The Phoenix of Hotel Freds

By Mateo Marquez

The Phoenix of Hotel Freds tells of the resurrection of a lovable rogue, a true picaro, and that resurrection is of course preceded by retribution, which follows transgression, hard on the heels of temptation. We join the tale in its middle, as it unfolds squarely and heavily in the midst of the retribution. The particulars of the temptation and transgression are left largely to our imaginations, an easy feat given the amply illustrated self-destructive appetites and over-indulgences of the protagonist. But seldom has any protagonist been as unflinchingly honest with himself, as unwilling to pass the buck, or more determined to hold himself accountable for his choices.

This picaresque entails multiple compendia—of pop culture, recent film, music, food, drink, fashion, digital lore, and the road trips of the hip crowd that gathers at Fred’s in Fort Worth—and always in service of the tale. Whether the resurrection of this unique phoenix can also lead ultimately to his redemption hangs in the balance, and five diversely memorable women have big says in the pitched battle for the soul of Mateo Marquez.

It is his distinctive voice we hear throughout, in its insistent allusions, over-the-top tropes, and strangely endearing raunchiness—two parts wise guy and one part pure sage. Part confessional, part commentary on the suburban rat race, part case study in family dynamics, part guidebook to the digital era, part inspirational message, The Phoenix of Hotel Freds speaks in numerous ways to multiple readers, and always from the heart.

~ Bruce Musgrave

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mateo Marquez
• Release date: Dec 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311803764

Mateo Marquez

Mateo is an author, speaker, teacher, entrepreneur and daddy. As an author, the major focus of Mateo's unique autobiographical narratives is offering tongue-in-cheek insight and guidance for navigating through the digital era while seeking fulfillment in life through transparency and acceptance, always having a lot of fun along the way: "Two parts wise guy and one part pure sage," as described by editor and longtime friend & mentor, Bruce Musgrave. These tales are told through the lens of an eccentric & slightly neurotic, metrosexual divorced dad and the highly unique existence he leads. Mateo's writing illustrates how truth is indeed stranger than fiction, as well as far more interesting. Mateo self-published The Phoenix of Hotel Freds in 2010, recruited a support team, and designed & executed a first of its kind, social media-driven grassroots promotional tour. He traveled through 10 states over 2 months with 5,000 paperback copies of the book, giving every single copy away for free by hand. Mateo is also the CEO & Founder of PoserKids Yoga (www.poserkidsyoga.com). PoserKids Yoga is a youth mindfulness solution provider that offers language driven interactive play for preschool and elementary age children throughout the United States. The company is building the first unified national network of youth mindfulness educators ever created, a skill set Mateo refined helping start-up companies recruit and train sales organizations for over a decade. Mateo lives in Fort Worth, TX with his daughter, Gracyn. He grew up in Albuquerque, NM where he graduated from the Albuquerque Academy prior to earning his degree from Texas Christian University.

Book preview

Most of us don’t realize that the people we need to save ourselves from the most are ourselves. By the time I was engulfed in the flames of this simple truth, it was too late to do anything more than burn to the ground.

I think I always knew this to be true, but had gotten away with flying close to the flame of self-destruction for almost 30 years, managing to go relatively unsinged. I had suffered a few burns and wounds of varying extremity, but nothing fatal, nothing I couldn’t talk my way out of or recover from. Near expulsion from school. Almost kicked off the team. Really close to being arrested. A smart comment away from getting beaten to a pulp by a meathead in an Ed Hardy shirt. One reprimand away from being fired. Nearly busted for water-ballooning people walking into prom because my mom punished me for having two dates by not allowing me to go at all. It’s a long list, one that is a separate book in itself. I picture the annals of my indiscretions and failures being stored within a massive filing cabinet that has my name on it, maybe in a bunker somewhere at Area 51.

I was perfectly imperfect like everyone else in the World, a blend of yin and yang, wrong and right, darkness and light. I’m a great father and often a terrible son. I can build people up with the same words I use to crucify them. I think I am physically addicted to cheese but am allergic to dairy. I drink oceans of beer and hardly any water. I’m Hispanic and of Spanish heritage, but I’m not Catholic. I believe DJ Lance Rock may be a better role model for my daughter than most of our elected officials. I love this country and have an autographed picture of Ronald Reagan on my wall, but am so apathetic towards politics that I think I’ve voted only twice. I love beans but hate rice. I have more bobblehead dolls (9) in my kitchen than I do pots and pans (6). I can’t touch public doorknobs or handles with my bare hand, but I can carry on a dialogue with a homeless guy on the sidewalk for 20 minutes. I’m a mama’s boy and a womanizer. I can be a real dick and a total pussy. My sister is one of my best friends, and my brother often feels like a stranger. I pray every night, but I curse like a drunk fan on the wrong end of a Texas-OU game. I don’t watch television, but spend half my week on Facebook. I’m scared to death of heights, but love to fly. My daughter and I play with Elvis Pez dispensers while we listen to The Beatles. I’ve spent as many days as my own best friend as I have as my own worst enemy. I was a walking contradiction, often trying to be true to myself while lying to everyone else.

I had done a lot of things right as I approached my pre-mid-life crisis—just as many things wrong. There was a ton of near misses that I was always clever, manipulative or ambitious enough to get away with. It enabled me to push the boundaries even more. Three decades of close brushes finally caught up to me, right around my 30th birthday. I had been mocking and taunting karma for my entire life just the way a bully teases the fat kid on the playground. Godzilla finally came to town to reap the wrath I had sown, as if I had hit a hornet’s nest with a seven iron. The monster took the Rome of lies and shadows that I had built into an impostor’s empire and engulfed the place in a mushroom cloud of cosmic justice.

The inferno the beast left in their wake was one ring of hell lower than the ninth circle Dante visited in his travels through hell. I lost my wife, my child, my job, a lot of family and friends, a pile of money and assets as well as a sizable chunk of my soul, all in the span of a few weeks. I had cast myself into a self-devised abyss by losing grip of the only two things in life any of us can control: my attitude and my actions.

The bonfire my charred former life lay upon was brighter than the sun. I couldn’t see the blaze with my eyes, though, only when I gazed into its radiant glow with my heart. The epiphany I pulled from the ashes has liberated me to fly on the wings of my heart’s true passion. I had to set myself on fire to see the light, though, even if only because I had run out of things to burn.

If driving had a fan page on Facebook, I would never like it. Unlike Rain Man, I was far from an excellent driver. I had a general disdain for confined spaces and for sitting still for long periods of time. My unusual combination of OCD and ADD formed a unique partnership of acronyms that often made even the simplest of day-to-day tasks, especially the routine and monotonous most people took for granted, quite challenging for me. Still, I had done plenty of driving to see my daughter, Gracyn, out of necessity, not because I wanted to. Her mother and I were separated when Gracyn was six months old, with a finalized divorce settlement to follow nearly a year later. The drives to and from were usually so awash in tears and The Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius that I was basically a droid driving like a numb auto-pilot, like being trapped in a Nintendo game. First it was from our house in Frisco to her parents’ house in Arlington when her mother and I were first separated. Then it was from Frisco to Fort Worth, where the two of them eventually moved. I finally sold our old house after it was on the market for a year and moved to The Fort myself. It has been nice to be in the same city as my daughter again, almost the same zip code even. That day Gracyn and her mother were staying in Arlington with my former in-laws, so my drive back was a little longer, and it was also a little more difficult than normal.

It was dark, literally and figuratively. It’s as if that prophecy of everything that happens when you decide to nuke your life before your 30th birthday had just kicked me in the face, finally coming full circle. It was like the dirty diaper I had changed before handing Gracyn off to her mother had just exploded in my face like a caca piñata. The ’80s metal ballad, Cinderella’s classic Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone), was playing from HairNation on Sirius. The chorus played on repeat in my skull as I navigated through tail lights and giant redneck trucks somewhere between Arlington and Fort Worth. Especially lately, I’d noticed I was always hearing songs that made me double-take and look into the sky as if someone was messing with me. I felt like karma had been the DJ for my life’s soundtrack of late, and she was spinning some very poignant tunes for me.

My Jeep Commander was pointed straight for Abilene, although I would eventually be stopping a couple hours prior in Fort Worth, a.k.a. The Fort, Ford Dub or Funkytown. I felt like a gambler down on his luck indeed, but I had lost more than just a hand of aces or some poker chips. I felt like part of my soul had died a few minutes earlier when Gracyn’s mother informed me I could not take my daughter with me to Austin for Easter the coming weekend. All my family would be down there celebrating the holiday at my brother’s new home. I felt a little bit of vomit in the back of my throat. It was the same way I feel whenever I ride in the car with someone that listens to political talk radio or when I even look at tofu.

It was fairly minor in retrospect, but it was then that I really felt the icy, firm grip of reality clutching at my throat like a frozen Chuck Lidell. The fact that I was always going to have to share Gracyn for the rest of my life was choking me, but not before I got out a few choice words for Jenna before I left. I needed to re-work our woefully one-sided divorce decree, but the guilt that drove me to work such a lopsided agreement in the first place was the very reason I hadn’t made an effort to change it yet. That, and I hadn’t had an income for nearly two years. I probably couldn’t even have afforded Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons. Jenna was technically not violating any part of the decree, but we had essentially been calling audibles to accommodate our still recovering and reshaping lives. We could have just switched days and worked it out. Whether it was or wasn’t, I took stuff like that as her way of still asserting control of my life through Gracyn, punishing me for my sins of the past with our daughter now. Perception is reality, just as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing in the The Boxer: A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

I perceived she was being a total bitch. I was pissed, and it was 159 degrees outside, roughly. I was hotter than a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader.

I save the C word for special occasions. The F bomb is pretty much my favorite word, something I am really working on because of my girl, G bomb. I’ve used it as every part of speech, multiple times in the same sentence, even as a filler word, like a normal human might use the word uh or um. C-biscuit kind of became my F word as a result, the queen of the curses. The C-note is like cooking a blowfish: you can serve it up the right way in the right setting and it’s superb, in intimate settings maybe even hot, but if you dish it out any other way, it’s a killer. There is but one context in which use of this word is appropriate, and it had been a couple years since Jenna and I had done that. She was not as excited this time when I addressed her as such before driving off. It was classy; drinking Miller High Life out of a thermos—classy.

That’s the gristle I was chewing on as an appetizer before meeting up with my sister for dinner, for which I was already running late. Tonight’s meal with Kelsey should at least be colorful, although that’s never been a problem for us. This was going to be peyote-trip colorful, though, as I was coming in armed with more emotional baggage than an adolescent boy after a weekend at the Neverland Ranch. I could see The Fort’s skyline on the horizon. As if Doc Brown had planted 1.21 gigawatts into the Jeep, the 30-minute drive flew by in the usual haze of doing my best Jerry Garcia impression to stave off the ghosts and demons of my past and present, keeping them from the wheel. It was equally vexing keeping them out of my head. I had enough to contend with on the blackened highway I shared on that day with myriad Texans even more deficient in driving aptitude than I am. The fact that I text, Facebook and email while driving—the new DWI of Driving While Interactive—doesn’t make my driving any less hazardous than the guy with the NASCAR decal on his giant Ford F150 one lane over.

I was relieved to see the 8th Street exit, and I cut over to Magnolia while I got myself together, propping my six-feet two-inches, 200 pounds of tan skin, beer gut, stubble, t-shirt, flip flops and depression into a mass out in the parking lot presentable enough to be seen in public. I was ready to attempt to eat something other than humble pie for the day, but I was certain a meeting with my Life Yogi would dole out several more helpings of my least favorite dish in life. Luckily, there were several offerings at the vegan dining establishment that are almost as unappetizing to me. Yummy. All I needed to complete the scene was to walk in wearing a bib that read Punch Me In The Face, then being informed by the waiter that John Mayer was going to be serenading us tableside all meal long.

Kelsey, looking her usual Penelope Cruz meets CrossFit, stood dressed head to toe in lululemon stuff in front of the Spiral Diner’s doors. She greeted me with a hug that we held for longer than normal. It may have gotten weird for her towards the end of the hug, like the scene from Groundhog Day when Phil Connors embraces Ned Ryerson. I opened the door for her, and we entered the vegan cafe (her choice, not mine) in the The Fort’s hospital district.

We were seated right away by a lady that had more tattoos than the UFC. It wasn’t super busy, maybe because they didn’t serve meat, maybe because it was a dreary Thursday night and a little past normal dinner hour. Checking my iPhone one last time as we headed to our table, I noticed it was 8:33 pm.

I had literally said nothing to my sister since we had made the date earlier in the day, including a muffled greeting minutes earlier that was more of a Neanderthal grunt than anything in English or Spanish, the two languages Kelsey and I might normally converse in. Still, it felt like she had been riding shotgun with me on my entire ride home. There are people in life that you just have a connection with, a way of communicating that is the closest thing to ESP or a sixth sense that anyone this side of the Psychic Friends Hotline possesses. The most important conversations I have ever had with the most vital reciprocal partners in my life are conversations in which very little was actually said.

My sister is a yogi, after all, one whose sagacity is well beyond that of a 27 year old. I think I had officially hit rock-bottom as we sat there having dinner together, and not just because I had finally let her drag me into a restaurant that didn’t serve meat. As I gnawed through my tear-stained sawdust and tofu surprise burrito with vegetables flown in from The Amazon to Fort Worth, I felt as helpless and lost and empty inside as I had minutes prior while trying to intelligently place a dinner order from their menu of food substitutes. It was like trying to read Sanskrit. It had been almost two years now since I had nuked my life Tiger Woods style. My shrink at the time celebrated me as some type of psychoanalysis Rosetta Stone, a cauldron of collective dysfunction that should be studied around the clock by a team of specialists somewhere in Vienna. Sprinkle in that near-crippling combination of ADD and OCD I have grappled with my whole life, I was a mushroom cloud on roller skates at the time.

Not much changed in the two years following—really changed, not just the bogus kind of change people say they experience to garner a second chance only to bide time living out a false destiny through an impostor life. I didn’t have to tell Kelsey all that; she is one of the few people who lived it with me and walked each step of the way by my side, dragging me or pushing me in a wheel barrow at times.

April Fool’s Day is a stupid waste of a holiday, one void of any meaning aside from watching people that aren’t funny try even harder to be even less funny. Until that day, it was always just the day before my brother’s birthday to me. Suddenly it had new meaning. I felt a fool indeed, drowning in a sea of self-pity, misdirection and lost confidence. My sister must have seen absolutely nothing in my puffy, moistened retinas that gazed