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[1]
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-dealing single mom[2]
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 17th
& 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 percentage of police compared to
total population. 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 [3]
joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them,[4]
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’d 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 got talked into coming to
Nebraska[5],
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 half block to the north. Considering my options, I
briefly consider 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
the hood of 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 had 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[6].
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 it would have been convenient to keep the income from that second job. Two
years pastward[7] from the
events of this paragraph I sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and became 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 a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know it makes little
sense, but they thought that changing that one word solved the problem); 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 also 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’. The people who we sold to were right in the middle of the continuum;
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 right 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,[8]
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 the 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[9]
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 precisely
because I was breaking the rules.
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 Denis the meat cutter, seemingly
the only other person in the building who had a job of any kind. 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 Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was
somewhat nuts. Bao could often be found walking up and down 27th
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-dealing woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s
position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he was still gay nonetheless, 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. From the second floor. 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”. [10]
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. What motivated me to move stemmed from the
water being cut off. I came home late on Friday night, in dire need of a
shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning 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 the reason that we had no water was that 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, but since I was one of the few who actually worked,
“everyone” didn’t include 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. [11]
[1] After
being convinced by my ex-wife to sell my road-worthy yet ugly Chevy Celebrity,
our other car threw a rod in central Nebraska a few weeks later. The only thing
we could afford to replace it was a $400 rust bucket.
[2] To be
fair, I never really ever witnessed
her dealing, but she talked about it a lot
[3] Gyros
are considered by some to be the perfect food, if by “perfect” you mean a
lamb-like substance, dripping with grease and containing enough salt to start
your own ocean.
[4] After a
few months at The Hovel I found that I could often get some free food by
bussing a table or two and mopping up some spills.
[5] Stay
tuned to find out that reason in later chapters
[6] I never
really did do anything about the smell other than leaving the windows open,
even when it was really cold,
lighting candles, spraying Ozium® and discovering the masking properties of
sandalwood incense
[7] Yes, I
know that “pastward” is not a real word, but I read a lot of science fiction,
especially time travel themed science fiction, and time travel science fiction
writers use the word a lot.
[8] I helped
elect Jon Corzine to the U.S. Senate
[9] We were
paid a per-hour rate of anywhere between $8 and $9 per hour, (I started at
$8.25) which was pretty good for 1999, and a commission based on how many sales
per hour we averaged for our shift. If we hit our goal of two sales per hour we
received $2.50 per sale, if we only averaged one sale per hour we only received
$1.00 for every sale. If the holy grail of three sales per hour was maintained
over a shift, the commission was raised to $3.50 per sale. What this meant was
that if I could maintain three sales per hour I was effectively earning $18.75
per hour, more than I was pulling in at my “main” job.
[10] She had
knocked on my door previously, looking to “borrow” ten dollars and spotted the
bottle of Jack Daniels on my bookshelf. The next time, she decided to bypass
the cash and go right for the booze, saving herself a trip to the liquor store
[11] Not
long after I moved out the building was razed and turned into a parking lot.
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