Stud Rites

New England colonists fled the British Isles in search of religious freedom. In truth, they were extradited—summarily booted out of the homeland of dog worship following a little-known incident, an act of heresy, if you will, that took place at the famous Canterbury Cathedral. There a rebellious clique of Brewsters, Bradfords, Carvers, and Winslows refused to join their fellow worshipers in what would otherwise have been the unequivocally fervent rendering of ”All Creatures Great and Small.” As everyone knows, the involuntary expatriates first sought refuge in Holland. In the course of a barge tour of Amsterdam, however, one of their number—a Stan-dish, I believe—uttered a very loud and extremely rude remark about a Keeshond, thus causing the previously hospitable Dutch to toss the future colonists over the dikes and into the cold seas of the Atlantic, where they drifted for many months before finally washing up on shore in the vicinity of a large rock on which many of them deservedly cracked their heads. Fable? Fact: The
    New England colonists attached dire theological significance to the backward spelling of d-o-g. The black mass: the litany backward. The dog: the creature of Satan.
    What leads me to the topic of the New England colonies is not the hotel’s decor, which was Hawaiian, but my conviction that somewhere on Maui, the Milestone chain has erected a hotel and conference facility structurally identical to the one in Danville, Massachusetts, but adorned with Ye Olde New England materials and motifs. The building itself is, I believe, the same as this one: the two-story motel-hotel at one end, the exhibition hall at the other, with the space between devoted to a large lobby, a bar, two restaurants, a variety of meeting, assembly, and banquet rooms, and the center consisting of a cavernous mock atrium that does not open to the sky and contains some droopy-looking trees that obviously wish it did and many others that, being plastic, don’t care. Through the center of the atrium at the Maui Milestone flows a miniature artificial trout stream spanned by a tiny replica of a genuine New England covered bridge. Unwary guests trip on the legs of spinning wheels, regain their balance, set down drinks on cobbler’s bench tables, and order refills from service personnel garbed for a grammar-school reenactment of the First Thanksgiving.
    The Milestone chain being a microcosm of a balanced universe, here in New England the equally cavernous atrium, the Lagoon, was, as its name suggested, a sort of South Seas grotto, the focal point of which was a tropical lava-rock waterfall overhung by artificial coconut palms and set near a plastic-mahogany bar shaped like an outrigger canoe. The walls, papered in what I think was grass cloth, were festooned with exotic-looking paddles, feather headdresses, bunches of fake bananas, and so many ukeleles that if strummed in unison their strings could have drowned out the music being piped into the lobby: a Muzak version of ”As Time Goes By” with the synthesizer set to the sound of Hawaiian guitars.
    My room, however, was luxurious, and even if it hadn’t been, the Danville Milestone possessed the one advantage that offsets anything from outrigger bars and ukeleles to bathrooms with rusty baseboards and no hot water: It allowed dogs!
    Such was the gist of the violent complaint currently being lodged with the hotel manager by a red-faced man who brandished a clenched fist at the innocent-looking black announcement board built into the wall of the hotel lobby. The white plastic letters stuck into the grooves spelled out:
     
    Thursday, October 31
    The Danville Milestone Hotel
    and Conference Facility
    Aloha!
    Alaskan Malamute National Specialty
    —Oahu Room
    Luncheon and Meeting—Wahiawa Room
    Lofgren-Jenkinson Wedding Party
    Bachelor Dinner—Kailua
    Room Bride’s Dinner—Wahiawa Room
     
    ”Crystal plans her wedding,” boomed the man, ”a full goddamn year in advance! She checks out restaurants, she visits historical houses, she goes to hotels, museums—and she picks this place! And her mother comes and sees it, and then she drags Greg out here, and they drag me out here, and frankly, all this South Seas shit puts me off, but, hey, they’re going to Hawaii for their honeymoon, and Crystal’s crazy about the |dea... And this is the middle of last winter! Booked m advance! For three goddamn days! We got two dinners tonight, and we got the rehearsal tomorrow, and