The Absolutely True Origin Story of 2 Star Hotel
An engineer, an architect, a physicist, and a nomad walked into a bar.
It was Halloween night, and the nomad was dressed in a handmade costume. Leopard print with claw marks. Her all-girl bandmates were dressed the same. All Jane, no Tarzan. That’s Jocelyn. As a child she wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so she sang songs instead. This made her a bit odd, but it turned out to be the thing that connected her to the myriad of people she met as she moved through 35 jobs; operating elevators, leading ghost tours, pumping bilge—and that Halloween night, into the Replay Lounge in some two star hotel.
They entered the bar like a pack of wolves, the girl band. Alert. Snarling. They were opening that night for an erotic power trio from a nearby cow-town. The wolves scanned the room and smiled, just enough to let the blue neon flash off their canines.
The power trio’s drummer strode across the room like a quarterback. Calling the shots. He didn’t know what a quarterback was because he came from the dark, wet, cold lowlands in the north of Europe—but that’s how he always walked. That’s Martijn. When he was eight years old, he built a replica of the Dutch masterpiece of engineering, Deltawerks storm surge barrier. It was so good, the builders mailed him the blueprints of the design, and an engineer was born. Everyone knows engineers make good drummers and Martijn joined a rock band, the Metal Dicks, when he was thirteen. They played metal. Cold and dark like their country.
The Janes played their set then lounged around the bar. This crowd was easy kill. Something about Halloween and a full moon. Martijn took the stage and pointed at Jocelyn with his drumstick. The crowd on the dancefloor grew. It was a good-natured crowd. Mostly woodland fairies and Bob Ross’s. A couple Mona Lisa’s, that sort of thing. Hardly any impaled knives or zombies. Jocelyn stared at the drummer. Who does he think he is?
She began to push her way through the crowd. Sexy cat, sexy Dorothy, sexy Beatles. She bumped into a man wearing a beret and a blue and white striped shirt with an accordion slung around his shoulders.
“Lemme guess, sexy French guy?” she asked.
“I am Breton,” the man said indignantly. His French accent was thick. An unlit cigarette hung from his lips. He looked like a resistance fighter from a WWII movie, but those were his normal clothes. “I play the revolutionary music of Brittany. The original rock and roll.” That’s Antoine. He started out playing classical piano in early childhood, then studied accordion with Yann Tiersen, inspired by the Stones of the Menhirs and the oppression of the Breton people. Antoine played four measures on the accordion and at the sound of it, Jocelyn’s heart broke a little. “Indomptable,” he said. “Untamable.”
Wildly drunk people began to throw their costumes off into the sweaty night. Jocelyn wondered if people always took their clothes off at The Replay Lounge. Martijn pointed with his drumstick again.
“I don’t just come when someone points at me,” Jocelyn said, after she had crossed the sea of dancers to come to him, flicking random pieces of costume off her jungle-leaf entangled hair, and indulging in the indignant attitude of the untamable.
“You should play the digeridoo on this song,” he said.
It’s true. She played the digeridoo. She had learned to circular breathe on a beach in Australia. Lonely and penniless. Nothing to do but pucker up and blow. She joined Martijn on stage for a song or two, but opted for the tambourine that night, because a tambourine can heal a broken heart.
Gently, and for no obvious reason, the naked people began to re-clothe themselves. Sexy Mormons, sexy sea monsters, and sexy Smurfs reappeared on the dancefloor. What’s the point, the bouncer thought?
“That’s strange,” Jocelyn said to Antoine. “I don’t see any nipples…at all.”
“But of course!” Antoine cried. “It is because David Lynch just walked in.”
“The David Lynch?”
“Oui. David Lynch, the double-bassist.”
“Wait—not the—oh, never mind.” Jocelyn sniffed the air. “Why does it smell like fresh-baked cookies?”
A tall, mysterious man svelte in a tuxedo sauntered through the crowd, unaware of the effect he had on it. “I feel warm,” a sexy jellyfish swooned as he passed, “in my heart.” That’s David. He picked up the upright bass at age eleven, drawn to the low, mysterious, and unique nature of it, and the way it interacts with the instruments around it. He has played in symphonies ever since and is so kind he merely smiles when people call his bass a cello. He approached Jocelyn not exactly bowing, but just as if he had.
“Pardon me, can you point me in the direction of the lobster bisque?”
“You might be in the wrong bar,” she said.
“Ah, there she is,” he said. “So sorry to have troubled you.” He rambled over to a sexy lobster dancing with a sexy eggplant.
The night went on, as Halloween nights do—huge, huge, huge amounts of alcohol. And with the added hour from daylight savings the borders of reality were pushed beyond the brink. The girl-band’s bass player managed to convince two doe-eyed Where’s Waldos to run behind the tour van on their way home.
It turned out the Breton was a physicist who moved to America to build an atomic clock that would be launched in a rocket to the International Space Station.
“I am building a clock to prove that time does not exist,” he declared.
“We should form a band,” Jocelyn said—immediately after he said that thing about time not existing. Well, immediately if time was a real thing.
“But how will we ever find a drummer?” he asked.
“Don’t worry. I got one,” she said.
She pointed to Martijn, who was in the middle of asking for some girl’s number in order to take a shower at her house. The girl was dressed like a sexy RBG. He narrowed his eyes and crossed the space between them in two strides. Like he’d just scored a touchdown. No one had ever used the pointing thing back on him before.
It turned out Martijn had moved to America to build bridges. “You know that bridge in Minneapolis that they turned purple when Prince died? I built it,” he told them. “But how will we ever find a bass player?”
“Don’t’ worry,” Antoine said. “I have an idea.”
David Lynch narrowed his aquamarine eyes. “I’m not that kind of bass player,” he said.
Jocelyn spied the shimmying, red tail of a lobster out of the corner of her eye. “But don’t you kind of want to be?”
David tilted his head and shifted his gaze to the ceiling, as if he was listening to the little bass player on his shoulder. Was it the angel or devil? Only David knows. And he’s not telling. It turned out David was an architect who designed animal shelters. “It’s just—fuzzy kittens are so cute,” he told them. It also turned out he did want to be in that kind of band.
It turned out Jocelyn really liked both gouda and brie cheeses and kittens so…
An engineer, an architect, a physicist, and a nomad walked into a bar like a quarterback, a gentleman, a time traveler, and a wolf. Respectively. Now Jocelyn can’t help but write folk ballads like a compulsion, telling mini stories to mend her always breaking heart. Antoine and Martijn immediately turn them into rock songs. Immediately, you know, if time was a thing. David smooths the cracks, elevates the sound and holds them together. They let a few ballads sneak in which allows Jocelyn’s voice to meander, as she once did, from a purr to a howl, sometimes in the course of one song. Antoine plays the music of the Menhirs on guitar as well as accordion, at times haunting, and at other’s urgent, with an ease and effortlessness that convinces the listener that time truly does not exist. Just like every room he enters, David fills their songs with warmth, mystery, and expression, and leaves everyone feeling like they just baked cookies. And Martijn ever-evolves from his peat bog beginnings, playing with an artful, firm, and adaptive style that gives 2 Star Hotel not only its foundation, but its reason and place in the world.
