The Graver was originally intended to be an apartment building, which may explain the utter lack of interesting details. Apartments of the era were rather plain – hey, if you deserved anything fancier you’d be living in a house, right? But hotels always had a certain amount of pretension; they put on airs to impress the guests, state the town’s pride.

Not this one.

The Graver also suffered from a rather depressing name; sounds like slang for a cemetery digger. We got another stiff – go wake the graver an’ tell him to bring his shovel.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the place, though. As a boy I had my hair cut in the Graver’s barbershop, a three-stool outfit run by a man named – really – Jim Crow. It was an old-style shop with leather strops hanging from the chairs, a lather machine, tall bottles of Barbicide, and Esquire mags on the table by the window. It smelled of hair oil and electric motors. The barber shop was off the hotel’s lobby; sitting in your chair you could hear the whoomph of the revolving door that led to the street. When I was seven this seemed like a portal to the world beyond, the world beyond Fargo.

Not that I wanted to leave. Not hardly. Not yet.