The Marco Polo Motel

The new screenplay I'm about to start drafting opens in a room at the Marco Polo motel, a real place just a few blocks from here on Parramatta Road. I chose it because of the name, of course, but until yesterday had never actually been there. I walked over in the misty afternoon rain, weather I find so much pleasanter than the dry heat we were having in the last days of 2005. The motel is big, oblong, set back slightly from the road, four or five storeys high, built, as some prisons are, around a central courtyard which is also a carpark. It's made out of brick, not quite blond, not red either, some umber in between colour. The office is on the right just as you go in. There was an overweight person sitting on a bench outside whom I took to be a woman because of the size of (her) breasts; only later did I realise he was a bloke and they were man-breasts. Walking into the office was like walking into a John Waters movie. Tiny, it was, and full of people. The first one I saw was a woman straight out of the early 1960s: stark white pancake make-up, inches thick, black bouffant hair so lacquered it looked like one of those plastic Beatles wigs, black slacks, slip-on shoes: a classic Widgie look. She smiled at me and I saw with a shock that she was about seventy years old. There was a child, whom I never quite saw, and then another woman swam into view, with the same make-up, the same hair, the same black slacks and slip-ons. Except she was twenty or thirty years younger. There was also a big bloke with a piece of carved greenstone round his neck, working at a computer and a dapper older gent with a sly insinuating smile which was the result, I learned when I spoke to him, of oddly fitted false teeth. All of these people were swirling around the tiny space, all talking at once; and then suddenly the room cleared and I was left with the younger of the two widgies. I explained that I was thinking of booking a room for friends coming to stay from London and she gave me two electronic keys to view a couple of rooms. It always shocks me, when I haven't been in one for a while, how small and mean motel rooms are. These were umber brick on the inside too, cell-like, with the bare minimum of space, the tiny bathroom, the double bed you have to edge around to get to the window, the garish bedspread, the ubiquitous TV ... out the window was a desolate view of the back yard of a business where rubber dinghies and aluminium runabouts called Tinnies were made. There was nothing to look at, nothing to see, and I felt disconsolate, trying to fit the activities I had imagined for that first scene into such a miniscule place ... back to Reception I went. There, the little bloke with the false teeth was behind the desk and the big bloke with the pounamu was still hanging round the computer. We got talking ... they were all New Zealanders: the guy with the false teeth was married to the elder Widgie, the younger was their daughter; the big bloke was a guest, over from Hokitika. We talked about the South Island, because Teeth was originally from way down that way, from Riverton, west of Invercargill. Well, it was pleasant enough and I was soon on my way, back through the rainy streets ... there's no way I can use the actual location for the motel room scene, although the carpark is interesting, but my dilemma now is, can I use the name? If I hadn't have gone in there I'd have no qualms but now, having met the owners, having looked a little way into their lives, I feel implicated, I feel unsure ... I don't know ...