By The Hour

How hourly motels destroy inner city neighborhoods

They will usually have a sign on the wall, displaying their rates. An hour or two is the sweet spot. They sell condoms and herbal concoctions they swear are just as good as Viagra, at the front booth, behind the glass. They advertise such amenities as jetted tubs and free porn.

If you should walk outside in your boxers, in the middle of the night, and go to the guy behind the bullet proof glass when you reach an hour and a half, and explain to him, laughingly, that it turns out you are going to need another hour, he won’t even have to look away from his dinner to tell you the cost for the extra hour. There is already a rate for that.

If you wish to bring a third person, there is a rate for that. Do you require more condoms, or are you a purest? If you do not come to the bullet proof glass when the third or the fourth person arrives, the guy will leave the safety of the glass, carrying the big gun, and come to the room and demand that you pay the rate for your expanded party. There is always a rate for that.

The hourly motel is a virus to every inner city community. I do acknowledge that there are those lodges along highways that serve as an affordable option for the weary trucker, but those customers will need the room for the full night. They need rest for the journey ahead.

There is nothing legitimate that happens in a room that is rented by the hour. The police know this. An hourly motel, right in the middle of a residential area, not along any major thoroughfares, is a brothel and a drug house. Cars drive up in the middle of the day, and checkout is only an hour later.

I live in the neighborhood of Sunnyside, in Houston, and we see the prostitutes and the men who drive as slow as window shoppers, looking for them, evaluating their worth, before finally pulling over and calling to the one they have chosen. Even in the midst of a pandemic, they come.

The prostitute is the benefactor of the drug dealer, so the dealer has a room too. He must. He needs her business. He feeds from her, like a bird who eats ticks off the back of a cow. And sometimes he is a half breed: half dealer, half pimp, a one stop shop.

I have counted six hourly motels within a 5 or 6 minute drive of my house. I’m not leaving; I’m committed. I have friends who thought I was crazy for buying a house in a neighborhood like this. But there really are good, hard working people who live in neighborhoods like this because they want to, not because they have no choice. I just want to get this out there so that the residents of neighborhoods like mine don’t have to feel they are fighting alone.

Young girls begin the much too speedy process of dying while walking along the sidewalk in front of an hourly motel. You can see the light in their eyes dimming with each customer serviced. It’s like watching someone drown. Even though they pop their heads up for air from time to time, you know that eventually, the tide will take them.

They advertise along the sidewalk or on the street corner, but they will conduct their business in the rooms. When they are done, and the man has driven away, promising to come see them again, they will go to the dealer. The great Oz. And they will get high in the room, forgetting about what they have endured, to feel the absence of gravity; they will find inspiration in needle or pipe.

And in the smoke that rises from the ashes of their souls, they will see something that has been lost, and they will spend the rest of their lives searching for it, one hit at a time.

The police and city officials pretend they don’t see it. See no whore. Speak no pimp. Most of the residents and homeowners have long since lost hope. They are convinced that no one cares what happens to neighborhoods like ours. They believe our country doesn’t think our children are worthy of happiness.

The hourly motel is almost always owned by someone who is not from our neighborhood, or any neighborhood like it. They don’t have to live with the consequences of their brutal capitalism. They get off work and drive to their houses in the suburbs. I imagine the lost souls at the motel provide lots of laughs at their backyard cookouts.

But strangely enough, all the hourly motels in a newly gentrified neighborhood will disappear as if by magic! But before then, the city will tell you the hourly motel is a virus with no vaccine.

All you can do is pray, or become prey.

If the police come, if the girl gets into the wrong car, or the dealer sells to an undercover officer, they will go only to the girl in room 34 or the dealer in room 16, and they will arrest those people and take them away. The guy behind the bullet proof glass will swear he didn’t know what was going on, he will tell the police he is shocked, even as he sits behind the glass, surrounded by packs of herbal Viagra, an assortment of condoms that he illegally sells individually and the little bags the dealer uses for packaging drugs.

The police will leave the guy behind the glass, with his bootleg innocence intact. In other rooms, there are other dealers, peaking from parted curtains, just waiting for the cops to leave. The girls in the other rooms are already back at work, some walking the street, some already lying beneath the sweating bodies of broken men.

I wonder what the guy behind the bullet proof glass would say if he looked outside one night and saw his own daughter or son on that corner, blowing kisses at passing cars. I wonder what the police officer who looks the other way, would say if they started construction on a brand new, hourly motel in his suburban subdivision.

Would it still be a virus with no vaccine then? Would that police officer settle for just telling his own kids to stay away from there? Would the guy behind the bullet proof glass tell jokes about his own daughter at backyard cookouts? Would he and his friends laugh about the time the pimp/dealer slapped the hell out of her, right in front of the motel?

Would it be funny then?

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