Boarding Houses

This is fitting. I went for a look for pictures of boarding houses and found this. Thomas Wolfe's mother: Julie E. Wolfe (Eliza Gant in Wolfe’s books), abandoned her husband and somewhat the rest of the family to run a busy boarding house.

Most of the ones I lived in looked a lot like this one. This one is better kept up since its now a monument to another very tall guy. Wolfe was my height.

The first one I moved into was in Bloomington- straight from my mother's house- it didn't have a caretaker living there. It was about four blocks from the restaurant where I worked. Had two floors and communal kitchen and bathroom per floor. Lots of music students. An opera singer right over me who would sing all day long on the weekends and sometimes late at night if she had company. I had an air-tight plastic pickle barrel to put my socks in at the end of my work shift because they smelled so bad. I had to shampoo the rug to get my deposit back when I moved out. There was a second one I was briefly in before I got married that had cheaper rent cause I was trying to save money.

When I came back to Bloomington, I was back in one for a little while and then shared apartments and trailers for a while and then was back in one again before I left for New Orleans. I've already described the places in New Orleans earlier here.

When I got to Monterey in '76, I found another one up the hill from Cannery Row. It was ok. The upstairs bath had no water pressure so you had to get up early to beat the morning rush and shower downstairs. I met Tim there. He was a jazz musician and a painter. We spent an evening painting an abstract painting from the crack on the wall of his room. He found a house in Pacific Grove that he and I another guy could share.

                                                                          Lauren Bacall's Boarding House 
I had always imagined when I was young that I might some day end up back in one of these. Fred, my friend that worked at the bookstore in New Orleans lived the end of his life in one I think. Sort of like John Wayne in "The Shootist" Not so sure that will happen now, since I have an abundance of family.