Calumet, OK Thursday morning I woke up in what I thought was someone's basement rumpus room and any minute someone's mother was going to walk in with a load of laundry. Cherokee Motor Lodge room number 47, looked like the one room in the house that the wife lets the husband decorate. The only things missing were a bumper pool table, a NFL Tiffany style lamp shade, an old Zenith console television set, and a porno stash.

Author's note: I didn't look for a porno stash. I am just saying if there was one, it wasn't in plain sight, or under the mattress, or in the ceiling crawl space. Not that I was looking.

What amazed me about this room, was how no two walls matched another wall. One wall was a large window to the hotel balcony, another was white, another was wood paneled, and the largest of the four was a deep crimson burlap textured wallpaper.



The hotel may have not offered much in terms of good looks, but it did offer some wonderful amenities; bath, toilet, towels, free ice, a Gideon Bible, and a zoo. Okay, it wasn't a traditional zoo, it was a "micro" zoo. Okay, it wasn't a zoo, it was two caged buffalo. Once the buffalo roamed and ruled the great plains of the old west, now they rule the cages of road side attractions of the new west. We didn't want the capture and imprisonment of such a grand creature to go to waste, so we did our part as traveling yokels and gawked. The buffalo did their part and laid in the dirt chomping grass.



Copyright © 2000 The Van Gogh-Goghs