Ecstatic but exhausted, Stephanie and I arrived in San Francisco.
Not the lovely San Francisco you see on post cards, but the real city, and a
particularly grungy neighborhood, near the corner of 16th and
Mission Street, where I'd been living. I liked the location because a BART
station was only footsteps away, but the hotel itself was exactly like hundreds
of other residential hotels in the city. It was sixteen steps up from the
sidewalk, but one step up from homelessness.
The formal term is "single room occupancy," or SRO.
They're generally ramshackle old buildings from an earlier era, constructed as
working-class housing for single people, but now used exclusively by the
poorest people in the city. An SRO or residential hotel might have dozens of
residents, and each has a room with a bed and a
dresser and a sink, and that's all. There are shared toilets and showers down
the hall.
Here's a picture I snagged off the internet; it's not the rez
hotel where I lived, but it's similar and probably close by. There are shops
and restaurants on the street level, and behind a nondescript, unlocked door,
up the stairs and behind the windows, that's where poor people live.
It
was called the Mission Arms Hotel — "Mission" because it was deep in
a sketchy corner of San Francisco's Mission District, and "Arms"
because you'd better carry a weapon for self-defense. I was worried
about Stephanie moving in. Some unsavory characters lived there, and the notion
of her navigating from the sidewalk up the stairs and down the hall to our
room, was cause for concern. I'd given her a canister of mace, and asked her to
keep it handy when I wasn't around. (We weren't certain, but I'd been told that
mace was illegal in California. If it's illegal that's a stupid law, and Steph
and I generally believed that stupid laws should be ignored.)
I
lived there for the super-cheap rent, and also, of course, because I was an
idiot. Everyone else in the building lived there because they had no place else
to go. The occupants were virtually all single men, who seemed about half a
welfare check from being homeless. Very few women lived in the building, and it
goes without saying that there were no children — that wasn't a rule, it was
just common sense. Seeing a kid walk into the building would've been reason
enough to call Child Protective Services.
There's
no guessing how old the Mission Arms was, but it was not in good repair. There
were cracks in the walls, funky smells even in the empty rooms, and in the
heavily-trafficked areas of the hallway you could see through the carpet. Loud
arguments could often be heard — residents arguing with each other, or with
themselves. Once in a while you'd find a needle in the hallway. We had a view
of the dumpster out my window, though the scent only reached us on very sunny
days.
The landlords were married immigrants, last name Patel, first
names never mentioned. They ran the hotel with their two sons, Ramesh and Saju,
both of whom were born and raised in America. Any of the four Patels might be
working the front desk during the day, but at night they all went home to the
suburbs, leaving only a phone number posted on the locked door to the office.
I was on good terms with the Patels, or thought I was. They kept
the shared toilets and showers reasonably clean, and I paid my rent on time or
early. I even called 9-1-1 a few times when I smelled fire, and the Patels
thanked me for it. See, once in a while someone in the building fell asleep
while smoking a cigarette in bed, which singed the walls and made for some
overnight excitement. In several years at that hotel, I called the Fire
Department three times, and then stood on the sidewalk while the firefighters
did what firefighters do.
So me and the Patels weren't pals, but we would smile and say
hello in the hallway. I wished them a happy Diwali every October, and they
wished me a merry Christmas each December. Twice they had asked me to be the
big guy on their side when they were having problems with a tenant, and they
gave me half-off on the next week's rent for my trouble. I've never been tough,
but for a lot of years I've been big, and big can be almost as
useful as tough in such situations. I certainly never had any problems with the Patels — until
Stephanie moved in, or tried to.
On our first afternoon in the city, we had rented and mostly
filled a unit at a storage facility, so the truck was empty except for the
things we were bringing to the hotel — several boxes of Stephanie's books and
zines and clothes and kitchen stuff, a box of sheets and blankets, a coffee
table, a few chairs, and Steph's TV. When we parked the truck in front of the
building, Ramesh Patel was smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He eyeballed
the rental truck suspiciously, and when we started carrying stuff from the
truck toward the hotel door, he reacted as if we were smuggling in bombs.
"What's going on? What are you doing?"
"We're moving my wife in, like I told you." I had
already cleared it with Ramesh and his father a few weeks earlier.
"Well, you didn't tell me she'd be moving a truck full of
stuff into the room!"
"It's not a truck full of stuff. We've already put most of
Stephanie's things into storage. This is just a few boxes and chairs and
—"
"No!" he said, emphatically. "You can't do
this."
"What do you mean? We've talked about this, you and me and
your dad. We've arranged this. We've paid for this." I had paid the rent
two weeks in advance — the new rent that was almost double the old rent, since
Steph was moving into my room.
"No! You never told me she was moving all this stuff into the
hotel. That changes everything. That isn't allowed."
"What do you mean, ‘all this stuff'? We're not homesteading.
It's eight cardboard boxes, two chairs, an end table, and a TV set. Everything
else is in storage, and we'll never bring it here. I've already told you, we'll
be moving out in a few weeks or months."
"No, no, you don't understand."
Stephanie put down the box she'd been carrying, and approached
Ramesh, and joined the conversation. "You're right, we don't
understand," she said, in a calm, reasonable tone of voice. "We're
not trying to make things difficult, we're just trying to move me in. I don't
understand what the problem is."
Ramesh took a breath and sighed. "The problem is, this is an
SRO hotel. People who stay here bring a duffel bag or a box or two. Nobody
moves in like it's a home or an apartment. Nobody comes with a moving van. You
can't bring that much stuff into the hotel. I won't allow it."
And he meant it. Ramesh wouldn't allow it. There was no yelling,
no cursing, nobody even raised their voices, but there was also no budging.
This was years ago, and I'll probably mangle the legal details, so let's not
put the rest of the conversation in quotation marks. The gist of it was that
the Patels wanted us to be hotel customers, not tenants. Tenants — someone
renting an apartment, for example — have certain rights under law in the City
of San Francisco, which makes tenants difficult to
evict, so the Patels were adamant that none of the
hotel's customers could legally claim to be tenants. If we carried eight boxes
of Stephanie's stuff up the stairs, and some furniture and a TV set, the Patels
were worried that it might legally make us tenants, instead of hotel customers.
Stephanie took the lead in negotiating with Ramesh, and he agreed
that we could bring three boxes up the stairs and into the room — but no more
than three boxes, and no furniture, and no TV set. She feigned crying and went
back to the truck, but inside the truck she re-arranged the contents of the
boxes so that her toaster oven was inside a box that looked like it was full of
books. Thus, we carried up three boxes of
stuff as agreed, and now we had a toaster oven on top of the dresser, alongside
my hot plate and microwave. All prohibited, of course, but Ramesh didn't
inspect the boxes we brought up, so we got away with it.
Tuckered and frustrated, we drove the truck back to the storage
facility, and unloaded the rest of Stephanie's stuff. Then we drove it to a
U-Haul shop, took care of some paperwork and said goodbye to the truck, and
took a bus back to the hotel.
We picked up a few groceries at a neighborhood bodega, then came
back to the hotel and cooked some frozen mini-pizzas in the toaster oven, rules
be darned. Then we watched some TV on my tiny black-and-white boob tube (which
the Patels had never objected to) and Steph wished she had her magnificent
24-inch color set.
Between the last of the driving, unpacking the truck, and the
argument with Ramesh, we were ready to turn in. When Steph had visited five
months earlier, she'd had her own room at the hotel,
so this was the first time we had spent the night in my tiny bed. It was definitely a one-person bed — single-size or twin,
I think it's called. "This is the same size as the bed in my room, at the
house where I grew up," she said, "and in that bed I was almost
always alone." So our first night's sleep at the rez hotel was a tight fit
indeed, for a very fat man who snores, and a woman who wasn't petite.
The next day I spoke with Ramesh's mother at the front desk, and
for an extra $10 per week we agreed that she would supply us with a second bed.
The hotel didn't have any doubles, queens, or king-size beds, so for the
remainder of our time at that hotel we slept in separate beds, but side-by-side
sharing a blanket. The rest of our time at that hotel, though, was only a few
days.