Chapter 44: I Remember You Well at the Taney Motel (or, The Look)
Taney Motel
Branson, MO
I keep wondering: would I have gotten “The Look” today if I’d successfully explored the abandoned theme park?
It doesn’t really matter, though. The Look did happen today. Twice, in fact. Almost always, I convince myself it’s a mirage, an enflamed emotional sore, a lasting result of childhood trauma, borne out of a time when words like “faggot” were liberally volleyed in my direction any time I had to walk down a hallway at my middle school. Usually, I come around and remember that it’s easy to gaslight myself into thinking that The Look isn’t happening — that it’s all in my head.
It’s not, though, and it’s actually pretty easy to catch it if you’re paying attention.
I know that a lot of my fellow queers know what I’m talking about. It’s that look of… what, disgust? Rage? Hate? The Look that some of us might get when we simply exist in a public place. You can just feel it, in a spectrum of presentations, from mild curiosity-seekers to more violent perpetrators. Sometimes it happens more than once in a day, and more importantly, there are a ton of variables that become contributing factors as to who might get The Look, when, and why. It depends on how you present yourself, where you might be in a geographical sense, if you have to use your speaking voice with other people around, for example at a cash register buying a bag of candy or explaining to a barber how you want your hair cut. How built your body is (or isn’t), your posture, the very way that your body moves through time and space.
It had been a while, and I knew that I was taking a risk wearing booty short-shorts, a cutoff sleeve t-shirt, and what I call my “fuckboy shoes,” aka my Adidas high-top kicks, out in public like this, but when I parked and made my way across the dusty lot towards the coffeeshop, I passed several cars idling at a red light, all waiting to leave downtown Branson, Missouri. At least four of them had some kind of “TRUMP SAVE AMERICA” bumper sticker slapped on the trunk. Three of those had their windows open, two of those were pickup trucks, and each driver in each of those pickup trucks gave me The Look as I passed by, minding my own business.
Back to back, almost as if it was a coordinated effort, a choreographed pas de deux.
I thought it was uncomfortable then, but it wasn’t until the antique shop, browsing old train advertisements that had been cut out of magazines, mounted on cardboard, and placed in a protective sleeve, that I experienced the most intense moment of homophobia I’ve felt in a while.
Because that’s when the actual word “faggot” was whispered into my ear by a fellow shopper.
It might be the first time since I rediscovered my childhood fascination for America’s ruins that I’m grateful to have accidentally stumbled into the arms of an abandoned space like this. I’ve been bummed all morning because I tried to explore the remains of Celebration City, a decaying theme park modeled after a heteronormative, whitewashed 20th century small town USA with sections of the property dedicated to rotting mainstays of American culture like 1900s boardwalk society or the glory days of Route 66. However, employees at the Steak ‘n Shake across the street from the now deserted and overgrown abandoned theme park strongly encouraged me to keep out. I went into the burger joint to temp check the lay of the land with a few locals, and apparently, the defunct mom-&-pop family fun center is heavily guarded, several of the buildings and empty parking lots having been occupied by Woodland Hills Church, one of three churches in the country that have operated out of an abandoned theme park since 2004.
As a queer kid who grew up choking on a homophobic atmosphere in a part of the country where guns are treated and worn like jewelry, I wasn’t about to try my luck exploring Celebration City, so I opted to be a normal tourist and poke about Branson’s “historic” downtown instead.
The ambiguous town centre looks awfully similar to Colorado Springs’ Old Colorado City, a tourist trap located a mere 20-minute drive from the house where I grew up. After The Look happened both times, in succession, I decided that Branson wasn’t my fate, but I was quickly proven wrong. As the rental car passed West Oklahoma Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the bridge over Roark Creek, my eye caught the faded sign for the Taney Motel, a stunning monument paying homage to the look of 1970s Ozarks’ tourism when motels like this dotted the Southern Missouri landscape, less than half an hour from the border of Northwest Arkansas.
I whizzed by and approached the traffic circle on the opposite side of the creek. I passed every exit that could’ve taken me out of Downtown Branson and made a full U-turn, crossing right back over the bridge and making the sharp right into the parking lot which slopes upwards then crosses parallel to Veterans Highway (an offshoot of U.S. Route 65 which runs from Southern Minnesota all the way to Clayton, Louisiana) and back down again towards the tallest building on the property, completing the hillside horseshoe design of this empty motel, that, from a birds-eye view, resembles a giant “U,” the center of which is the faded blue pool, gated off on all four sides by a rusty chain link fence.
I park towards the top of the hill, out of sight from any passing cars that might have The Look ready for me. As I hop out of the car, my skin instantaneously begins to sponge up the August sun that gently massages my body while I listen intently to the sound of motorists speeding by, into and out of downtown Branson. Still on my toes after the scary moment at the antique shop, I inspect my surroundings, noting the adjacent motel next door still fully operational, clean, a total yin to the yang of this disrepaired, dwindling complex.
Luckily, I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to whisper “faggot” into my ear in here.
I pull out my Kodak half-frame loaded with purple Lomography 35mm film and begin my investigation. My imagination almost immediately begins to burst through my skull and whip up all sorts of dizzying daydreams of the Ozarks’ bygone era when nuclear families found refuge in this land of fun and fare. The deeper into the motel complex I get, the further into my 1970s Ozark fantasy I go, and further away from The Look I go too. The sounds of Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” play over the imaginary loudspeakers positioned in various places throughout the park, and the music almost cradles me as I wander into the motel tourism office and begin to sift through a wall of pamphlets for tourist traps, tacky Christian musical spectacles, and outdoor adventure experiences like ziplining or skydiving.
I begin to notice that much of the motel is boarded up or inaccessible, but then I spot the pool, which isn’t, so I pass through the rusty metal gate and dip into the faux waters of the deep end. The concrete hole is cracked and riddled with debris, plastic Coke bottles and condom wrappers and piles and piles of leaves. I peer up at the second floor of the main building, which boasts a crooked spiral staircase, and I wonder who owned this place before it went bankrupt. I decide that it was an elderly couple, and they had no idea how to keep a mom and pop motel in business though I can’t say that for sure.
I wander to a block of rooms towards the back, and I imagine a radio inside one, playing Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel.
I change the lyrics:
I remember you well
At the Taney Motel
I stare at my reflection in the smudged glass, and I hear the passing cars zip back and forth. Out of sight, I realize no one can see me. I’ve pulled the car in far enough that no one can see that either. No one can give me The Look. I sincerely doubt somebody will drive up onto the lot unless it’s a wayward wanderer like me. I’d welcome them. I wander up the passageways of the open-air motel lot, passing by each room, smushing my nose up against each window, wondering about break-ups that happened here, honeymoons that did too, children who were conceived here, heartbreaks and hopefuls just trying to make sense of the world that we’ve created.
I invite the Missouri August sun to wheedle its way into my pores, and I realize that this is the first moment on this trip where I haven’t felt like The Look was breathing down my neck. It’s so easy for people who don’t know what they’re talking about to say, “Just ignore it. Live your best life.” That’s a little difficult to accomplish with The Look hanging onto certain moves I try to make in the world. I think about the sanctuary of queer spaces, safe havens for gay people like me. In that way, abandoned spaces model the queer experience; entities that have been scorned by the rest of the world, forced to tuck themselves away from the outside world, spaces to create their own, authentic realities.
I glance up at the fading Taney Motel sign, and I think to myself, “Maybe I’ll just stay here forever.”
