Cream Team 2: Art Car Weekend 98

Autographed copies of Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth are now available!

PonyBoy & I checked out of the Allen Park Inn in order to move to a place closer to the Orange Show so we could sleep later Sunday morning. This was a bad decision. Saturday night we went to a warehouse party. This was also a bad decision. We didn't end up on our hotel search until late, late, late. And we couldn't find anything. The Orange Show isn't far from Hobby Airport, and everything--I mean everything--was booked up. And it's not the greatest area, either. PonyBoy got propositioned in the parking lot of one inn.

Appropriately enough, the Hou-Tex is next to a cemetary.

We decided to try one last place off I-45 before heading back to the Allen Park Inn (with no guarantee they'd have any rooms left, either). This place was called the Hou-Tex Motel.
The first clue should have been that there were no rooms but "a room would be opening up in about 5 minutes." What kind of motel do people check out of at three in the morning?
Answer: The kind of motel we were checking into at three in the morning.
Alternate answer: The wrong kind of motel.
We get up to the room. It's a disaster. The door doesn't even fit the doorframe. There's graffiti on the walls. There is hair in the bed--the sheets obviously haven't been changed. There's blood on the pillow. There are stains on the sheets.
Yet, there's no place else to go. We get the manager to bring up some clean sheets. He hands them to me, and right on the top, there are stains of obvious origin.
Manager: "Those aren't stains. That's just stuff that doesn't come out in the wash."
Me: "Yeah--in other words, STAINS!"
Manager: "What do you want me to do, look through all the sheets for you?"
Me: "YES!"

The Hou-Tex Motel was NOT a fine choice.

I was in favor of splitting, but PonyBoy was against it. And, when I thought about it, it was only five or six hours till the Orange Show brunch. We could tough it out. As soon as the lights were out, I said, "Hey, PonyBoy--what do you suppose was going on here about an hour ago?" That prevented sleep for a while.
The Hou-Tex was the worst motel I ever stayed in. Worse than the Baker, California dump Simple & I stayed at. Worse, even, than the Anaheim disaster.

In the morning we saw a maid cleaning the room across the way. This was surprise enough. Then she came out with not only the sheets but the bedspreads. Must've been some night. Yuck.