So, here’s a story, in this time of monsters.

If I could take you back to 1982, I’d show you a California motel that got built a little too far from the beach, in too rough a neighborhood, to ever make a go of it. Couple of palm trees, a small swimming pool, weren’t enough. After it failed the tourists, they converted the rooms to “efficiency units” with kitchenettes, for people who had enough money to get off the street, but not enough resources to get all the way safe. Life got dealt with, week-to-week, in cash.

That was me, in the spring of ’82. Owner of a backpack and a gold Camaro that smoked on startup—a kid from someplace far away, on my way to somewhere else.

The first night I moved in, a committee of two men and a woman knocked on my door. They shoved a warm can of Budweiser at me, by way of hello. We sat together on my step as the sky got dark. They explained that paying for accommodation at the front desk didn’t mean I could stay in the motel. They needed to okay me. If I was a troublemaker, I had to leave in the morning. They wouldn’t call the cops, because the cops didn’t take their calls. 

If they decided I could be family, then welcome. Rough people. They meant business.

I wasn’t a rookie. I didn’t need diagrams. I didn’t feel keen on being in anyone’s family, but I wasn’t a troublemaker—not the kind they meant. I just needed somewhere to sleep, somewhere with hot water in the morning. I finished my beer, nodded and went back inside.

The rates and terms suited me fine, as it turned out.

The motel made a castle, one that pulled the drawbridge when dusk fell. A funny thing happens when people don’t belong anywhere. They start to go back to the “in-between”, the childhood place that’s right on the border between somewhere and nowhere. They know monsters are real, they have one foot in the Askew, and they have a sense of what forever really means. 

The power in that can be enormous.

Several years later, he remained as muscular and angry as ever. I thought maybe the beer preserved him.

Behind the office in 121, a woman in her forties housed a seemingly endless stream of young women in her unit. They came and went, stayed a night or a month. The woman rarely showed herself, but her guests sunned themselves by the pool in twos and threes. I heard they were hookers who did their business elsewhere. I also heard they were a colony of lesbians, using the motel as refuge from the world. I didn’t wonder about them too much. Even as a young man, I had a good understanding of none of my business.

Everyone had a story after all, including me.

I never walked past the door of 108 near suppertime that I didn’t get pulled inside and cajoled into eating an enchilada. The beautiful mom always made too many and worried I would get thin. The German poured me small glasses of angry-tasting liqueur. I sat with him while he shouted at the Los Angeles Dodgers on his television set, slipped out when he fell asleep. The strange young women from 121 tapped softly on my door in the middle of the night, looking for cigarettes. They were always shy and appreciative. The next day an invisible hand invariably slipped a fresh pack through my open window.

We were family. We all knew that monsters are real, and once you know that you can never be exactly like normal people again.

We were failed as good people, but we did our best to be kind and to protect. If a woman got slapped in the parking lot, if a date turned into rape by the swimming pool, if a kid came home with bad drugs, it got dealt with by everyone-all-together-right-now and nobody ever talked about it afterward. 

After dark, all kinds of dangerous things came down from the hills. Downtown, the goblins took off their masks and started to hunt. None of them bothered us, at least not for long. I never slept sweeter, safer than in that seedy motel in the bad section of a Pacific seaside city.

They promised the statue-lady in New York Harbor was there for everybody. They said not to be afraid of uniforms.

They said no such thing as goblins, but in your heart you knew different, didn’t you? Now, you see zombies on the teevee, holding press conferences to announce there’s no such thing as zombies. The real-life demons scream your-body-my-choice, we have guns and we don’t need permission. The bad things wear sunglasses and masks. The creeps do their best to scare you and make you stop believing in beautiful. That’s what monsters were born to do. 

I won’t pretend this won’t be awful. I won’t tell you the things you were taught to trust aren’t the most dangerous. Some of us won’t last long enough to see the sun come up.

You feel alone, so it’s maybe time to start looking at the faces around you. Maybe, you’re about to be less alone than you’ve ever been in your whole life. Maybe the motel lights are already coming on, golden. Start walking toward them.

Stop believing that warm nights, blue mornings, and true love are only in the movies. Finding your way back to those things comes with the deal. No extra charge.

Stay safe, motel-people.