My son wanted to go to the Virgin Fest.
Virgin Records, that is. Held in Baltimore this summer, two days of music featuring the Police and Smashing Pumpkins among others.

I told him to research hotels in the area, and he found a few that were on the Virgin Fest website that were cheap. I told him to go ahead and book one, that my girlfriend and I would go up there with him and his friend Ben- not that we were going to the concert with them, but that we would be nearby in case of emergency.

We found it, all right- nestled behind a car battery shop. We checked in with the Indian woman at the front desk who told us in very heavily accented and somewhat broken English to drive around to the back of the building, and gave us a room on the second floor.

The pavement of the parking lot was cracked and had major craters in it. Along the trash-strewn edges of the parking lot there were vegetable patches planted- obviously a major source of food for the hotel owners. We passed by the rusted trash bin, bumped our way down to our parking spot, and climbed up the outside steel staircase which has holes rusted through large enough to put my entire foot through.

The room smelled a bit stale, but the bedding seemed to be reasonably clean. The mattresses were as soft as pressure treated lumber, but the TV worked well. The bathroom wallpaper was coming down and had been repaired with transparent tape, and had graffiti over the toilet. Outside of the bathroom was the sink in the middle of a counter- and the counter was cracked at the front of the sink, where clearly someone very large had sat on the edge. I tried to blot out the images of Norma Stitz that flooded my brain, with little success.

My son arrived just after I did, and entered the room with a look of oh-shit-what-did-I-do. I smiled and mentioned a few of these things that I've described above, and he looked increasingly apprehensive. "Ummm... I'm not going to live this one down, am I?"

I burst out laughing and assured him that it was fine for the one day, as I had been the one to tell him to get us all one cheap room, and he looked very relieved- until I wondered aloud about the used Band Aid I found stuck to the top of one of the bedspreads.

It was, at any rate, an unforgettable weekend.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 17 Jan 2008, 18:57, Reply)