How Hungry Are Ya?

In the American hotel night with Livvy Dunne

In the days after the Texas floods there were storms all over America. I missed an evening connection at O’Hare and found shelter at a Chicagoland La Quinta. It was past ten p.m. when the crowded shuttle dropped me at the hotel, a five-story prison block wedged between a freeway and an aging concert arena in the hardluck suburb of Rosemont. I couldn’t sleep, I’d never got dinner, and I felt that ol’ American twitch: overtravelled, a state or three from home, going on midnight and stranded out on some chain-hell strip miles from anything like ‘town’ and anxious to consume something, anything, that might split the miles from the sleep.

The Five Guys was closed, the Outback was closed, the Potbelly Sandwich Shop was closed. All this from my phone. Used to be you had to walk the strip in the dark, scanning distant fast-food joints for signs of life. Only out of tradition did I ask the human at the front desk.

The Cane’s is open ‘til one, he said with a smile.

Never heard of it. No matter. The names of chains pass between Americans as signs of comfort. You belong, fellow traveler. The fat of the land awaits you.

I followed the hotel clerk’s directions through the parking lot past a long and weirdly dim wing of the hotel. It wasn’t that late, but every window was already dark. Everyone on their screens, curtains drawn.

Not me. I was hungry. I braved the night.

At the street I dashed like a cat across four lanes of traffic. On the far side fat weeds posed in the dirt of the verge. A silent car wash. The shuttered Five Guys. The last of the Potbelly night shift shuffled to his car. The arena’s flashing sign offered Los Tigres del Norte this November. A half-mile north a Target logo burned like a setting sun.

Texts from my college boys: floods in North Carolina, too. One forwarded a clip of coffee-colored rapids topping the fenceposts in a friend’s yard. I was alone on the street so I cranked up the sound. Water as angry static. The camera pans. The sky grows dark. No one speaks.

There was no night inside Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. Three mirrored balls in the ceiling. Fresh Prince’s Summertime on hidden speakers. Commands in giant red letters: ONE LOVE and EAT. By the bathrooms a cardboard cutout of a pretty young TikTok star squatting on her roller bag. On every wall a cartoon dog in sunglasses driving a van.

eat happy men

HOW HUNGRY ARE YA? called the young man behind the counter.

The menu listed only combos. Could I have just the sandwich?

OF COURSE. He punched the screen. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?

I surrendered my credentials.

DAN THE MAN! he crowed.

I fall for it every time.

I ate my sandwich outside on the patio, listening to the passing cars thunk-thunk over cracks in the concrete street. The corporate playlist partied on.

The TikTok star watched me eat from a life-sized window decal. Her teeth were perfectly white, and her smile—I mean, in America you can never escape the image of a pretty girl giving you that look. New Zealand does without these looks somehow. I am out of practice. I willed my eyes to the cartoon dog.

Now the patio speakers played Mr. Jones, the ‘90s Counting Crows hit now thirty years into a life sentence on cheerful corporate playlists.

And we stare at the beautiful women
She’s looking you
Oh no, no she’s looking at me

The TikTok star is named Livvy Dunne. She was a gymnast at Louisiana State University, in Cane’s hometown of Baton Rouge, and graduated last year. Her campaign’s a hit, by which I mean that the Cane’s employee reddit is full of tales of drunk young men doing unspeakable things to the cutout, offering to buy her for cash, or stealing her away into the night.

It’s all part of the show. Last month Livvy Dunne herself posted a video in which she visits a Cane’s, eats a basket of chicken fingers, then kidnaps her own cutout. Livvy shoves Livvy into a black SUV and drives a lap of the parking lot, her cardboard daemon’s head smiling from the sunroof. Warhol never did it better.

Believe in me
’Cause I don’t believe in anything
And I, I wanna be someone to believe

The sandwich was pretty good.

I walked back to the hotel. On the second pass I realized the wing of darkened rooms wasn’t just dim but abandoned. In one window room a stack of mattresses, in another a pile of furniture. Some rooms showed signs of life. In one second-floor window someone had scrawled a heart. In another, YA YA in white paint. From inside I guess it read AY AY.

On the ground floor the wing’s single glass door was propped open with half a blackened cinderblock. I drew closer. You have to look. What hallway I could see was scattered with dust and trash. Beyond a few feet the darkness inside was total.

Safely back in the new La Quinta I blinked in the lobby’s dazzling white. The same clerk stood behind the desk. I asked about the abandoned wing. Are the two hotels connected? What happened over there, anyway?

But history was not his job. His job was comfort.

Outside, yes, the hotels are connected, he said. But inside there is no connection at all. //