Even at the time, I knew my experiences as a Bluecoat would colour my memories of Portland from then on. But besides making my low status highly visible, the well-meaning folks at Columbia Sportswear had also managed to negate one of the more enjoyable aspects of my move to Portland. Before the parka came into my life, I’d been able to walk the unfamiliar streets of Old Town with the carefree certainty that my escape from New York meant I no longer had to worry about turning a corner and bumping into someone I’d let down or screwed over. Now, around every corner I turned, I ran into blue-clad versions of myself: the very person I’d let down the most, and screwed over the worst. Which was unsettling, to say the least. Though I have to admit, the whole Bluecoat fiasco provided a sobering reminder that straightening out my life would require much more than a wardrobe change.
Securing a place to live was obviously the next big change I had to shoot for, and as it turned out my quest for permanent housing gave the kindly woman at the drop-in centre a chance to atone for inadvertently turning me into a Bluecoat pariah. This was a few days after I’d collected my new parka, when I went back to the centre to ask her what I’d have to do to qualify for one of the ‘leap cheques’ I’d been hearing so much about on the chow line at the Blanchet House.
‘It’s not hard at all,’ she cheerfully assured me. ‘If you’re enrolled in the Food Stamps programme, your income eligibility has already been established, so the only other thing I’d need from you is proof of local residence.’
Here we go again, I thought, and explained that my local residence was under a freeway overpass.
‘Well, then you wouldn’t be eligible, I’m afraid. LIEAP only subsidises people who need help heating their homes in wintertime. Sorry, that’s a rule I have to follow.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ I frowned. ‘So I’m out of luck then, is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Not necessarily,’ she replied. ‘We have a number of SRO hotels in the neighbourhood that participate in the LIEAP network and they’ll accept a heat-subsidy cheque in lieu of rent. All you’d have to do is pay for a week’s stay at one of the approved hotels, bring us your rent receipt and we’ll issue a cheque for $143 directly to the hotel. Which should at least be enough to keep you indoors for the rest of the winter. If I were you, I’d consider it. Let me give you this list of the hotels we work with, and if you decide to rent a room, come back to see me and I’ll be glad to help you with the paperwork.’
Thanking her for the advice, I left the drop-in centre with at least a glimmer of hope. Surely I could raise enough money selling plasma to cover a week’s rent at one of the local flophouses. If they were anything like the Bond Hotel back in Tribeca, the rates wouldn’t be too steep. It was worth checking out, I figured, and as I walked back to Burnside Street I decided I’d pick a few names from the list and visit them to see how much blood money I’d have to sock away (quite literally) to cover a week’s rent. But as soon as I consulted the list, I knew there was only one hotel I wanted to call home – no matter how sleazy it might turn out to be.
How could I ever pass up the opportunity to live in a place called the Joyce Hotel?
Checking the address, I realised it was right around the corner from Powell’s Books, surely another sign that the Joyce was the place for me. And I wasn’t disappointed when I got to Eleventh Avenue and saw the vintage-style marquee sign above the hotel’s entrance, with my Irish hero’s name prominently displayed.
Like most of its run-down neighbours in the Burnside District, the Joyce Hotel’s four-storey brick building had seen better days. The date etched into the cornerstone read ‘1912’ – which meant it had opened the same year that James Joyce wrote the poem ‘Gas from a Burner’, his famously scathing portrait of the censorious Irish printer who sabotaged publication of Dubliners on the grounds that Joyce’s stories libelled Ireland’s good name.
Something told me I wasn’t likely to encounter any readers of ‘Gas from a Burner’ among the lodgers at the Joyce, but you could never tell. If I was any indication, maybe the hotel’s august name pulled in a more literate clientele than your average flophouse. That would be a pleasant surprise.
At the moment, however, all I wanted was good news from the desk clerk, a paunchy old-timer who looked like a ringer for Weeb Ewbank, coach of the Jets in Joe Namath’s glory days. Same flat-top haircut, same jowly jawline, same hard-eyed stare – which was how he sized me up as I approached the Plexiglas security barrier that topped the reception counter.
In hardship hotels like the Joyce, you speak to the desk clerk through a hole cut in the Plexiglas. Not surprisingly, the diameter of the hole is always smaller than a man’s fist. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the company you’ll be keeping if you’re desperate enough to give the place your business. Then again, if you’re willing to conduct business through a talk-hole, I suppose your desperation is self-evident. Mine certainly was, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was a rate I could afford, and some assurance that there’d be a room available the following week, which was the soonest I figured I could raise the cash I’d need for a week’s rent.
To my relief, there were several vacancies about to open up, and the weekly rate was only twenty-two dollars, so it was good news all around. Three more visits to the Stab Lab were all it would take to get me back off the streets at last! Three more visits to the Stab Lab were also all it took for me to finish reading Down and Out in Paris and London (which I’d carefully rationed, and only dipped into while I was bleeding for cash).
Orwell’s account of his down-and-out days struck me as uncannily similar to what I’d experienced as a penniless transient since I’d hit the road. There were historical differences, to be sure. These days we have vagrancy laws. In Orwell’s England, they had more restrictive ‘tramping laws’ – laws that forced homeless unemployed men to stay constantly on the move from poorhouse to poorhouse, or face imprisonment. But when Orwell writes about the human element of poverty – how it feels to be homeless, how it feels to go hungry, or to sleep in the cold, or to be looked down on by the public – his insights are timeless. Reading his portraits of the men he tramped with, I felt as though I could step outside onto Burnside Street and find their twins on every corner.
As it happened, I came to Orwell’s closing pages (in which he offers his thoughts on improving the lot of the homeless) on the afternoon of my final rent-raising session at the Stab Lab, and as I sat in the hospital bed, squeezing my doggy ball for all I was worth – with a night’s rest in a room all my own just a blood bag away – here’s what Orwell had to say: ‘It does not matter how small a cubicle is, the important thing is that a man should be alone when he sleeps.’
Smiling to myself, I thought, By George, what a capital idea!
Next stop, the Joyce Hotel . . .
CHAPTER 9
Weeb Ewbank’s lookalike, whose name turned out to be Vern, was once again on desk duty when I hobbled into the Joyce Hotel’s lobby and pushed my blood money through the cash slot in the security barrier. In return, he shoved a registration card through the slot, and as I began filling it out it suddenly dawned on me that it was 13 March. Exactly four weeks had passed since I’d landed in Baloney Joe’s on the night of my birthday. Which meant that – whether by fate or by happy coincidence – when I woke up tomorrow in a bed of my own at last, I’d be starting my twenty-ninth day in Portland. I’d always considered twenty-nine my lucky number, and now it had come through for me again. As soon as I’d done the math a goofy smile broke out on my face, and I made no attempt to hide it from Vern, though I noticed he was now studying me with a skeptical look. Guy probably thinks I’m short a few marbles, I thought. Who else but a nut job could find anything to smile about in a flophouse like this?
I considered explaining that the room key he was about to give me was the best belated birthday gift I could possibly have wished for but decided it was a story best saved for another day. In my experience, flophouse desk cl
erks are a garrulous breed. More often than not they’re residents of the hotel themselves – old pensioners working off a portion of their rent by pulling shifts at the desk – and their favourite pastime while on duty is swapping long-winded stories and hotel gossip with the ‘lobby rats’. So, unless you’re looking to kill time, it’s wise not to give them an opening. Tired as I was, I didn’t care whether Vern pegged me as a head case or not. I just didn’t want to get trapped at the talk-hole and have him bending my ear for the next half-hour.
‘Okay, here you go, Room 222,’ Vern said, sliding a tagged key and my rent receipt through the slot. ‘Elevator’s on the fritz, so you’ll have to take the stairs up. If you stick around, we’ll get to know your face pretty quick, but for the first few days make sure to stop by the desk and show your room key before you head upstairs, okay?’
‘No problem,’ I replied, grabbing the key and the receipt as I turned toward the stairs.
But before I could get away, Vern barked, ‘Whoa, not so fast!’ As a first-time guest, I was obliged to listen to a recitation of the ‘house rules’. Which turned out to be the usual list of Noes.
No hotplates. No loud music. No overnight guests (unless you cleared them at the desk first and paid for their stay in advance).
‘The front doors are locked at 10 p.m. every night,’ Vern added. ‘After ten, ring the outside buzzer, hold your room key up to the glass and the night clerk will let you in. Any questions?’
‘Yeah,’ I grinned. ‘What time’s the Continental breakfast?’
‘Hey, Marvin, you hear that?’ Vern called out to the other old-timer doing bookwork behind the desk. ‘We got us a comedian. Wants to know what time we serve the Continental breakfast!’
Marvin swung his swivel chair around to get a look at me and shouted back, ‘That’d be right after morning yoga class, son!’ Proving I wasn’t the only comedian in the room.
Heading past the elevator on my way to the wide marble staircase, I noticed the curling corners of the ‘Out of Order’ sign taped above the call buttons and had a hunch that, in the Joyce at least, ‘on the fritz’ was a terminal diagnosis. Which made me thankful I hadn’t gotten stuck with a room on the fourth floor. How the pensioners in the place managed without an elevator was difficult to fathom. They must have had legs like mountain goats.
Room 222 was just off the stairwell, and when I opened the door to take my first look at it there were no surprises. It was basically a clone of every other flophouse room I’d rented in recent years. Standing in the doorway, I took it all in at a glance. The sagging bed with two lumpy pillows and a threadbare bedspread. The tiny hand sink tucked into a corner, its porcelain bowl crazed with a spidery web of tiny cracks. The unframed mirror above the sink, splotched with dark patches where the silvering had flaked off over time. The indestructible, steel-framed straight-back chair, de rigueur not just in flophouses but in discriminating parole offices and psych ward rec rooms throughout the land. Then, of course, there was the room’s lone window, which looked out over (you guessed it) the concrete walls of a blind airshaft – at the bottom of which lay a multicoloured glass mosaic composed of broken wine and beer bottles, an organic art installation that changed nightly as the dead soldiers came whistling down past my window and shattered on top of their fallen brothers. And, finally, the obligatory four-drawer dresser, with two missing drawer-pulls and a cherrywood top whose edges were deckled black with cigarette burns.
All of which, I should add, sat atop a layer of crusty industrial carpet – in this case, in a mottled brown, though mottled by what I didn’t care to speculate. For twenty-two dollars a week, that’s what you get. But I wasn’t disappointed in the least. The only furnishings in the room that mattered to me were the solid wood door and the sturdy Yale lock that secured it. Everything else, no matter how seedy, was a bonus. Including the thick red brick that was sitting on the windowsill – an amenity I’d never encountered in any of my previous flops.
At first, I couldn’t figure out what purpose the brick might serve. But when I lifted up the lower half of the window to let in some fresh air, the damned thing came crashing back down like a guillotine blade the instant I took my hand away – and suddenly the brick’s purpose was no longer a mystery. And the brick proved to be more versatile than I’d imagined. Depending whether you stood it upright, or laid it down flat, or placed it on its side, you could prop the window open at three different heights, letting you adjust how much cold air flowed into the room. Which was handy, since the room was hotter than a Brooklyn tenement in August and there was no way to adjust the flow of steam clanking through the old cast-iron radiator beside the dresser. I know, because I tried. Only to discover that someone had removed the handle from the radiator’s regulator valve.
Shaking my head in disbelief, I thought, Yep, Bob, you weren’t joking. The vandals had taken the handles. And, apparently, the window sash weights too.
Closing the door behind me, I savoured the satisfying click of the lock. I then paused for a moment to read the notices posted on the back of the door, all of them mounted behind protective Plexiglas and securely screwed into the door’s solid wood. As always, I checked the ‘In Case of Emergency’ map to make sure I knew which exit to head for in the event of a fire – definitely information worth knowing before you nod off in a flophouse like the Joyce, where nearly every lodger is a smoker, and the only part of the cut-rate mattresses that won’t burn is their ‘fire-retardant’ labelling.
Beneath the emergency exit map hung a sign in bold letters that read: ‘NO HOTPLATES ALLOWED! By Order of the Portland Fire Department.’
‘Fuck the PFD!’ read the comment scrawled in Magic Marker on the sign’s protective plastic. That made me smile. Judging by the aromas wafting through the half-open transom window above my door, ‘fuck the PFD’ seemed to be the general attitude toward the no-hotplate rule. On top of the usual undertones of mildew and roach spray, I caught definite whiffs of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Dinty Moore’s Beef Stew – the same two favourites that had flavoured the air in the hallways of every transient hotel I’d ever briefly called home. This was an encouraging sign. It meant the Joyce enforced the no-hotplate rule the same way the other flops did – only when the fire inspector showed up for a visit.
As soon as I could put together a little extra cash, the first thing on my ‘home improvements’ list would be a used hotplate. The pawnshops in the Burnside District were full of them. I could probably pick one up for five bucks or less, which was a small price to pay for the freedom it would buy me. Not just the freedom to heat up a hot meal when I felt like it, but, more importantly, the freedom to withdraw from the daily grind on the hand-out circuit. When you’re forced to structure your days around the fixed schedules dictated by the Samaritan ‘establishment’, you forfeit all pretence of independence and just take your place among the herd. As I’d discovered, it’s a routine that wearies the soul pretty quickly. I had only been on the streets of Portland for a month, but I was already tired of queuing up in the soaking rain outside the Blanchet House every afternoon, and even more tired of singing for my supper at the Rescue Mission every night. With a hotplate in my room, my time would once again be my own. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one. Come Monday, my next scheduled plasma donation day, I’d be hitting the pawn shops the minute I left the Stab Lab.
In the meantime, I’d make do with cold food. I had stopped at a bodega on my way to the Joyce and picked up a can of pork and beans, a box of doughnuts and a quart of milk, which was now chilling nicely on the wide ledge outside my brick-propped window. I was hungry after giving blood, but I put off eating for the time being. What I needed more than food was a hot shower, so I stripped down to my skivvies, tucked a frayed hotel bath towel around my waist and headed down the hall to the communal shower room, where the hotel’s old boiler didn’t let me down. I must have stayed in the shower for nearly half an hour, till every mirror in the room was fogged, and still the hot water neve
r faltered. It was bliss, I tell you. Pure bliss!
Even the fact that I had nothing but the same unwashed clothes to put on once I got back to my room didn’t spoil my good mood. Not after my first hot shower in nearly a month. Anyway (as John would say), a quick trip to the St Vincent de Paul thrift shop over the weekend was all it would take for me to stock my empty dresser drawers with hand-me-down clothes. And it wouldn’t cost me a dime, either. Father Gary, the parish priest who ran the Sunday meal programme at St Francis of Assisi Church, had given me a voucher for the thrift shop. I’d been holding onto it for several weeks, not wanting to burden myself with extra belongings while I was still roughing it out on the streets, but now that I had a home base it was time to cash it in.
It wasn’t till I’d finished dressing and sat down to eat my supper that I realised I’d forgotten to pick up a can opener at the bodega, so I had no way to open my can of pork and beans. What now, dumbass? I considered knocking on one of my neighbours’ doors but decided it would be better to stick with the devil I knew, so I took my can of beans downstairs to the lobby and opened it with a can opener that Vern dug out of the junk drawer behind his desk. Then, as I was climbing the stairs back up to the second floor, I had an oddly unsettling encounter with one of my fellow lodgers as we passed each other on the first-floor landing.
He was a gaunt, white-haired old-timer, shuffling along on slippered feet. His checked pyjamas were covered by a blue flannel robe and atop his head sat a navy-blue ball cap with braided gold lettering that spelled out: Pearl Harbor Survivor. I’d never seen him before in my life, and I was pretty sure he’d never seen me either, so it was quite a surprise when he reached out a shaky hand and gripped me lightly on the shoulder as I passed. When I stopped to face him, he smiled like we were the oldest of friends and, in a solicitous tone, said, ‘So, are you starting to find your way?’
Idiot Wind Page 24