Lali Gonzalez naked in Rest in Peace (2024)

The premise: guy fakes his own death to escape debt collection.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I once faked my own death to break up with a stalking ex-girlfriend. To this day, she still places flowers on my grave.

Clarification: I didn’t really do that, but I thought about it. I finally managed to get rid of her by doing something very similar to dying. I moved to Hungary.

To make a long story much longer, some reminiscences follow.

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Hungary filled a surreal chapter in my life. My time there played out like one of those “so bad it’s good” movies. I arrived just after the Red Army had marched out, when Hungary was still experiencing the aftershocks of Communism. Life there was primitive then, but interesting and incredibly cheap for those with hard currency.

I usually lived in a hotel in Pest, but there was a week when I needed to stay a few nights in a small city that had only one hotel, a hoary monument to faded, pre-war grandeur. My client had booked me into the “Royal Suite.” At check-in, the desk clerk handed me a gigantic key, almost like one of those ceremonial “keys to the city” that mayors hand to visiting celebrities. I found my room number on what we Americans call the second floor, and thought “this can’t be right.” The hand-carved wooden door must have been twenty feet tall and six feet wide, with an immense, baroque lock and doorknob, as if it were the entrance to a cathedral. At least that cleared up the mystery of the monster key. I shrugged and fumbled my way in.

I could never have imagined the sight I then beheld. There never had been a suite, royal or otherwise, but the hotel had created an ersatz just for me. My bedroom had been the ballroom of the once-grand hotel. It was about 200 feet wide and perhaps 40 feet deep with 20-foot ceilings. It contained several ornate chandeliers, and a full bank of gigantic, curtainless windows along all 200 feet of its outside wall. Inside the room, on the far right as I entered, was an unpadded folding chair and a tiny B&W TV on a flimsy rolling cart. On the far left was a single bed. The solitary pillow was foul-smelling and scratchy, as if it had come from a cheap couch, with no pillow case to soften the abrasion. Next to the bed, a jury-rigged metal contraption contained hangers, acting as a surrogate for the non-existent closet. There were two bathrooms side-by-side, each consisting of a small sink and a commode. Ballrooms don’t have tubs or showers. There was no other furniture, and no rug or carpeting. In between my bed and the TV was enough space to stripe out two full tennis courts on the bare wooden floor.

Royal, indeed!

I left my luggage in the room and wandered down to the basement restaurant, which surprised me by retaining some of its old-world elegance. A waitress dutifully seated me and took my order, but I soon noticed that I was the only patron interested in eating. The bar and the rest of the tables were occupied by idle young women in full make-up and evening attire. Men would pop in, sit briefly with some girls, then leave with one. I’m not familiar with bordellos except from movies, but this operation seemed to match my expectations of a proper brothel. It didn’t bother me. The drinks were good, the food was edible, more or less, and I had interesting conversations with a few women who could speak English or German. They seemed to enjoy my company even though, or maybe because, I wasn’t going to pass through their turnstiles, so I had a pleasant enough dinner and returned (alone) to my room.

I tossed the fetid pillow into one of the bathrooms and balled up some t-shirts to replace it. I undressed and lay down, but sleep didn’t come easily. Because of the hotel’s true business model, cars pulled in and out of the parking lot constantly until about four AM, and I was in a room with no curtains and 200 feet of floor-to-ceiling windows! What about alternatives to sleep? It wasn’t possible to watch the TV from the bed. Not only could I not make out the fuzzy images, I could barely see the TV itself. It was like playing left field and trying to see the catcher’s signs. Not that it mattered. There was nothing on the one TV station but prerecorded, single-camera broadcasts of local sporting events, like scholastic volleyball. Occasionally there was just dead air until the station’s engineer cued up another poorly-filmed competition. Reading in that room was also off the table, or it would have been if the room had a table. All the chandeliers were on the same switch, so my choices for illumination were: (1) a blinding level, comparable in lumens to a bank of stadium lights at a major league sports facility; or (2) moonlight and headlights.

I joked earlier that living in Hungary was not that different from dying. While there is a grain of truth to that, my time there created memories that I came to treasure. I loved a beautiful, elegant woman there. She was about six feet tall and, I later discovered, a dead ringer for the actress Natascha McElhone. Seeing McElhone for the first time shocked me. Ever since then, the sight of her has made me both nostalgic for my brief time with Anita, and sad for having lost her. But Anita was only a small part of what I came to love about post-Communist Hungary. Everyone in that country seemed to approach me with good humor and had tried to make my experience pleasant. The manager of that ancient hotel must have thought he was according me a great honor by giving me 8,000 square feet of living space. Of course he totally missed the boat, but even now I feel a tinge of guilt for making fun of the place because I have come to realize that he and his staff had done the best they could with what they had available, and had tried to anticipate what an “important” visitor might want. My time in that hotel seemed annoyingly and laughably uncomfortable while I was there, but the perspective created by time made the annoyance dissipate, allowing the laughter to take over completely. My stay there now seems like a grand adventure. I was privileged to experience a unique time and place so evanescent that it seems never to have existed at all, as if Emerald City had a shabby older neighborhood, and I had rented a flat there just before it was razed for new developments.

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If you found this interesting, many stories from my life can be found, lightly fictionalized, in my novel, which is now available as an audio book, although I am not the narrator.