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    The Gaslite Motel
    The Gaslite Motel
    The Gaslite Motel
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    The Gaslite Motel

    By Mel C. Thompson

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    About this ebook

    A crippled, anxiety-ridden, precocious, apostate youth minister leaves his ministry to become a motel desk clerk in a sometimes tacky / sometimes upscale tourist motel in suburban Orange County. He lumbers around in a full-length walking cast as his fragile leg-bones are resistant to healing. His unkempt red hair is down to his shoulders and his wispy, unsightly beard make him look like outcast hippie. In fact, he is a nerdy Philosophy student at a nearby college. His reactions to the wide range of unsavory characters and upright citizens he's exposed to on this job reveal him to be alternately socially clueless and sometimes socially adept. Ever at war with his work-ethic-oriented employer from Taiwan, and always having to adjust to the odd resident managers he works with, there is no end to the debates, the conflicts and the moments of rapturous joy. It is a window into a shady, questionable, but fully-lived life, the outcome of which history may or may not opt to judge kindly. In a cry for understanding, the author cites the immortal line from the movie "American Hustle:" "You know, sometimes in life, all you have are fucked up, poisonous choices." And even so, the author and the reader are left to guess which of those choices are the least destructive. The protagonist tries his best, and the results are mixed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMel C. Thompson
    Release dateJan 19, 2018
    ISBN9781370478699
    The Gaslite Motel
    Author

    Mel C. Thompson

    Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

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      Book preview

      The Gaslite Motel - Mel C. Thompson

      The Gaslite Motel

      Mel C. Thompson

      Copyright © 2018

      Mel C. Thompson Publishing

      For information on how to support the ongoing work of

      Mel C. Thompson Publishing, please contact:

      Mel C. Thompson

      3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

      Lafayette, CA 94549

      melcthompson@yahoo.com

      Cover photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons license by Søren Wedel Nielsen.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: Two Taiwanese Settle In Orange County

      Chapter 2: Mr. Lin, The Richardsons & Me

      Chapter 3: Buena Park As A Context

      Chapter 4: An Air Traffic Controller Moves In

      Chapter 5: An Ending In The Middle

      Chapter 6: A Bully Confesses

      Chapter 7: A Brief Moment of Profitability

      Chapter 8: A Pentecostal Family

      Chapter 9: Two Inexplicable Women Visit

      Chapter 10: The Panama City Boys

      Chapter 11: An Attack

      Chapter 12: A Man of Honor

      Chapter 13: Eviction Day

      Chapter 14: My Own Gaslite Motel

      Other Smashwords Works By Mel C. Thompson

      Chapter 1

      Two Taiwanese Settle In Orange County

      Return To Table of Contents

      It was 1979 when I first met Bruce and Sonia Lin. Without intending to, they changed my life in countless ways. They did not intend to hire me, but were forced into it. Little did they know our relationship would last for years, and they would come to trust me enough to let me manage their large motel single-handedly for 32 hours per week. It was a complicated place, and, as usual, I was pushed into management and forced to use my full array of skills to deal with employees, accounting, sales, evictions, security, and hospitality; and this was a job where being bilingual came in handy every day.

      Although I could only walk with a heavy cast on my leg, and although physical therapy had failed and I looked severely maimed, and although I seemed like a maniac and had hair down to my shoulders and a weird red beard that everyone hated, the labor shortage was just too severe, and so, just months after yet another hospitalization, I was again at work. After what had gone on in the past year, and after what my psychiatrists and orthopedic surgeons had said, it was patently absurd for me to go back to work again, but I did. To my surprise, I actually succeeded at this job and could have spent a whole career there. The reasons I left after a few years will be covered repeatedly.

      Bruce and Sonya Lin settled along the corridor of Orange County known as Beach Boulevard. To the passing traveler Beach Boulevard appears to be a long, straight, flat, wide street stretching on infinitely into a bleak suburban emptiness. That’s true, but to simply flick it off as any old nothingness is not quite accurate. It’s a vast and peculiar sort of nowhere that is at once the curse of the world and also the center of the world. Further complicating our job was that the thing was a crash course in foreign cultures, and the world was not yet a global village, and so the busloads of foreigners we worked with were often truly disoriented. And, of course, no one in Orange County really knew what to do with the millions of international people coming to move there permanently, or to live and work there part time.

      Knotts Berry Farm was just two blocks away, and all the travelers who’d tired of Disneyland but felt an urge to keep coming back to Orange County, found that this secondary amusement park was just the ticket to make their next trip novel. But along with that novelty came crowds trying to wedge their way into anyplace along Beach Boulevard. Our motel was as large as one could be without being a fully-fledged hotel, and so our dozens of extra rooms kept stressed-out tour operators calling us again and again, filling our parking lot with huge white busses filled with curious people from places I never thought I’d bother to go to.

      Tourists fell in love with our motel, and so did locals. It was not unusual for a worker to stay there while some remodeling was done on his house and then later decide to just live with us for years. Many people came, intending to stay for the week, and simply never left. Everyone on staff just simply loved our customers and they loved us. For many reasons, I did not feel I could choose to stay there for more than a few years, but if I’d have felt free to, I myself would have never left. Sometimes I worked forty hours straight without going home, and so I was sleeping there too, being woken up every ninety minutes or so to tend to a late arrival or an early departure. I continued working 32 to 40 hours, even when I was taking up to nineteen units in college.

      Now Bruce and Sonia had exotic-sounding and complex Chinese names that they knew the xenophobic people of West Orange County could never bother with, so they simply adopted simple American first names and kept their short last name.

      Their journey was a curious one. They were somewhat older than me, which means they very well may have lived through the revolution in China, probably trying, at first, to live under Chairman Mao and then at last following Chaing Kai-shek onto the island of Formosa, which would later be renamed Taiwan. However, at that time, Taiwan was no great place of opportunity for the average worker, and so Bruce and Sonya set out to the new world, but they came here in an odd way.

      They first settled down in South America where they established small businesses of some sort. Both having amazing minds, they were able to learn the two main languages of South America, Spanish and Portuguese, well enough to conduct business and thrive in that land so alien to them. It must also be noted that Bruce Lin could also speak Japanese and Korean, along with his native Chinese. When one added English to the mix, it must be assumed that Mr. Lin spoke six languages actively. More astoundingly, he did so with seemingly no effort or concentrated study. He was not a bookish man by nature, but picked up languages the way he picked up building maintenance skills, on the job and in his spare time and in an off-hand way. I myself heard him speak several of these languages to customers and workers. It was astonishing.

      Sonia, his wife, was not quite as astute, and therefore could only speak four languages. She could however, do that while taking care of her children, tending to the front desk of the motel and cooking dinner for several people.

      Bruce and Sonia worked from sunup to sundown. Being ambitious people, it was only predictable that they would eventually settle in the United States which, at that time, was the only super-economy and the only place one went if one wanted to be among the super-rich. Even by that time, they were already super-rich. I cannot imagine the amount of money they eventually retired with, but it would have had to be in the millions.

      As the reader may have guessed, no two people on earth would be more opposed to me, and just about everything I stood for, than the Lins. Thus, did God, in His infinite trickery, elect to bring us into a collision course. The Lins would, in order to expand their vast holdings and build their economic empire, purchased this aging-and-trashy, but somehow luxurious-and-beloved motel on Beach Boulevard called The Gaslite Motel. As fate would have it, I came there begging for work. I had no idea at all what I was getting into, and neither did the Lins. We all survived the experience, but it must be noted that a few times we barely survived, and are, indeed, lucky to be alive.

      Chapter 2

      Mr. Lin, The Richardsons & Me

      Return To Table of Contents

      Of course Mr. Lin did not get to be a multimillionaire in the 1970s by lacking savvy. He was one of those rare breed of businessmen destined

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