Green Doors

May 2, 2016

Greetings from this side,

The marquee says that rooms are $35.99.  Sunday special $31.99.  There are monthly rates available.  There are TV’s.  There are Jazz Rooms.  The motel is spread out behind other businesses near the UHaul office, dozens of units stretching away from the busy business district.  If you didn’t look closely you might not notice the low, non-descript buildings with the matching green doors. 

I have not been inside but I know what is between the narrow spaces.  I have seen the guts of some rooms pulled out into the parking lot, maybe for repairs after a big night, or perhaps to update an ordinary room to a Jazz Room.  Two queen beds, dresser, institutional night stands, lamps.  80’s Drab.

Among the row of businesses that form the moat between the motel and the constant traffic on the main road there is a gas station.  It has cigs for $5.30.  It has a small grocery aisle, a three burner coffee machine, a lottery machine, and an ATM.  Across the side street from the gas station is where I sometimes get my coffee.  Tall Pikes. $1.96.

January.

Through my windshield I watch the side lot of the motel.  There is a layer of snow, just deep enough to qualify as a winter stage.  I am sipping my coffee, an indulgence, watching people walk from the motel to the gas station.  Walk back with small plastic bags, holding Styrofoam cups, smoking.

A woman appears around the end of the motel.  She is wearing a winter coat, the hood is up, her hair hangs out in chaotic ropes.  She is wearing bright patterned pajama bottoms and insulated boots.  Moon Boots.  In one hand she is holding a cigarette, staunchly working her way toward the filter in short bursts, locomotive puffs.   In the other hand she holds a leash.  On the other end of the leash is a three legged dog. 

The woman leads the dog into the stretch of snow that is the median between the motel and the street.  The dog tends to his business as gracefully as three legs allow.  The woman tries not to watch.  I wonder if dogs are allowed in the motel, but smoking is not.  The woman pulls the dog gently but the dance is not done and so they wait in the cold.  I am struck by the image; two survivors, bound by a loyalty to that brotherhood.

 March.

I am standing near my car, hesitating before I get in.  It is unseasonably warm, and I am tempted to sit at the table on the sidewalk.   Across the street at the motel a green door opens and an unlikely number of people parade out.  It is reminiscent of clowns emerging from a small car.  A woman steps out, behind her a man, wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt, holding the hand of toddler.  The child is wearing only a diaper.  Three more children appear, and then another man.  I stop counting.  I wonder for the tenth time about Jazz Rooms.

The man lifts the child by the wrist, dangling him by his little arm, swings him over the yellow mottled parking curb.  The group spills out into the sun, like mineshaft survivors, blinking at the light.  The man guides the child across the pavement, tiny bare feet twitching across the lot.  He leads him to the patch of grass, and lets go of his hand and we are bound together for a moment, all watching him celebrate with his little dance in the patch of nature where the three legged dog does his business.

April.

My car is parked in a different spot, facing away from the green doors, nosed against the strip of grass along the busy street.  A few feet from my bumper is the bus stop.  The grass is beaten down to bare earth there, seasoned with cigarette butts, bottle caps, Target flyers decoupaged in the dirt.

I am standing inside the coffee shop, adding an eccentric amount of cream and sugar and stirring it to perfection, looking out the window.  A woman pulls her roller bag across the parking lot, skittering across broken blacktop.  I didn’t see her leaving the motel but there is only one place she can be coming from.  Behind her are two young boys, one holding the hand of the other, tugging him to keep up.

I walk across the lot to my car.  The two boys are standing close to the bumper, waiting, fidgeting, the dance of all little boys wanting something to do.  The traffic roars by ten feet away, waves of noise crashing on us.  I say good morning; the woman turns slightly and nods at me.  The older boy says nothing.  The younger one says they are going on the bus.  I fold slightly to speak to him.

“How old are you?”  I ask.  It is my standard question for children in this range.

The boy holds up a hand and offers three or four fingers, struggling with thumb dexterity.  He may be telling me he is OK.

“Are you three?”

He nods.  He is chewing something.  Someone needs to wipe his nose.  It is not me.

“Is this your brother?” I asked, pointing with my chin at the other boy.

The boy went on chewing and nodded.  Then he shook his head.  “Naw. He’s me,… he’s my...he’s my stick brother.”

The other boy said nothing at first, seemed not to be listening.

The smaller boy again said they were going on a bus.  I said that sounded fun.  The older boy said something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the surf, and all I heard was dummass.

“I ainneether a dummass,” said the OK boy.  The older boy said he was too a dummass.

The mother turned and said something and the boys moved away.  The bus slid into view, silently, like a whale gliding in far deeper water.  The three of them disappeared inside it.  It gave up its illusion of silence and surged away from the shore, coughed a dark cloud and roared to fit in, bound by a loyalty to that noisy brotherhood.

May

It is unseasonably cold outside the coffee shop.   If it were not raining it would be snowing.  I am at the counter waiting for my coffee. Tall Pikes. $1.96.  I opened my wallet and remembered I had lost my credit card, and then it occurred to me I didn’t have any cash to pay for my coffee.  Just a fraction of a second, a tiny pang of anxiousness, flitting over the last few days, remembering the last money I spent. 

The barista knows me well enough to call me ‘Hey Buddy’.  I understand social capital sufficiently to know I could influence her, to invoke trust.  At the end of the counter is a millionaire I know well enough to ask for two dollars or two hundred.  Around the table there are other coffee addicts that would help a well-tailored patron, connected as we are in this brotherhood.  At the gas station there is an ATM, an ironic portal to my wealth.  There was no reason to be concerned.  No one was going to evict me, or humiliate me, or send me with my last things out to get on a bus to find some worse place to sleep.  I flashed back thirty some years to an afternoon when I stood at the counter of the bank and the woman told me Paul must be paid, and there was nothing to borrow from Peter.  I opened my wallet and saw the two dollar bills.

I stood outside for a minute, with my extravagant coffee, meticulously prepared to eccentric perfection.  I looked across the street at the barracks of the anonymous.  I saw them through the chilled mist that hung around me.  I felt the gauze-thin illusion that separates me from nights behind green doors.  The fine web of calamity, hard choices, one last drink, anger, compulsion, missed connections, sickness, random pointless luck.  The same fragile veil that hangs between any of us and all of us.   

Hope this finds you with $1.96,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith