Who’s a Germaphobe?
Story and Photos by John O’Bryan
The cheap hotel I found somewhere in Idaho (its name is omitted to protect the innocent, and the guilty) had a very nice website, with reasonable prices, and all of their rooms were suites. This suited me fine. If I had to be away from Moscow and my family on business for a few days, why not get a suite? Sleep in one room, work in the other.
Plus the price was cheaper than the nationally known hotel chain’s plain ol’ room with two queen beds. The ratio of savings to luxury was just about perfect. I ignored the warning bells that fired in my head as I booked a room for three nights. How bad could it be?
I hate falling victim to advertising and shady marketing schemes. The sad thing is I usually know better. I’m a cynic at heart and carry around low expectations, like Eeyore looking for his tail, and because of that I’m never surprised when I pull my McChicken out of the bag and it looks like it’s been held tightly in someone’s armpit or that the new X-ray glasses I ordered from the back of a comic book won’t actually allow me to see through walls. I have come to expect such disappointments.
The problem is, I love a lot of stuff. My willingness to suspend disbelief is determined by the amount of money I might save and how large the potential is that an item will be awesome. If there’s a chance I could pay less for something that I know should cost more or if there’s the possibility an item will make my life somehow better, the belief in that thing borders on idolatry.
A still, small voice of doubt always echoes somewhere in my head, but I mostly ignore it. I firmly believe there are such things as free lunches and am confident that before I die, I will, at some point, get something for nothing.
On the counter at the front desk was a bell, but sitting right behind it were an attendant in black eye shadow and her boyfriend, whose black hair covered one eye in a long sweep. They didn’t look up when I entered. I stood at the counter for a few minutes, silently waiting for them to finish their game of Bubble Pop. When they had finished, and before they could start a new game, I tentatively clicked the silver bell button. It gave a sickly ring.
Four bloodshot eyes rolled in sync and locked onto mine. The girl reached up and placed her finger deliberately on the bell. I smiled. She heaved a sigh and pushed away from the desk. When she asked how many hours I needed the room for, I knew I was in deep, deep trouble.
The problem is that I have an issue with the unclean. (I also used to have issues with the undead but then I lived with teenagers and got over that.) I also have a very good imagination and since I work in a hospital, I know that simply because something looks clean doesn’t mean it is clean. What you see as clean, I see as potential nastiness: an invisible yet steamy rainforest of death. I buy hand sanitizer in the sixty-four-ounce container.
Some people have gone so far as to label me germophobic and suggest I get help. Before you call for an intervention, I have to remind you the Bible says cleanliness is next to godliness. OK, maybe that was Ben Franklin, but he was a founding father so it’s almost the same.
I’m the normal one, people, and it’s all of you who are crazy. If you all knew what I know about invisible death, you would run screaming from public restrooms just like I do. Actually, I like my own germs just fine—it’s other people’s flora and fauna I can’t abide.
Studies have shown that almost everything you or I touch is covered in a mixture of fecal material, blood, and nasal effluence. How do you get that thought out of your head once it’s in there? What were the people doing in order to get that on their hands? I really have to stop thinking about this.
Touching public things like shopping carts or handrails makes my hands feel like they’re growing little green mittens. As soon as it becomes socially acceptable to wear a mask in public (think surgeon, not lucha libre fighter) I will strap one on in a heartbeat, because almost every speck of dust you see floating in the air is really a fleck of someone else’s sloughed skin. I hate the thought of a tiny piece of someone else lodging in my bronchial airways. Come on people, use a loofah sponge!
I pulled my truck around the back of the hotel and parked it underneath one of two working lights which, as I found out later, happened to be right in front of an industrial dryer vent. The next morning, my truck was covered in a thick mat of frozen lint. At the time, parking next to a light had seemed prudent.
I walked past drunken people smoking cigarettes at the back entryway. Parked beneath the stairwell was a dark green couch. As I stepped over the couple talking in the hallway I realized the couch had to be really bad if they had opted to sit on the floor instead of using it.
My room was nearby. I slid the card into the slot and when the little light flicked from red to green, I opened and shut the door before the smokers could get in. I glimpsed them staring at me like characters out of The Walking Dead.
I bolted the lock, flicked the safety latch, turned on the light, and my heart about fell out of my chest onto the floor. Had it actually leapt from my chest onto the floor, I would have left it there, not wanting to put the filthy thing back into my body.
In truth, the place appeared clean enough but I was very glad at that moment not to be in possession of a black light. My imagination was doing a good enough job already. This is because although I had booked a suite, and by golly that’s what I got, it wasn’t the kind of suite I was expecting.
It had no writing desk, chair, or separate television, like every other suite in existence. Instead, smack in the middle of this suite was a large mirror-encased hot tub.
This took me right out of my element. I felt like that Nigerian a few years back who learned to swim the month before being sent to the Olympics as his country’s lone swimming entrant. This room was designed for business, but not for any business I was interested in. I staggered past the cesspool and made my way to the bed. I grabbed the comforter by the very edge, yanked it from the bed in one swift motion (comforters are sickly dirty) and piled it into the corner.
Too late, I realized I had just launched every skin cell on the spread into the air. I pulled my T-shirt over my mouth and nose and, using a tissue to lift the receiver, called the national chain hotel to see if they still had a room open. They didn’t. I was stuck for the duration. I came close to weeping.
As I sat on the bed, trying not to think at all, a vision kept popping into my head of the thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of people who had stumbled into my hotel room for reasons other than rest. Suddenly, it seemed like every person who had ever used the room was standing there unclothed and they were all fat and hairy and shirtless and wore tightie-whities.
I sat on the bed amid a vast ocean of other people’s bodily fluids, hugged my knees to my chest, and tried to relax. I turned the TV on with my shoe. I couldn’t even look at the tub.
We have whirlpools in the birthing rooms at my hospital. After baby and mother have gone home, environmental services personnel clean the tub by running a strong solution of water, disinfectant, and biological cleanser through them a number of times before rinsing them. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process that I’m not sure this hotel did.
If it isn’t done, little body pieces sit in the inner pumps and hoses and grow silently, snickering in the warm, moist environment, waiting to spew forth a maelstrom of other people’s DNA when the tub is filled again. It’s like a human crockpot.
After watching a few hours of Say Yes to the Dress (it was the channel the TV was turned to and I couldn’t touch the remote to turn the channel), I forced myself off the bed, put my bag on the wooden table, and got ready for the night.
I brushed my teeth and washed my face with water from my water bottle without setting anything on the counter or letting any part of my body touch the Formica. Don’t ask me how I did this but the last thing I shed from my body was my shoes, which I set right next to the bed in case I needed to get up during the night.
In one scene in Die Hard, the Bruce Willis character takes off his shoes and squishes his toes into the carpet to release the tension of travel. This scene always makes me cringe when I think about how many people have done the same thing. The podiatrist at my hospital told me the single greatest cause of nail and foot fungus is the carpet in hotel rooms. Vindication!
I did wonder what the housekeeper would think about a single guy who used enough bathroom linen for four people, but it really was the only way to get from the shower to my clothes. Have you seen nail fungus?
I slept little, but survived my first night and then went looking for my free continental breakfast. By God, I deserved it. The attending queen-of-the-microwave didn’t look up from her magazine as I entered the room.
Fresh eggs and bacon, a waffle or maybe some French toast and a big glass of cold orange juice would just about put things right. The smorgasbord consisted of a small tin pan of what looked like eggs, an aluminum pan of possible sausage patties, and liquid that could have been prune or cranberry juice.
I survived those three days, just barely. It’s amazing what you can live through if you have enough hand sanitizer. I was never so thankful to put a place in my rearview mirror although it was frustrating that I didn’t figure out one particular thing.
Why would anyone leave the lotion, soap, and a hand towel on top of the microwave? I guess some mysteries are better left unsolved.
John O'Bryan Writes 