50-48 #55: AWFUL DISCLOSURES OF THE HOLIDAY INN BATON ROUGE, OR, THE HIDDEN SECRETS OF A NUN'S LIFE IN A CONVENT EXPOSED

50-48 #55: AWFUL DISCLOSURES OF THE HOLIDAY INN BATON ROUGE, OR, THE HIDDEN SECRETS OF A NUN'S LIFE IN A CONVENT EXPOSED

It was Maria Monk who first peered into the cloistered halls of a dark and labyrinthine building in the early 1830s and found evil lurking in a supposedly holy place. The child of a tumultuous youth, Maria decided to engage in the grand project of self-reclamation by entering a convent. But the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal was anything but the promised life of seclusion and quiet, patient reflection.

After a series of gross discomforts, Maria escaped, before thinking better of her dire predicament and returning, hat in hand, to the convent. Still, the nuns forced her to pay a fee for re-entry. Such is the business of godmaking.

When she re-donned the vestments and got about the chores of being christ’s bride, Maria found that things were more than simply amiss at the Hotel Dieu. The nuns, it turned out, were the public concubines of the priests, raped incessantly to feed the urges of the unmarried men of the cloth. When babies were born of these sexual experiences, they were quickly blessed, then murdered in ritual sacrifice before being dumped into a basement pit filled with lime.

Hmm.

The message Maria provided for the country [presented in semi-titillating Victorian prose as Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery Montreal (1836)] after her second escape from the nunnery is clear: Beware of dark and labyrinthine buildings. Even if they seem nice. Even if they are well-stocked with beverages and laughter. Even if, like a Holiday Inn for example, they have a quaint little Mexican restaurant in the lobby and one of those elevators with the glass backs, allowing riders to watch as the floor below ascends and retreats.

We here at 50-48 were also the children of tumultuous youth. We here at 50-48 also sought shelter in a dark and labyrinthine building. And we here at 50-48 were also chagrined by the experience.

Evil lurks.

So it was that we returned to the Baton Rouge Holiday Inn after witnessing Hootie’s players defeat the hapless LSU Tigers this weekend. During the game, we sat right behind the Ole Miss bench, and we here at 50-48 did our level best to shout every disgusting thing we could think of at the huddle of coaches massed on the sideline, hoping that Hootie would hear one of our verbal ripostes and cry like a little girl. To no avail. He was probably text messaging some Oxford news anchor. We only saw him from behind, but his posture would seem to indicate the proper motion for either internet stalking, pederasty, or generic wanton infidelity.

Then the dejection by my Tiger-loving family. Then my own dejection at yet another Hootie win and an almost guaranteed Ole Miss berth in the Cotton Bowl. Then off through the interminable LSU traffic to the Holiday Inn.

Little did we here at 50-48 realize, we were staying in the Ole Miss team hotel! Oh, the cruel and vicious fates! We enter a place for sanctuary, only to discover it’s possessed by the devil itself! It was a horror near indescribable in its all-encompassing blackness.

That’s when we here at 50-48 knew we had to act. Thus the old question goes: Would you have killed Hitler if you had the opportunity? With Arkansas’s Hitler so ever close, so under the very roof that we ourselves were under, we formulated a Valkyrie operation of our own.

We moved slowly, silently out of our room, down the hall to the bank of elevators situated just across from the soda machines and ice vendor. We carefully—but without giving any indication of willful intent—pushed the up button and waited, waited. The glass monstrosity seemed to creep along at a snail’s pace until we were sweating bullets in the artificial hotel cold of the foyer.

But came it did, after so much waiting. We smiled politely to the elderly woman exiting, giving no indication that it was our intention to ride up to the sixth floor, seek out Hootie’s room, then murder him in cold blood.

We walked onto the elevator, looked out at the floor down below, looked out at the hotel lobby, decorated as it was to provide a sense of easy comfort to anyone coming from any part of the country—a sort of drab, positive malaise designed to numb more than anything else. Then we turned to face the bank of buttons and lights that would take us to the dark lair where the great Satan himself was probably making phone sex calls to a local Baton Rouge hotline. We pushed six.

But the light behind the number didn’t appear.

We pushed it again. And again.

Again with the cursed fate! The sixth floor required card access! Our murder plot was foiled.

Instead, we returned to the room, watched Texas Tech get boatraced by Oklahoma, and ate some delicious peppermint sticks. Such is the nature of potential revenge. Attempts are thwarted, but potential never completely dissipates.

Meanwhile, the Hogs blew another lead. They lost another late road game. The cosmic disappointment that game provided only topped the slow building of another disastrous day. And I don’t want to talk about it.

I finally fell asleep, nightmares bouncing off the inner-shellac of my skull, haunted as I was by the dark presence of Hootie just four floors above me.

“I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things,” Maria wrote, “and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. I expressed some of the feelings which this announcement excited in me, which came upon me like a flash of lightning; but the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favour of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honourable to me. The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might be considered our saviours, as without their service we could not obtain pardon of sin, and must go to hell. Now it was our solemn duty, on withdrawing from the world, to consecrate our lives to religion, to practice every species of self-denial. We could not be too humble, nor mortify our feelings too far; this was to be done by opposing them and acting contrary to them; and what she proposed was, therefore, pleasing in the sight of God. I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me.”

You see?! You see?! Does that not sound familiar?! We are all surreptitious nuns. We have all been abused by the false religion of Hootie and his minions. God speed, Ole Miss. You’re going to need it.

I have never been unwillingly fucked by a priest. I have never slaughtered my baby, blessed it, then dumped it in a giant pit deep in the bowels of my apartment. But as I lay there in that hotel room, I was conscious that I was resting defeated under the same roof as a victorious Hootie. Conscious that the basketball team had dropped its first game of the season to Missouri Southern (more about the basketball team in weeks to come). I was for all practical intents and purposes Maria Monk. I were become Maria Monk.

And as I lay dying, I thought what Maria probably thought during one of the myriad times a nefarious man of the cloth covertly entered her room, convinced her that it was God’s will that she remove the robe, then pounce on top of her with the zeal of someone whose sexual choices had been thinned through a career choice cleverly disguised as The Call:

“Fucked yet again.”

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS

PS: (50-48 would like to include this brief disclaimer that Maria Monk’s story was disproven soon after its publication. Also, 50-48 is engaging in a fit of fantastical storytelling and is not admitting to conspiracy or attempted murder in any form or fashion. We’ll save our revenge against Hootie for when we see him in hell.)