The Devil's Motel

I'M STAYING AT THE DEVIL's MOTEL...ROOM 666 by Anthony Rain Starez
If there's a Devil at all, he, or she, must laugh with joy as people stray into the depths of insanity. For insanity breeds many of the acts we call evil. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two, like when a delusional woman who thinks demons surround her house locks her children in a closet for years to protect them. Is this evil or just crazy? And I wonder sometimes if sane people can have insane thoughts, then commit just as insane acts. And can it work vice-versa? I wonder these things because I've seen both so clearly, yet still come away with no answer. When I was 10 years old my parents moved to Miami, Florida in hope of my father finding the music mecca he'd been so interested in being a part of since his childhood. You see, my father was intense and very passionate about his music as a saxophonist and flautist, and Miami in the late-60s was a hotbed for jazz musicians and lounge acts. It was a town of high-rollers, and the beautiful people came out at night to mingle in the fabulous hotels along the Miami Beach strip. Frequently, you could catch Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra in one of their local hangouts schmoozing, drinking and performing for the elite. Many musical acts would make the trek to Miami to float around the stars, hoping for the magical day of being discovered, or to at least find work. My father, who took the stage name Jet Nero, was among this group, and managed to find plenty of work playing in the hotel orchestras and even becoming his own headlining lounge act for a club called The Sir John.
	The circus atmosphere also drew the likes of mobsters anxious to dip their fingers into the industries that profited from the river of cash that flowed through the Miami streets like a golden underground sewer system. At the same time, there was a large number of disenfranchised people living on the fringes.
Drugs, rock-n-roll and sex were all changing and forming new rules away from the societal-norm. It was a backlash against the old-school of thought of following blindly. This subculture withdrew further and further from the mainstream as freedom became the dominant theme of the era. The freedom to dress differently was a blatant sign you were part of the new generation; wearing your hair and facial hair long and unkempt, listening to radical music, doing drugs to excess and having sex with multiple partners was no longer taboo. There was even a new lingo among the in-crowd of America who formed words like groovy, cool, far out and right on to unify this new community. Well, enough of my summing up the hippie generation. I was still very young, so most of what I saw was only half-understood, or not understood at all. However, everyone has a need to belong. In fact, I bet most of us would have to plead guilty to that inherent trait if we were pressed. Sometimes that need overrides any logical thought process, and looking back I think my father's need to belong to that musical scene of Miami led his family into the pit of hell; where times were dangerous, insane, evil and, oh yes, free.
	To be honest, the marriage between my parents was already on terrible terms, as my father would spend all night in clubs and days in bed sleeping. Not to mention the women that found my father an irresistible dashing jazz musician with dark Italian features. And there was my father's not-so-clandestine affairs with those women, which didn't help matters. Understandably, my mother found all of this hard to deal with, especially since I was only 10 and my sister, Jani Rose, was only six.
In fact, my mother had become pushed over the edge of clear thinking during that time. But in a last ditch effort to keep the family together my mother, Jani Rose and I followed my father to Miami, specifically to a small apartment complex called The Haven; otherwise known as The Devil's Motel. The Devil's Motel acquired its infamous pseudonym within a short time of staying there by my mother because of the frequent acts of evil committed by some of the drugged up crazy residents that found refuge from the rest of the World in this low-rental neighborhood. This was the bottom. The place where all the freaks of society felt at home with each other.
	I remember feeling like I'd landed on a different planet. A planet far removed from my middle-class home in the middle of horse country in Ocala, Florida. The streets in The Haven were dirty and maligned with jagged potholes, while at night the huge Palmetto bugs, or Cockroaches, would make their way around the apartment freely.
Jani Rose and I clutched each other in fear of the pests many nights before falling asleep, a fear that stayed with us into adulthood. I met another young boy who lived in the complex. His name was Sputnik, and he lived with his alcoholic mother and sisters who were known prostitutes. Regardless, we became instant friends. We palled around together daily in the Miami heat, as I hadn't been registered in school, and Sput hardly ever went. Some of the things we witnessed around The Devil's Motel in my four-month stay were enough to change a child's mind about everything they ever knew, and my mind was changing rapidly from the moment I arrived. There was the time we sat at the bottom of a stairway laughing as we listened to the drug induced ramblings of a man screaming at his dog about the pressures of being the President of the United States. There was also the time a hippie guy gave us pastel chalk and told us to decorate his apartment with sayings, like, Free Sex, L.S.D., Peace and Love, etc. We did as he said, covering the walls with graffiti. Later the same guy tried butchering a dog with a machete in front of a group of people. His reasoning as I remember was because the dog had a disease.
	On occasion, Sput and I would ride along on dumpster diving excursions with Jim Outlaw, the manager of the complex. Jim would wait till nighttime, then we'd all go behind supermarkets, like Publix, and find food in the dumpsters. We'd have a blast finding intact watermelons, cantaloupes and still-packaged fruits. Lots of stray cats ran freely in the complex, lost or abandon, while their feces lay in the dirty sand of the grounds.
It was rare if we kids ever wore shoes, so we were open to infections, and consequently this led to many of us contracting very painful sores on our legs and feet. I had the sores almost the whole time I lived at The Devil's Motel, and suffered every morning when they hurt the worst from swelling overnight. Everything about that place was painful. The sores were just an outward sign, but the real pain was in our hearts as Sput and I would run to the water in a nice neighborhood that was nearby, passing by the groomed lawns and nice houses pointed out how different we were. There was constant fights between people in the complex and the sight of police cars was commonplace. The violence seeped into us kids too, resulting in many fights. I remember fist-fighting all afternoon with a boy, and being beaten by another kid with a switch. I even choked a girl to near unconsciousness after she hit my sister. We were lost children, finding our way the only way we knew. I now understand the importance of where a child grows up, and how everything in that child's environment teaches that child. The old African saying "It takes a village to raise a child" is true, so beware of the village your child grows up in. You see, children are impressionable. Children can be molded to the shape of the adults around them. Sput had already seen enough of The Devil's Motel, and other places like it, to possess a tainted view on life, although I remember the sweet boy inside him. The boy who could get so excited over the smallest thing, like receiving a free drink from the drink machine. As for me, I was learning quickly the World that Sputnik had known for quite some time, and would continue to know. However, my saving grace was that my mother sent me to live with my grandmother after four months. I was off to another journey, and while it wasn't a cherry life, I had at least escaped the dark clutches of The Devil's Motel where children's confidences were crushed and adults were swallowed by the mouth of drugs and violence.
	Mental snapshots remain, and now, knowing the danger we kids were in, I wonder what happened to my friend Sput. I want to believe that somehow he found his way out of the deep pit that trapped so many with drugs, violence and craziness, but I know the odds were stacked against that boy. Sput, I hope you're okay!