Humour: Room service

There's nothing quite like hotel sex. Maybe it's the high thread-count, beds the size of a pacific island, or paying R400 for a dinky of JC Le Roux that trick us into believing we're rich, which turns us on, and makes us want to have decadent sex.

Or perhaps it's just that if you're in a hotel room, someone else is looking after the kids, dogs, plant and pet mongoose, and you're free for a change, which drives you wild with excitement.

Plus you don't have to clean up. If you want to have swinging-from-the-chandeliers, couch-bed-floor-couch-bed-again sex at home, you're faced with your own debauchery the next day, cleaning lubricant out of the shag carpet. You know how a cup of tea made for you by someone else always tastes so much nicer? Sex is the same. Shagging on sheets you don't have to wash and dry before it rains makes the sex so much hotter.

Although if you really consider where that hotel mattress, sheets and pillows have been, it would be the last place you'd get naked. Hotel beds are like sausages, you shouldn't think too much about what goes into them. Rather just let your animal instincts take over.

And do they ever! Rock stars and celebs have been losing their shit in hotel rooms for years, some quite literally. And I'm not just talking about leaving a messy room, I'm talking total carnage. I've seen pictures. It's as if the room was first given to four-year-olds without any adult supervision, then burgled, then trashed by a Mexican SWAT team looking for drugs, then burgled again.

In the '80s, Aerosmith would bring their own chainsaws to hotels so they could chop up the furniture more effectively.

Keith Moon, the drummer from The Who, was one of the greatest hotel room wreckers of all time. For his 21st, he threw a five-tier cake at his guests, started a food fight and multiple fire extinguisher free-for-all, slipping and knocking out his front teeth. When the cops arrived, he stripped, escaped in a Lincoln Continental, drove through a fence and crashed into the Holiday Inn's swimming pool. Moon was also famous for nailing and strapping furniture to the ceiling.

In 1972, Rolling Stone Keith Richards became possibly the first person to throw a television set out of a 10-storey hotel window, which inspired decades of copycats. This phased out recently when they started bolting flat-screens to the walls.

Marilyn Manson left a hotel room with a phone stuck in a wall, burns in the carpets, and just about every surface stained with hair dye. And Billy Idol once spent three weeks in a Bangkok hotel, racking up twenty grand in damages and a sex and drug bill of about $250000 before he was carried out on a stretcher.

Why did they do it? Boredom? Off their heads? Entitlement? Or that same sense of freedom that makes us want dirty sex when we're set loose in a hotel?

In his autobiography, All The Rage, Ian McLagan, keyboardist for The Faces, wrote of the Holiday Inns where they all stayed: "It was not possible to walk into the identical room in 20 different cities without wanting to hurt it just a little."

Today, concert tours are all about professionalism and the bottom line. This makes me sad. If rockers can't behave badly, surely it has a knock-on effect on what's considered acceptable behaviour for us writers?

Even when Charlie Sheen trashed his hotel room in 2010, it was only to the tune of about $7000. Which seems tame by his standards.

A few years ago, a semi-famous band threw a TV out of their hotel window because it was "the classic rock'n'roll thing to do". It turns out they had a journalist with them who was writing a book about their tour, and they did it so he'd have something interesting to write about.

I've got a trip coming up. They'd better watch out, I plan on getting pretty crazy in my hotel room, especially if there's scotch in the mini bar. They'll probably have that limited DStv bouquet, so I'll be watching Steven Seagal movies on e.tv and eating Pringles till 3am, then I'll steal a bar of soap and pass out in a hot bubble bath. Then it's bottomless bacon buffet for breakfast! Yeah baby, living on the edge. LS

• amillionmilesfromnormal@gmail.com On twitter @paigen
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