The Haunting
Italy - It sounds so much like an old Scooby Doo episode, but we spent a night in an old asylum cleverly disguised as a hotel in Torino. After the last Italian show, which for the record was busy and fun as hell with a good dance party at the end of the night, we were to retire to our hotel to try and get some sleep. This particular quarter was unmatched by our previous Italian hotel experiences, and we have gone through some doozys.
To give you some perspective, in the past our Italian accommodations have been varied and usually kind of frightening. When one goes to a hotel you think 24 concierge, a private shower or bath, a bed to sleep on, heating, and maybe if your in a civilized part of the world a minibar with an assortment of overpriced snacks and thimble-sized amounts of alcohol that you couldn't clean a knee scrape with. Generally it is the Italian promoter's sense of humour to attempt to house us in spaces that are as far from this description as possible. In the past some of these little jokes have included a farmhouse in a vineyard with no glass in the windows, no beds and a proliferation of ants on the walls (though Jens our ever-vigiliant agent was happy to forcefully correct the problem and let the promoter know that this would NOT do for accommodations), villas with roosters crowing at 6AM under our windows after going to bed at 4AM, and 'hotels' with hallways that are as hot as St.Tropez and with ices hanging from the rafters inside the rooms. In short, the hospitality is usually scary. With this crapshoot of hotels constantly threatening us and hanging over our heads the grand dame of these came a few days ago in Torino.
Directed to the place, we arrived to an already open gate, gaping open, the fenced property looking for all the world that something that was supposed to be kept in had gotten loose. We democratically elected J-Brand to go and explore and suss out the situation. Calamity Kate, JT and I were enjoying the spoils of the catering in the back and quietly munching away, when the sight of this place had us all stop in mid-mastication. While food sat in between our molars, we pulled up into the driveway of this place. We had noticed that there were bars on the some of the windows. I do not like bars on the windows of the places I stay unless I am in Detroit at a low-end motel with new drywall and stains on the mattress. J-Brand go out to investigate and the rest of us had a lively debate as to whether or not we should get the keys from John before he went inside. The three of us had seen enough horror films to know this plot well enough. By letting John leave with the keys, something horrible would happen to him, forcing the remaining three from the safety of the van to seek the keys, only to meet our own untimely and unnecessary gory demises. We weren't slouches, and knew how these things went down.
But we were saved from this fate and our squabbling by a grim faced J-Brand returning from their scouting mission. The place was unlocked, with hospital beds and strange Catholic icons all in one room like a small chapel. The layout was very much like that of a old folks home or a mental institution. With areas in the entrance for group and play therapy, 'television rooms' and so on it didn't look like any hotel I saw advertised for Italian holidays. We were unsure that this dark, eerie unlocked place was much of an area of rest.
We reconvened in the van and about a block away (before the gate could slam shut on us, trapping us in - saw that in a few movies too). Upon a call to the promoter, who assured us that this was the place, we met with the care taker. He too assured us that this was the place and was a hotel and was new. Scenes from Hostel flashed through my mind as he led us upstairs to our rooms. I had the mean satisfaction if we were going to get harvested for our organs while we slept at least there wouldn't be a decent, usable liver in the lot.
Calamity Kate and I opted to share a room (we all had our own - another horror movie technique). The rooms were spartan, neat and clean. Despite a comfortable bed, I had restless dreams of waking up strapped down, with a rubber bit in my mouth and electrodes attached to my temples. It was not a pleasant experience.
Upon waking from my third dream regarding unnecessary surgery, I decided to sluice off the bad thoughts with a skin-scorching shower. I had gotten the water going and pulled a cord to start what I guessed was the fan, since there was no vent in the room. The thing about miserable luck is once i get started, it tend to snowball. I had pulled a cord, thinking I was turning on a fan, when in fact I had activated some kind of alarm system which had a light and buzzer going off outside our room, and incidentally inside of JT's room. He had not had a good night, given the fact that his bed was broken and had slept on the floor, only to be woken by an alarm going off in his room.
So after the three of us were up, grumpy and so on, we figured that this must be a feature of the hotel's by-gone era of being a institute of some kinds since the Ritz doesn't have alarm features for if you fall in the shower... But the important thing is that we left the hotel with all the organs we came in with, and we all agreed if any promoters tried to make us stay in such a place again, we would hold them hostage until they found us suitable accommodations. Or we'd kill them.
xoxox
LMR