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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.

To Utah

There were a couple of boarding houses between the subdivision and northern Utah, but I thought I'd do a whole riff on those. We had a little house outside of Logan. I looked like this except it was white. We had very little furniture and didn't really unpack a lot of the boxes we brought. I brought all of my books. I thought we were going to live there a while. Marti decided to bred the Miniature Schnauzer and we had puppies by winter. They all broke out of the pen or were stolen and so the money making scheme didn't work. I think they were stolen. I walked and walked out across the fields covered with snow and found absolutely no trace of them.

Before it snowed, the grew hay around us and harvested it two or three times. I had a major allergic reaction, the only time I was ever in pain from hay. I also lost a whole lot of weight, because I was told I was eating too much and we couldn't afford that much money for food.

After the snow came in September, our truck started not starting in the cold mornings and our neighbor had to pull us out to get us going. Marti, it turned out didn't finish her requirements for her BA from I.U. and so the job with the Logan Park & Rec never happened and she ended up waiting tables again. I changed me major to Allied Arts Ed because I was convinced that there were too many English teachers in the world, but I was lousy at Shop and Woodworking and probably wouldn't have done it anyway. I worked 12 different jobs in eight months.

The whole thing was a big mistake. We moved into town in the last few months there, but it didn't help matters any. We rented a spare room to a girl that didn't pay her rent and then moved out.

I did climb Mt. Logan. I did have my consciousness raised by going to encounter groups at the school. Did begin to learn about self acceptance which really took me another ten years before it began to sink in. Probably would have done all that anyway, where ever I was. Except for Mt. Logan. There was a girl that I was supposed to meet in NYC the following year, but it never happened. Anna is still in Utah.

The Boring Subdivision

I sort of lied. A fifteen minute walk from my boring subdivision was a state forest. It looked a lot like this in the spring. We captured hibernating turtles and sold them around the neighborhood. A friend I went bow hunting and came back with squirrel. I built a tree house out in the middle of no where where no one but me went and spent hours out there one summer reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a tree nursery in the opposite direction that had a wild duck pond. A half hour walk took you down to Griffy Lake.  

Subdivision

After the divorce and my Mom got some money, she bought a little three bedroom house outside of town in a little subdivision. We rode the bus to school, it would pick us up at the entrance of the whole neighborhood, so we had a ten minute walk down there and home in the afternoon. All the kids knew each other. There were a lot of little trees, because they had all been planted in the last three years and no bushes yet to speak of. A lot of the fathers would spend their weekends working on their houses. One boy's Dad had built their house from scratch. It was boring there. Very little to do. In the summer time, before I could drive, I would walk into town which would take about a half hour. The front windows of every house were lit by the glow of television sets in the evenings. A friend of mine and I thought it looked like some ghostly horror movie. There weren't real people there any more. just a ghostly glow of spirits that couldn't go on. I was out of there as soon as I could get.

Transition Homes

It didn't look like this and there was no motor boat out front. It was about this size in a little neighborhood near the high school. It was a rental. I was with my mother the day we went to look at it. We had to find something quick. I had the golfer's hat that I wore to annoy my brother. (He had started wearing one- a little straw hat with a tee in the brim and I had got one to copy him and so he couldn't wear it any more. It was a 60s thing.You wore it on the back of your head.)

When we went in, I took off the hat and carried it in my hand as we walked through. When we were through, my mother said she wanted to rent it. The guy said 'well, I never rent to divorced women, but the fact that your son took his hat off when he entered the house, I figure you are all right.' So this doesn't end the story.
My Mom wasn't stupid or all that much of a wilting flower. She still had keys to the house that we had been ran out of. She knew he was still going to work in Indianapolis every day. She hired a mover to show up at the house at 9:00 and had them empty everything out and put it into our new rental. I would have loved to see his face when he got home from work that day. Of course then he began stalking her. I remember her running in and locking the door behind her, because he had waited for her to get off work and had followed her home. She didn't know where else to go and was afraid he would try to hurt her if he got her alone somewhere. A Restraining Order got rid of him.

Short Stays

When we were awakened at 4:00 in the morning and told to pack a bag, my brother and sister and I grabbed a few things and loaded them into the back of a taxi with my mother's suitcase and we went to my Great Grandmother's house and moved in with her. I think I was 11 or 12. My Great Grandmother was very old and lived alone in a little house like this. It only had a central potbelly wood burning stove in the living room. There was a big stack of wood out back. My Great Grandmother had outlived her husband and her daughter (my Grandmother). She didn't outlive us. The strain of three kids running around the house did her in. She had a stroke and died while we were there. My brother liked the doctor's Cobra. He bought one later. Of course, when she died the house was left to my father, so we had to move again.