The sleeping accommodations at my friend’s house in Baltimore were lots less than palatial. But the price was right at the generous zero mark, with all the pasta I could eat for dinner – breakfast and lunch were my affairs. The couch had springs and protrusions that made sleeping through the night in a single position impossible. Toss and turn or wake with the tingles and dead limbs of paresthesia. One morning in a rush to get coffee, I collapsed onto the floor, my left leg refused to answer, and I writhed in agony for several moments before I could get up.
So for those of you who are fans of being carefree on the “road,” This is what you never read about in the novels.
Then there are the missed meals and making meals from disparate items not because you are a foodie or experimenter in rare cuisine, but because two slices of bread, some green beans, and red onion are all that’s in the fridge. Yum.
There was the time my buddy and I had a single set of pants between us to go to the laundromat. Please don’t ask how that happened; it’s an entirely different story. But we crept in near closing time and started the laundry while one helped conceal the other. Then, when a pair of homemakers were scandalized, we ran for it in wet clothing. I guess you might look up the police report on that one.
It wasn’t all fun and games on the “road.”
This made me remember walking into a laundromat as a young 20-year-old and totally misunderstanding the plight of the naked guy huddled there anxiously watching the washer sudsing. I get it now!
I think they call that “The good ol’ days”, lol.
Painful and fun times all in one! Love it, Lou!
I guess we all slept on irregular surfaces and ate odd meals when “guesting” with friends.
I remember making a biscuit from scratch in my friend’s Greenwich Village apartment one time. I’d never made one before, had no idea what went into one, but felt some internal engine would start up and a biscuit would appear…AND, miraculously, it did! I ate it with honey, the only food other than the uncombined ingredients I created into a biscuit that I could find in his apartment.
(I saw my first cockroach ever when making that biscuit, but this was in New York. I am grateful there were no first-time rat encounters, too!)
When my friend came back from work, he asked if I’d gone out for lunch, and I revealed my mastery of biscuit-making. What? he marveled. You know how to make biscuits?
No, I noted, but I figured it out. When you are hungry enough, you’ll figure things out.
You were lucky that the stove was working. Some people never cooked in the rat nests they called apartments, and you couldn’t trust that stove ( gas of course) was actually working. One friend had a new girlfriend who liked to cook. she almost blew the place up when the oven didn’t work right.
Roaches were a normal part of life in New York. The can of Raid was your friend.
That’s a fact. There was a gang that preyed on residents of that street (East 3rd). When I went to visit my friend that time, they were standing on the sidewalk and street around a car. They had a young German shepherd dog. I’d a dog back in Nebraska at the time that I’d not seen for months, thanks to being in the US Army for boot camp, then training in motion picture photography. “What a beautiful dog!” I said to the guy I thought might be his owner. “Is he yours?” The guy had an odd expression on his face, like he didn’t understand the question. Then he said yes. “May I pet him?” I asked, and he said, yes, if I wanted to. The dog ate it up, wagging his tail and panting happily for the attention. Later, when I told my friend about being happy to pet the dog that that gang of guys had, he turned pale. Seems the same guys had robbed him of his Accutron watch the week before, right on his stoop, and using the dog to intimidate him. Oh well! He was a nice doggy! And the young hoods may have killed a guy in another gang earlier and robbed my friend of his graduation watch, but we shared love of the young German shepherd between us. LOL! (What does a stupid hick from Nebraska know about The Street and Street Toughs?)