“The Hovel” was 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, home of The Good Life. 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 (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.) where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, (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.) 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,
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. That’s enough of a plan for now. (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)
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 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, 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 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. Denis 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 a guy who had spent a lot of
time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. He might have been a South Vietnamese general. He 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, 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 third 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 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. What eventually 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. 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.
The "Nobody" Series:
Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band
Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)
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