no vacancy (at the teepee motel)

I think I saw a short article about this place in the Houston Chronicle a couple of weeks ago and, since then, I have had it in the back of my head as my Spring Break destination. It’s called the TeePee Motel, located off Hwy 59 South about an hour’s drive from Houston, and I’m the guest staying in Teepee Number 3.

I know I am going to hear a collective groan of disappointment when I reveal that my digital camera has dead batteries, so I have no photos to post of this weird slice of Tex-Americana. I know I should have checked before taking off but, you know, I was more focused on getting together the materials I needed to start writing a talk on jailhouses and universities that I’m supposed to be giving in New Orleans in less than a month. I figure holing up for twenty-four hours in an architectural anomaly will inspire me to think critically about my theorization of institutional space and the production of knowledge. So here I am.

When I first drive up to the TeePee Motel, I literally gasped. The photos on the web site don’t do the place justice. Ten identical, beige-colored, one-room “teepees,” built out of concrete and plaster, sit in a perfect line at a right angle off the highway, like a row of giant cupcakes. There is nothing else but a parking lot and some grass and puddles. And the highway. If I open the door of my teepee, there’s my parked car, that stretch of grass, some trees in the distance and, behind the trees, what looks like little houses or, more likely, trailers. Every so often, a rooster crows.

The teepees are daringly close to one another. I’ll say about five-feet apart. There is a little walkway leading from the parking lot to the teepee’s dark-brown door, which is centered in a recessed entrance. (I know my friend Cake will call me later to tell me my architectural vocabulary is impoverished. I’m trying the best I can!) There are three tiny windows in the teepee, two are on either side of the teepee, like little ears, and one is over the sink in the bathroom, directly across from the front door. The windows have dark brown awnings. The tops of the teepees come to a point, and have three little spikes, suggesting, I think, feathers. I am reminded of the igloo-shaped building that Julianne Moore moves into at the end of Todd Haynes’ Safe.

Inside, the room itself is not much: a bed, a little desk, a small fridge, a microwave, and a chocolate-brown couch. The ceiling is about nine feet. The trap door in the ceiling tells me there is an attic that comprises the architectural point of the teepee. A television juts out from high on the wall near the front door, reminding me, eerily, of a hospital room. There is a Gideon Bible on the desk, but I’ve placed it in the top drawer of the nightstand, where I think it is supposed to be.

Since I arrived around noon, I’ve been reading and writing. I’ve kept the door open for fresh air, although there is an air-conditioning unit and I opened one of the windows, too. The kindly woman at the front desk, who called me by my first name, asked me if I was a writer. When I told her I was, she let me know that there is a couple saying in TeePee Number 1 who both write children’s books, and that they’ve been staying there since their house burned down a few weeks ago. I have not met them yet, or any of the other inhabitants. When I asked, the same woman told me the teepees are almost always full, especially on weekends. Right now, the neon “No Vacancy” letters on the TeePee Motel highway sign are lit, which means, obviously, we’re at full capacity.

The families in Teepees 5 and 6 are friends. They’ve had their camping chairs out in front of their teepees and a cooler of beers and some wine going all afternoon. There are some kids throwing a Frisbee. There’s a man in Teepee 1 who is just sort of hanging out in the doorway. I smiled and waved at him earlier. I want to stress that sort of hanging out in the doorway is not at all a weird or creepy thing to do. It’s, like, the only thing you can do, unless you brought a chair with you. It’s a good way to get some air. (The teepee is a little stuffy, but it is also really humid today and, right now, the skies are dark with clouds threatening a thunderstorm.)

According to the website, the Teepee Motel was built in the 1950s, and survived for years before finally shutting down in the 1980s. You can see the disrepair of the teepees in photos posted from the late-1990s. Fortunately, some lucky and kind soul won the lottery and donated money to the motel to renovate the teepees, which is why I am able to, um, use them as a writing retreat.

Surely, there is something to be said about how the stereotype of the “Indian” gets perpetuated by this kind of hokey 1950s Americana, and how the historical specificity of various Texas tribes gets erased by a vacation-style teepee experience for white people. (I have not seen all the guests, but all the ones I have look white to me.) But there is also something -- what? campy? queer? about this place. It’s the kind of place you want to bring your friends from New Jersey to see. Teepee Number 2 (no lie!) was the setting for a scene in the 1995 cinematic remake of Lolita.

I plan to heat up some tamales I picked up from Whole Foods in the microwave later and, if I get enough writing done, watch the film Medium Cool (1968) on my laptop. I am hoping there will be a terrible storm later, and the sound of the rain on the teepee’s roof will lull me to sleep.