Boarding House Blues
Maybe you’ve read about boarding houses, probably before your era. Widow ladies mostly, but not always, rented out rooms by the week or month or even the year to supplement their income. For two summers I lived in a boarding house with 3 rooms for rent upstairs from the landlady, Jane Dean, the town librarian, who lived downstairs. I don’t remember exactly the rent but around 50 dollars a month, an amount that cut into my Coca-Cola truck driver/delivery sales commissions a bit but I was around 20 years old and this was 1969. Plus … my girlfriend lived in that town so there you are.
Mostly it was just me and Glenn, a 50-ish alcoholic who would disappear for days at a time on his benders, then return so hungover he would hole up in his bed for more days at a time, recovering before the next cycle began. He admitted openly he had a problem but was powerless to control it. Usually he had no memory of most of the days spent drunk and the ones sleeping it off couldn’t have been much either. Ms. Dean explained one day to me that he was harmless, tremendously sad but otherwise a likeable fellow. How he found money to pay his rent, much less his bar bills, was a mystery to me.
The only other tenant we had was one short-termer, who stayed for a week. She came for a science fiction book writers’ convention. Since we shared the kitchen, we had some conversations over an occasional meal where I learned over my habitual TV dinner and chicken pot pie, that she had written a book about alien encounters. Fiction, I presumed incorrectly, what was a serious faux pas, it turned out. No, she was writing, she said, from personal experience.
At the time I had aspirations myself to be a writer. Not that a career as a truck driving pop salesman wasn’t appealing, but my colleagues who did have that career all urged me to stay in college and find other lines of work. I totally agreed. And even thought maybe this particular alien encounter might make a fine beginning. But my fellow boarder proved to be fairly insane and any hope of turning her into my main character dimmed considerably after our second and last dinner together.
What I think now, looking back 50 plus years, is that a boarding house was a lot like riding the Greyhound bus cross-country. All of us fairly itinerant, mostly poor, hauling our small possessions, waiting to get off at some further stop. Glenn died of cirrhosis not long after I left. Jane Dean retired. I went back to college. And I have no doubt our science fiction writer is safely situated on some exo-planet where, hopefully, her fellow boarders treat her well.
Tags: Boarding House, Living in the Past, Renting Rooms