What a contrast this was with my beautiful bedroom at home, with its king-size canopy bed and thick pink rug. Mama was a bit of a fanatic when it came to cleanliness and neatness. Papa had been brought up in military housing, so everything in its place with spit and polish was standard and expected operating procedure. I was confident that despite Papa’s comparisons with a hard army life and meeting the challenge, neither Mama nor he would permit a stray dog to sleep in a place like this room. However, all I could imagine at the moment was Papa hoping that I would end up in just such a room.
“Let’s see how tough she is now,” he might mutter with a smile of smug satisfaction.
I think I managed to fall asleep for the rest of my first night merely out of spite. Whenever I began to feel sorry for myself, I forced myself to envision my father’s red, enraged face and his confidence that I would return and plead for mercy and forgiveness, writing promises in blood. I was as strong and as stubborn as he was, however, and I was determined to have him cry “uncle” before I ever did.
During that first night and the days that passed afterward, I harbored the belief, perhaps more accurately called the hope, that somehow, someway, my mother would come looking for me, find me, and convince me that my father regretted throwing me out on the street. I actually looked for her on street corners, in nearby stores and restaurants, and in the hotel lobby, even though there was no way she could possibly know I was in this place or in this neighborhood. I tried to imagine her running around in a panic, asking strangers if they had seen me. I even envisioned her putting pictures of me on walls and utility poles, with desperate pleas for anyone who had seen me to call her. Maybe she would hock some of her best jewelry and put up a reward.
Whenever a policeman on the street looked at me, I stared back, expecting him to come rushing over, demanding to know if I was Roxy Wilcox. Perhaps by now, my picture had been given to all of the police in the city. But most of the time, the officer I saw would look right through me or just turn away, uninterested in the sight of just another runaway teenager, with so many more serious problems to face.
After the first few days, the reality hardened. I realized that Papa would resist reporting me to the police or permitting Mama to do so this soon. He would be too embarrassed at work if his colleagues found out, and if the police brought me home, he wouldn’t feel victorious at all. He’d have to accept me without my surrendering, and he would have to assume most of the blame for an underage girl being thrown out onto the streets. I was still weeks away from being eighteen.
At first, I had no idea what I was going to do or how long I would remain where I was. I suppose anyone who has been thrown out of her home or has run away begins by thinking of other relatives to go to. Going to my father’s family would probably be worse than going home. For all I knew, my grandfather would have me court-martialed and put in some military brig to scrub floors and wash dishes for years.
Rushing off to Mama’s family in France loomed as a possibility, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had to get more money together for such a trip. Perhaps more important, I knew how everyone there would react. They’d want me to go home immediately, and my uncles and aunts would force me onto the next flight back to the States. Relatives provided no hope, no option. I had no friends close enough to trust or concerned enough with my welfare to offer me any assistance here, either. Realizing that brought home the reality of who I was and how I had lived my life until now.
I would probably be the first to admit that I was too bitter, too selfish, and too distrusting to form any solid relationships with other girls. By now, most of them knew how their parents would feel about their being too friendly with me, even though I could see that so many wanted to be. They thought I could teach them things none of their other friends could, and there was the attraction to someone or something dangerous. However, I was the quintessential bad influence who, if I didn’t get them to be as bad as I was, would do something wrong when they were with me that would get them into trouble, anyway. It was the old guilt-by-association thing. I might as well be carrying a fatal disease. Maybe I was. Even my teachers had begun to avoid contact with me recently, choosing to pretend I was invisible until I did something they couldn’t ignore.
Only Mr. Wheeler made any real effort to save me. He said he could tell from the way I wrote that I was far brighter than my grades revealed.
“You could do something with your life,” he said. “You could be proud of yourself, Roxy.”
“Who says I’m not?” I fired back at him.
He smiled, his soft gray-blue eyes twinkling with that irony he could express and see in what others said or did. “You hate yourself, Roxy,” he replied softly. “Others might fall for your act, but don’t try to cover it up with that false bravado when you’re talking to me. Remember your Macbeth. ‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’?”
I didn’t spit something smart or nasty back at him. I could see how unhappy he was for me and how much he hated telling me that.
“Stop fighting everyone who wants to help you,” he added. “Get that chip off your shoulder before it’s too late.”
I didn’t want to continue the conversation. He was the only one who could bring me to tears, and if there was one thing I never wanted to do, it was cry for myself or give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me do it, especially at school. My father had taught me that much. Good soldiers don’t whine. They grin and bear it. What was I living as in my father’s house if not a good soldier? I thought. Soldier up!
For the first few days at the roach hotel, I was comfortable deceiving and lying to myself, telling myself that I would be just fine on my own. I had enough money to get by eating at inexpensive restaurants for a while, and I had enough clothing. I walked around with this Pollyanna belief that somehow, someway, something would happen that would provide me with some sort of future in which I wouldn’t be dependent on my parents ever again.
But as my money began to diminish and wandering about the city lost its novelty, I could feel myself beginning to despair and began to sense a growing desperation festering beneath my breasts. Sometimes I felt hot and flushed, and sometimes I just felt numb. Returning at night to my dingy room only reinforced this growing depression and melancholy. How low had I sunk? Where could I go from here? Had I lost my senses? Had my pride blinded me to reality? I didn’t want to answer any of those questions.
Even so, I’d lie there at night, forbidding myself even to think of going home and begging for mercy, despite how many times I actually set out to do so, leaping off the rotten bed and charging toward the door. I never opened it. I stood staring at the doorknob and then retreated when I imagined the expression on Papa’s face coming back at me in wave after wave, his angry smile rippling through my eyes and into my brain.
Even after hearing someone try to open my door at night, something that would surely terrify any other girl, I remained determined and stubborn. I was confident that I could deal with anything unpleasant. Where did I get the fortitude? Was it from my father? Should I be grateful to him for that, at least? Could I ever admit to being grateful to him for anything? Just thinking about it made me even more miserable. I was there because of him, and I could survive there because of him, but I didn’t want either, not really.
To feel better about all this, I tried to call up images of my parents suffering. Surely they were both up all night thinking about me out on the cold, indifferent streets. Perhaps they feared that I had already been mugged, raped, or murdered. Now that time had passed, days had gone by, and I had not come home with my tail between my legs, my mother surely had become more frantic. She was crying, pleading every day, maybe even demanding that my father do something. Maybe they were at the stage where they weren’t talking to each other, and every time Emmie asked about me, my mother would just break into hysterics, driving my father out of the house. He was suffering, I told myself. He had to be. He could put on his act, pretend to be strong and indifferent, but he was tossing and turning when he went to bed, maybe even taking sleeping pills, and all day, he was regretting his rage, regretting what he had done. I convinced myself that his bitterness was eating him up inside.
Convincing myself of all this did make me feel better for a short while, but the stench of the room, the ugly sounds from outside, the crying I heard frequently coming through the walls from other rooms, and the sight of other, far more lost young girls already down some path of drugs and prostitution, their complexions blotchy, their necks dirty, their eyes full of fear and
dread, sickened me and filled me with new despair.
Was I looking at my immediate future? I couldn’t get over the growing feeling that I was somehow dwindling and disappearing. I would soon lose my name, and one day, I would look into the smoky, cracked mirror in the rusty bathroom and be unable to recognize myself. The girl looking back at me wasn’t the girl with stubborn pride anymore. She was a shadow of who she had been, a corpse on the prowl.
This really was a hotel for the dead, I thought. I had crossed over into Hades. The people living in it didn’t realize who and what they had become. Soon I could be one of them, moving like people in a chain gang, drudging their way through the muck of their own making. They struggled to get up the stairs and to their rooms—or tombs, I should say. Some of them vomited, moaned, and sobbed along the way. Who else but the mythical Charon would want to own and operate such a graveyard?
Most of the time, there was that elderly, sick-looking man at the desk in the very small lobby, but occasionally, a young man with reddish-brown hair was there. He had a pockmarked face and slightly orange lips. Maybe he brushed some lipstick on them. As skinny as someone who had been near starvation for a week, he sat on a stool, with his small, feminine shoulders turned inward as he hovered over a checkerboard, apparently playing his right hand against his left like someone with a multiple-personality syndrome, both hands with the long, dirty fingernails of someone who had been scratching his way out of a grave. The first few times I saw him, he barely looked back at me, but one time, for some reason, he sat back and smiled, revealing two rows of nearly corn-yellow teeth.
“My grandfather told me to watch for you today,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Pappy Morris. He owns the joint.” He shrugged. “Someday it will be mine. My father ain’t around no more. We don’t know where he went. My mother left about ten years ago with a cable television salesman.”
“Terrific,” I said. “You gave me your biography in less than a minute.”