They build that hotel out on top of the old Buddy Holly crash site, and there’s this big grand opening with a packed parking lot, and then, bam. Bed bugs. Everywhere. People find them all up and down the mattresses, and sometimes it’s the live specimens, and other times it’s those little waste trails they like to leave behind, and the guests, they go straight to the front desk. They got the bugs folded up between sheets of hotel stationery. Inside Ziplocs sometimes. They strip naked and just abandon the clothes and the luggage, and the highways are crammed in all directions with bare asses on heated leather, and they drive back to Omaha and Minneapolis and Lubbock and Chicago, and the company that built the place, this Royal Treatment Properties up near that Mall of America, they know they’re gonna spend the next year (at least) giving out reimbursements. Free passes. They can see the class action from a mile away, and God only knows what the settlement will cost, and, from the look of things, you’d think that would just about be the end of the story. Ol’ Buddy gets the last laugh, and they knock the place down or else repurpose it as some kind of something else, or maybe they just end up unloading it for pennies on the dollar to some other Hospitality, Inc. so they can take their shot, but that isn’t what happens. Not even close. Well, they do pay out impacted customers. Replace socks and suitcases and run these one-time, all-inclusive getaway specials good at any RT property anywhere in the good ol’ U S of A, and of course there’s still that lawsuit hung up in litigation or what have you, but what happens next is some low-level marketing staffer files this memo that says, Well, hey, why not leave the bugs alive? Not everywhere, mind you, but just in one room. And maybe it’s the one right above that spot where they found the Big Bopper, and I know it was supposed to be the Honeymoon Suite, but let’s repurpose the fucker, and I think we can get people to pay for the privilege. Like sell them a night of haunted blood-sucking and old-time immersion, and this is a nutso idea, everyone says, but this marketing guy is connected somehow. He’s somebody’s nephew or third cousin or friend of a dear family friend, and so the whole idea gets passed up the chain as a courtesy and then kicked around departments for a while until somehow it lands on the desk of this guy Warren Hafner, and by this time the original bugs is long dead (having been fumigated and re-fumigated and choked into chemical dust), but he says, Fuck it. Let’s give this thing a try. And Warren’s got this kind of mad scientist rep about him on account of they say he’s the one invented reality tourism or something like that (not to mention he’s been involved with the whole Buddy Holly project from the very beginning), and, so, people listen. They get these jars of bed bugs from an exterminator in Fridley, or maybe it’s Coon Rapids, and Hafner drives them down 35 himself (in this 2006 Toyota Corolla he just fucking loves because it makes him look inconspicuous, like somebody’s frugal mother) and opens them up in what used to be the Honeymoon Suite, and he spearheads the establishment of all these elaborate precautions and protocols and gets some kind of greased-palm permission from the Health Department, and what it boils down to is this. Once guests enter the suite, they can’t leave. And their clothes and personal belongings (and there’s a lockbox in the lobby for watches and cufflinks and purses and the like) have to stay behind. And they’ve all gotta take this decontamination shower at check-out (as if they’re leaving (or entering, more like) a prison), and wouldn’t you know it, people sign up. Artists mostly. Sometimes newlyweds. Drifters and rich city folk with time to spare and money to burn, and they all cite this desire, this outright fucking hunger for experience, man, and these people pay upwards of 900 a night. Triple during the week of Feb. 3, and something like 5K on the anniversary itself, and they stay up all night and try to feel every single bite. There’s no TV in the room. Just this old record player, and it’s playing Winter Dance Party Live, and they say somebody recorded it at the Surf that very night, but it’s really probably from some other stop along the tour (or else not even authentic at all), and these idiots dance on the bed. They screw on top of these tiny little vampires, and sometimes they get blood on the sheets, and it doesn’t matter one bit because the hotel just fucking tosses them after each guest anyway, and the rates more than cover it. They don’t even have to advertise. The internet picks it up. Various alt weeklies. It gets named “Offbeat Vacation of the Year” in some big-shot, LA travel mag, and Hafner (who, by this time, has gone from behind-the-scenes cult figure to full-on hospitality celebrity), he’s giving these big-appearance-fee lectures out at Cornell basically annually, and every Trump hotel on the planet is calling him constantly and all the time, and the crowds, they give him these roaring greetings and standing o’s. They chant his name. Sometimes people give him dead (or living) bed bugs in shoeboxes or pressed between panes of glass, and the whole thing becomes this phenomenon. This sensation. Somebody even makes a documentary about the people that stay in this infested, corn-country room (“this B & B from hell,” as the director called it), and there’s all kinds of debate about whether it’s one of them genuine docs or else somehow just scripted real nice and subtle, and at the end of it they zoom tight on the face of a writer who’s working on a story cycle about Buddy Holly and Clear Lake, IA, and he’s got these massive ears and big buck teeth, and he looks a little like Alfred E. Neuman (only maybe just a shade uglier), and they ask him, they go, What was it like? And, Do you feel inspired? And he says, Fuck. Yeah. And I swear to Christ Almighty. Their beaks, he says. You can feel them way down past your caffeinated soul.
Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere. 48 Blitz, his debut story collection, is available from Split/Lip Press. You can follow him on Twitter @bbl_brett.