12 Legs Travel

Hotel Congress has occupied the same corner in downtown Tucson for 91 years. But it sure feels like it’s been around the block a few times.

Look closely and you’ll find flecked paint and cracked tile and water-stained plaster. If you arrive in the morning, you might get a whiff of stale beer from one of the five bars (yes, five) that adjoin the lobby. Arrive at midday, and your olfactory glands might be overwhelmed by the cleaning staff’s liberal swabbings of ammonia.

The iron-framed beds are small, the mattresses a little lumpy. But checking into Hotel Congress with sleep on your mind is folly anyway. Long past midnight bottles clank, kick drums thump, locomotives rattle ancient windows.

The bathrooms? Tiny. A man of average stature can rest his forehead on the wall while he sits on the toilet (which I suppose is helpful if you’ve spent too much time at one or more of the bars downstairs). The showers are about the size of refrigerator boxes, and the temperature of the water trickling out of them is as fickle as Joe Lieberman.

Hotel Congress has its flaws, yes. But love is being able to overlook flaws. And true love is when flaws cease to be flaws at all, but rather contextual definers of unique beauty and your relationship to it — like tiny flecks of rust on your ’69 Mustang or laugh lines around your father’s eyes.

Having said that, let me declare this: I truly love Hotel Congress.

I’m not the only one, of course. Since 1919, Hotel Congress has seduced travelers of every ilk. First it was rail passengers, Easterners mostly, disembarking from Southern Pacific trains that squealed to a stop at a station across the street. Later, in 1934, John Dillinger and his gang decided the hotel’s third floor would be a lovely place to lay low from federal agents. And beginning in 1985, when a club opened downstairs, aficionados of live music, unpretentious booze and cigarette-fogged conversation made “the Congress” their favorite hangout.

Hotel Congress comes by its agedness honestly. This place isn’t Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button makeup; it’s John Hurt after a bender. It doesn’t so much live and breathe as it creaks and convulses and bellows.

Hotel Congress’ saving grace lies in the details. It gets them right at every turn. The blood-red Mexican tile in the lobby is burnished to a shine that catches every glint of natural light. The bare, mustard-hued bulbs that droop in arcs above the outside patio cast a perfectly dull glow on the tables below. The ornate yet worn carpet in the hallways whispers the stories of a thousand soles, including those that wobbled past the night before.

Hotel Congress’ décor isn’t merely aesthetically pleasing — it’s transportive. Depending which direction you swivel your head, you might feel like you’re in a Spanish hacienda, a Parisian café or a Victorian bordello. It’s the kind of hotel you want to take up residence in for a week rather than a weekend. It’s a place for whiling away writer’s block or having a fling with a European girl on holiday.

With its stylish surfaces and antiquated guts, Hotel Congress reminds me of the old muscle cars my friends and I drove in high school. The exteriors of those cars were studies in the visceral allure of paint and chrome and vinyl, but under the hood were globs of grease and burnt oil. The hidden grime didn’t matter: The engines rumbled like a Zeppelin song, and your date had oblivious fun riding to the dance.

Like John Dillinger — who, with his gang, was flushed from the hotel by a basement blaze and later arrested on a tip from a fireman — my personal history has been shaped in no small way by Hotel Congress. It is where Jill and I hatched the idea for this trip, and it’s also where I audaciously asked Jill’s favorite musician if he would perform at our wedding … at a campground … in rural Tennessee.

That’s a pretty good story, and many of you know it. For those who don’t, here’s the short version:

On Dec. 27, 2008, in Chattanooga, Tenn., during a concert by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, after Isbell sang the lyric “Don’t worry about losing your accent/A Southern man tells better jokes,” Jill took a long drag on her cigarette, then turned to me and asked, “When are you going to make an honest woman of me?” Later that night, after stealing a ring and dropping to a knee next to the Tennessee River, I did just that.

This is the story I recounted to Jason Isbell himself three months later as we stood outside Hotel Congress, next to his band’s van, bathed in neon. It was 3 a.m. He exhaled smoke from a Marlboro red into the night air; I nervously shifted from foot to foot, my hands stuffed into the pockets of my jeans.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to offend you, but is there any chance — any at all — that you would consider playing at our wedding?”

To make a shortened story shorter, six months later Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit — a band lauded by SPIN and Esquire and Rolling Stone — graced a rec-center stage at Fall Creek Falls State Park. My 86-year-old grandfather was in the audience. Jill cried. Jason and the band hung out with us after the show, passing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around the campfire.

And it all started at Hotel Congress.

The place doesn’t have air conditioning. It doesn’t have TVs. It’s loud. The plumbing sucks. But it’s where stories begin. Or end. Or just gestate at the bar. Or, in the case of this post, get rapped out on a keyboard as haggard dogs sleep on shiny Mexican tile.

I would happily stay here for months if I didn’t have so many other places to go.

—Scott