Diary of an AirBnb Host
Phil Collins, hazelnut coffee, and the delightful variousness of strangers
If you’ve always wanted to stay in a third-floor loft in that part of Pittsburgh which is half warehouses and half forest and half old townhouses with prayer flags and Halloween skeletons hanging from the porch, I’ve got good news for you: You can stay in the AirBnb my partner and I are running above our house.
Every time we turn the apartment over between guests, I find J going through his records and grabbing an armful of whatever he thinks the next guest might like. Tinariwen, Phil Collins, Solange, Pharaoh Sanders, Madonna—we’ve got it all. I don’t know how he determines the selection, but it is very serious business, which makes it all the more disappointing that none of our guests have played a record yet. (Are people just anxious around turntables?)
But I do the same thing with books—maybe I’ll add a little Brandon Shimoda and Morgan Parker if they seem really cool.
One of the reasons I typically enjoy staying in AirBnbs is that I find it extremely entertaining to conjecture about the hosts based on the furnishings and condiments. If you’ve ever taken my POV workshop, you know that my whole theory of fiction centers on the idea that every bit of granularity in a character has to say something about who they are, from word choice to narration style to morning egg preferences, and that the secret to rendering consciousness is in making a constellation of decisions which allow the reader to echolocate and inhabit the mind of the character.
So it makes sense that a rented room charged with the tastes and expectations of a human who is not a hotel chain would be as interesting as any character study. Sometimes it’s interesting because the guest quarters are in some part of the house which used to be part of the host’s office or something—like the time we stayed in a poolhouse in Pasadena which, we eventually realized, was the home office of a photographer who produced Ann Geddes-esque portraiture of her little Pomeranian, Mr. Winkle.
But I actually find it equally interesting when the space is completely devoid of such information, because in that event, it serves as a case study of what this AirBnb host considers a normal night’s accommodation, what they expect you’d want in the kitchen, what sort of coffee you’d want (not hazelnut, imo), and everything like that.
Some of these places feel enormously cynical, and consist of a shopping spree in the Target home goods section. There are banana-leaf prints and central-casting succulents. Others are saturated with Glade air freshener or have extremely detailed red plastic labels on every appliance. Or, chillingly, present bedrooms with only overhead lighting and no lamps in sight. (Am I the only one who hates overhead lighting with a fury?)
I never imagined that it would work both ways, that guests would give off a tremendous amount of information about themselves as well. But of course, cleaning up, you find the eyelash glue stuck to the counter and wonder, why on earth would you be putting on your falsies in the kitchen? Most recently, we had a guest who turned on the A/C and the heater at the same time, which prompted J to have a sleepless night imagining what other monstrosities such a person would be capable of.
I’m sure our guests are able to draw similar conclusions about us. Favorable, I hope, but who knows. There will always be a perceptive gap between how I see myself and my capacity to imagine how someone else will see me, and the less I think about it the better. Can they hear the theme song from The O.C. over and over every time they walk past the living room window on their way out? Do they think the orange oil facial cleanser is weird? Are they chilled by the lack of a TV?
Proximity to other human beings is like a vitamin. Without it, it gets easier and easier to project a reality onto other people. I find that I actually like having my various assumptions disrupted, although we’ll see if that holds true. There’s still a part of me—a lazy part, I think—that would prefer to only deal with people I agree with entirely. It might be the same part of me that thinks all I ever really want is to dodge all work and responsibility and take my comfort. Comfort and fear are almost twins, I think. They both instruct you to make your world smaller and smaller, and then there you are, glued to the sofa, eating out of a bag. That voice is still loud in my head (thus the repetitions of a certain California-based teen soap opera), but I’m happiest when I don’t take its advice.
We’re currently hosting a violinist in town for an audition of some kind, and last night I could hear the muscular lines of some compositional etude she was practicing while I took a bath. I felt like I had somehow ended up in a movie—a good one. Not about isolation, but about something else.