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Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich
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deep under the bed. This Motel 6 is in the latter category, which makes it, homier, you might say, or maybe only more haunted. Walking out from the main entrance, through the VIP Auto Parts parking lot, you reach the Texaco station with a Clipper Mart attached. Crossing the turnpike from the Texaco—a feat that, performed on foot, demands both speed and nerve—brings you to more substantial sources of sustenance, including a Pizza Hut and a Shop-n-Save. This is, of course, a considerable step up from the situation described in J. G. Ballard's harrowing novel Concrete Island, in which the hero crashes onto a median island and finds himself marooned by the traffic, forced to live off the contents of his car and whatever food items he can scrounge from the debris left by motorists. I bring pizza and salad back to my room for dinner, telling myself that anything tastes better when acquired at some risk to life and limb, like venison fresh from the hunt.
How many people, other than fugitives and refugees, ever get to do something like this—blow off all past relationships and routines, say bye-bye to those mounds of unanswered mail and voice-mail messages, and start all over again, with not much more than a driver's license and a Social Security card to provide a thread of continuity to the past? This should be exhilarating, I tell myself, like a dive into the frigid New England Atlantic, followed by a slow, easy swim beyond the surf. But in those first few days in Portland the anxieties of my actual social class take over. Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived. So what am I doing here, and in what order should I be doing it? I need a job and an apartment, but to get a job I need an address and a phone number and to get an apartment it helps to have evidence of stable employment. The only plan I can come up with is to do everything at once and hope that the teenagers at the Motel 6 switchboard can be trusted to serve as my answering machine.
The newspaper I pick up at the Clipper Mart bears the unexpected news that
there are no apartments in Portland. Actually, there are plenty of condos and
“executive apartments” for $1,000 a month or more, but the only low-rent options
seem to be clustered in an area about a thirty-minute drive south, in the soothingly
named town of Old Orchard Beach. Even there, though, the rents are right up
at Key West levels—well over $500 for an efficiency. A few calls confirm my
impression that winter housing for the poor consists of motel rooms that the
more affluent fill up in the summer. [8] You
get the low rates after Labor Day, and your lease expires in June. What about
a share, then? Glenwood Apartments (not its real name) in Old Orchard Beach
is advertising a room at $65 a week, share bath and kit with a woman described
to me on the phone as “a character, but clean”—and I think, hey, that could
be me or at least my new best friend. Navigating with my Clipper Mart map, I
reach the declining, and evidently orchardless, beach town at about ten and
am shown around Glenwood by Earl. He repeats the “character, but clean” part
about my potential housemate, adding that they are “giving her a chance.” I
ask if she has a job, and, yes, she does cleaning. But I'll never meet her because
the place is so disturbing, to the point of probably being illegal. We go into
the basement of this ramshackle combination motel and boardinghouse, where Earl
indicates a closed door—the kitchen, he says—but we can't go in now, because
a guy is sleeping there. He chuckles, as if sleeping in kitchens is just another
one of the eccentricities you have to put up with in the landlord business.
So how do you cook? I want to know. Well, he
How many people, other than fugitives and refugees, ever get to do something like this—blow off all past relationships and routines, say bye-bye to those mounds of unanswered mail and voice-mail messages, and start all over again, with not much more than a driver's license and a Social Security card to provide a thread of continuity to the past? This should be exhilarating, I tell myself, like a dive into the frigid New England Atlantic, followed by a slow, easy swim beyond the surf. But in those first few days in Portland the anxieties of my actual social class take over. Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived. So what am I doing here, and in what order should I be doing it? I need a job and an apartment, but to get a job I need an address and a phone number and to get an apartment it helps to have evidence of stable employment. The only plan I can come up with is to do everything at once and hope that the teenagers at the Motel 6 switchboard can be trusted to serve as my answering machine.
The newspaper I pick up at the Clipper Mart bears the unexpected news that
there are no apartments in Portland. Actually, there are plenty of condos and
“executive apartments” for $1,000 a month or more, but the only low-rent options
seem to be clustered in an area about a thirty-minute drive south, in the soothingly
named town of Old Orchard Beach. Even there, though, the rents are right up
at Key West levels—well over $500 for an efficiency. A few calls confirm my
impression that winter housing for the poor consists of motel rooms that the
more affluent fill up in the summer. [8] You
get the low rates after Labor Day, and your lease expires in June. What about
a share, then? Glenwood Apartments (not its real name) in Old Orchard Beach
is advertising a room at $65 a week, share bath and kit with a woman described
to me on the phone as “a character, but clean”—and I think, hey, that could
be me or at least my new best friend. Navigating with my Clipper Mart map, I
reach the declining, and evidently orchardless, beach town at about ten and
am shown around Glenwood by Earl. He repeats the “character, but clean” part
about my potential housemate, adding that they are “giving her a chance.” I
ask if she has a job, and, yes, she does cleaning. But I'll never meet her because
the place is so disturbing, to the point of probably being illegal. We go into
the basement of this ramshackle combination motel and boardinghouse, where Earl
indicates a closed door—the kitchen, he says—but we can't go in now, because
a guy is sleeping there. He chuckles, as if sleeping in kitchens is just another
one of the eccentricities you have to put up with in the landlord business.
So how do you cook? I want to know. Well, he
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