Madonna's Sin

 

From around 1963 to about 1969, when I was between four and 10 years of I age, I lived in a sleepy college town called San Luis Obispo, a short drive from the Pacific Ocean on California's Central Coast. My father, Joe, worked as a heavy equipment mechanic for the Madonna Construction Company. The owner, Alex Madonna, was a wealthy and colorful character. He owned the famous Madonna Inn just outside town. The Inn sat on about a thousand acres, where Madonna had a horse ranch. My sister Buffi and I used to go horseback riding there. Madonna also had a zebra, imported all the way from Africa, running around on his ranch. According to Dad, the zebra was so violent that it had killed some of Madonna's horses. After that, it had a paddock all to itself.

Since it was almost exactly half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Inn was popular with touring musicians. It was very large, and each of the rooms had a different theme and name. The common areas were decorated with large rock walls, beaten copper, and lots of pink paint. Madonna (or his wife) was obsessed with pink. There was a Union 76 gas station on the property. 76's symbol was a an orange ball with their number on it, which sat atop a pole outside each station. Madonna allegedly asked Union 76 for permission to paint the ball pink. Permission was denied.

Now imagine this in pink

I don't know if Madonna's employees got a discount for dining at the Inn, but I do know that our family seemed to eat there rather often. I loved those visits. The place was a labyrinth of passages, and I always found some new place to explore. I guess I felt a sense of ownership because my dad worked for Madonna.

Madonna Inn's famous "waterfall urinal"

One of the men's restrooms featured a "waterfall urinal", surrounded by rock down which trickled a man-made cataract to flush the piss away. According to a story told by my older brother Jack, he took a friend or cousin to show him the bizarre Madonna Inn. There was a large fake waterfall somewhere amongst the Inn's dining rooms, shops, and lobby. Upon seeing the waterfall, Jack's companion said, "Oh, this must be the urinal you were telling me about!" and stepped up to it and started to unzip his pants. Jack was able to hustle him away to the proper urinal before an incident could occur.

There was another men's restroom which also had an unusual flush delivery system. Water would run along a little wooden flume high up on a wall. It would then go over a waterwheel before entering the urinal itself. The water was activated by a motion sensor near the door. I don't know if the stream of water was actually strong enough to turn the wheel, or if the wheel was electrically operated. Either way I wasn't having it. The first time Dad took me to see this amazing contraption, that waterwheel terrified me, and I refused to ever visit that particular restroom ever again.

In my memory, the waterwheel was HUGE! My little mind could not fathom how such a dangerous juggernaut could be allowed to operate so close to a boy's favorite toy. I could easily picture myself somehow accidentally getting caught in the works and crushed to pulp.

Years later, as I was doing some research for my "High Turnover" blog, I found a picture of the hideous machine online. As you can see, it's not very large at all. Now it's hard for me to grasp why it was so fucking frightening to me at the time. Kids are weird, and I was an unusually weird kid.

Maybe I was more disturbed by the tacky decor