
spectator as she made her calculations.
Then her eyelids closed and rose back up – at the rate of an automatic
garage door – and she smiled beatifically.
“And now for the fun part, my dears. What do we call the place?”
Carlotta gripped the edge of the table
and said, “Oh! I’ve thought about this.
You wouldn’t want the name to be too obvious, because you’d want to give
your patrons the opportunity to slip away incognito. So I was thinking… the moon. Villa Luna, or maybe Villa Athena, after the
Greek goddess of the moon… and wisdom, I might add.”
“Oh, honey,” said Hessie, shaking her
head in disappointment. “You’re being
much too cerebral. Besides, you’re
spoiling our fun. I think we should do
the exact opposite. I think we should be
downright crass about it. No timid
bleeders here, I say!”
“How about... Hotel Menses?” said Carlotta.
“There ya go!” said Hessie.
“I got it!” I said. “The Tamp On Inn. Or... Casa Kotex.”
“Chez Phlebotome’,” said Hessie, then
quickly retracted. “No, no. Here you go...” She took thumb and index
finger and drew out a sign in the air.
“Cycles: A Spa.”
“Oh yes!” said Carlotta, and then glanced
at the front of the restaurant.
“Whoops. Hate to break up the
fun, but my manager looks like he’s getting antsy to go home.”
We paid our bill, gave Carlotta a
ridiculous tip and sisterly hugs, and were headed across the street when Hessie
caught a glimpse of something out on Knickerbocker Beach and beckoned me
forward. Once across the parking lot and
down the stairs, she stopped and spread her arms to the dark sky. “Would you look at this low tide! Look at how wide this beach is!”
We aimed ourselves at the now-distant
ocean and trod through the sand until we came to a huge rock shaped like the
humps of a camel. Normally surrounded by
water, there it stood, high and dry; I placed a hand on the leeward hump and
said, “Are you really considering this spa thing?”
Hessie clucked her tongue. “No, not really. It’s a wonderful concept, but I am a hands-on
manager. Between the cafe and the Bel
Canto I’m already losing too much sleep.
Besides, if you think about it, the spa has certain logistical
problems. You’re consistently ruling out
the large percentage of not-currently-menstruating females, so you’d have to
have a large urban audience to begin with.
And then, what do you do about reservations? I don’t know about you, but my period doesn’t
always come as scheduled.”
“Good points,” I said.
We turned to watch a line of foam
chugging in like a locomotive pulling freight.
It stopped a foot in front of us and sank into the sand.
“Sandykins,” said Hessie. “I really hate to leave you here all by
yourself. Are you gonna be all right?”
I felt the need for another visual
keystone, so I scanned the sky above our covert ocean and found the reclining
zig-zag of Cassiopeia’s Picasso throne.
“Oh Hessie! The last couple of weeks, I’ve had a regular Mormon
Tabernacle flying through my head. Maybe
if I’m by myself for a while they’ll all spin away and leave me the hell
alone.”
“I understand,” said Hessie. “And maybe when I come back next week, you
can tell me some stories.”
“Sure,” I answered. “No promises, but... sure.”
Photo by MJV
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