VERY CLEAN!
An honest review of a Super-8 Motel
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There’s a Super 8 Motel nestled between a Shell gas station and the I-70 off-ramp. In front of the motel, there’s a big sign. On the sign, spelled out in those 6-inch-tall letter cards that people still, in the year of our lord 2026, get up on ladders and slide between plastic rails like so many scrabble tiles, are the words “VERY CLEAN!”
Seeing “VERY CLEAN!” attached to a motel feels like being handed a bag of potato chips emblazoned with the words “VERY REAL POTATOES!” It reminds me that, truly, anything is possible. Which is invigorating, if you think about it.
Seriously, though, I’m thrilled to be here. Today I am many things, but unlike the Super 8 Motel — allegedly — “clean,” is not one of them. In fact: I spent the last two nights sleeping in the red dirt at the bottom of a canyon and the last three days sweating profusely whilst hiking into, out of, and around said canyon.
I am also not poor, but I like to act like I am. Penny-pinching makes me feel Safe. My friend Naomi, a night shift nurse who frequently — I kid you not — flies to the other side of the world when she gets a few days off so she doesn’t have to reset her circadian rhythm, is only able to maintain her lifestyle by having a similar attitude.
What I’m getting at here is: it’s $93 for a room with two real beds here at the Super-8 motel, and sign or no sign, that just pencils so very nicely into our budget.
Right about now you might be saying: “Hey, it kind of sounds like you went on an epic adventure in the desert Southwest with a dear friend! Why are you telling us about the Super 8 motel?” Listen. I don’t know WHY this nonsense is the best story to come out of my trip. My husband was a film major in college and he often educates me on the theory of why some stories “work” and what the “elements of story” are and so on and so forth. It’s really fascinating and I never retain ANY of it.
We walk inside.
The lobby smells like the lobby of a Super-8 Motel. There is no one at the desk. We ring the little bell. For about two minutes, no one comes.
Then, a tall man with a ginger beard and glasses ambles around the corner.
“Sorry, I had to go to the bathroom,” he says.
We tell him all good, everyone has to go to the bathroom sometimes haha, but yes we have a reservation for a two-queen room under “Olivia?”
Desk Man prints out a sheet of paperwork with highlighted fields for our car’s make, model, and license plate.
We crane our neck to get a glimpse of the plate on the borrowed black Subaru sitting outside the sliding glass doors.
“We didn’t used to ask for the plate,” Desk Man goes on. “We just changed the paperwork after an incident like two months ago.”
Naomi writes down an honest guess at what the sand-covered license plate might say.
“Thank you. Yeah, we had a little incident with a guest getting very intoxicated and smashing up a bunch of cars in the lot.”
Oh? we ask. Smashing up?
“You might think a Jeep looks pretty different from a Honda Camry but let me tell you, if you smash them good enough, it’s all just chunks of gray metal. So I’m out there with a flashlight trying to figure out what cars are smashed so I can call the other guests and wake them up. It was super stressful, I was running around like a crazy person. Like I said all this happened about three months ago.”
By now, Desk Man’s face is adorned with the very particular expression of a person who knows their manager wouldn’t want them to be saying what they’re saying, but who also knows they work at a freaking Super-8 Motel.
I ask if he’d caught the intoxicated guest.
“Oh yeah. Are you kidding? He couldn’t get anywhere. Anyway it ended up that people were waking up the next morning and going out and finding their cars all smashed up. And they were all like: `Why didn’t you tell us?’ which of course, I really wished I could have told them but it was impossible to tell what their cars even were anymore. So once this was over, about 5 months ago, we started asking guests for license plates. You understand.”
We tell him we understand, and thanks so much!
About 15 minutes later, I’m inspecting the tiny soap bottles in the room and realize none of them are conditioner, which simply won’t do after what my hair has been through. Naomi suggests I shoot my shot and ask at the front desk.
There is no one at the front desk. I ring the bell and wait.
Desk Man slides in the front door.
“Sorry,” he says. “I was smoking a cigarette.”
All good, I say. Does he by any chance have any hair conditioner?
Behind his glasses, Desk Man lifts one red eyebrow into an arch even the southwest deserts would envy.
“Well, we have shampoo.”
I tell him I know, but conditioner… thought I’d ask.
“Let me check,” he walks into an employee-only door and I hear loud rummaging.
A few seconds later, he emerges, and victoriously plops down a bottle of decidedly-not-motel-brand conditioner before me.
“Guest left this forever ago,” he says.
I am legitimately thrilled. I grab the conditioner and thank him profusely.
He pulls back his head into a double-chin and raises his palms in the most cartoonish shrug I’ve ever seen as he calls after me:
“Best of luck!”
Later, lazing around and enjoying my clean, soft hair, which has not dissolved or fallen out of my head, I drop my phone on the carpet between the bed and nightstand. Reaching for it, I find that this crevasse is crumb-covered in the manner of the space between the couch cushions in a house with children and maybe a dog.
I think about the sign outside.
In the morning, I’m reluctant to rouse my nocturnal friend, who has already done The Most for me on this trip, so I decide to go to the lobby and take my time over the complimentary continental breakfast. A different and decidedly less interesting Desk Man is hustling to refill the coffee.
I make myself a waffle (win) cover it with peanut butter and honey (win) and reflect about how if a drunken guest had smashed our borrowed Subaru into an indistinguishable lump of black and grey metal, we would have probably heard about it by now (win).
Eventually, Naomi wakes up, and we check out, and all is well.
Two days later, a mysterious $60 charge from Super-8 pops up on my credit card. I call them and am informed that it’s for “damage to sheets on the bed.” Neither Naomi nor I know what he is talking about. There is a part of me that feels quite sure the charge is, as they say back east, a racket.
But what can I do?
It’s not like they didn’t warn me. The folks at Super-8 take cleanliness very seriously.