The King's Inn

Whenever I tell people that I spent a year travelling around the world their reaction is inevitably “Oh, I’d love to be on vacation for that long.”  They envision me poolside working on my perfect tan with a postcard view of the ocean, a slim brown-skinned waitress with perfect teeth and a flower in her hair bringing me my 5th Mai Thai by 10am.  We laugh over some joke that only locals would know and remark how the temperature is a perfect 84.5 degrees with only 10% humidity and no chance of rain, as it has been for the last 364 days straight. My biggest stressor is whether to snorkel and then hit the seafood buffet or to rent a moped for a tour of the island first.  Even now, when I’ve come full circle in my life and dropped out of polite society once again to get the dust of far-off lands on my shoes, my friends tell me that it must be so nice to “live in paradise.”  Let me tell you right now; it ain’t like that.

Granted, I thought it was going to be like that.  Travelling around the world for a year brought to mind pristine beaches and a schedule completely free of anything but placid introspection, and I fell victim to that dream.  I mean, how could it not be?  I could go anywhere I wanted and had nothing at all to do all day but enjoy it.  Then I came across the King’s Inn, and my life has never been the same - and not for the better. 

My travelling compadre, Shane, and I landed in Caracas, Venezuela without knowing our ass from our elbow where to go or what to do.  Most people carefully plan their vacations or travels to the point of having a strict schedule and being able to anticipate every step they are going to take; boring!  We bought a round the world airline ticket that outlined our major stops, loaded up one backpacks worth of gear each, and hit the road with no clue.  So when we hit Caracas our only help was a Lonely Planet guide, which was really no help.  By the way, in case you didn’t realize it, the Lonely Planet, just like every other guidebook, places hotels and restaurants in their book not based on their quality, but who pays them the most.  What?!  I thought they were fair, balanced, all knowing, and only interested in bringing our world together as one?!  If that came as a surprise to you then I should probably let you know that theirs no Easter Bunny either.  So when you open travel guide and choose your accommodations you’re getting the establishments who’ve paid to play, the best advertisers, not necessarily the coolest ones or the best values.  Back in the day, before everything was online, they were also horrifically outdated, probably two years old by the time they were published and hit the shelves, so choosing accommodations could be a crapshoot.

So when we landed in Caracas we expected a beautiful city with cheap wonderful hotels and beautiful people who loved us catering to our every need as Americans.  Instead we found that the capitol of Venezuela is unbelievably expensive.   We checked our guide books and hit a couple of hotels that were suggested but the prices were almost double what was quoted – some times as high as $150 a night, which was an astronomic sum for two poor travellers in a Third World country back in 1999.  Time and time again we unloaded our heavy bags and schlepped into a hotel lobby, only to turn around dejected once we learned they had no vacancies or were ridiculously overpriced.  We’d flag down yet another taxi and move on to the next hotel.  We came to find out that Venezuela is an oil town, the epicenter of South American production and international distribution, so everything was occupied and inflated by the ultra-rich.  We’d hit about 5 hotels already and were tired from the flight, so when the cab driver was taking a shortcut through a shitty neighborhood and we saw a sign for a hotel that had a neon vacancy sign we both told him in unison to pull over.  He told wanted us to keep going to a nicer hotel in a nicer neighborhood, but I assumed he just wanted to run up his fare.  So we hopped out and walked up to the King’s Inn, which boasted to be a certified 2-star.  Sweet. 

There was a chubby lady in her mid-fifties behind the front desk.  You could tell that twenty years earlier if it was pitch dark and you were really shit-faced drunk she might have been attractive, but now she was resigned to pass the decades behind that desk.  She was much more interested in watching her novellas on a small black and white TV while she sucked on a greasy chicken bone than helping us check in.  We asked her in broken Spanish if they had a vacancy and how much it would be.  She looked at us funny and kissed her teeth, scratcher herself in a few unmentionable places, and asked how long we wanted a room.  When we answered that we wanted a room for at least a couple nights she looked like she was going to die of shock.  The room cost us about $15 a night, when the cheapest thing we’d found all over town was about $125 per night. 

The elevator didn’t work so we had to lug our bags up five flights of moldy staircases.  The hallways were dimly lit with a lone light bulb, lined with peeling lead paint and smelled of bleach.  An old man in one of the rooms had his door half-open and was coughing up a lung.  The frayed carpet, which I couldn’t tell what color it originally was, was littered with newspapers, empty beer bottles, and a few abandoned car parts.  Shane and I just looked at each other, shrugged, and said “Fifteen dollars!” in unison.  Surely it would be much nicer in our room. 

We double-checked the ancient key to our room and yup, this was it, good old room #37.  The door looked like it had been kicked in many times and rigged back up with cardboard and cheap plywood.  We had to struggle with to get the key in the door and eventually got the door open with some huffing and puffing.  Roaches scattered in every direction and out of site.  The reveal of the room was even worse than I could have imagined.  It wasn’t a small room but was bare except for the first TV ever invented and two twin-sized beds, really just prison-style cots with flimsy mattresses and blue bedspreads from the 70’s.  The bedspreads had “King’s Inn” stenciled on them, as did the browning sheets, so no one could steal them, or had to lay their head on the evidence every night if they did.  Our presence in the room must have upset the permanent residents, a squadron of bugs that took to flight like a dust storm when we walked in.  Wow this place was a Grade A shithole.   

Shane and I each threw our backpack on a bed, which almost collapsed them, and came in and jammed the door closed.  It was about 120 degrees in there so Shane pried open the only window in the place, which was blacked out with paint.  It opened with a lovely view of a cement wall about four feet away, an unfinished construction site with the sounds of jackhammering at full volume that made our teeth rattle.  Shane quickly closed the window and told me to try the air conditioner.  I walked over to the wall unit AC, which had no faceplate so it was all bare electronics and a filthy filter, and switched it on.  It instantly shot about 100 volts up my arm and sent me jumping back.  That fucker just shocked me!  Maybe it was static or something, and we had to get the AC on to cool the sweltering room, so I creeped up slowly and tried to turn it on again.  It shocked me again, and this time I yelped in pain as I jumped back, and gave it a hard kick in anger.  It came to life, and we left it on full blast for the rest of our stay, which only dropped the temperature two degrees, scared as hell to go anywhere near it. 

As we settled in we noticed curious water stains about three feet high on the walls, a visible mildewy line showing where there had been some long-ago flood.  How the hell can a room on the fifth floor fill up with water three feet high?  I pondered that one for a long time.  Was it actually water?  By the looks of this place it could have been human blood, beer, or semen and I wouldn’t have been surprised.  I put it on my mental checklist to avoid the air conditioner and look out for flash flooding.

Shane and I agreed that at least we had a semi-safe place to store our bags, so we were free to wander.  Surely we wouldn’t stay in this shit hole for more than the two nights we told Rosie Perez’s mom we’d be guests.  At least we could clean up after a long, hot day of travelling and go hit the town for some nightlife.  No one wanted to take the first shower, so we drew straws, and as usual I lost.  Shane turned on the TV and flipped through the seven channels we got in, but they all were showing local football matches.  I hesitantly entered the bathroom and flipped on the light.  Zap!  Fucker!  I got another mild shock when I touched the switch.  The sink was half ripped out of the wall and the tile floor was filthy with what looked like dried mud.  I jumped in the shower, not daring to take my flip flops off, and turned the hot water all the way up.  A tiny trickle of freezing cold water came out.  It took me about twenty minutes just to get enough water over my body to have a serviceable wash.  I grabbed one of the ratty towels, with King’s Inn stenciled on it with spray paint, and tried to wrap it around myself, but it was stiff as a board.  Someone went a little bit overboard with the starch.  I positioned myself in front of the sink and spread shaving cream on my face.  I turned on the sink to wash off my razor, and you guessed it – electricity ran through me, but this time from the floor up.  It was a low level current, but still enough to make it damn unpleasant, especially since I was now standing in a puddle of water.  After some repositioning I found that if I stood way to the left of the sink and reached over I could avoid getting electrocuted again.  My mental checklist was growing.  I’m sure if you plugged in a hairdryer the whole city block would blow up.  I came out and Shane grabbed his stuff to enter.  He asked me how the shower was and I told him it was fantastic and gave him no more warnings – let him figure it out for himself.  What are friends for?  A moment later I heard him yell in pain as he got shocked as well.

We walked downstairs feeling clean and looking snazzy for a night on the town.  We hadn’t really seen other victims, I mean residents of the King’s Inn yet, so we were pleased to see a couple holding hands, a businessman and his niece, passing on the stairway.  We said cheerily said hi to them, and hoped to engage in a pleasant conversation about where the good tourist spots were in town, but they just looked at the floor and rushed right past us.  Wow some people are just rude.  Rosie Perez’s mom was sitting on a stool by the front door, fanning herself with a package of tortillas.  Her front butt threatened to pop out of her jean shorts, and she had the top button undone to mercifully protect everyone in the room from getting hit in the eye if it popped.  She looked at us curiously as she sucked on the same chicken bone, and asked if we were checking out.  That’s a damn funny thing to be asking someone – we just checked in an hour ago. 

The neighborhoods surrounding the King’s Inn were completely empty – we didn’t see another human being and only a few taxis speeding through.  Even the buildings were blacked out and looked vacant.  Finally we found a restaurant or bar under a huge billboard promoting Polar, Venezuela’s national beer.  We walked in expecting beautiful women and college kids, but we were just faced with about fifteen rough-looking cowboys, some with machetes hanging off their belts, playing pool and drinking at the bar.  I swear the record skipped and the music stopped when we walked in and every squinting, inhospitable set of eyes fixed on us.  Hola!  Was all we could muster, and we walked to the bar and ordered.  I looked around – there wasn’t one female in the whole place? Was this some sort of kinky Venezuelan Gay Machete bar? I’ve heard about these places.  I think I remembered that this is where the Village People got their start, so I kept my eye on the door in case the police officer, the Indian, and the Navy dude walked in – I wanted autographs. 

The locals didn’t warm to us at all, and mean-mugged us all night long.  We didn’t really give a shit – it was just nice to be out of the King’s Inn.  We did manage to talk to the bartender, who spoke a little English. He asked us where we were staying and when he told him the King’s Inn he whistled, said the word for butterfly in Spanish, “Mariposa,” and walked down to the other end of the bar.  Pretty soon we had all of the Polar we could stomach so we stumbled back to our new home.

Back up on the fourth floor we noticed that our door was slightly ajar.  Had we been robbed?  We investigated, but if we had been jacked didn’t take anything.  Was our crap undesirable even by Venezuelan slum standards?  Damn I needed an extreme image makeover.  The flimsy door only took a butter knife to jam open, and by the looks of the worn and chipped-away frame, many had.  Whether we locked it or not our room was open game for the hookers, pimps, dealers, murderers, drunks, robbers, and cleaning ladies who might roam the halls of the King’s Inn.  We saw most of them, except for the cleaning ladies.  From there on every time we left our room we’d leave the lights on and the television blasting some football match, in hopes that they would think we were home, and this we called our “Ghetto Security System.”  That first night we were so tired from all of the travelling and too many Polars, so we both hit the sack after promising each other that it was going to be a one-and-done situation at the King’s Inn; tomorrow we would hit the road and find a legitimate, nicer hotel. 

It was impossible to sleep.  Once the lights went out the noises in the room were overwhelming.  It had been pretty quiet during the day, but now, after midnight, there were sounds of people banging coming at us from like seven different directions.  Believe me when I tell you that the sounds of people banging are no fun if you’re not somehow involved.  I buried my head under the pillows, but that only left me exposed to the bugs.  Armies of bed bugs, mosquitos, fleas, and who knows what other prehistoric insects, savaged any part of my body that was exposed.  I itched like crazy, until I was tossing and turning tearing at my flesh like a lunatic.  The only remedy was to cover up, so even though it was sweltering and airless in the room, I had to put on long pants, socks, a long sleeve shirt, and even wrap my head with a t-shirt.  I still got bit, but a little bit less.  I spent a horrible night trying to get one little wink of sleep, and finally around six in the morning when I was able to close my puffy eyelids, the construction noise from outside our window started.  A symphony of jackhammering and diesel engines roared to life, and kept us wide awake. 

Around midday we emerged from our tomb, backpacks in hand and ready to go, and muddled sleepily down to the front desk.  Fuck this place!  We slammed the key down on the front desk in front of Rosie Perez’s mom and told her in broken Spanish that there was no way we were going to spend another night in that decrepit hell-hole.  We were so tired we could barely see, but managed to flag down a taxi and asked our driver to take us to another hotel.  He brought us to a decent looking place and Shane ran in while I waited with our stuff.  It was fully booked.  We tried another hotel – it was $180 a night.  Again and again we pulled up to hotels or rolled our luggage down the sidewalks of Venezuela, but we couldn’t find a damn thing.  Eventually we were so tired and discouraged that we just went back to…the King’s Inn.  Our friend behind the counter didn’t say a word, in fact she acted like she’d never seen us before, but something behind her heavily-painted eyes spoke volumes:  “I knew you’d be back you damn gringos – you’re mine now!”  She gave us our same room and we made the trek up the stairs again, sweating and cursing.  It was three in the afternoon, the quiet time of the day, and maybe we could get a few hours needed sleep before all of the banging started. 

That night was the same, and somehow we survived the oppressive heat, the rotting smells, the rats, the electric shocks, the high-volume banging that knocked plaster of the walls, and the endless rashes and bites.  The next day we tried again to find another hotel – and again we failed and returned to the King’s Inn completely defeated.   The best part was that no matter how hard we tried to escape the King’s Inn, we would find ourselves back there with Rosie Perez’s mom enjoying a smug sense of victory.  It became a battle of wills, and we were losing badly.  We made an executive decision to get the hell out of there and take a bus to a neighboring smaller town, but two hours into the drive the bus broke down and everyone had to take another bus back to Caracas – and the King’s Inn.  We planned a flight to Brazil but when we went to the airport, jubilant to board a plane to Rio and get the hell away from Venezuela, they informed us at the last minute that we needed Visas to travel.  Back to the King’s Inn.  At this point we didn’t even check in, we just walked past the front desk with our eyes on the floor, walked right up to our old room, kicked in the door with a gentle nudge, and took our places on our rickety rusted beds.  It took a week to get our Visas, but then we found out we had to get immunizations.  Our one night stay at the King’s Inn turned into a three and a half week odyssey to escape the last place on earth we wanted to be.  We were so sleep deprived and pocked with rashes and bug bites and our tempers flared.  I was so melancholy about our $15 a night prison that I was secretly hoping for the wobbly ceiling fan to finally come off track and one of the blades fly off and sever my head from my neck, or dying of a merciful massive electrocution in the bathroom.

The shadowy denizens of the King’s Inn were few and far between.  We noticed that there were a few people coming and going during lunchtime, but the vast majority of activity was after midnight.  Those are some strange hours for hotel patrons.  People were always in pairs – a man and a woman, and sometimes a man and two women, or a man and a midget, and once a transvestite with a live goat on a leash.  Who were these people?  They came and went within hours, and it seemed that the only other long-term resident (and by long-term I mean those of us who rented by the day, not the hour) was a 19-year-old hottie named Orlaney who I met by the soda machine.  She was super friendly, and I didn’t mind at all that she was wearing clear heels and a miniskirt at ten am on a Sunday morning.  We sat on the stairs, right by the soda machine, and had a pleasant conversation.  She confided in me that she was a stripper who worked at a club here in Caracas but she was from a small town somewhere, and longed for a better life and a family of her own.  We got along great, and she really was a sweetheart.  And to be honest, I’m not gonna lie, she was sizzling hot.  We talked for a while, her in broken English and me in bad Spanish, and eventually went up to her room on the top floor so she could show me pictures of her family.  Wow, we were really vibing.  Maybe there was a future here between us.  Maybe, just maybe, I could look past the fact that she was a stripper and take her back to the US and make a good, honest woman out of her?  We could get married and buy a little white house and go to church every Sunday.  She led me into her room, which was surprisingly much nicer and neater than ours, and sat we down on the bed.  This was turning into a bad porn movie, and I expected a cheesy “Brown-chicken-brown-cow!” soundtrack to strike up out of nowhere.  I was putty in her hands, because this was one of the hottest chicks I’d ever seen.  She gave me a little kiss and then showed me some pictures and we just hung out.  She told me that she had to pack up for a business trip to Spain the next day.  Business?  Spain?  What the hell kind of business could she be in where a poor stripper heads all the way overseas?  Just as I was pondering this question in my head I noticed that she grabbed a huge plastic tube with a squeeze bottle at one end – it looked like a two-foot long turkey baster – and packed it in her luggage.  I got up and ran out.  Hell’s to the NO!  I didn’t know what that monstrosity was but I wanted no part of it. It finally hit me – the King’s Inn was a sleazy motel for couples, mostly adulterers and mistresses, where they could rendezvous for a few hours out of site and consummate their forbidden romances - hence all the banging.  And my sweet, precious Orlaney, even though she was the only long-term resident other than the roaches, rats, and bugs, was a hooker.  Maybe she was the heir apparent to Rosie Perez’s mom, and old hookers don’t die, they just retire behind the front desk of the King’s Inn?  Either way there was no way I was marrying Mrs. Turkey Baster.  I ran down to the local pharmacy and grabbed two oversized bottles of rubbing alcohol off the shelves, and doused myself with them, including my lips where I kissed her.  Yuck.  This place was really getting to me, but then again the rubbing alcohol really seemed to help sooth the bug bites.  I never saw Orlaney and her turkey baster again, but wherever she is I can only hope and pray that she’s…ahh hell, actually I don’t give a shit.   

Pretty soon it became clear to me that the only way to tolerate this Dantian level o hell was to get stinking drunk every night. Any time we could leave the hotel we headed immediately to the nearby dingy pool hall, still wearing our full body suits we slept in even though it was over 100 degrees, to get smashed on lukewarm Polar beer and shots of fire-water rum while the locals stared at us with hard looks.  We didn’t care.  Not to be intimidated, we gave them hard looks right back and crushed our beer cans on the bar.  They had machetes and outnumbered us 20 to 2, but we were King’s Inn survivors – a badge of toughness not even the surliest of them could claim.  They backed off.  No matter what time of day or night it was (it was all blending together at this point) we returned to the King’s Inn semi-anesthetized to the tiger-cage of discomfort and racket, and thankfully passed out for a few precious hours of sleep.

Eventually we did escape the King’s Inn, Caracas, and Venezuela, flying to Brazil with stenciled pillow case souvenirs stolen away in our luggage, but not before turning our miserable condition into a sport.  Our last night there, exuberant that we were getting the hell out of that rat hole and three-sheets to the wind drunk, we decided in our ultimate wisdom that it would be a good life choice to surf our mattresses down the stairs.  So we ripped the filthy foam off the bed, sending sheets and bugs flying, and positioned them at the top of the fourth floor staircase.  One, two three!  We pushed off and surfed about three feet before wiping out and tumbling down the rest of the way in a snowball of laughter and destruction.  If we weren’t so drunk I’m sure we would have broken our necks but it turns out the only damage was to the walls, the staircase, and the other hotel patrons who had to go leaping out of the way less they were run over.  Right then and there the Gringo Bobsled Team was born, and the score was now King’s Inn - 47, Gringos -1.  After a couple of runs down the stairs Rosie Perez’s mom came hauling up the stairs, chastising us in rapid fire Spanish and waving her chicken bone at us.  We ignored her, reloaded, and surfed again.  After all, what was she going to do, kick us out?