The first thing you saw once you pulled off the highway was the Olympic size swimming pool with its two diving boards jutting up like antennae from the blinding slash of its sparkling water. At the shallow end was a green and red stripped slide for the children and a scattering of aquatic toys and rubber floats. The driveway veered off to the left and deposited the weary traveler at a vibrant pink stucco and log cabin that was the check in desk.
Inside it was decorated with Indian blankets and Frederic Remington prints. The desk itself was a mahogany wonder that had once been the bar in some western saloon. It was blissfully air conditioned with tinted green windows and even with the
blinds drawn against the desert sun the entire room glowed from the superb maintenance of paste wax and elbow grease. A large coke machine stood to the right of the desk with a revolving rack of post cards of Reno and Las Vegas. Behind the desk to the left of the key board were shelves that housed a variety of cigarettes, and magazines.
Lisa showed Toni the back room where a huge ice machine turned out cubes with monotonous regularity by the pound. 'That's John out front on the desk,' Lisa said jerking her finger over her shoulder at the grizzled, Gabby Hayes type they had just passed. 'He's been with me since I started out and he's good as gold. I can trust him with the running of this entire place.' Behind the ice machine was a fully stocked kitchen, a bunk bed, easy chair and television set. The bathroom was set off to the right of the small but comfortable back living quarters.
Separate from the check-in cabin were twelve cabins all facing onto the pool, then the motel proper. Lisa showed the one room that had been converted into the maid's quarters. 'This is where I lived when I first took over here. I keep two maids and one of them is always on the premises.' Toni looked around at her at the well kept room with a wall full of cleaning supplies behind a beaded, hanging curtain. There was a full kitchen and bath, a small living room with a television and two bunk beds.
'And that's about it honey,' Lisa said jangling her ring of keys. 'There's sixteen rooms all with tile stall showers, air conditioning and color television and when you've seen one motel room you've just about seen them all. 'They walked outside and Lisa opened a vacant room and led Toni to the back window. 'Have a look,' she said pointing to the dense wall of Cactus that separated the motel from her own living quarter's. 'Can't see a thing, huh?'
'No you sure can't. That's great. It's like having your very own compound. You see what you want to see and nothing else.'
'Of course,' Lisa said lifting her shoulders and sticking out her tits-the proud owner of an A One motel.
When they walked out of the room they could see three kids stacked up on the slide preparing to descend into the pool. A man with a Buddha like belly in baggy, plaid shorts was waving a finger at them and saying, 'Now you be careful understand?' They shrieked with delight as they zipped down the slide not paying him the slightest bit of attention. Lounging in a deck chair buried behind wrap-a-round sunglasses was a middle aged woman with blonde hair and a good figure sipping at a bottle of coke and smoking a cigarette looking from time to time at a young couple ten feet away from her necking openly and giggling almost as loud as the kids flopping around in the water.
The whole place was bathed in soft sunlight and the kind of tranquility you find only in the desert. Toni stood for several seconds looking up and down the length of the flagstone walk at all the cabins with their brass knockers and hand painted numbers and at the swimming pool and over at the funny looking but quaint log cabin that had a garish but effective neon sign in the shape of a cactus.
'A real nice set up. Lisa, I've got to hand it to you. Makes my little office seem like a drop in the big drink by comparison.'
'Well all you need is a small office for what you do right?'
'Yeah, you're right, but there's something about having your own motel that's well, great!'
'To tell you the truth Toni, sometimes I wonder. Business has been good but it's a lot of work holding it together. I've got a good reputation and I'm in tight with the local authorities which makes it, I must admit, a hell of a lot easier but it keeps me jumping. I don't spend all my time hanging around my pool.'
Lisa had to look after some bookkeeping for half an hour and Toni walked back to the house, made herself a drink and took it out onto the patio where she hung her feet over the edge of the pool and looked up at the blue glazed, snow capped enormity of Mt. Driscoll, The only sound was of crickets and birds and her own feet moving through water.
Lisa Williams grew up an only, but not unhappy, child in a large comfortable house in Cos Cob, Connecticut. She had everything she wanted and was given more on top of that by her adoring parents. By the age of twelve it was obvious that Lisa was going to be a great beauty; by sixteen there wasn't a doubt about it. From as far back as she could remember Lisa was always the most noticed girl wherever she went; the most sought after, the most desired.
This created problems as well as resolving others. Lisa acquired an extremely elevated opinion of herself that she didn't shake until she was well into her late twenties-after she had seen more of the world than just Cos Cob, Connecticut and found out that she was not the only pea on the pod; that around most corners there was another beauty lurking-younger and capable of many of the same tricks she thought she held an exclusive copyright on. The fact that her parents told her she could have anything she wanted in the world and from the world did nothing to dispel this lofty self image.
To a large extent they were right of course. Lisa's towering, blonde beauty opened many doors for her. She had her pick of the 'boys and was forever being told that she was it; that no one could hold a candle to her. She managed to crank herself through high school without ever having a thought of what she was going to do after her father had bought her into college, which she didn't really want to attend. Her
mother couldn't have cared less if her daughter went to college because it was her plan that Lisa should marry a doctor or a lawyer and settle down to raising children and joining the local country club and the easy, sheltered life to which she had become accustomed. That was part of her birthright.
During the last week of her senior year in high school she decided that she wasn't going to go to that college in Vermont come September. 'Well what are you going to do?' her father asked when she announced this fact to him.
'Go to California. Hollywood.'
'Hollywood!?! And do what? You don't know any people there.'
'I'm going with Jeanette and I'll meet people. I'll get a job or something.'
'What do you mean, 'or something'?'
'Well how do I know! I'm not there yet am I?'
'And how are you going to get there and what are you going to live on until you get a job?'
Lisa's eyes swung out to the oval driveway with the brand new, powder blue Thunderbird gleaming like some exotic bird of paradise in the afternoon sun; her graduation present from her parents.
'We're driving and I've got a few hundred dollars in my savings account that should hold me over until something comes along.'
'But you're only eighteen!' her father protested, the strain of the conversation ripping deep into his face.
'Well, daddy it's about time I started doing something isn't it? After all you're the one who always told me life is too short to waste. Who knows, maybe I'll become an actress.'
'An actress!' he barked.
'Yes what's the matter with that? Lots of girls go to Hollywood and do it.'
'And lots of girls end up very disappointed with nothing to show for any of it too.'
'You don't know until you try do you?'
'Look Lisa,' her father was using everything he had to master the panic that was bubbling up from his stomach, 'don't you think we should sit down with your mother and talk this over. After all you have been accepted to college, and a very good college at that. Somehow it would be a shame to just toss it aside like that because you've got some half cocked notion about going to Hollywood to become an actress. Sure, OK go to California for a month with Jeanette, she's a very nice girl and your mother and I have always liked her, no objections there. We'd hoped that you'd be spending the summer with us, but since you've decided that that's what you want to do I can't see any harm in it. You're a big girl now and the drive across country would be worthwhile I think but please, I beg you, don't just blot out the idea of going to college altogether.'
'But daddy I have thought about this and sure I'll tell mother and we can talk about it but I know what she's going to say and I know that I'm not about to change my mind. College just isn't for me and mother has always said
