A nighttime adventure at the hotel in Lillooet

I live in a hotel.

It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. I have a little stovetop I can cook on, a little fridge, a little microwave…all I have to do is flip the little sign on my door when I leave for work, and when I get home, the room is spotless, little mini soaps and shampoos have materialized, and fresh towels and sheets have magically appeared…

However, there are the inevitable downsides of small town hotels too…The sleazy passers through who invite you to their room for a beer, pleasantly addressing your boobs instead of your eyes and seemingly genuinely surprised when you decline saying that Hell would freeze over before you missed the new Grey’s Anatomy (read: new camera angles of Patrick Dempsey)…the dude next door who snores so loud, you can hear him through the walls AND your trusty earplugs…the woman below you with the grating donkey bray laugh who apparently finds humour in everything from flushing the toilet to opening a drawer…living in a room so small that as long as everything is stacked in such a way that there is a narrow pathway from the bathroom to the bed and from the bed to the door, you feel organized…the fact that you may not be the only one with a key to your door…which brings me to my point…

I am not currently staying in the hotel I started off in here in Lillooet. In fact, the one I voluntarily moved to is smaller and older. Why you ask?

I will start by saying my friends had a good laugh when we got word of the place the nursing agency was putting me up in during my contract. Not only was it newly renovated and right “downtown” (Lillooet has a population of around 2500), but it had a bar and a liquor store right downstairs! How convenient…I guess. Of course, the implications of this didn’t really sink in until I got here. Luckily, my window was at the back and on the opposite side from the bar, but the thuds and scrapes of arrhythmic gaits and accompanying cusses from the old boys staggering home through the back parking lot constantly seeped through the seams of my window into the wee hours of the morning. Occasionally, if they were drunk beyond coherence, they would somehow get themselves a room in the hotel. It was common on any night of the week to be woken up briefly by heavy, dragging steps and wall thuds of someone doing the pinball walk down the narrow hallway before they fell noisily through their doorways and passed out for the night.

On this particular night it was a Wednesday around 11:30pm. I was asleep in bed and woken by some poor sod who, judging by the swooshing scrapes accompanying the customary stagger, was obviously walking while leaning completely against the wall for support. I rolled my eyes and turned over to go back to sleep as I heard my doorknob starting to jiggle, waiting for whoever it was to realize that the key didn’t fit and that this was not his room. The next second, my eyes snapped open as the light from the hallway spilled into my room, and a very large dark figure swayed towards my bed. It took a minute for me to register that this was actually happening before I jumped out of my bed and started yelling, the adrenalin greatly hindering my ability to formulate a sentence “NO NO NO!!! MY ROOM! NOT YOUR ROOM!”. He responded with what was actually a surprisingly rational argument “This is MY room – my key opened the door. I’m going to bed.” (of course, I am only giving him credit for this answer given his state of inebriation as the heaps of belongings, and a yelling PJ clad girl in the bed would likely be enough evidence for the general population to gather that this was probably the wrong room).

As said drunk man lumbered at alarming speed towards me and my bed, someplace in my brain made a split second judgment that while logic said that this was a very bad situation (given that the front desk and the pub both close at 11pm and due to low season and I am usually the only one staying at the hotel during the week), something told me this grizzly bear of a man was actually quite harmless and luckily had no sort of malicious intent. Three seconds later, the Grizzly was drunkenly protesting as I reached up and clamped my hands on his shoulders, turned him around and steered him out of my room.

My conscience quickly became a curse as I realized I could not go back to bed in good mind while leaving him barely supporting himself against the wall outside my room…plus, I had to get my hands on those keys…

I told him that if he gave me the keys, I would help him find his room. He amicably handed over the keys, commenting on how good the service was at this hotel. I again rolled my eyes and glanced down at the keys – room 112. My room was 102. I inserted the keys into my door, and sure enough, the key easily turned and my door was open…I shook my head in disbelief and started to conjure up the conversation I would be having with reception tomorrow. As he stood swaying, I walked up and down the hallway trying to find the room. No room 112. Who was this guy and how did he even get in? All the hotel doors are locked and he has a key for a room that doesn’t exist…I once again held his shoulders from behind and steered him down the hall to reception figuring there must be an emergency number to call.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I found the number and picked up the phone to dial out. No answer. I tried several more times, our man breathing what smelled like vaporized Jack Daniels down my neck. As I hung up for the 3rd time, Mr Grizzly started to get a little peeved and demanded where he was going to sleep tonight.

I realized that this situation had the potential to go very sour very fast and it appeared that I wasn’t going to have any backup anytime soon. I glanced around and my eyes fell on the lobby couch. I smiled a little at the idea of what I was about to do…I gently placed a hand on Mr G’s forearm. “I’ll tell you what” I said. “This is a really crummy situation and I feel so bad ‘cause I can tell you are super tired and just want to sleep…the least I can do to make it up to you is let you sleep on my couch for the night, and we can figure this all out in the morning. How does that sound?”.

The tension immediately dropped away from the air between us and Mr G tilted his head slightly “Do you mean that, Sweetheart? Would you do that for me?”. I was already leading him over to the couch as I replied “Of COURSE I would. As I said, it’s the least I can do”.

He patted my arm as he flopped on to the couch. “I owe you a beer, Sweetheart”. Half a minute later, he was passed out. I plodded back down the hall in my PJs, the mystery keys in my hand and went back to bed. My sleep was a little broken as I went to check on the poor old sod several times throughout the night to make sure he was still breathing. The last time I checked on him was around 4:30am and I was mildly surprised to find the couch empty and the six pack of beer he had been toting gone too…I can only hope that he found someplace more comfortable than “my couch” to sleep on for the rest of that night…

I checked out of that hotel the next day.

Fi
xo