{"id":2355,"date":"2021-01-31T23:19:24","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T23:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/oxmag\/?page_id=2355"},"modified":"2021-01-31T23:19:24","modified_gmt":"2021-01-31T23:19:24","slug":"great-american-vacation-by-brett-biebel","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/oxmag\/great-american-vacation-by-brett-biebel\/","title":{"rendered":"Great American Vacation By Brett Biebel"},"content":{"rendered":"

They build that hotel out on top of the old Buddy Holly crash site, and there\u2019s this big grand opening with a packed parking lot, and then, bam.\u00a0 Bed bugs.\u00a0 Everywhere.\u00a0 People find them all up and down the mattresses, and sometimes it\u2019s the live specimens, and other times it\u2019s those little waste trails they like to leave behind, and the guests, they go straight to the front desk.\u00a0 They got the bugs folded up between sheets of hotel stationery.\u00a0 Inside Ziplocs sometimes.\u00a0 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\u2019re gonna spend the next year (at least) giving out reimbursements.\u00a0 Free passes.\u00a0 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\u2019d think that would just about be the end of the story.\u00a0 Ol\u2019 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\u2019t what happens.\u00a0 Not even close.\u00a0 Well, they do pay out impacted customers.\u00a0 Replace socks and suitcases and run these one-time, all-inclusive getaway specials good at any RT property anywhere in the good ol\u2019 U S of A, and of course there\u2019s 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?\u00a0 Not everywhere, mind you, but just in one room.\u00a0 And maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019s repurpose the fucker, and I think we can get people to pay for the privilege.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He\u2019s somebody\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Let\u2019s give this thing a try.\u00a0 And Warren\u2019s got this kind of mad scientist rep about him on account of they say he\u2019s the one invented reality tourism or something like that (not to mention he\u2019s been involved with the whole Buddy Holly project from the very beginning), and, so, people listen.\u00a0 They get these jars of bed bugs from an exterminator in Fridley, or maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Once guests enter the suite, they can\u2019t leave.\u00a0 And their clothes and personal belongings (and there\u2019s a lockbox in the lobby for watches and cufflinks and purses and the like) have to stay behind.\u00a0 And they\u2019ve all gotta take this decontamination shower at check-out (as if they\u2019re leaving (or entering, more like) a prison), and wouldn\u2019t you know it, people sign up.\u00a0 Artists mostly.\u00a0 Sometimes newlyweds.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There\u2019s no TV in the room.\u00a0 Just this old record player, and it\u2019s playing Winter Dance Party Live, and they say somebody recorded it at the Surf that very night, but it\u2019s really probably from some other stop along the tour (or else not even authentic at all), and these idiots dance on the bed.\u00a0 They screw on top of these tiny little vampires, and sometimes they get blood on the sheets, and it doesn\u2019t matter one bit because the hotel just fucking tosses them after each guest anyway, and the rates more than cover it.\u00a0 They don\u2019t even have to advertise.\u00a0 The internet picks it up.\u00a0 Various alt weeklies.\u00a0 It gets named \u201cOffbeat Vacation of the Year\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s.\u00a0 They chant his name.\u00a0 Sometimes people give him dead (or living) bed bugs in shoeboxes or pressed between panes of glass, and the whole thing becomes this phenomenon.\u00a0 This sensation.\u00a0 Somebody even makes a documentary about the people that stay in this infested, corn-country room (\u201cthis B & B from hell,\u201d as the director called it), and there\u2019s all kinds of debate about whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s working on a story cycle about Buddy Holly and Clear Lake, IA, and he\u2019s 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?\u00a0 And, Do you feel inspired?\u00a0 And he says, Fuck.\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 And I swear to Christ Almighty.\u00a0 Their beaks, he says.\u00a0 You can feel them way down past your caffeinated soul.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock\u00a0 Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua,\u00a0 SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere.\u00a0 48 Blitz, his debut story collection, is available from Split\/Lip Press.\u00a0 You can follow him on Twitter @bbl_brett.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They build that hotel out on top of the old Buddy Holly crash site, and there\u2019s this big grand opening with a packed parking lot, and then, bam.\u00a0 Bed bugs.\u00a0 Everywhere.\u00a0 People find them all up and down the mattresses, and sometimes it\u2019s the live specimens, and other times it\u2019s those little waste trails they … <\/p>\n

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