*The following are excerpts from the forthcoming book _Clean Rooms. Low Rates.__, a collaboration between photographer Brendan Barry, who photographed empty motel rooms across the US, and writer Jeff Parker, who wrote short texts to go with those photos of empty motel rooms.

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Dear Guest, Due to the popularity of our guest room amenities, our Housekeeping Department now offers these items for sale. Should you decide to take these articles from your room instead of obtaining them from the Executive Housekeeper, we will assume you approve a corresponding charge to your account. Thank You.

An alarm clock and a pillow, twenty-five dollars every. Sheets sixty! And comforter eighty. Hairdryer only thirty-five. Not bad for hair dryer. Goodie one.

In mine country sheet will be sixty rubles for sure, man. I once thiefed Yuri Gagarin Fist Cosmonaut in Russia Space plaque from hotel in mine country. To the pussy price! How to explain me? Supply and demand? This what different make me from mine enemy?

And everyone say here hotel towel free take. Now I see twenty dollars.

Who is Executive Housekeeper, and how summon I her? I take all your towels. And hair dryer. I also buy hair dryer. You assume I approve corresponding charge mine account. Thanks you.


Motels and hotels. What difference does a single beginning consonant imply?
As an adult, there is a simple answer: A hotel is where you want to be. A motel is where you are at.
The best motel has a pool. I have been going to the motel pool for near to thirty years now looking, probably, for some brunette-haired girl who I met at a motel pool thirty years ago when my grandparents took me to Disney World and left me play with her, thinking it an all-innocent kids thing when even then it wasn’t exactly that.

This motel does not have a pool.

This motel has a window in the door.

That is the level of excitement on which this motel is operating.

But I am good with that. I am right with that. I am fine with that. Right fine with that level of excitement. In the disappointment of wrong brunetteheaded girls in my life, I have come to be right fine with a room with or without a view. A motel with or without a pool. A sheet to pull back. A TV to light my path to the bathroom.


After Children of the Corn, I’d never again trust a redhead. An American Werewolf in London and an entire bowl of overly buttered popcorn made me throw up, and Pet Sematary inspired me to kill and bury a black snake, which never rose from the dead, wrathful or benevolent. I cut my arm with razor blades over the unbroken earth of that beautiful snake’s grave.

I swore off little girls after Firestarter, as well as big hotels, crazy writers, and Olive Oil lookalikes after The Shining. But Poltergeist slayed me. That little girl, so much more barren and damaged than Barrymore and her fat cheeks. They’re here. At times I still sit alone in a motel room watching the snow, waiting for them—for somebody, anybody—to speak to me.


I wake up in the middle of the night and my arm is dead. The night is dead too. I am in my aunt’s basement, moving slowly against the wall into the yellow light, where I see that it is not my aunt’s basement at all, and my arm is dead. It is a cold and unfamiliar room, and it is dead and I am alone and my arm is dead. Do you remember that fairy tale about the golden arm? Where is my golden arm?

My dead arm tingles and comes back to life and the night and the room comes back to life. My heart beat pounds in my ear. My chest spasms. A new and worrisome vein, like a blue thread, circumnavigates my penis. I lie across the fuzzy bedspread and stare at the ceiling panels, which are exactly like the ceiling panels in my aunt’s basement. Just a thin cracker-crust buffer between me and whatever occupies all that space.


There are three rivers here in Three Rivers, Michigan, and three square boxes that I can stare into. I perch on the au revoir and watch the TV in the reflection of the Southwest print. And this is not the Southwest. My French ain’t right, I know. The TV itself is the room’s sun. The fridge its moon. I am in a free-flown orbit. The fridge by the way works best for keeping the remote cool.