Whooshers and Peekers
Rooms with a view and a window into your soul…
Every hotel room has a view.
And every person I’ve ever known has to see what that view might be. Like, I’ve never met anyone who has the discipline to stay in a hotel and never once check the view out the window. Even in a motel (remember those days), you enter the room through an outside door. Once inside, the window is right next to the door that you just walked through and that clearly overlooks the parking lot you just parked in…and you will always look out that window to see what the view is like.
(I will confess that I even do this at an Embassy Suites. No, not with the normal window facing the outdoors, but with the second window I already know faces the interior of the hotel! I have serious problems.)
Perhaps it’s an evolutionary urge to settle in one’s surroundings, establish potential threats and sight lines. Or maybe we were made with an innate curiosity and pulling back a blackout curtain is an easy way to satisfy it momentarily.
So, now that we know everyone looks through that window, let’s play out this scenario further. Because there is one key differentiator that occurs at the window.
To recap: you open the door to your hotel room, wheel your suitcase out of the way, set down your keys and room card on whatever table-like structure is nearest to you, take a brief inventory of your temporary domicile (No blood splatter on the wall? Ok it’s fine.) and, inevitably, move towards the window.
Here is the moment of truth, the point of personal delineation.
How do you open the curtain?
Some of us, you see, are “whooshers.” We pull the curtains apart with a dramatic flair, as if we’re expectantly unveiling the world’s most incredible scene…which happens to be right outside Room 203 of the Poughkeepsie Hilton Garden Inn. We open curtains like we’re in the climactic moment of a Broadway musical or as if we are Ponce de Leon and we’re certain the fountain of youth is just beyond the glass.
WHOOSH!
I am an unapologetic whoosher, full of pizazz and expectation.
I am Wink Martindale. I am hosting a game show of my own design. There is no Door #1 or Door #2, but there is The Window and the view that it holds. So I must whoosh the curtains open - “Let’s show him what he’s won!”
(It’s a parking lot. Or another hotel. Or an Applebees.)
Does this not describe you?
Ah, then I must let you know that you, lacking the requisite imagination to be a whoosher, are what we call a “peeker.”
You and all of the other peekers make your way through your hotel room and grab a infinitesimal piece of the curtain fabric and allow the smallest sliver of light to come through as you take in a mere hint of a glimpse of what lies beyond your carefully sanitized hotel experience. I can’t tell if this is because you’re doing some preliminary leering, expecting to see something you shouldn’t see (“Ma, we got ourselves a window into the some sort of bath house!”), or if it’s a move of trepidation.
I mean, I have whooshed opened a hotel window and seen a dice game happening in a Brooklyn alley before, made eye contact with the gentlemen playing, and slowly closed the curtain again. So maybe you are afraid of becoming friendly with a street hustler. Or maybe you’re just tired of getting your hopes up only to see a Denny’s. Either way, you are a peeker. You don’t need to apologize. Carry no shame. You have your reasons, I’m sure. And you don’t have to tell me.
(Who hurt you?)
Anyway, this is the part of the post where I would normally move on to over-generalizing and psychoanalyzing whooshers and peekers. Then I would draw a vague and strained line to some vein of spirituality, leaving a few of you dismayed by my conclusions and others intrigued at how I arrived there.
I would ask you to tell me whether you’re a whoosher or a peeker. And I’d ask you to consider why for yourself.
Today, though? Not gonna do it.
I think it only fitting to stop here, leaving the curtains to the rest of this post closed. Whatever is on the other side will simply have to exist in your imagination.
— KB