Monday, December 5, 2011
My Airbnb is in the Occupy Wall Street Anthology!
Air and Breakfast - an awful feeling
It took 20 years of livin’ to rack up the $21,000
in credit card debt, but my back was finally against the wall. I was well and
truly tapped out. $411 a month came out of my Disability payment of $659, and
went straight to Greenpath Debt Management. On top of that, for 2 months in a
row the Chinatown Y took $80 out of that same tiny checking accountm instead of
$39. My Triple Play Time Warner package costs $176, and every time I call to
talk them down they tell me what a great deal I have.
Many years ago I went to a Credit Counselor, and
they told me that my continued existence was doubtful, at least on paper. This
was when the horrible democratizer of the hustle came into play - no, I
wouldn’t exist if I didn’t leave a so called swing club with a middle aged
business of less uncertain means than
myself. Upon our exit I’d get an envelope not nearly full enough of cash,
and go from there. From there to a restaurant with a decent back exit, if I was
lucky.
Oh, those whirlwind college days! And I wouldn’t
have been eating at the age of 19 without my creep tranny friend and her
backstage entering wiles. Visiting bands so seldom wanted any of the food
provided for them, chowing down is not part of live performance, so we often
had access to untouched wheels of brie, crackers, even rice balls when a
Japanese band called The Plastics came to the Bay Area.
Plus
one submarine sandwich a day, it turns out, more than supports the human body,
and I loved the ones near my second apartment, on the corner of Bush and
Powell, in San Francisco. So I existed for 30 more years, albeit not on paper,
I must take full responsibility for my tendency
towards chronic destitution, since it is a spiritual axiom that no change is
possible, silver or emotional, without manning up. One typically dumb thing I
do is pay $86 a month so my mother and I have a spot at the Neptune Society
Columbarium. The minute I have paid a total of $4500 for our little eternity
displays at Anza and Arguella, in San Francisco, we can buy urns, decorate, and
die. That’s a luxury many would let go but I am a finisher, especially when i
comes to the funereal. We live a long time in my family, my mother’s turning 86
next month, my father’s a scrappy 85, and if not for the constant exposure to environmental
toxins my dusty urban life entails, I’d be right up there with them. As it is,
I’m figuring on 75 – 78, barring a terminal mishap.
My
activities have almost nothing to do with generating income, but a lot to do
with a misplaced sense of obligation to frequently nonsensical tasks. I will
show up to read my work in a leaky basement in Toronto, because I said I would,
I’ll finish a useless advanced
degree because I started it, and I will finish off that mountain of debt, a
daunting $21,600, before the world is finished with my dear self.
Recently I turned to Air and Breakfast, a
terrific site whereby city folk can rent out their spare rooms, or even their very
own bedrooms, to complete strangers. I don’t have a spare room of course, or
god knows a couch, but technically I have a bed and its good enough to sleep in,
especially if my visitor is not the type of jet setter who is driven to the
brink of madness by excessive clutter and the vivid artwork of some of those
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet. I stuck the following profile on Air BnB,
flattering picture included:
I'm a middle aged broke writer who does a lot of
spoken word around the neighborhood, and often visits San Francisco as well. I
have 4 pop type books published, but out of print, and hang out at the Bowery
Poetry Club from time to time, as its 3 blocks away!
The rest is not important. Well, not to me, but an
artist type teetering on the edge of spiritual and financial bankruptcy does
not emit the same ‘keep away’ affect on foreigners that it does for other
Americans. Its seems like an ok category there, in the rest of the world, and
my price, $47 a night, is right. I once listened to a set of cassette
tapes on which theologian Huston Smith described every world religion, and for
the Hindu one there is a hiearchy I fit in. The intellectuals get no money but
they get respect, which I mentally calculate as meaning a couch to stay on and
perhaps even a visit to a local diner while on a ridiculous penniless tour of
some sort. This seems fine, more than enough, really, but Air and Breakfast is
sort of just as good. These strangers need only a layman’s grasp of the
internet and a small amount of funds, and they can be in my bedroom for a low
low price. They need never publish or sit through an evening of performance art
to enjoy a sound sleep in my manic den. I’m fully expecting a small art theft
soon, I have high hopes for one Bec who’s coming from LA next week. She first
said she was from Melbourne, but now her grasp of basic English has slipped
exponentially in 1 week and a half, so though I am committed to being her host,
something is not as it appears in this ad hoc hotel situation, and I believe
that is Bec.
Mostly
though its been working out, though I’m discovering that $47 is a crazy low
price to rent my room out for as I spent that tooling around not being at home.
Sometimes I go to Queens, where I’m fixing up somebody’s apartment, and sleep
there. Or being in between places when I can’t go home due to the woman from
Brussels, Leona, who’s in my bedroom enjoying a week of walking tours. Or
taking a taxi to my ex boyfriend’s because its easier than going to Queens. I
just bumped my price up to $57, but its way too late for me to up the price Greta
or whoever, Bec, Matteo, Lygia, and one in august I forget the name of, Robin
maybe.
The
first guest, a Chinese or Korean student from Rutgers or UCLA, was shy but
quietly snotty - “What do I get?” he murmured upon seeing my room.
“Well,
nothing” I replied, confused.
“Usually
they change the sheets,” he added the next day, talking to me from Google Voice
Mail. “I am one of those lost souls without a phone” he texted, which is how I
knew the method by which he was subtly putting down my general hygiene.
“I
changed the sheets! They’re Clean!” I insisted to Jun Ning Shao, my voice
rising to a squeal. I’ve had two people cut me off, citing as evidence my
failure to ‘strip the bed’ upon leaving another’s residence. Nobody EVER told
me about this strip the bed thing. I know about ‘wash the dishes’, not that I
always do it, and believe me Thank You and Excuse Me figure largely in my very
speech pattern, they are that innate, but Folding and this Bed Stripping are 2
things that can send you hurtling into a social darkness just as surely as bad
math.
I’m just adding the math part because there’s a late nomadic mathematician,
as in dead (though he probably was often late) who traveled the world visiting
small groups of mathematicians and trying to solve insoluble problems. He was
old and probably reeked, and a terrible guest, but he was a much sought after visitor
none the less. There’s a documentary about him, I believe it’s called “N is a
Number”, directed by George Paul Csciery, a Hungarian American acquaintance
who’s debt load is so staggering he and his wife have a financial long plan
involving insurance and the spouse who (i want to say ‘gets to’) dies first
settling the credit cards.
“It’s
fine” my first Air and Breakfast consumer quickly self corrected. For 47
dollars, it better be fine! I screamed, silently. I did wash those sheets, I made
sure to! Of course I did! Oh, this generation, Jun Ning’s, I’ll just never get
them. I must appear as a weird apparition of crackling despair to him, in turn.
Its not always your big day.
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