7.44AM
My Pops Terry Theriot used to say waking up early makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. But if you’re already sick, poor and flunked most every lesson in life, then you sleep in till midday like most of the lazy rats who live here. Not me though. I got a clock in my head like a drill sergeant. Snap to at 7 am sharp every day, no need for an alarm clock or nothin. I just got back from a shower down the hallway. On weekdays I tend to prop my walking cane against the door for some privacy and a hot shave before folks start wandering in and pissing in the sink. Next I fed my pigeons, took an insulin shot, and now I’m back in my room writing this diary of the Bell Hotel and the nightmares of living here.
The Bell Hotel ain’t its real name. If the criminals who run the joint ever found out it was me who told about it, it’d be curtains. They’d kick me out and keep my General Assistance money all the same. That’s the scam. Once that’s signed over, they can keep sucking your blood direct from the bank as long as they like. $598 a month for an 8 x 10-foot shoebox with complimentary bedbugs on every pillow. Goddamn vampires. Never blink, not even in broad daylight. I bet there are carpets in here that ain’t had a vacuum run over them since Nixon was president. Worst of all, the boredom that exists in this place. It’s like a thing people breathe. Bad as cigarette smoke.
Anyways, I best quit complaining and introduce myself. My name is David Theriot. I’m a forty-six-year-old Airforce veteran born and raised in Slidell, Louisiana. It’s a blue-collar town on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain. I was a happy enough kid with seven brothers and sisters. My pops worked as an engineer at the C Stennis space center until around 1987 or 88’ when NASA laid off a bunch of folks, my old man included. He started brewing moonshine to make ends meet, and then started drinking it. When I was 18 he flipped his car blind drunk and was in the hospital for three months. All the tendons in his right hand snapped like rubber bands and when they healed up they’d froze in a grip good for nothing but picking a banjo and lashing us with a leather belt. His mind was broken. That’s when the trouble started. I borrowed a month’s rent from a loan shark to move the hell out, then got fired from Walmart. The interest on the loan piled up so I drove two girls to Vegas to pay it back. That’s when I hit the first of many rock bottoms, living out of dumpsters and drifting until I had the bright idea to join the Airforce. I’d need a telephone book to list all the twists and turns that happened since, and I’ll share a few by and by, but first I better get downstairs and tell you all what the hell goes on around here.
11.27AM
I’m sitting in the recreation room on the ground floor of the hotel. There’s a lobby where folks sign-in, a front entrance that opens onto South Van Ness Avenue, a kitchen area with no utensils and a fridge that's padlocked for staff only. It’s your standard zero star layout for an SRO hotel. SRO is short for ‘Single Room Occupancy’. Here in San Francisco, they’ve been around since the Gold Rush. If you were a miner, or a foreigner, or some drifter looking for a cheap room, you paid by the week and lived in an SRO. I ain’t no historian, but I’ve lived in here enough to know there used to be hundreds around the city. SRO’s for the Filipinos in Manilla Town, Japanese in Japantown, Blacks in the Western Addition and Filmore and Latinos in the Mission where this hotel is, although most of the old neighborhood families got pushed out when the rents started spiking. There are about 160 poor souls living here all together including drunks, drug addicts, dealers, and low-lives of every stripe.
There are schizophrenics, ex-school teachers, people with bi-polar disorder, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, and two Catholic priests. There are widowers, grandmothers, cripples, and gambling addicts. It’s like Goddamn Noah’s Ark of degeneration in here.
The smell of sweat reeks to high heaven, and the walls are thin as rice paper. You can hear every grunt, fart, sob and scream that happens twenty-four hours a day. Old Mike across the hall is a veteran like me. He served two combat tours in Vietnam and when he wakes up yelling from the PTSD it puts a chill down my spine like an icepick.
Anyways today is Donut Day and there’s already a line of folks in pajamas and slippers scratching their butts and shuffling up to the picnic table. There could be a red flag on the roof and a North Korean missile headed straight at it and folks wouldn’t run down the stairs half as quick as they do for a Krispy Kreme or a bear claw. You got to fill out a page of paperwork to get one, but it’s worth it. I read somewhere too much sugar grows receptors on your brain like devil’s horns, but damn if life ain’t too short for morning buns. That’s my kryptonite. Last month at the hospital I weighed 330 pounds. Doctor said I got to change my diet and start exercising to get the diabetes under control, but my toe ulcers and the pins-and-needles in my ankles get even worse if I walk too far. Damned If I do, damned if I don’t. Still, soft socks and sandals seem to help, so I’ll take a stroll round the block to 16th Street and take care of some business.
2.17PM
I'm back in my room after my trip to the 16th BART station plaza. It's like an outdoor market where folks from SROs like the Bell Hotel, shelters and tents go to hang out and shop for bargains. Between the dumpster-divers, trash-pickers, storage-container traders, and hustlers selling brand-new stuff that just ‘fell off the back of a truck’ you can get most anything you need. Toiletries. Cellphones. Ramen Noodles. Comic books. Power-tools. Hell, I’ve even seen someone selling a three-foot replica of the Titanic glued together by hand. I bartered a new homing pigeon from an old boy called Lone Star Swan in exchange for a 1993 Mickey Mantle baseball card. The pigeon is a young male with good bright eyes, a curved neck and a wide wingspan. Lone Star has a screw or two loose but he’s a nice guy and a bona-fide pigeon whisperer. He catches the birds with a leg noose made of dental floss. I ain’t made any hard cash from my homing pigeons just yet, but this one could be a world-champion once I train it. In Belgium and Japan, a prime breeding bird like this one can fetch a seller more than a million bucks. I was a mechanic in the Air Force before I got discharged, so I know a thing or two about aerodynamics, and this bird is basically an F16 with feathers.
I bought a new DVD player for $10, that’s a real bargain. Plus, it’s got the original power cables too. You gotta be careful with that stuff. My neighbor from two-doors down, Jimmy G., squirrely junkie but handy with a screwdriver, he hotwired a second hand microwave that wasn’t working right. Story goes he came in drunk one night, started defrosting a two-pound frozen lasagna in this microwave and passed out on his bed. Problem is every goddamn room in the Bell Hotel has only got one power socket. Every DVD player, fridge, television set, toaster, hairdryer and whatever the hell else needs electricity, has to run plugged into a 110-volt power board. So, the microwave bursts into flames with Jimmy G. still blacked out and that sets off the sprinkler system. Now nothing much works well in the Bell Hotel, but those sprinklers flooded the floor with something biblical. I’m whackin’ the door with my cane trying to wake up Jimmy G. and in less than a minute there’s a mini Niagara Falls pouring down the stairs. We got Jimmy G. out before he got barbecued, but the hotel says everybody who had their rooms flooded and wants compensation has to sue Jimmy G. for any water damage to their stuff. The hotel ain’t got no insurance, apparently. Now Jimmy says he’s gonna sue the manufacturer of the microwave. Good luck with that. What a mess, like most of what happens around here
5.51PM
Back down in the recreation room, about two dozen residents are sprawled across the pews of the church they worship: The Church of Television. That’s the source of all evil. It’s like a fifty-pound altar bolted to the wall. There are three rows of brown couches covered in clear plastic sheets and folks jabbering about what to watch. Everybody loves Friends and Seinfeld. Serial killer shows are pretty popular too. But mostly it’s a marathon of drug commercials. Viagra. Shingles pills. Cancer meds with side-effects that sound worse than dying. And of course, an ad for Novolox insulin pens, which reminds me mine is completely empty. Maybe Lone Star is right and the cable companies can read our minds. Most Vets get medication for free through the VA Hospital in the Outer Sunset, which is basically a resort with spas, massage-tables and ocean views, but because I got an administrative discharge and ‘bad paper’, I have to pay $283 out-of-pocket for a pen and stand ten hours in a hallway for it.
Next, a commercial for the Wonder Mop comes on and kicks off another round of ‘Toiletgate’ speculation. Last week someone stole the toilet paper from every restroom in the hotel. Of course the staff are too lazy to look at the video footage and said unless the thief owned up, or we turned them in within 72 hours, we’d have to buy our own damn toilet paper. Everyone knows it was Barbara-Anne who did it. Barbara-Anne is the trouble-maker-in-chief of the Bell Hotel, always sitting front and center with the TV remote clutched in her bony claw. She looks like a thousand-year-old voodoo doll and never stops conjuring up new mischief.
Anyways I had enough of this scene. I’m gonna head up to the roof for a breath of fresh air and introduce my new pigeon to his flock-mates. I got a top-secret training facility I built up there. It’s called area 52. Nobody knows about it but a Mexican kid called Elvis who works at the front desk, and Jimmy G., who helped me wire together the loft where the pigeons live. I’ve got 22 pigeons all together, and I give them enough food for 20. That keeps them hungry, which is how you get them to come home once they fly off. Training birds ain’t rocket science; once they learn there's a bowl of sunflower seeds waiting for them back in the loft, they’ll fly one or two miles and head straight back.
But if the birds are too young and dumb when you flag them up, chances are they’ll just fly off and never be seen again. The secret is discipline and a strict routine.
9.09PM
After I fed the pigeons and swept out the loft I headed out to meet my girlfriend Madelaine and get a take-out dinner from Irma’s Papanga, the Filipino BBQ joint on the corner. Madelaine says they serve the best Lumpia north of Manila. She’d know, she’s travelled the whole world and even flew in a Concord when she was two. Anyways, our plan was to eat in the recreation room and watch the Blues Brothers on Showtime, but of course Barbara-Anne ruined everything as usual. The rule is you gotta sign on the TV clipboard if you want a prime-time slot like 7’ O’clock. Jimmy G. put his name down for us first thing this morning, but at some point Barbara-Anne, that old evil bag of bones, scribbled out Jimmy’s signature and wrote what she wanted to watch over the top, Shark Week or some such crap. Pretty soon Jimmy G. and Barbara-Anne were bawling in each other’s faces. One of the old priests, already half-soaked from the hip flask he keeps in his pocket, jumped up on his chair to try and keep the peace, but when the insults started flying his way he went up in flames, red-faced and righteous and bellowing how sinners who eat sour grapes are gonna have their teeth rotten, or some such nonsense. He didn’t shut up until Tito, who used to be a Hell’s Angel in Sacramento, grabbed that preacher by the collar and swung him into a plastic picnic table of potatoes and powdered milk donated by St. Anthony’s church. A real-life Jerry Springer show kicked-off. The only people who weren’t ripping each other’s hair out were me, Madelaine and a few other clean-living folks who don’t drink or do drugs. Lucky that nice kid Elvis was working reception and turned a blind eye to me smuggling Madelaine up to my room. Rule is any guest before the 7pm curfew has to show ID with a fixed address, but Madelaine lives in a tent for Christ’s sake, like most homeless folks who visit here.
We cooked up the Lumpia on my George-Foreman grill for dinner and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on the new DVD player. The song ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ made Madelaine cry in a happy way. She said it reminded her of being a young hippy girl with flowers in her hair dancing in Golden Gate Park. Seeing the little crow's-feet wrinkles in the corner of her smile, that made me tear-up too. Nobody with a heart as good as Madeleine's deserves to be sleeping under a freeway overpass with a bunch of crackheads for company. Not a seventy-year-old lady with class like hers. They say fortune favors the brave, but I don’t know if it does. She says her great Granddaddy was the founder of Wrigley’s chewing gum and owned a building in New York. When he died and the family started with the bickering and bad-blood and who-gets-what from the will, she ran away to San Francisco to protest the war. She dropped an acid tab some guru gave her and says she never came out the black hole it pulled her into, that the chemistry in her brain changed and it was like a shadow that wasn't hers started following her and has done so ever since. Still, no matter how many dark things cross her mind with the voices and the night-sweats and such, I love her all the same. I’m her candle and I’ll keep burning for her as long as my heart holds up. Ours isn’t a hanky-panky love, it’s more special than that. It’s the love that’s left when you realize everything else in this world is an illusion. Anyone who's ever lived through hell knows it.
Back in ‘05 I was home in Slidell seeing my dying Pops when Hurricane Katrina hit. I must have walked down the street we lived on a thousand times and would have sworn it was flat as a tack. But soon as that flood water rose up, one end of the street was six feet underwater and the other end high and dry. I realized then and there our eyes are liars and nothing is equal as we imagined to be. Strange thing is, for all the horror, bodies floating all purple and bloated, people came together. They helped each other out. Strangers camped on each other's roof-tops and shared food. They hugged, they cried, they forgot themselves and still found happiness in that sea of mud. That’s what love is. San Francisco could do with a good flood to put all the cats and rats on the same level.
6.49AM
I woke up before dawn with a bad feeling. Normally I can hear the pigeons on the roof flapping and cooing, but it was dead silent. I headed up the stairs with my swollen ankles burning like fire and discovered Area 52 was empty. All 22 birds disappeared. I felt a sharp pain in my heart and for a moment I thought it might stop right then and there. The culprits began running through my head when I realized the latch was still down. Somehow the birds must have pushed out a brick from the back wall and flew the loft. I am dumb struck. I mean, no one bird could have done it. It must have taken a dozen or more, all flapping at the same time to budge a damn brick. I heard of individual jailbreaks, but pigeons working as a team, if that don’t leave you slack-jawed I don’t know what will. Being young and wild still, I just got to hope their bellies bring them back home for sunflower seeds come 5 o’clock. I lost every bet I ever made in life, but I got a feeling I’ll see them back here.