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.
