The Two Palms Motel

Here's to the offing and dead-eyed Franklins on the floorboards

Fellow miscreant writer

Jason Thompson

lent his collaborative strokes on this one. Be sure to subscribe to Ear Candy Update

Let us know if you’d like to see more collaborations – we have ideas.

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Down some stretch of busted-up asphalt, your ragtop flies.

The sun has tumbled off the edge of the earth, throwing molten slag into the clouds. Night might be coming, but that hellish wind needling your skin and eyes for the last few hours will never quit.

At best, your Spanish is rusty but the norteño station, riding shotgun since Vegas, has you tapping along. Everything is a whirl of nonsense, so why not the music, too?

Shaking your head, hoping the road comes into focus, doesn't help. The weeklong bender and those dead brain cells are the only take-home in that doggie bag brain of yours. Luckily, you escaped with something more tangible.

Through the fog you remember that Navy swinger everyone called Battleship. He says the place where the sea meets the sky is called the offing. You see that now as the road and sky merge into a tunnel of nothingness. There it is, you have found the offing.

So, with an ashtray full of butts and yours melted to the vinyl seat, you pull off, welcomed by the skeletal husks of long-dead palm trees and a dirt parking lot. A trio of motorcycles sit idling, their Milwaukee aspirations ready for a quick departure, in front of a dozen rooms facing the highway. To everyone, this place is a pit stop somewhere between Hell and Oblivion.

To call it kitschy would be a lie–it's a shithole.

No matter, your internal gauge is on E. Any remaining miles will have to wait.

A night watchman doesn’t look you in the eye as you push a couple of twenties at him. You’re thankful he’s glued to the titty magazine for two reasons: you’d have to smell his breath directly instead of ricocheted off the countertop, and he might recognize you — from another life, on page thirty-two.

The metal number on the door says nine, but when the lock breaks free, a nail holding it disintegrates. Sliding in a sad downward arc, the number spins: now it’s room six. It strikes you as funny that in an instant, things can receive a new identity. Entropy is magnificent, innit? You blink, banking that thought for another day–maybe in a new life.

Before you enter, you know this place is a murder scene with the bodies only recently carted away. A lone bulb sends a search beam ahead of you, a warning beacon, telling the cockroaches to arm themselves — tonight might just be a fight!

Travelers have shuffled the shag carpet thin, and the sun has leached the color to something best described as distressed carrot – the least favorite Sherwin Williams color. You remind yourself to keep your boots on as glass crunches under your feet.

Two twin beds wrapped in a fitted sheet occupy the center. Judging by the giant Rorschach blotch, there’s a very real chance this bedding was never new.

Stains on the walls are deviant, deep, and honest. They’re from years of unbathed souls seeking shelter. Like you, these walls have history, too — not the kind written in pastel-colored textbooks, but rather carved with knives into the doorjamb, the plaster, the headboard, like:

The invitation: Souls for sale, inquire within
The rebuke: Fuck MJP!
The advertisement: Sandy gives good head

Dropping your bag, you stretch, letting your spine unroll — you’ve spent too many hours crouched, looking in the rearview, watching each vibrating speck on the horizon. You’re too hungry to eat. It's A strong drink-or-bust kind of night. The bottle tips back easily. Too easily. Here’s to the offing you think, as the liquid in the bottle swishes its medicinal march toward your veins.

In the quiet heat, you remember how you greased the bookie setting the trap. How you found the cop who would play nice for a sloppy favor. But mostly you remember him — his mouth agape like some prehistoric fish dragged from the deep. He’d been rooked, and you were the architect. Good riddance. The fucker deserved nothing and got it.

You remember laughing, throwing the bag in the car, twisting the key, and peeling away. The zipper broke when you hit the curb and a thousand Franklins stared dead-eye at you from the floorboards.

Now, here in the twisted nowhere of this place, nobody ever asks for a fresh pot of coffee or when the workout room opens. The lives of people who stop here are secret; their troubles are their own.

That’s how it’s meant to be, isn’t it?

Welcome to The Two Palms Motel, where there’s always a vacancy.

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Music to read by:

Agua Turbia by Guadalupe Plata

Santo Enterrio by Guadalupe Plata

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Backstory

There really is a Two Palms Motel near where I grew up. It’s a shade nicer now than I remember as a kid but it’s still, as the story says, an shithole. And, yes, at one point it had two sizable palm trees marking the entrance. But time gets the better of all of us, doesn’t it? It stands now, a ghost motel from another life, when air travel was still new and fashionable but not a greater force than a spirited convertible hitting its redline on the open road.

Highway 60 (Grand Avenue to locals) was the byway, that took you, side-by-side with freight trains, from Phoenix to Wickenburg. Each mile along that route, I remember thinking as a kid, was a mile further from civilization. Each mile deeper into the scrub brush and over long-dried tributaries with aspirational names: wash, basin, arroyo.

The Two Palms is more than a roadside stop from one dusty town to the next – it’s a place that has somehow captured my imagination. Since I was a kid I’ve wondered what might have happened there? Who tumbles in at 3am? I imagined it’s the kind of place you don’t know you need, until you do.

And with that, I was off to the keyboard races.

I penned the main structure a few years ago and promptly forgot about it. But, when I read some of

Jason Thompson

’s work (then listened to his podcast) I just knew there was a desert we could sojourn together, in a fictional ragtop, no less. I thought his visceral style could breathe some new life, new energy to the piece. And boy did he.

Hopefully, we’ve woven our styles together in a way that is invisible – a merging of two miscreant minds into a sketchbook of the open road, where bad things have happened, probably still do, and where escapees find refuge, if only for a night.