At Home In The Pigeon Coop
It’s past Eleven at night.
Outside my window, one story down, and sitting on a wooden scaffolding which painters stand on during the day, a drunk man is sitting, and swinging his legs. He is singing a song loudly:
We are the world, we are the children.
I live in The Palomar Hotel in Santa Cruz. The Pigeon Coop is a Hotel which was built in the 1920’s.
When I first came to look at The Palomar as a place I might live, I was greeted in the building office by the manager, a woman whose name is Berl.
“It’s like Milton Berle, or a Redwood Burl,” she told me. “A lot of people think I say Darlene. I have no idea how someone can get Darlene from Berl.”
Beryl is an older gal with a warm and genuine smile which shows off a smart set of white false teeth.
Pulling herself from behind her big desk in the office and setting down a romance novel she had been reading, she fetched a key to the elevator, and for the room which was to become my home.
She moved pretty well for a big gal. She’s not so big, really, just her behind. Beryl is one of those people who have a huge ass. My Aunt Mary has one of those. The kind of butt Groucho Marx probably had in mind when he said:
“She had a rear end you could play card games on.”
The keys were above Beryl’s reach in a cabinet, and for just half an instant I thought I was going to get to see her jump for the keys. But, Beryl had a little stick to retrieved the keys with. And with a quick, practiced motion that could make a professional Hockey player gasp with jealous awe, she snatched the keys, and she set the stick back down.
Come with me, dear, Beryl said.
We waddled out to the elevator, like some kind of Stork and
Penguin Circus act. I was The Stork.
Standing in the hall for a while, we silently looked at the Elevator door. Our hands were folded in front of us. We stood waiting as if those doors held the answer to the questions of the Universe.
When the doors to the elevator slid open, there inside was an old woman with a filthy blue yarn overcoat holding about fifty five white plastic bags. And each plastic bag held what looked like fifty more plastic bags. It was sort of a definition of infinity, because inside each of those plastic bags were more plastic bags holding even more plastic bags inside of them.
Beryl said to the woman, “Hello Dear. How are you today.”
And then Beryl and I stepped into the elevator, and joined the old woman who was holding the plastic bags, and wearing the horrible, filthy, blue yarn overcoat.
The old woman began speaking.
“How dare you ask me about my personal affairs. That is just none of your business. I am a tenant here, but that gives you no right to interfere in personal matters of mine. My personal business is no concern of yours. You have your nerve. . .”
This vitriolic lecture lasted four floors.
Berl and I stepped off the elevator at the fourth floor. The old woman stayed on the elevator, and the doors shut around her as mysteriously as they first opened up to reveal her in the first place.
It was an extraordinary scene sure, but what impressed me most about the whole bit was that not a word was said by Berl to explain the old woman. Not, “Well, she sipped some bad coconut juice and forgets to take her meds, ” or “That’s Fifi and she thinks everyone is a Martian”.
Nothing was said to me, a prospective tenant. Not a thing. And I just knew that I had found a suitable home at last.
In October 2004, I’ll have been at The Palomar for two years. That is the longest I had ever lived indoors by my own efforts. Since that very first day, I had never known a place which I had felt was more a home for me than here at The Pigeon Coop, The El Palomar in Santa Cruz, California.
I looked up El Palomar once to see what it meant, and the closest I found was “The Pigeon Coop”. Good enough for me, I guess, and as good a home as I have ever known.
The old woman, as it turned out, lives in the room on the floor
right above me. Her name is Betty, and on occasion I see bits and
pieces of white plastic bags floating outside of my window down from Betty’s room.
The man serenading me outside my window tonight, singing terrible songs, has picked up a guitar, which he plays much
worse than he sings.
I see some pieces of white plastic bags stuck in his hair. I could hit him in the head with a tomato without any effort at all.
I guess those elevator doors which Berl and I stood silently in
front of with our hands folded, like some somber Stork and Penguin Circus Act actually did actually hold the secret to the Universe.
Anyway, I’m glad they opened for me.
