A Cheap Room In St. Louis
A St. Louis story of the 1970s
As I’ve written elsewhere, my plan in renting a cheap room in St. Louis, during my two years of conscientious objector alternate service in the locked psych ward at Deaconess Hospital, was to save all the money I could manage. With that small fortune (emphasis on the “small”), once my servitude ended, I’d fund my romantic notion of a Hemingway/Fitzgerald bohemian writer life in Paris.
But, like a diver coming up from the deep without getting the bends, first I had to make my way from New Haven, and all that it promised (promises that would not be fulfilled for me) to St. Louis and the unknown that faced me there – unknown, even though I’d spent four years there in college. The alternate view I was about to get would hardly resemble the city I’d known before.
First stop along the way, last stop in the promised land, New York City.
We’d never met, but I stopped there to spend the night with the Princeton friend of a Yale friend (you can stretch connections to that degree when you’re young) in the Turtle Bay basement sublet he had for the summer. Or was it an apartment-sit? Such fine distinctions of City life were well beyond my understanding. Either way, it was a haven of luxury such as I’d never known before, and would not know again for decades – with it’s chic Sister Parish décor and mullioned windows looking out from a breakfast nook onto a city garden, subtle and tailored and expensive, as only real estate devoted to ornamental plants and flag-stoned paths in the middle of Manhattan can be.
The friend of a friend and I didn’t particularly hit it off – he was Ivy; I was Ivy castoff – he was blond, his orthodontia impeccable; he rowed; squash had been invented for his tribe. None of these descriptors applied to me. He didn’t say it in words, though his eyes and his demeanor yelled it: why had he agreed to this? He showed me the sofa I was to sleep on, and made it clear that he had evening plans that did not include his friend’s friend – me. Even so, it was a last night of swaddled comfort and New York fantasy from a life I’d only been subletting, not making my own, as I’d thought I would, driving east the year before.
When I woke up in the morning there were bagels and cream cheese, corn muffins and Chock Full O’Nuts coffee, followed by a “Good By,” more enthusiastic by multiples than had been the hardly audible “Hello” the night before. And I was on my way west again, toward the locked ward and the cheap room and the two years of servitude. And, as it turned out, the long-delayed coming out of a gay guy, not in the forefront of Gay Lib – not even aware of Stonewall – hardly steps ahead of roasting-in-hell-for-eternity because of it. In an old red Chevy that did make it – just.
The chief virtue of the cheap room – the only one really: It was cheap. I knew at once that it was not Turtle Bay. I don’t remember how I even found it. Surely none of my “friends” would have sent me there. Maybe a flyer nailed to a telephone pole. When I first got back to St. Louis, I roomed for a few nights with my Lesbian friend, Claudia, but those were the days before we’d come out to each other – so I was eager to have a place of my own, where I could bring other boys for doing all the things I’d begun to dream that boys could do together – things NOT involving footballs or philosophy.
My cheap room was above a storefront on Euclid Avenue; maybe intended to be inhabited by humans, but not decently – better suited to roaches and rats. First door on the left, at the top of a stair going straight up from the street to a second floor landing lit by a dingy bulb. “Furnished,” which translated into a table and a chair; a sofa/bed, likely salvaged from a curb before the heavy trash collectors reached it; a mini-fridge and a hotplate, an aluminum all-purpose pan, and place settings for almost two.
The single window gave a view across an air shaft into the bathroom of the slum next door, where other lodgers who had to know they could be seen, sometimes did shocking things – shocking to the naïve me of 23, anyway. Even though my squalid New Haven apartment had shared a wall with the blue-movie theater next door (only “blue”; porn wasn’t legal then), I could only hear those shocking sounds, not see the scenes too, as now. What I sometimes saw across the air shaft – just glancing, never leering, but how could I look away? – gave a life lesson in the lengths we’ll go to to be noticed.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like … hovel. But in my desperation to find that cheap place of my own, not even rats and roaches, not even exhibitionists, disqualified – when the rent was low enough and the lights were out.
My cheap room gave me another life lesson when I came back one night after my 3 to 11 shift to find the door kicked in, and my few possessions scattered – some missing: my high school ring, a graduation watch, the twenty dollar bill I’d left on the table out of oblivion and foolishness. What good luck that I’d ridden my bicycle to work, so it wasn’t there to be stolen too. Eventually, it too was stolen, of course, from a rack on the campus of my alma mater, but by then such things only bummed me out, they no longer shocked.
I wasn’t in the cheap room long. Eventually Claudia and I did come out to each other, and we moved back in together – giving a moment of rekindled hope to both sets of reality denying parents. It amazes the old me that the young me lived in such a place, even briefly, and survived. There’s much to be said, I guess, for the resilience – or oblivion, more like, of youth.