It was in 1964 when I last walked through the doors of a YMCA as an overnight guest. That had been in downtown Manhattan as I was heading to Europe for the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I distinctly remember that the room was not much larger than the bed, but it was clean, and the lobby and halls seemed to bubble quietly with normal, or what I perceived as a mid-60s college kid, to be normal people. Twenty-two years later, I was coerced into staying at the Minneapolis Y by a close friend, Jim, with whom I had spent two summers, 1981 and 1982, doing satellite research at NASA Johnson Space Center, outside Houston. We were attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in early spring. Not my pick for a professional meeting of any kind in a Minnesota spring. Jim was a university geographer from Texas, and I was a university ecologist from Nebraska. Jim stayed at Ys regularly to save his per diem money that he received from his university.
I quickly came to discover that the YMCAs of the 80s were not the YMCAs of the 60s. The clues were there, but I chose to ignore them—for a while. When I called several months in advance to make my reservation, I thought the desk clerk had lost his voice. The silence was audible. After I introduced myself, he yells into the office, thinking he has the receiver covered with his hand,
“Hey Rip, this guy from somewhere in Nebraska is trying to reserve a double room with his buddy from Texas. Do we do that kind of stuff? Yeah, that’s what I said, a double. How the Hell am I supposed to know? He don’t sound like one.” There is a long quiet pause while the clerk or Rip are apparently going through records, probably to see if any policy existed on reservations to “ones”. Now back on the phone, “We don’t ordinarily make reservations,” he said. “Either you’re here or you ain’t. But we’ll try to reserve you and your buddy a double even though they’re hard to come by.”
“What the Hell have you gotten me into,” I blurted to Jim when we reached our $15 double on the 10th floor. Having walked through the chaotic, humanity-choked lobby, we now faced the worst accommodations I had seen anywhere, and that included much of Mexico and South America. Jim said nothing but he carefully deposited an army duffle bag full of mixed popcorn, oranges, and bagels, onto a heavily charred table. The table appeared to be the work of a previous tenant that had attempted to build a winter warming fire. I sympathized completely; you could see your breath in the room.
I had seen that duffle bag before, several years earlier. Only then, the now-patched corner was dribbling popcorn into an immense Houston movie theater. It had had one of those unmistakable holes that only a casually dedicated mouse or squirrel could make. Jim and I had entered the movie late with the popcorn and a 6-pak of Diet Pepsi concealed under our coats. I had the Pepsi and Jim had the duffle of popcorn and I’m not sure to this day how he managed to hide a duffle of popcorn under his army surplus trench coat without looking pregnant, but he did. The movie was the newly released ET, and the theater was completely full except for two empty adjacent seats in the second row, about mid-row. Our eyes had not adjusted to the dark, especially against the light of the massive screen as we indiscreetly maneuvered toward the two seats with our duffle and 6-pak. The children we sat on were as stunned as we were. They screamed. The office saw our snacks and still refunded our money.
Back in the comforts of our toasty room, Jim casually dropped onto the solitary metal folding chair. I cautiously backed myself toward one of the three cots and sank into its depths to the point where my feet lifted off the floor and my butt bottomed out. I could only see the upper half of Jim’s body. I started to itch immediately.
“You know why I do this, don’t you?” he said.
“Well, I assume it has something to do with the fact that you’re writing a book about the Third World,” I replied.
“That’s only a part of it. The other side of that coin reveals the simple truth that I am trying to beat the Texas university system of providing a lump sum for lodging and meals.”
And then he launched into telling me about last year’s AAG meeting in downtown Detroit, one I intentionally missed because Detroiters had, at least at that time, a penchant for wasting each other at an uncomfortable pace, especially in the heart of the city. And I, as a biologist, was interested in life, mine most especially. In Detroit, Jim had managed to locate a Y very near the convention center for under $10 per night. But he was unable to find a cabby who would deposit him at the front door. The best he could arrange was a moving drop-off, several blocks from his destination, in the middle of the day.
“You go on up to the room, I can handle this,” Jim said, and shoved me through the closing door of the elevator. The elevator, under normal circumstances, is an improvement over the staircase when you’re tired and on the 10th floor. There are exceptions. Had the Y made the decision to rip out the shag carpet floor cover to allow for frequent and thorough cleaning, it would have been a wise decision. After the doors sealed me in, my olfactory system short-circuited. Simultaneously, my peripheral vision detected a grayish, lump of something propped up against a corner of my sealed tomb. I suppose the lump was urinating into what might be misconstrued, under low lighting conditions, as a miniature urinal. A small chocolate milk carton.
When we returned to the Y our first night, after an excellent KFC dinner, the lobby was packed. The crowd did not represent what I consider to be a good socio-economic cross-section. Not even close. As Jim and I cautiously snaked our way through the inert bodies, the pervasive smells of regurgitated burgundy and cigarettes added a latent dimension to our greasy dinner. Almost to the elevator, an elderly woman blocked our way to freedom.
“Would you nice-looking young gentlemen help me with my bags? They don’t seem to have a bellhop in this establishment,” she said. Her bags surrounded her and were of the Safeway, not Samsonite, label.
“That’s okay. I’m stuffed with chicken grease,” I said.
“So, what meeting did you gentlemen say you were attending?” she asked. After responding, she asked me if she might join us the next day. I told her that we were involved in an all-day field trip, which was the truth.
“Well, I love field trips,” she said.
One hour back at our room and Jim had not yet returned. My mind envisioned bag lady accomplices dragging Jim’s perforated body toward the Y dumpster. They would never have been noticed on the elevator. On his way down to the lobby to get help, via the staircase, I met him coming up with a blanket under his arm.
“She doesn’t have any covers on her cot,” he explained. “Furthermore, I’ve found her fascinating. She is an intelligent, articulate woman down on her luck. Come along and have a chat with her. You’ll see what I mean.” Within seconds after introducing us in her doorway, Jim had evaporated. She offered me some ice cream out of one of the bags that filled the tiny room. It had begun to ooze out onto the floor.
“No, that’s true, you wouldn’t be,” she conceded. “Well how about any loose change? I need to make some long-distance calls to my surgical team in New York.”
“The trips are restricted to the members of the association,” I didn’t know if that was true or not but I’m fairly certain she wouldn’t have passed for an academic. I really didn’t know if that was true, but I assumed it was. I had paid substantial money to attend the conference because I was not a member of the AAG. Then she hit me with her hidden agenda.
“Do you perhaps have $20 that you might loan me?” she asked. Her voice had lowered considerably. “I afraid that I need money for a heart transplant.” I glanced futilely over my shoulder for some invisible support. The hallway was empty. Even Jim, with his Third World mind, would have balked at this request. Twenty dollars would buy him one helluva lot of popcorn and an unperforated Army surplus duffle.
The following day, Jim and I transferred to the Minneapolis Marriot, where the meeting was being held and the other Third World geographers were staying.
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**Originally published Feb, 24, 1987. Potpourri Writers’ Bloc #5. Texas A&I University Literary Magazine, pp. 26-28. Revised December 2020.
“Do you think I would be staying in this place if I had that kind of money?” I said.