WELCOME TO THE FLOPHOUSE
EXCERPT
KALDHEIM FINDS SHELTER FROM THE STORM IN PORTLAND, OREGON.
ROOM 222 was just off the stairwell, and when I opened the door to take my first look at it there were no surprises. It was basically a clone of every other flophouse room I’d rented in recent years. Standing in the doorway, I took it all in at a glance. The sagging bed with two lumpy pillows and a threadbare bedspread. The tiny hand sink tucked into a corner, its porcelain bowl crazed with a spidery web of tiny cracks. The unframed mirror above the sink, splotched with dark patches where the silvering had flaked off over time. The indestructible, steel-framed straight-back chair, de rigueur not just in flophouses but in discriminating parole offices and psych ward rec rooms throughout the land. Then, of course, there was the room’s lone window, which looked out over (you guessed it) the concrete walls of a blind airshaft—at the bottom of which lay a multicoloured glass mosaic composed of broken wine and beer bottles, an organic art installation that changed nightly as the dead soldiers came whistling down past my window and shattered on top of their fallen brothers. And, finally, the obligatory four-drawer dresser, with two missing drawer-pulls and a cherry wood top whose edges were deckled black with cigarette burns.
All of which, I should add, sat atop a layer of crusty industrial carpet—in this case, in a mottled brown, though mottled by what I didn’t care to speculate. For $22 a week, that’s what you get. But I wasn’t disappointed in the least. The only furnishings in the room that mattered to me were the solid wood door and the sturdy Yale lock that secured it. Everything else, no matter how seedy, was a bonus. Including the thick red brick that was sitting on the windowsill—an amenity I’d never encountered in any of my previous flops.
At first, I couldn’t figure out what purpose the brick might serve. But when I lifted up the lower half of the window to let in some fresh air, the damned thing came crashing back down like a guillotine blade the instant I took my hand away—and suddenly the brick’s purpose was no longer a mystery. And the brick proved to be more versatile than I’d imagined. Depending whether you stood it upright, or laid it down flat, or placed it on its side, you could prop the window open at three different heights, letting you adjust how much cold air flowed into the room. Which was handy, since the room was hotter than a Brooklyn tenement in August and there was no way to adjust the flow of steam clanking through the old cast-iron radiator beside the dresser. I know, because I tried. Only to discover that someone had removed the handle from the radiator’s regulator valve.
Shaking my head in disbelief, I thought, Yep, Bob, you weren’t joking. The vandals had taken the handles. And, apparently, the window sash weights too.
Excerpted from the hook, Idiot Wind, by Peter Kaldheim. Copyright © 2019 by Peter Kaldheim. Reprinted with permission of Canongate. All rights reserved.
