Imaginary Latvian Maid at a Roadside Motel in Upstate New York
in Sam Shepard’s “The One Inside” (2017)
I had room 329, ground floor, looking directly out at the stagnate waters of a small Hudson tributary. The town itself was conceive in the mid-1600s, burned and pillaged by the British in 1777, and littered with Dutch stone “rubble,” structures for grain deposit. This pathetic, side-of-the-road motel was built along the lines of a traditional Holiday Inn, lacking the slick green plastic veneer and welcoming marquee for deer hunters. Remodeling from twelve-by-twelve scaffolding took place daily. Construction workers in yellow hard hats and steel-toed work boots came and went from the restroom marked “For Handicapped Only,” trailing hunks of plaster and dust. There was no laundry service, no restaurant. A potato chip machine that took several quarters, and one maid with a Latvian accent who never entered your room unless you hung a “Please Change the Linens” sign on your doorknob. Strings of gray junk hung like mushroom spores on the air conditioner’s grill. Black plastic boxes filled with rat poison nestling in the long weedy grass outside the window.
