by Douglas Messerli
John Perreault Hotel Death and Other Tales (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1989)
Although I have now read Perreault’s
collection of tales, Hotel Death, at
least three times, I never perceived until this year’s re-reading how much his
stories were concerned with the two unifying themes of My Year 2015 and ‘16,
identity and belief. Indeed, in story after story, Perreault’s nervous
characters—most of them gay men, some still within heterosexual marriages—are
seeking to find out who they might really be, particularly since so many
aspects of their identities have been defined by others.
In the title story, “Hotel Death,” a science teacher (astrophysics)
seeks to escape his not so fulfilling work by traveling into the Baja Peninsula
to visit a tourist hotel, Hotel Descansado. Although the hotel is comfortable
and modern—with large rooms whose balconies face a pool and the ocean—and
spacious public spaces, strange things seem be happening around the corners and
behind his back, with waiters ironically smirking and winking, one seeming
desperate to have sex with him. He has taken pictures during his travel to the
hotel and his return, but none of the photographs of the hotel itself turn out.
The swimming pool, strangely enough shaped as a question mark, is a stagnant
body of green water, and although the ocean beacons nearby, a wall stands
between the hotel and the beach full of sand dollars. When he does climb the
wall to take a nude stroll in the sand, he is met by banditos who demand money,
although, as it points out, he has no place to even carry it, and, moreover, he
is surviving on a credit card back in his room. One morning he awakens to
discover a body in the stagnant pool. In short, while he has no specific
evidence, he feels that the place is somehow evil, that even the spacious rooms
are somehow akilter. It is a place, he observes, where one sees God or, to
express it another way, the visitor encounters death, perhaps even his own.
Nothing does truly happen to the traveler, but he is still terribly
affected by the place months after his return when he attempts to explain what
happened there to his ex-wife and friends. It is, as he attempts to explain, as
he himself had created to hotel and was responsible for the evil therein,
expressing what might almost be described as a mantra of the author: “Within
this nature we correct ourselves.”
The world around us, throughout Perreault’s ordinary yet fantastic
tales, reshapes us and re- defines us. As in “The Previous Tenant” and
“Mysteries” rooms and their previous tenants make the characters not only
wonder about their lives and beliefs, but gradually works to redefine and
reshape them. The philosopher-teacher, ensconced in another professor’s office,
in “Mysteries” gradually begins to read the former tenant’s works and wonder
about how his mind functioned; the bedroom he has rented, where the renter’s
son had previously slept, leads the older man to speculate on the life of the
young boy, whose porn and leftover jock-strap somewhat titillates the older
man. Ultimately leaves in both the office and the boy’s room a strange emblem
of masking tape upon the wall which reads a bit like a x’d out cross—perhaps a
kind of talisman to protect him from their forces.
In the wonderful tale “The Catalogue,” a lonely woman finds her identity
in the regular mail order catalogues she receives, from which she orders all
the furniture and accessories of her isolated Iowa home until she has “erased
desire.”
The young would-be Beats living in a San Francisco group house, begin to
play games with language that fill up and redefine their lives, while
frightening those who do not know that they are “IT,” around whom the others
are playing the game.
In “Airport Music” a slightly paranoid man is so terrified of the times
that he determines to take on the identity of a regular businessman traveling
by air; but to protect himself he determines to visit only airports in which
the arriving planes are connected to chutes, spending his entire life in
traveling internally from airport to airport without leaving the safety of
their confines. He buys new clothes in airport shops and bathes in airport
showers and in one hotel connected by enclosed pathway to the airport. When, by
accident, one of his flights is rerouted to a small airport at Ft. Myers, and
he is forced to briefly deplane outside, he is shot dead by unknown assailants;
clearly his paranoia has been valid.
Often, as in the tale “Do Not Drive in Breakdown Lane,” the narrator or
storyteller so loses his selfhood, that, in the end, identity is completely
lost no matter how the story is told:
Change all the genders;
change all the names, persons, tenses.
Whose story is this,
anyway? Does it matter? Whose house
is this, anyway?
William’s, Dawn’s, Eve’s, mine, or yours?
I am a woman and I
arrive in Provincetown in the dead of
Winter to take care of
a house and a dog, but the doge is gone.
And, believe it or not,
I find love. It goes on and on; it goes
Around and around; in a
spiral, this story-telling.
Time and again in Perreault’s world, figures, while driven by inner
desires, are also redirected and redefined by others, their identities stolen
or, and the very least, redefined. Often, it is their inner desires which
actually remake their identities. Identity, in short, is a malleable thing for
Perreault—unlike the view of Gertrude Stein for whom identity is merely
repetition—so fragile that even the slightest outside intrusion can destroy all
self. Is it any wonder in the terrifying story “The Door,” a man lays inside
his apartment horrified by the possibility of someone intruding upon him,
whether it be with the intent of selling, proselytizing, burglary, or, perhaps,
even murder!
Los Angeles, October 15, 2015
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfiction (October 2015).
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