Reno

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, 20^th 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 14^th 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.