THE MOTEL 6 ADS PROMISE "We'll leave the light on for you," and they do not lie. This cheery glow will come from a room that has been set on fire by a prison escapee using it for a meth lab. After the firemen have hosed it down, it will be rented to you as "non-smoking."

  The people who favor Motel 6 exhibit the same courtesy and respect for others as Josef Mengele, Vlad the Impaler and Judge Judy. They keep the same hours as Dracula. And judging by the volume on their TVs, they share at least one handicap with Helen Keller.

  If Mengele were alive today, he would be in the room next to yours, humming along with "The Horst Wessel Song" on the Disney Channel and trying to install blue eyes in a Nicaraguan maid who only stopped by to burn the traditional carton of Chesterfields under the bed in his non-smoking room.

  Motel of the Living Dead. As an peripatetic journalist and bicycle racer with the income of a blue-eyed Nicaraguan maid, I often find myself staying in a Motel 6. Notice that I said "staying" rather than "sleeping." No one sleeps in a Motel 6. They're either up cutting throats or lying pop-eyed in bed, waiting for the goodnight kiss of the blade.

  This chain is two sixes short of its proper name. The desk clerks are zombies dreaming of bitten parts in a George Romero movie, and the lodgers are gap-toothed werewolves who drive Dodge diesels festooned with "Honk If You LIke Human Flesh" bumper stickers.

  Slip between the sheets at a Motel 6 and your neighbors will play you a lullaby as soothing as the yowling of a sackful of cats at a Marilyn Manson concert. And before dawn, you will wish you had spent the night in a comfy drawer at the county morgue.

  Samurai Hotel. I recently bought a 1978 Toyota Chinook midget motor home to spare myself nights like this while traveling to races. Drive to the course, rack out in the back, arise, brew coffee and compete, went my reasoning.

  But this doddering rice grinder quickly proved to have more disabling problems than Robert Downey Jr., infested as it was by mechanical gremlins that feared only the hottest of fires, that conflagration which depends for its fuel upon Federal Reserve Notes, in large denomination and in quantity.

  When cyclo-cross season rolled around, I was still money-whipping various mechanics' children through law school. And since the racing started at 9 a.m., on courses at least three hours away from home, I found my plans deep-6'd, as it were.

  Three Strikes, And I'm Out. For one race in Boulder, I stayed in a Motel 6 near 84th Avenue and I-25, where teen-age crack addicts harmonized with the Hound of the Baskervilles in a wee-hours songfest that sent me to the start line with a tic in one cheek and a wandering eye.

  For another north of Denver, I gambled on the same Motel 6. "What are the odds of that happening again?" I asked myself. Exactly 100 percent, since the Hound of the Baskervilles was not passing through, but lived in the back yard of a house across the parking lot from my room. I raced with bags under my eyes that looked as if they had been painted on to cut the glare by an NFL trainer.

  Come the state championships in Lakewood, I selected a Motel 6 on Wadsworth, off 6th Avenue. The troll working the desk put me in a room above the office, where the Wadsworth traffic sounded like an Indy 500 for 1978 Toyota Chinooks. I relocated to a room that smelled like the Taiwan Pavilion at Interbike, but at least was quiet. I drank a Guinness, hit the rack and went straight to sleep.

  Until 3:30 in the morning, when the reincarnations of John Holmes and the Whore of Babylon checked in next door and uncorked a squealing humpathon soon to appear in a quarter-arcade booth near you.

  I lay abed until the happy couple drifted off to sleep, then quietly packed up the truck, turned on the TV, cranked the volume all the way up and left. One good screwing deserves another.

  This column appeared in Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.

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