Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

When you are older, as I was, and you hit bottom, you often find yourself in a room like the one where roaches crawl through plumbing.

I STOOD BEHIND THE SHABBY CURTAIN. A NEARBY CHURCH BELL TOLLED FIVE. I GAZED DOWN THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW ONTO A PARKING LOT ACROSS THE STREET. A SMALL COMPANY USED THE PARKING LOT AND COMPANY EMPLOYEES, MEN IN SUITS AND WOMEN IN DRESSES AND SUITS, WALKED TOWARD THEIR CARS.

Next door, as days and nights passed, the fights intensified.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Behind me was the fourth-floor hotel room where I’d been, by then, for five days. The room held two twin beds, a desk, a closet big enough for a dozen hangers, a television bolted to the wall, a bar refrigerator, and a microwave. I slept in one bed and kept books and notebooks on the other. The bedspreads were a beige ground, printed with brown flowers. What seemed to be coffee splashes and what was pink nail polish stained the bedspreads and the tan tweed carpet. The room smelled strongly of Pine Sol and fumigant.

I was in this town as a writer, a poor and poorly paid writer, working on a story. This hotel was where the organization that hired me put me up. I did not dare complain. I was fortunate to have any work at all, given how little experience I had. Believe me, I was grateful. It was a complex story that demanded many interviews and much research in a downtown library’s newspaper reading room. By the time I returned to this room from my interviews, I was exhausted. I stripped off my heels and pantyhose. I tasted above my upper lip salt from the day’s sweat. Nervous sweat and heat sweat.

Above each bed hung a painting. That is not accurate. The paintings did not hang; they were nailed to the wall. They were landscapes, framed in ornate black plastic; the plastic had been molded into curlicues and flowers that were like no flowers are in life. The “painting,” I think, was actually printing or like the frames, a molding, for the paintings had actual texture—brush strokes, daubs, pointillist dots. But clearly, they had been mechanically turned out, not painted by an inspired individual trying to stamp his vision onto canvas. The landscapes offered bucolic and oddly threatening scenes. The painting nailed above what I came to call the “work bed” showed emerald pasture that was textured in such a way that its surface resembled broccoli buds more than grass tips. A dilapidated white fence circled the pasture. The fence enclosed four pitiably thin white cows whose udders swelled to ridiculous size. A vast tree rose from the pasture’s center and cast down shade that turned the pasture grass almost black and the cows a leukemic blue. Across the thin slab of sky, V after V of brown geese flew left to right. As I studied this painting, I kept feeling I was missing something, that some event had taken place that I did not understand.

The painting nailed above what I came to call the “sleep bed” was simpler and sunnier but no less vaguely menacing. Its center featured a stock pond in the midst of more emerald broccoli pasture. Cattails poked out of the pond’s khaki water. Two anorectic bug-eyed white cows, these with small, contracted udders, drank at the pond with long pink tongues. In the left foreground a farmer, no bigger than my pinkie, raked golden hay onto a rounded haystack. A yellow beam of light that reminded me of the spotlight from police helicopters that patrol urban neighborhoods shone down on the farmer. I could never figure who “painted” these rural settings — neither boasted any signature — nor who bought them, certainly by the hundreds, to hang in rooms like this.

If you are still young and find yourself in a room like the one out whose window I gazed, you may not notice the paintings and wonder about the geese and the farmer and why the cows are skinny. You may not notice the man down the hall who has a rough cough, or the woman in the room next to him, a 90-pound woman in her 30s, already faded by hard work and perhaps methamphetamine or perhaps pure hunger. If you saw her one night, as I did, standing alone at the lobby candy machine and silently licking the slot where you drop in quarters and dimes, you might be frightened. After all, this likely would be your first foray into the world. But you would not see this woman as a raven, a bird of ill omen. She would not remind you of the cows in the paintings upstairs. You are just starting out. Everything is ahead of you.

A shower stall, sink, and toilet crowded the hotel room’s small, windowless bathroom. Moisture condensed on the stained beige walls. Cockroaches climbed up out of the toilet. When 1 telephoned downstairs to ask for help with the roaches, a laconic voice belonging to a sweet-tempered guy whose right cheek was blotched with a purple birthmark, told me not to worry. “The roaches,” he said, “aren’t in your room. They crawl up through the plumbing.” It was not a happy hotel room, and I wasn’t happy in it.

When you are older, as I was, and you hit bottom, you often find yourself in a room like the one where roaches crawl through plumbing. Usually you end up there because you did something to excess—drink, shoot or smoke drugs, love, gamble, spend credit cards beyond their limits. Or your health has failed. Or someone you loved did not love you. Or, no matter how you tried, you were fired from your job. But usually you are in such a room because of a break, a rip and tear in the plot of how things should have been. Your life story has fallen apart. It is all your fault, you think, and often it is. Perhaps it was only poor planning, but you were the one who planned poorly. You are someone no one wants living with them, at least for the moment. All your good memories are of what you lost, and all your bad memories are of what you did to lose your good memories. Rather than going up or on, you have gone down. So that the initial days and nights spent in these small rooms are days and nights when the face that one sees in the mirror is a face that is in the dock of judgment.

A drug dealer lived below me and in the next room, an unhappy couple. The head of the unhappy couple’s bed and the head of my bed abutted on either side of our shared wall. The female half of the couple worked nights. She left about 3:30 in the afternoon and returned soon after midnight. Her leavings and returns were marked by slams of their door. If the male worked, he worked irregularly and at odd hours. He ran his television set during the day and through much of the night. I think that he talked to the television. I never heard their telephone ring. When the woman returned home, conversation rose and fell through the thin walls, walls so thin they might have been mere veils, mere voile on a bridal skirt. I could not hear what they said. I heard only their voices, and their voices became like a sound in nature, a babbling brook or rainfall. Occasionally, they fought. They screamed. “Fuck” and “bitch” and “whore” and “bastard” were said loudly enough to make their way through our shared wall. Occasionally, the woman cried and sobbed, and occasionally, he or she threw some object against our shared wall, and one night, he threw her against our wall. Their quarrels were quick, like a summer storm, and after they quarreled, I heard the water run in their shower, which shared a wall with my shower. Then they went to bed and engaged one another in long and vigorous lovemaking, so vigorous that their bed thumped against my bed where I tossed in the terrible heat and sweat. I felt, some nights, as if we were a menage a trois.

After ten at night, the hotel was closed to anyone who did not have a key.

When the drug dealer below me on the third floor had customers after ten, they stood in or near bushes that grew listlessly along the building’s edge. They whistled or called out. Some nights, I idly wrote in my notebook’s margins what these customers said as they huddled below in the dark. “Are you there, brother?” “It’s me, Greg.” “I got the dimes.” The dealer leaned out his window and said he’d be right down. Sometimes he apparently did not immediately go downstairs to open the door, and the same voice would call up again, impatient or anguished or, finally, angry. Marijuana exhaust often floated up into my window. I now and then felt giddy and wondered if I were getting high.

I sat on the bed and spread out my dollar bills and straightened them with the same care I had once given to ironing pillowcases. I stacked dimes and nickels and quarters and the pennies I had once thought more trouble than they were worth. I had recently parted from my husband. I was alone in the world

Weekday evenings, I stood behind the curtain and watched employees of the small company leave for home. They walked alone and in pairs and groups of three and four. They idled together and chatted. One duo, a man and a red-haired woman, almost every day tarried by her navy Saab. They talked earnestly, heads close together. He frequently tilted his head toward her and smiled. She didn’t smile. She smoked. She lit her first cigarette with a lighter, and then as she continued to smoke, she lit the new cigarette off the old. One evening she smoked four cigarettes before she climbed into her Saab and he opened the door of his red Toyota. By 5:30, workers from the office across the way had left. Not a car remained in the parking lot.

I think that if I looked back at old newspapers I would discover this might have been one of the hottest summers on record. Polluted air layered in tan to dark brown bands at the horizon. Breeze seemed forgotten. My room had only one window and no cross-ventilation. The air hung, hot and torrid and unforgiving, and day after day accrued to itself the Chanel 22 I wore then, my dirty pantyhose, the peanut butter I ate, my sweat, the spray the man at the desk gave me to use on the roaches.

I began to tell myself stories about the people who worked in the building across the street. I did not realize then, but do now, as I write this, that a simple, single theme fueled the stories. These were people who had led their lives correctly. Therefore, these people had homes and I did not. For most, I imagined, someone waited in an airy house at a distance from this urban office. I imagined kitchens fitted out with gas stoves and double ovens and refrigerators with capacious freezers. I imagined queen-size beds, made up with 200-thread-count sheets, unlike the grayed man-made fabrics that covered the bed where I tried every night to locate sleep. I imagined bathrooms, without roaches, and thick, luxurious pastel towels.

I imagined the smiling Toyota owner pull into his driveway. At the side of his brown-shingled rambler, the sunflowers he and his wife had planted, drooped. Before he even went into his house, he unfurled the hose and stood, letting the water run into dry soil. I imagined the lawn he watered later that evening and honeysuckle and mock orange and yellow forsythia blossoms blown on the breeze that we did not have that summer night. I imagined potted ivies and pink geraniums in windowsills and vegetable and herb gardens in the back yard. I imagined a white cement birdbath where robins splashed. I imagined a profusion of tomatoes and the pungent, acrid odor that tomato vines give off when you reach past the vines to pick the warm fruit. I was afraid he was in love with the redhead.

The redhead, I thought, had a longer drive home. I saw her kiss a handsome man who met her at their front door. I saw their strawberry blond girl child clutch her mother’s leg and her mother lean down to pick her up. I saw a chubby tortoise cat run out the door and jump onto the hood of the navy blue Saab. I smelled a roasting hen stuffed with rosemary. The hen had just been taken from the oven. A salad of new potatoes and baby green beans waited in the refrigerator. I hoped that the redhead wasn’t in love with the Toyota owner, nor he with her. But I worried, nevertheless.

I stared into the bathroom mirror at my smudged reflection. I was truly lost.

I imagined dinner. I was always hungry, because I had little money, and I was unaccustomed to going alone to a restaurant, even if I had had the money. I had been a magnificent and inventive cook, with all the accouterments, from omelet pans to pudding molds, in my kitchen cabinets. In this hotel room I slathered one after another slice of bread with peanut butter, and for breakfast, I hunkered on the beige bedspread over a paper bowl filled with corn flakes and cold milk. The corn flakes often doubled for dinner. A can of Nalley’s chili warmed in the paper bowl and splashed with ketchup from packets I brought home from my Arby’s lunch was a triumphant feast.

Next door, as days and nights passed, the fights intensified. The perilously thin woman began to pace the halls of our floor and wring her hands as she walked. Beneath me, the drug dealer grew more careless in making his way quickly downstairs to the front door to let in his customers. Other odors, strange to me, drifted upward with the warm air. I think now that the dealer and his customers smoked crack. The buyers’ cries grew strident or piteous. “Man,” a voice begged, “I gotta get my shit, man.” One especially impatient buyer lobbed a rock or bottle, some object, through the drug dealer’s half-open window. Glass shattered. The dealer leaned out the window and howled, I wrote in my notebook, “You fuckin’ dumb fuck. I’m gonna kill your ass.”

I also wrote in my notebook, in hand writing I now almost do not recognize as my own: “You are so sorry but no one wants to hear. The people to whom you wish to apologize are fed up with you. They are weary of the sound of your voice’s pleading with them, whatever the plea. You come into these rooms in shame, withdrawal, and exile.”

You have to remember that my mind was not clear. I was unsure. I was, I see now, not entirely well. I was being shriven. It was a procedure that had barely begun. I knew what had to happen to me, but I would not know for years how to describe that process. Years later, I would find the words for the operation I underwent in a poem by Amy Gerstler titled “The Nature of Suffering.” I would have, in Gerstler’s words, to be “bled white.” I did what I would have advised anyone in my situation to do. I said to my face in the bathroom mirror, a pale face made paler by the bathroom’s subaqueous light, “You’ve got to quit living on peanut butter.”

As a brown-backed roach made its way out of the toilet bowl onto the toilet seat, I added, speaking sternly to this strained face, “You’ve got to get beyond corn flakes.”

At a nearby mom-and-pop grocery, I purchased a four-ounce bottle of olive oil and a bottle of red wine vinegar. Back in my room, I took out a paper bowl. I mixed, with a pink plastic fork, oil and vinegar and the contents of an Arby’s mustard packet and made salad dressing. Onto a paper plate I tore lettuce leaves. I found at the bottom of my purse my Swiss army knife. I cut a tomato into hunks. I knifed open a can of tuna and emptied the tuna chunks atop all this. I poured over the dressing. It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

No comforting Bible verses or inspiring poems came to me in that room. My mind was not helping me much. It wandered off into fantasies like those about the workers across the way. It asked questions about what had gone wrong with the thin cows with the absurdly large udders. It sank into remorse and regret and what-might-have-beens.

That was all, now, a long time ago. Part of what I learned in that room is that sometimes you have to save the body before you can offer up the soul for salvation. What saved me was what saves most of us: instinct. Hunger.