"Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?" - M. C. Escher

By the time I get up to the fifth-floor room, one of the officers has already disappeared into the hole. I shuffle sideways between the door and hasty pile of belongings to take a look. I’m not often in tenant’s rooms – while the locks operate more on a social understanding than security, respect is offered by limiting my entrance to when asked in. The room is small: a cupboard, sink, single bed normally fills it, barely leaving room to function. Like many of the other rooms in the SRO, that room to function has been squeezed out by piles of dumpster-diving finds or remnants of a life before here. If you’ve ever tossed a particular item out, odds are good that I’ve seen it or its equivalent in one of these rooms. Sometimes it feels like all the garbage in the world moves through this place.

This ragged hole in the ceiling, almost the same length and width as the single bed beneath it, had been quietly whispered by tenants for weeks.

“He’s in the ceiling, stuffing bikes up into the roof.”

“Trevor’s got this hole he cut, put a tarp over it. I can hear him stomping up there in his boots.”

“You gotta do something about that hole in Trevor’s room.”

This last whisper is something new: do. It’s only the last couple of months that people have been asking me to ‘do’ anything.
So we do.

The cops have leaned a ladder against the wall. The tenant has used shiny red paint to mark a thin border around the room. The paint has dripped, giving the stomach-rolling impression that the walls are cut and bleeding, beads of red glistening. This bleeding motif is not unique here – I’ve also seen a night stand painted to suggest gore oozing out around the closed drawers. I suspect there’s a possible psychology thesis for some eager grad student linking IV drug use and compulsion to ‘bleed’ your surroundings. My new-found skepticism regarding blood on walls is courtesy of the toilet stall I use at work. When I started at the Hotel, someone had sprayed one of the walls in the cubicle when shooting up. I’ve watched the red splatter absorbed into the plaster quickly turn brown and then, over months, fade to a ghostly gray.

Anyway, the ceiling hole beckons. A beam is visible at the edge of the ragged plaster, the light from the officer’s flashlight animating the edges. I move out and watch from the door as the bikes start crashing down.  Another tenants sidles up to me, waits until everyone has left before he speaks.

“Took your sweet time getting up here.”

I assume he is making a nuanced observation that the wheels of justice turn slow. Or he’s making a nasty link between my slower stair ascents and the new donut shop around the corner. I choose the first interpretation but check the waistband of my pants.

I shrug. “It takes time to follow the rules.”

I think about how long it has taken to check this rumor out. Whether you pay your own rent or the government pays for you, everyone who rents has the same protection through the Landlord and Tenant’s Act. One of those protections regards access to rental properties: notice of at least 24 hours must be given and access hours are limited to between 8 am and 9 pm unless otherwise agreed.

 Between a couple of police visits, a request to check the paint in the room for lead that we properly gave notice for, an official city inspection and a straight-forward request, we’ve attempted to get into the room a handful of times over the past month. The city inspection the day before had finally gained access to the room. Other than the smell of fresh paint, the room seemed normal. Only after a final police visit had anything shook loose.

After talking to Trevor for about half an hour and confiscating some loose bikes in the hallway, the officers returned to the front desk.  They asked for rumors and general opinion, all of us skirting guesses about who would fill in the power vacuum opened up by removing the big bad tenant about three weeks ago. We’re trying on the idea of Trevor filling that role when he comes down to confess. He offers up the bikes in the ceiling, having covered the hole with a tarp and painting over the whole thing. He shows the officers that night and agrees to allow access the next day when they return.

I keep an eye on the pile of bikes and bike parts growing in the hallway on the fifth floor. A few more residents come to watch as a handful of cops haul the bikes downstairs. When a tenant heads downstairs, they’re requested to take some of the parts with them. Some accept, some decline. In the end, a couple of them keep assisting creating a conveyor belt style line of bikes headed out, roughly 50 frames and almost a hundred wheels. Considering the general mistrust of police, the scene of residents helping officers to clean out the mess from the building feels too pat and scripted. Maybe this is a turning point.

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time. - Arthur Koestler

Sigh.

Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Herbert Kaufman

As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too.
Johnny Depp

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. - Carl Jung

I attended my first work-related funeral yesterday. It could have been my second; a resident died a couple of months after I started working at The Hotel. I only met him a handful of times so I passed on attending his memorial. He came to visit once, after moving to a hospice. This little old man wheezing up the stairs, half-collapsing into a seat after the single flight up to the office. I remember looking at him and assuming he was in his late seventies. My coworker knew he was 52.

Anyway, we'll call her Melanie. Melanie moved into The Hotel about two months ago. An imaginary file on her would tell you that she was in her late twenties, bipolar and had a raging drug habit. She'd often comment that doing drugs was her job. After she died, one of the other desk workers commented that he had never seen anyone go on so many long benders, staying awake for days at a time. In this place, distinguishing yourself by drug use is even more impressive, like commenting you're a fast runner when you live with an Olympic track team. I remember one of the last conversations I had with her...

"Do you think I'm pretty?"
She was standing in the half-open door, a sweaty slick mess of hair and unwashed clothes. Her face seemed tight, swollen pick marks on her cheeks. Someone had explained those pick marks to me: some people, when high, think something is under their skin. They try to get it out. Not finding anything simply makes them pick further. Her question is unexpected, I'm left fumbling for an answer.

"I think you look tired. Why don't you grab some sleep?"
She muttered something in the tune of negative, heads towards the mirror and starts picking at a swollen spot on her cheek. We talked about Courtney Love, debating if her career had pretty much ended back in the '90s. Music was a safe topic: distracting but neutral. I regularly inserted comments suggesting sleep and, finally, when the conversation took too much of a left turn into her ranting about her ability to control everyone, a firm suggestion about returning to her room. 

At the memorial, there's a circle of chairs and a table with candles. Her picture is next to a book for you to write words in. A brown wooden guitar is lying under the table. It looks functional from the front but walking behind it, I notice the back is splintered and separated from the body. When the memorial service begins, most of the chairs are filled. Aside from her mother and her aunt, the other people are support or social workers.

When she was new to The Hotel, Melanie showed me one of her online profiles. Once, she had a job at a big name music store, played in a band. Like me, she grew up in a small town and moved to the big city. I'm still surprised at how often these conversations come up, that people want you to know who they were before they came here. Even the first time someone explained how they had had a job and a 'fully furnished three bedroom apartment', I wasn't shocked. Everyone was somewhere else before here, I think. Why wouldn't you have been fully functioning in society before you were here?

For the memorial, I had picked some music. Recalling our conversations and her online profile, I had a list of heavy metal and grunge, none of which would be appropriate background music. I settled on acoustic covers of grunge music and string covers of heavy metal songs. There were long pauses as people told stories about Melanie. During one of those pauses, Hole's 'Malibu' filled in:

Crash and burn
All the stars explode tonight
How'd you get so desperate?
How'd you stay alive?
Help me, please, burn the sorrow from your eyes
Oh, come on be alive again
Don't lay down and die

Hey, hey
You know what to do
Oh baby, drive away, to Malibu


The Sunday before last, I was at work. Melanie had been back from the hospital for a couple of days. I hadn't seen her. Since her being taken to the hospital had been a mess of her going off her medication, going on a bender and threatening to shoot me, I chalked her non-appearances up to avoidance. I wouldn't want to see me, either.  There was this smell in the hallway: ripe garbage, a broken sewer line, take your pick and multiply it. I checked the rest of the hallway, couldn't figure out where it could be coming from. By the end of my shift, it had dissipated. Apparently, it was worse on Monday and the staff started checking rooms.

At the memorial, people are tactfully pulling up memories about Melanie. Tactful because, hey, that's their job. All these people are employed through various companies and organizations to look after people, like Melanie, when their life goes off the rails. I wonder where are all the other people are, Melanie's friends and visitors. She was popular in the building and, the weekend before the memorial, I had talked with some residents that were upset about her death. I talked to a co-worker who reassured me that, yes, he had reminded people about the service that morning.

The distance between The Hotel and the service was a couple of blocks. Most of the people who live at The Hotel are on welfare; constraints on their time is minimal. I rushed out of my morning class, skipping my afternoon class, grabbed a train and still arrived.  I hadn't slept with her, done drugs with her, borrowed her clothes or called her my friend. But I was here and those people weren't. Being angry about this surprises me, still. When I talk to Max about this, he points out a range of reasons for people to not go. Justifications can range from slightly delusional (if I don't go, she isn't dead) to avoidance (the drugs  I'm doing won't kill me). If at the heart, addictions are about avoiding pain then I guess it makes sense not to show up.

“Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.” - B. Johnson

Someone on facebook commented on a desire to increase their patience. I know that's something that I've improved in the last year or so and I wanted to reflect on it, see if I can suss out what changed.

The only large aspect that altered for me was perspective. I think before, when I felt impatient, it felt like whatever was irking me was taking 'too long'. That it shouldn't be x... x being this difficult, this complicated.

“The best things in life are unexpected -

...because there were no expectations.”   - Eli Khamarov

Thinking about AJ, consulting me about visiting an addictions counselor in a wash of beery breath. I'm trying to be tactful, offer that maybe visiting the counselor later might be a better idea.
"Oh. You can smell the beer, huh?" He chuckles.
This completely throws me, as if pretending to not recognize his intoxication is not a kindness needed.
"Yeah.... uh, they might like it better if you go in sober."
He nods, then counters, "But if you can't talk to an addictions counselor when you're drunk, when can you go in?"
I consider it and coincide his point. If not then, when?
 
I notice the rat on his shoulder, tucked between his neck and his hoody just before I head out the door.

“Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.” Oscar Wilde

I'm climbing up the stairs for the first time to The Hotel and thinking about the reply I got during a conversation with a constable during a walking tour of East Hastings.

A couple of weeks ago, I had been invited by one of the retired Inspectors to go on a walk-around of the area. He had been taking small groups of police hopefuls from the judo classes out. The night it was offered, a handful of us gathered at the downtown office and headed out with a couple of constables escorting us.

I had asked what had surprised her when she started working in District One. We kept walking with the group, then stopped to wait at the corner of Hastings and Main, watching the people gathered in front of the Carnegie Center.

"The dirtiness", she finally replied. "Just how dirty everything gets down here."

At The Hotel, I've been buzzed in through the glass and metal bars, up cracked narrow lino steps. The walls are plaster and embossed, like in some of the fancier furniture stores a few blocks away in Yaletown. I don't think 'Pre-Reno Flophouse' is the mood they want to evoke. I reach the top of the stairs, turn a blind corner and see the front desk. 

"Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved." - Lao Tzu

I'm moving out of Livejournal... I'm irritated by the new ads that interrupt you and I'd like to play with analytic options that are added in rather than me making a Frankenstein  version.