Hotel room stock imageHotel room stock image

OK, so you want the backstory about how this newspaper gets out every day? Here goes:

I’ll take you right there behind the scenes.

This is how things get done, with dedication and teamwork and a certain can-do spirit.

This is how Jim Beam and I came up with the perfect hotel arrangement for our travels to Baton Rouge.

Actually, it was Beam who figured out and secured the hotel. The “arrangement” part was my idea.

This was a good 20, maybe 25 years ago.

But Beam had secured a very reasonable rate on a nice Baton Rouge hotel room for the duration of the Louisiana legislative session, which, as always, he’d be covering.

I guess it was probably me who noticed that the room wasn’t going to be used two nights per week. Two nights that I had eyes on.

See, Beam always got to Baton Rouge on Sunday nights for his Monday-Friday forays into the state’s political foolishness.

This was during baseball season and, as luck would have it, I was getting to Baton Rouge on Fridays to cover an LSU weekend baseball series.

It was perfect. No sense leaving a paid-for hotel room empty for the weekend.

We never saw even each other. He’d leave straight for home from the capitol on Friday afternoons, I’d be arriving that night after a baseball game and I’d leave Sunday morning for an afternoon game well before he arrived back to start the cycle all over again.

If I say so myself, it was the perfect arrangement.

It always amazed me how neat and orderly I’d find that hotel room.

I’m not saying that Beam is a neat freak.

But at his work area in the hotel room, his notes and important papers would always be arranged and stacked perfectly, labeled and all. Pens, pencils, even a stapler, all looked like they had a certain, specific place in the universe.

Because he’d be back Sunday afternoon, he’d always leave some clothes and I couldn’t help but notice — not that I was snooping or anything —that he folded his socks.

I guess that’s important when you’re covering something really serious like the state legislature instead of a sports writer trying to decipher baseball players and coaches.

But it was a great arrangement, even cost-effective for the expense account.

The size of the room came in handy one Saturday during LSU’s NCAA baseball regional, with several visiting writers in from near and afar.

The baseball action had lingered long into that night, to where our entertainment options after all the word-smithing had been done were limited by closing laws.

Somebody had recalled my bragging about my spacious accommodations and suggested a mass beer run before we all convened there.

Sure. By all means. What could go wrong?

I do remember doing my best to keep some semblance of order.

But there must have been a plethora of the world’s ills to solve that night because the festivities lasted until dang near daylight.

I kind of remember an impromptu scrum when a full pizza box went flying, emptying a lot of pepperoni and Canadian bacon along its path.

The rest, frankly, is a little fuzzy.

But it must have been about 10 a.m. when I rolled out of bed and surveyed a scene right out of the movie “The Hangover.” It looked like the morning after an “Animal House” frat party.

I found three stragglers still there, one sleeping on the floor, another halfway on the couch, the other half snuggled up amid the beer can-clutter of the coffee table.

There may have been a mountain lion rummaging through the ignored trash cans.

I seem to recall a lot of half-eaten fast food scattered about. But, on a positive note, only one lamp was broken.

This, I thought, is a problem…but not for me.

Sure, the hotel’s cleaning staff was going to have its work cut out for them before Beam returned that afternoon.

So I got Beam’s stapler back in its proper place before leaving the rest to the pros.

I felt bad for them, even left them a dollar tip before heading out for the noon baseball game.

I guess there was a game played and I would assume I wrote an enthralling story about it.

So I was headed home, tooling across the Atchafalaya Basin, when I gradually got a sinking feeling.

Surely not, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember, for absolute certain, the actual physical act of ever taking the “Do Not Disturb” sign off the doorknob of that hotel room.

Oh well.

Maybe they ignored it and the room got cleaned up anyway.

Right? Right?

Turns out I hadn’t and they hadn’t and…Mr. Beam was still the boss…and…

Anyway, that was the end of that perfect hotel trade-off arrangement.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com