The Hovel (Nobody Would Want to Live in That Dump)

Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs so it didn’t make the cut) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-head single mom who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, vowing to never open it ever again.

“The Hovel” is located on the corner of 17^th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, highest per capita gay population and highest percentage of police compared to total population. More homosexuals per square foot than San Francisco and more cops per wise guy than in New York. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location…if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill - a gyro joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.

I’ve lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney, and before that, six months in Sidney after moving to Nebraska from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I had a reason for coming to Nebraska, got talked into coming to Lincoln and I’m still here due to inertia, or perhaps momentum; I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.

It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a block to the north. So, I muse, what should I do? How about blowing my brains out? The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to land on some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I just made a vow not to open that thing ever again! As I thought up and rejected idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.

So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now.

Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, assistant store director in a local grocery store chain, but I needed the income from the second job too. It would have been convenient to keep that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I had sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and become a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated ungrammatical assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t at all a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, and who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions. We called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180 ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could “access at any time by calling the toll-free number”. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to talk about the “ASDC Continuum”. On one end were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, and they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were talking about. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they just couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. They were future Sarah Palin supporters. The people who we sold to were right in the middle. Stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort. Okay, maybe not in the middle; closer to the stupid side would be more accurate.

For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes also doing political polling or surveys, but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at selling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of a long and complicated spiel, “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections without taking time to talk to them, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased.

It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.

So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was Dennis the meat cutter, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job. Dennis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was Ba Nguyen Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. Ba could often be found walking up and down 27^th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills (I never inquired about their source). One time he fell asleep and left some food cooking on the stove; it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-head woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he still felt gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows into the alley. One day I came home to find them handcuffed and being led away by the Lincoln Police Department, the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the Native American woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.

I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. Until one day the water was cut off. I came back late on Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning there was still no water, so I bathed and shaved using some bottled water that I had in the fridge. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, everyone that is except for me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment. My landlord couldn’t believe that I’d want to move.