You don’t meet interesting people at the Holiday Inn Express. The best motel rooms for a good conversation cost less than fifty dollars.
Sarah and Pradeep are on vacation, traveling the country in his Porsche. The Grand Central Motel in Ely, Nevada is a $65 room in a building with a cant to the floors, a potholed asphalt and gravel parking lot, and a cold water spigot in the shower that doesn’t work. They each held a goblet of red wine and puffed my weed as we chatted.
They’re from Victoria, Canada. Sarah is forty-eight and walks dogs for a living. Pradeep was born in Kuwait, the son of an oil worker, schooled at the foreign encampment until middle school; he went to high school and college in India where he earned his Doctorate in Psychiatry, and spent his career working in Canada as a psychiatrist. He’s sixty-nine and retired.
They invited me to dinner, the Prospector Hotel & Gambling Hall was a good walk. Sara had a sixteen ounce sirloin well done, a baked potato and three beers. Pradeep’s diabetic and had a salad and two glasses of casino red. He explained to her that Morocco is a country in Africa.
They’ve been together for twelve years, both divorced, no kids. I asked them why they weren’t married and she assured me that they were trying, they almost got married last year; Pradeep had a family emergency. They’re going to try again this year. She nudged him while she described the plan, Pradeep picked at his lettuce and the conversation moved on to motorcycles.
Canadians don’t like us. Our products are now labeled on grocery shelves and boycotted. Friends were appalled that they would spend money in their reviled southern neighbor. I told Pradeep about seeing a dozen men with rifles forcing two dark-complected men onto their stomachs in a bar ditch in Montana. He assured me that no one would mistake him for a Muslim. “Those guys in Montana didn’t look like muslims, either.” He bought me dinner.
In the morning as we said our goodbyes, she gave me Pradeep’s phone number, “He won’t turn it on until we get home.”
