I’m writing this from the lobby bar of the Marriott in Palm Springs just before dawn.
I’m alone at a table which has two empty drinks—a couple of Martini glasses coated in a cough medicine red residue. They were Cosmos, I think. Maybe something to acknowledge the alignment of the planets and the return of Sex and the City, same cast (almost), same living in rarified (if not pretend pandemic-free) air, same timeline but not quite, same meta references turn into real life messes: big dies on a Peloton bike. Peloton stock slips in real life because nothing matters. Another actor cum ad man makes viral ad featuring Chris Noth (as “a version of Big”) that goes viral. Peloton stock shoots up a little. Noth outed as sexual predator. Stock dips again. But now it looks like we’re all going into lockdown so—you guessed it, the stock is up again this morning.
Back to where I’m sitting, there are two hotel-issue complimentary drink tickets and a five-spot left over for the effort. I consider snatching the tickets up. There’s nobody but me and the graveyard shift guys at the front desk who are watching Colbert highlights on YouTube.
Here comes another guest. A man sits a couple of booths over, back toward me. He’s in a work polo and has an oversized Dell laptop; he plops down onto the Ikea-adjacent love seat and discovers what I did—the hard way: particle board with a little fabric machine-stitched over the top is no kind of comfort.
This place is all desert ‘90s adobe browns and oranges and Spanish tile on the outside and a Magnolia whitewashed inside complete with imitation barn wood laminate flooring inside. Everything in chevron and gold accents and even brass, just because.
Beyond the man—who cracks open his computer with a sigh—the only other character in the vicinity is a flat-screen on mute showing last night’s Thursday Night Football highlights.
All the bar chairs are swiveled in the same direction, due south, ready to fly home for the winter, I suppose.
The fake Christmas tree with the lights and ornaments attached stands sentry in the middle of the open lobby just to my left.
When we were checking in a middle-aged woman in a conference lanyard was kicking the empty present boxes, maybe to see if anything was there. Perhaps a mysterious Hallmark Christmas movie suitor left her a Tiffany necklace in one of those boxes and was about to spirit her away from the dry breakout buffet turkey sandwiches and coughing sounds of her coworkers to a place far, far from here.
An in-ground light-up disco floor mosaic of reds and purples are the main decor upon entry or exit. I’m not sure why it’s there, but I want so badly to do some of the “You Should Be Dancing” routine from Saturday Night Fever that I spent whole afternoons and evenings trying to learn in my living room after school Freshman and Sophomore year.
The guy who sat down has his noise-canceling headphones on now. I guess my tapping is too much for him. I’m a loud typer. He’s already got a Microsoft Office Teams thread going with someone.
Who’s up at this hour? Who’s doing work? (Or “work.”)
…Now is the time us humans are supposed to be receding into the darkness with one another, huddled close in our caves, warming ourselves by the fire in our mud huts, waiting for the darkest night of the year to break out in our special furs, light up the night sky, and make a sacrifice to our pagan gods in hopes they will show mercy through the worst of winter to come.
This is no time to be up before dawn, in a hotel lobby, annoying/harassing/flirting with a coworker online.
The in the headphones’ hair is neatly cropped, no beard, and the noise-cancellers make it look like a pair of plungers are on either side of his head, sucking away what’s left of his frontal lobe.
Another guy sits down. He’s got a work fleece on, gray. It matches the hair on his temples. He’s got a saggy chin and is picking his nose while he looks at his phone and sips on lobby coffee. He’s got a titanium wedding band. He’s someone’s loving husband/proud father, no doubt. The blue screen of his phone reflects off his little disposable specs.
He looks like the kind of marketing guy who comes in a room and shoots down ideas because he can before he goes back into his office, shuts his door and puts on Pearl Jam, and reviews the Instagrams of female subordinates to check in and see what they did over the weekend before switching over to OnlyFans for the good stuff.
I guess it’s nice to see these guys in the wild. I haven’t been anywhere in a long, long time, and they still exist. They survived. Unfazed.
The middle-aged woman from yesterday materializes from the elevator bay. She’s now in a baggy pink sweatshirt and black tights makes her way past the Christmas tree, giving the presents one last look. She steers herself toward the automatic sliding doors to the outside dragging a wheeled carryon behind her. There’s a shuttle waiting, and she gets in.
The gray-templed guy gets up, jeans and Allbirds, and strides over back to the coffee. The noise-canceling guy is on a PowerPoint deck now, hunched over even lower. Am I the only one wearing a mask? No. A shaved bald head guy carrying a bag of last nights’ leftovers and a hotel cup with a tea tag hanging off strides by. He’s got his on. Thanks man, good looking out. The worker bros can’t be bothered with such face coverings.
A well-dressed woman in all gray checks out as the graveyard guys have put their videos away, their laughter has subsided into an early morning hotel lobby monotone. I stretch my feet out to the loveseat across from me. It moves, all eight pounds of it, too willingly. The woman who checked out is now moving toward the shuttle, her designer purse dangling too low. There are two teenage kids, her charges, I suppose, tip-toeing behind her at a safe distance snickering.
The flag outside is flying at half-mast. Did something happen? Something beyond the 9/11 number of people who are still dying of a deadly virus here every other day. A virus that 40% of the population still hasn’t finished doing their research on as to why they’re not protecting themselves or others against it. The narcissists who didn’t take their shots or their boosters or refused, when it suited them especially, not to wear masks are going to send us back into isolation.
I missed it out here, but not too much.
290 E Simms Rd Palm Springs, CA 92262
Many things in Palm Springs as we set off toward year three of the pandemic seem slightly gutted, mangled from the inside out.
Walking around Palm Canyon Drive yesterday, I took a slight detour and wandered into a place called Mitchell’s, and that seemed like it was trending in the right direction.
It was a shotgun-style shop filled with the most beautiful and still smelly vintage clothing, mostly for women: Chanel, Gucci, Pierre Cardin, Diane Von Furstenberg, Anne Klein. On the men’s side, it was a little sparer, though there was an electric blue sharkskin Armani blazer the spoke to me. Size 42 regular—just that, a little bag of coke, and a late 70s Porsche 911, and I’d be ready to American Gigolo my way to living here full-time.
I tried on the jacket, and I’m not sure what happened to bodies in the corn syrup era, but 42 regular fit me like my old confirmation suit, no way I was getting this button snapped without popping it right off. And the shoulders were tighter than a neck massage, cuffs reached mid-forearm when I let it hang.
Was I still growing?
I gently removed the delicate coat and put it back on the rack hoping the shop girl in the Detroit Tigers mask didn’t see me pop any seams. I angled toward the door, hurrying, but not, spotting a handful of screens above, showing off the in-house closed-circuit grainy video of me with that guilty look. It felt very Been Caught Stealing.
Once out on the street, again, walking by the Crazy Shirts store and realizing that brand persists in certain kinds of communities—the kind that still features bronze sculpture on the public right of ways and couples with all of their best years now hanging on the wall leading up the stairwell, shuffling off to find something to eat, together.
And there were such folks actually eating at a Tommy Bahama’s….giant salads and sandwiches that could be spotted from a half black away while Jack Johnson songs played too loud on the outdoor speakers. I thought about how Tommy Bahama’s portions help you fit into Tommy Bahama’s clothing. Circle of life and all that.
I grabbed a more sensible bite at Sherman’s Deli, a small bowl of chicken noodle soup and half my son’s mangled kids’ menu grilled cheese sandwich. A trio of men, probably in their early seventies, called and made dinner reservations for three at Melvyn’s before their lunch even dropped.
They ate quickly and bid a temporary farewell before respectively disappearing into a '90s model Jag, Mercedes, and Bentley—off to desert afternoon things before the sunset and happy hour and dinner. They truly hit the right seam in this existence.
Two couples next to us, both originally from Boise, one lives here now. The men had their own giant sandwiches, the women split pastrami and caught up. A lot of talk about what became of the neighbor kids and their respective sons and daughters-in-laws whereabouts. You don’t really get to see this side of grandparents, the lament, the constant disappointment in their lifetime projects that were their progeny. There was the art of letting go, the blunt force realization that their children are no longer (or maybe ever were) extensions of them. You don’t often hear that side of the story unless you’re out at these type of gatherings. But it’s there. Lemme tell you, it’s there.
I suppose a place like this is where we should all be living as we lurch toward revolution, or Balkinazation, or just the boring, slow-rolling, billionaire-fueled, resource-guzzling on and and on and on riding into the whitewater of oblivion.
Here there is still plenty of natural mineral-enhanced drinking water. There are long, dramatic shadows of the overgrown palm trees stretching out over the flatscape, and the sun hitting the mountains just right before slipping over and into the ocean. The air is chilly and desert clean, and nobody seems to be in much of a hurry. Everything about this place is temporary. Ambulances zoom by on the regular reminding the locals that it all gets taken away, one guest at a time.
I have to go now. The lobby is coming to life. The dad bod middle manager with the glasses is on his HP at a meeting. Replicant-sounding executive women voices are coming through the other end talking about distribution and pain points. He takes a get-ready sip of his (now third) cup of coffee and chimes in once in a while with a question like, “Is that something we could use logic to parse?” To show he’s still got a pulse. Paycheck earned.
In the meantime, I’m haunted a little by the Glass and Steel House #1. It’s following me everywhere this trip. This Donald Wexler- and Ric Harrison-designed home was built by the Alexander Construction Company in 1962 and refuses to be ignored.
Seven of them were made but this is the OG. And if you don’t believe this home has its place stitched into the town’s lore, you haven’t been to any gift shops yet.
There are Glass and Steel House tissue boxes:
T-Shirts
Ornaments:
Magnets:
Plates:
It’s on the cover of books about the architecture of Donald Wexler:
And it’s featured on the local homes rag (naturally.)
Wexler, a native South Dakotan and University of Minnesota grad, died in 2015 which I respect the hell out of. It was maybe the last good year to be alive, here or anywhere else. Before passing, he oversaw the restoration of this one so it wasn’t done—like this little old hotel lobby and all others like it—in the faux Midcentury aesthetic that is actually late-times unaccommodating and uncomfortable. The home is small, by today’s standards especially. Only 1,500 square feet. But it’s still got formal living and dining areas, a den, a master and a guest room.
What more could you need to wrap around yourself and wait for the next meeting to start.