Love, Lust, and Liberty, by the Hour
It’s an innocuous redbrick building, wedged snugly into the triangle formed by West Fourteenth Street, Tenth Avenue, and the West Side Highway. It could be some kind of government office, a place where you’d go to get your driver’s license renewed or apply for the proper permits to gut your apartment. Only the single word printed on the front of its maroon awning provides any clue to its actual identity: LIBERTY. As in Statue of; as in “and justice for all”; as in the Liberty Inn, where you have the freedom to rent a room by the hour to do whomever you want, whenever. As one of the city’s very few remaining hourly love motels, it’s an island at the edge of an island, occupying a parallel universe of its own.
I heard about it from a friend. She had learned about it from the confessed sex addict she was dallying with at the time. They were strolling along the High Line one afternoon when the mood overtook them, and he, quelle surprise, knew just the place to go. It was, she reported to me afterward, good clean fun. The room was spotless, literally. Yes, it may have had a mirrored ceiling, red lights, and a bed with a vinyl headboard, but it was immaculate. You could eat off the surfaces; surely some people had.
The secret was the retinue of poker-faced maids the hotel employed, women who lurked outside the rooms, vacuums and all-purpose cleaner at the ready to dispatch rogue pubic hairs and effusive stains. The maids stood all but primed to pounce, because they had to; the hotel depends on efficient room turnover, particularly during the after-work hours, when business is brisk with couples eager to forget, if only temporarily, their spreadsheets and passive-aggressive office managers.
My friend’s description intrigued me. Not because I had harbored a long-simmering fantasy of patronizing a love motel, but because I’ve always been drawn to artifacts of a New York I arrived too late to experience, a city less savory and yet oddly more innocent than the one I now occupy. And by virtue of its location alone, the Liberty provides a case study in historical cognitive dissonance: Since 2009, it has been engaged in a face off with the Standard Hotel, André Balazs’s steroidal tombstone of a monument to shallow waters that run fast. That the Liberty not only exists but continues to thrive in the Standard’s shadow feels like a tiny miracle, a triumph of quiet kink over luxury porn.
Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve had occasion to visit the Liberty twice, both times with M., a man I met in June. Our situation is very simple in terms of physical attraction, but complex in terms of real estate; due to circumstances surrounding our respective previous relationships, M. is bunking temporarily with extended family in New Jersey, and I am sharing my apartment with my ex-fiancé. It’s a long story, and a situation tailor-made for both immense sexual frustration and the Liberty Inn’s brand of hospitality.
The hotel has been good to us. It’s as clean as advertised, if also as cheesy as one would expect and hope an hourly love motel to be. Our first room sported a ceiling mural of naked people engaged in what was probably supposed to be an orgy but looked like an array of raw chicken parts; our second was awash in an eerie blue light that gave the room the ambience of a tanning booth. Both featured a TV set tuned to the porn channel, and bath towels starched so remorselessly that they could have taken the skin off a rhinoceros. And both had a phone that rang fifteen minutes before our time was up.
They were, in other words, perfect.
The first time I met M. at the Liberty, we had to wait for a room. The hotel’s receptionist, perched behind bulletproof glass, motioned for us to wait in the lobby. It bore no trace of the Anvil, a legendary gay sex club that shared the hotel’s first floor until 1986. Where men used to fist each other with abandon, there is now a vending machine dispensing condoms, lube, batteries, and Oreos. I’d imagined encountering an uninterrupted pageant of prostitutes and johns; instead, there were regular couples, gay and straight. We all knew why we were there, and perhaps because of the lack of pretense, the mood was relaxed. It was not unlike my dentist’s waiting room. Couples chattered among themselves; some laughed and held hands, while others shared earbuds and stared into space, nodding their heads in tandem.
When our number was called, M. paid the lady behind the glass eighty dollars in cash and we ascended the narrow stairway to an even narrower hallway. The maids regarded us sternly from the shadows, and primal grunts and moans attended us through the thin walls as we searched for our room. We had entered a carnal purgatory that was of the city and yet entirely sequestered from it. And within it, for half a handful of hours, we found a spot of heaven.
