August 13, 2008
by Volt and Electra Penn
We fight like hell to get here through a 6" opening, then use every trick imaginable, for as long as possible, to avoid flopping into a 6' one. Moments of life between these two cracks often produce weird-ass experiences right out of a Twilight Zone episode. Like the time 2 weeks age when Electra and I were 'zooed-in' at The Springs, the last surviving grand hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I know it's hard to believe, but the view from our 4th floor room looked like Bagdad after the shock and awe of a thousand points of light. On both sides of our hotel were abandoned buildings, some with ragged curtains flapping from broken windows and weeds growing through cracks in the bricks.
Back in its hey-day, these same hotels lining Bath Row hosted notable preachers, rowdy gangsters, sleazy politicians and classy whores. But in 2008 the decaying rooms in leftover lodges are frozen in time, waiting for a citywide renaissance that's not coming in anybody's lifetime.
Electra and I were appropriately assigned to room 420 at The Springs. We had just thrown our luggage on the bed when, without so much as a knock-knock howdy-do, a skinny skeleton of a housekeeper popped our door with her universal key and stuck her head in. "Hey, ya'll" she drawled. "Did I leave my teeth on the nightstand?"
The room, as it turned out, was loaded with anti-amenities. Strange binging banging sounds leaked into the 15'X20' rented space from all directions. Water from a flushed toilet on the other end of the building gurgled and rushed through pipes grandfathered in somewhere under our bed. While I worried about a broken line drowning us in the under-tow, Electra skated around on telephone books, making sure her feet stayed dry.
To use the telephone in room 420, one had to go the bathroom. All calls came in and went out from the crapper. While concentrating on a call-waiting, I noticed a most unappetizing green mold thriving in the shadowed corners under the sink.
After I had meditated, flushed, dried up and hung up, I noticed an empty bottle of Southern Comfort in the trashcan and suspected the toothless maid got paid to un-tidy the rooms.
On the wall the guts of an exposed thermostat, manufactured in 1954 at the Toledo Steel Works, had become a brass art installation, unusable, unmovable and forever stuck at 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Without doubt we had landed in an Arkansas time-warp, where I fully expected to see Bill Clinton's mother, a gin fizz in one hand and a cigarette in the other, emerge from the adjoining room.
At The Springs' spa everything is by appointment only. If you're a few minutes late - well, that's too damn bad, even if you were in a car wreck. Two people standing in front of us at the spa desk were just such examples. Oh my God! They were 15 minutes late. As they told their sad story of a flat tire, engine trouble and dented fender, we couldn't help but feel sorry for them.
Not the spa Nazi. In her own words: "No Treatment. It'll mess up our schedule. You're too late. Come back tomorrow at five." And folks, that's how Electra and I got that fortunate couple's Treatment at The Springs.
It started behind the two glass entry doors beautifully lettered: THE SPRINGS SPA. We were led down an unlit hallway into a dank, dripping cavern, where piles of once white sheets had lingered so long they'd yellowed into sculptures and gone gray. Our dark-haired girl guide told us to disrobe and pointed to a folded pile of well-used, worn out sheets. "Wrap up in one of those," she commanded.
I was directed into a mineral bath cordoned off by circa 1955 plastic shower curtains. As I entered the ancient porcelain bathtub filled to the brim with the hot 'springs' miracle water I cautiously stepped around what was bolted to the far end of the tub - a galvanized air-jet leftover from the pre-industrial revolution.
"Go ahead. Flip the switch," my guide said, after I'd settled in. "Nobody's been electrocuted - yet."
With a 50/50 chance for survival, the risk taker in me won. I squinted at the frayed electrical cord snaking up the wall, closed one eye and flipped the magic twanger. Instantly I was on the receiving end of a hot bubbly enema. But hey - I was still alive!
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If the swirling vortex of mineral baths added to the cramped quarters of a double steam cabinet wasn't enough, Electra and I volunteered for more abuse - one of The Springs' famous massages. Electra's masseuse turned out to be a toothless old man aptly called Iron Thumbs who'd graduated from the Marquis de Sade School of Body Pinching.
My masseuse, on the other hand, had fingers from a different order. What had me totally unnerved was his lisping groan every time he slid his lotion-covered hands up my leg.
That evening we'd recuperated enough from the Treatment to go foraging for liquid refreshments. Any stiff drink would do. As a matter of fact, anything over 90 proof would be welcome. Our internal Magellan sensors guided us into The Springs' bar where, sitting in the corner, a dried-up skinny noodle banged away on a piano. While eyeing each newcomer as her potential replacement, the old gal took long swigs from her Ozarka bottle.
Our waiter swept in from the dark recesses of a storeroom, flashed a brilliant smile of silver braces and within minutes, delivered two schizophrenic vodka martinis. "They're wet and dry," he said, and refilled the Noodle's water bottle with the same Old Mr. Friendly fire water.
As Noodle played Basin Street with her left hand and Beale Street with her right, across the room huddled a Greek Orthodox Russian trio who'd probably never seen a church since baptism. On the left end of the couch sat a grinning, toothless cadaver. Lack of teeth was obviously the 'in' thing in Hot Springs.
The middle member of the three couch potatoes was a 7' Lurch who spoke Greek in such a booming voice he often drowned out the Noodle. When this Zorba whispered some unintelligible garble at his right side neighbor, the butcher from Fleet Street in a blood-smeared white apron, all three stood up to march single-file from the room.
Ten minutes later they strode back in grinning like idiots, quaffed submarine shots of whisky dropped in beer, and rattled on in some kind of foreign wheelie dealie. It was a show of the weirdest sort, when right in the middle of the Noodle's rendition of Mack the Knife, all three broke out in a pig Latin version of Die Moritat von Mackie Messer.
I swear on Clinton's little black book that, at that instant, into the bar walked five lanky little Pakistani guys who somehow managed to plop their skinny butts on three barstools. Their beverage order was nontoxic and instead of plotting some big Western wipeout, the cocoa colored men hit on the five beached blonde whales blowing beer bubbles at them from the end of the bar.
None of these goings on seemed to bother the lesbian lumber-jills sitting at the next table. The two sisters smooching in plaid shirts were totally out of this world, practicing the sort of love that conquers all that they knew.
Unique to the core, The Springs has to be one of the last pockets of entertaining insanity in our totally uptight status quo country. Remember when American meant original - when we always started the latest fad, fashioned the newest look, and invented all the best gadgets imaginable? Too bad we've been sold out to the Gangster Business Class who have smoothed over, nailed shut and regulated to death whatever was unique about America.
There used to be joints all over the U.S.A. that provided twisted service just like The Springs, where a waiter could admit he'd lost the lead in his pencil, yet still scribble copious notes about nothing to nobody in the kitchen, then present some kind of meal you don't remember ordering.
As a matter of fact it didn't matter what you ordered from the menu anyway, all food came back the same. Nicely presented, but only what the chef had cooked that day: fried spaghetti plate, spaghetti au gratin served with fried upside-down cheesy spaghetti rolls. The next morning I noticed the marquee had spaghetti omelets on its menu.
Just look around, from San Diego to Austin to Newark and all stops in between, we've been McDonald-ed, Disney-ed, Wal-Mart-ed and pidgin-holed. We've been blended, pounded and pushed into perfectly perfect little people molds with no peculiarities left to call individual. There's not enough electric eccentricity produced in Branson, Las Vegas, Miami or Chicago to light up Sun City, because closed minds have homogenized everything that was unique.
Except for a few idiosyncratic watering holes such as The Springs, I doubt if there's many places left to jump off a map, grab you and offer up leftover spaghetti for breakfast. It's a fact, you just can't get that kind of service anymore.
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Have Penn they'll listen. Volt Penn writes speeches for Progressive Populists and reasoned arguments for those on the left of center. He has also written speeches for anybody who has read his work. You can reach Volt Penn through his artist friend, b.b.kemp, at bbkemp@bbkemp.com
Volt/Electra Penn copyright 2008
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