Hotel Cosmopolitan (Moscow):
So, unemployment. Intermission. I can just pick up and write anytime. Begin anywhere. Grab an idea mid-thought or snag a random pic out my IPHOTO and allow it to conjure that same familiar, detached groundlessness I feel today. Only in these pics it was Moscow and that vulnerable aloneness of the strange new country. And language. With no friends due to arrive for 6 hours.
I was the 1st to land in Moscow. It took me a long time to clear Customs (apparently 'cause I was too dense to see they wanted a bribe); but my guide at the airport located me quickly and drove me to the hotel. At least he said he was my guide. Could have been anyone I suppose as he drove the anonymous black sedan thru the grey, dank industrial clouds and piss-rain of Moscow.
They say all foreigners stay at The Cosmopolitan. At least back then they did. My Polish friends insist that its rooms are bugged and that the clerks are all KGB. Normally I’d dismiss their comments as the paranoid scars of their Eastern Europe heritage; but the first thing the smoking-hot desk clerk did was take my passport.
“Hey,” I told her. “Aren’t I gonna need that back?”
“You’re to be here a whole week--no?” she asked with a stern countenance.
“Yeah, but.... I mean. Don’t I need my passport to get around?”
She looked at me from her hard, blue, evaluative eyes.
“...We’ll keep it here for you,” she said with a tight smile. “It’ll be safe.”
As the bellman led me to my room we passed the lounge full of cocktail girls situated directly next to the elevators. Hard to say if their night was starting or ending since they lived their days on hotel time. Oblivious to hours. Cognizant only of work-shifts. To the rhythms of commuter subways and international flights. The bellman took a moment in which he seemed to allow me to chose a favorite for later, then led me to the elevators, and to my room, before he slowly left.
...And then suddenly, I was alone. No friends for another six hours. No knowledge of Russian whatsoever. No passport as the sun slowly descended. I turned on the television for some comfort, but what I saw on Russian MTV scared me so bad I had to turn it off.
I walked to the windows. Parted the drapes. Outside, ‘cross the street was what I now know to be the the Yuri Gagarin monument. The Monument to the Conquerors of Space Travel.
Course I didn’t know its specific symbolism then. I just saw a strange phallic spaceship poised straight towards the sun. With thin metallic skin that conveyed so much sleek power and speed I had to rub my jet-lagged eyes to convince myself it would remain fixed in place.
I 'd planned to walk across the street to inspect the sculpture more closely, but as I continued to stare out my window the trip caught up with me and I began to drift to sleep. A foreign traveler holed-up in his hotel room. With no passport. No friends or family near. Descending into sleep in the hotel's cheaply upholstered chair, where the world I'd known slowly faded into intermission.
The view from my room's window at The Hotel Cosmopolitan* (*Double-click on pic for Full-view):
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