City Dive Hotel And The Season For Frenzy
by Lex Loeb
Downtown: Added on November 15, 2006
This is a second hand story. I do not live in a flop house in downtown portland and never did. Well maybe for a couple of days in the distant past but nothing like the one in this story. A friend of mine was there and lived to tell the story. Just because Portland is not as big as San Francisco does not mean that it does not have its own equivalent of the infamous Tenderloin district. I unfortunately once found a very cheap hotel room one night in the Tenderloin and when I was making my b-line for the hotel from Market Street a police officer stopped me and warned me that if I was going to stay there not to come out at night. It was a friday night and that Tenderloin district, which was dead when I got there at dusk, really started jumping once it was dark. I spent a lot of time that night looking out the window in disbelief. I have been in tropical jungles at night and seen those places similarly come to life. If you want to see all the wild life there is in a jungle you wait until it's night time.
Portland's City Dive Hotel is a rather quiet place most of the time. My friend, let's call him Sam, qualified for low cost housing and got what seemed a reasonably priced monthly rental room there and it was a quiet place to live in the beginning. The only thing that bothered him was a bulletin board showing the mug shots of the various resident registered sex offenders living in the building. I told him that with their records and his age he probably had nothing to worry about. The idea would give most people the creeps .
Sam started getting used to living there because it was in budget and he had lots of extra room. I went up only once to visit and saw he had harvested drift wood and made shrines out of it in the corners of the room. He had no bed just a few blankets, sheets and pillows on the floor. The room had a window looking out into an open tar roof court yard sandwiched between walls of draw string windows like his. I was fascinated that anyone could or would live that way. In spite of being a dive and flop house it really did not seem that bad but all that was about to change in an instant.
When the first of the month rolled around suddenly everyone in the building had a social security check, a crazy check, or a refilled oregon trail debit card for welfare assistance. The building immediately began to transform itself. First thing Sam noticed was that the registered sex offender were no longer hanging around in the hall ways barricading their capon like bodies into their rooms so they would resist the coming temptations. Soon other residents in the building were out on the streets of Portland offering $200 worth of food allowance dollars for $100 or less in cash. People in the building suddenly had money but they all needed fast cash. It seemed to be working cash was filling pockets and purses of residents.
Within hours and by dusk the building was completely transformed from a cheap rent hotel dive to a virtual drug super market. Doors were all suddenly open to the hall way and Sam knew he had a tough time with the temptations. One room was the Meth room, and several others were 420 marijuana party rooms, there was heroin on the third floor, designer drugs on the forth floor and the black guys in the building had a special thing for openly smoking crack. Cheap Beer by the 12 pack suddenly appeared with a favorite being Milwaukee's Best in tall can six packs. There was an attitude that while the drugs were fresh and plentiful that it was a time of sharing--something like christmas once a month when the checks rolled in.
Sam, no stranger to drug culture heeded the temptations and went from room to room sampling the various "life styles."
Poor Sam. Later that night this Indian princess woman with an odd name distributing her drug of choice crawled though Sam's window when he was sleeping and whispered to him her desires to make love to him while she offered him her drug of choice. Sam had no curtains and realized he had been being watched for quite some time in his private space. A 70 year old woman down the hall propositioned him for sex and offered him a cash down payment. The whole flop house was going mad in a money driven frenzy that would last about 5 nights until all the drugs and beer bought with social security checks was dissipated into thin air. Once again the building when dead and quiet, the sex offender opened their doors to the hallways again to hob nob with each other and there was relative quiet. The jungle animals were back in hibernation suspended animation waiting for the next welfare check payment date. It goes in cycles.
Sam moved out and is now living in a bus.
Other Stories By Lex Loeb
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