Reno is not a place you want to be alone in. I was sitting
at a table at the Brew Pub on the mezzanine level of the Eldorado Hotel and
Casino. At first, I was seated on a stool at a high cocktail table, but I felt
a tremor and, as a waitress had yet to approach, I was about to flee. I’d
forgotten the reading material I’d set aside to bring with me when I left the
hotel room, and I didn’t think I could get through a meal alone at a restaurant
with nothing to read. All I had was the little folder that my key cards came
in. (My favorite sentence: “For your convenience, the servibar is
touch-sensitive, and anything that you move will be charged to your account.”)
But I ran into the hostess, and the waitress said she’d be
with me shortly. Before sitting back down, I told the waitress that I felt a
trembling. “That’s because you’re on the overhang,” the waitress said. The
what? “The road is underneath.” I looked down at the floor, which was planked,
like a deck, and remembered that the driver of the shuttle bus from the airport
had told me that the five downtown casinos were connected at the mezzanine
level, so you never had to go outside. I asked the waitress if it was OK if I
moved to a low table. “Sure,” she said. Would it tremble less at a low table? “Probably
not.”
It was a little ridiculous: I had chosen to sit “outside.” Although
everything is inside, the architectural details say “exterior.” All the
restaurants have facades, as in a mall. There is a fountain, as in a piazza. My
eye kept falling on a narrow, pulsing, black horizon that turned out to be the
lip of the up escalator. As I watched, heads rose over the little horizon of the casino:
a guy in a cowboy hat, a couple who could have been shoppers at the Mall of
America, a lush holding a beer in a flimsy plastic cup. There was a tournament of "gal bowlers" in town.
This is when you want an iPhone—I could be carrying on
conversations with people all over the world! I could be tweeting the bejeezus
out of Reno! I have a pen, but no paper. My own beer, a Redhead Amber Ale, in a
tall glass, has already left a wet ring on my placemat. As a last resort, I
reach across the table for a dry placemat, featuring all the Brew Pub
microbrews—Big Dog IPA, Double Down, Wild Card, Gold Dollar, Carano Extra—flip
it over, fold it in quarters, and start writing to keep myself company. This is
pathetic.
My day began at 4 AM. Three-thirty, actually, but I stayed
in bed. It was pouring rain. I swore I would never fly out of LaGuardia again.
It is so stupid when you have a home in Rockaway and a free place to park the
car, not to fly out of JFK. And yet I am forever trundling my suitcase to Grand
Central to catch the bus to Newark Airport, or taking a cab from Rockaway to
LaGuardia at dawn. And here I was again, up with the first robin—I could hear him
out there, singing in the rain—having to drive to LaGuardia and put the car in
a long-term parking lot before catching a flight to Reno via Denver at 7:49 A.M.
Parking at LaGuardia is more expensive and less convenient than
the Long-Term Parking Lot at JFK, no doubt because everything is packed into a smaller
area. I had checked it out online the night before. It was hard to know which
deals were legitimate, but in the end I had paid in advance to park the Éclair,
for thirteen dollars a day, in a lot behind the Extended Stay Hotel, or ESH. I found
directions to the parking lot online, but I knew they were wrong—you don’t have
to get off the BQE and wiggle around on Roosevelt Avenue to get onto the Grand
Central Parkway. My parking lot of choice was well beyond the airport. It sickened
me to barrel past it on my way to the Whitestone Expressway, in the dark and
the rain, unable even to pour a cup of coffee from my thermos without sloshing
the coffee all over the dashboard. The directions printed on the receipt I
printed out were in a cruelly tiny font, impossible to read by the roof light while
barrelling up the Whitestone Expressway in the dark and in the rain. Luckily, I
had called the Extended Stay Hotel the night before and had enough of a memory
of what the guy said to get as far as the service road off Exit 15, 20th
Avenue. There I could stop and read the fine print by the interior roof light
in the car. I had to continue to the light at 14th Avenue, turn left
and then left again onto the service road for the Whitestone Expressway
southbound, and the hotel would be on my right.
I found the driveway and went behind the hotel to the slots
numbered 1 through 50 (I chose slot No. 37), put the receipt on the dashboard,
as instructed, and lugged my stuff into the lobby of the Extended Stay Hotel. The
woman at the reception desk said approvingly that it takes “a cruel woman” to
get up early. Her Queens wisdom took me by surprise. As I waited for the shuttle
bus, I tried to parse it: The early bird gets the worm: I was early; ergo a $13
a day parking spot near LaGuardia was the worm. I guess it does take a certain
amount of determination bordering on cruelty to follow directions past
LaGuardia and make a U-turn on the Whitestone to reach the lobby of the
Extended Stay Hotel in time to catch the 5:30 shuttle bus to Terminal D, or
whatever, in the rain. But what was the alternative?
I had had an extremely complicated weekend (my house guests’
house guests had house guests), and the day before leaving I had the
near-deranging experience, as I was getting into the elevator, of dropping my
keys—including the car keys—and watching them disappear soundlessly into the
gap beneath the elevator door. It was only minutes before the blessed super
restored them to me, but it was time enough to calculate the cost of taking a
car service to the airport and leaving the Eclair exactly where it was for
eight days, in its Tuesday-Friday parking spot, collecting tickets. Three
tickets, at $90 each, is $270, plus the car service, and then the inconvenience
of not having the car at the airport when I got back and not having it in
Rockaway, either. I guess it was worth it.
End of placemat.
