The Last Days of the Y.M.C.A

I moved in over three years ago. Sir Thomas Cartwright placed me into the second floor -- for Section Eight and and those with all types of social disorders. Yet Sir Thomas gave me a roof over my head. No longer did I need to play the check-in-and-out games. No more Motel 6's or Quality Inn's for me. It was less than eight hundred a month, about one third of my retirement check.
  I still owed the Quality Inn of Carlsbad two hundred dollars. After Sir Thomas took four hundred for my security deposit, it left me with about three hundred dollars for the rest of the month. The small room felt more like a walk-in-closet.
 It was in May of 2011,  and like I said, it felt good to have a roof over my head and a shower and kitchen down the hall. I felt mad that Bobby Medina had lost my reservation and I needed to fill out a new form and later call the State to fax a paper showing my retirement allowance. So lets turn back the clock to three years ago, or thereabouts to get a first hand view.
 Doors banged, the guy next door spoke aloud to somebody not there. Loud music down the hall shook my room. The sound of buses and ambulances blasted outside. Dust flew in from my only window. It was quite stuffy without an A/C but it did have a small T.V. and phone. A custodian brought me a desk light.

Y.M.C.A Broadway 

 Sir Thomas promised that with my lease, I would get new towels, have my room cleaned Mondays, and also it would be "peaceful since it was across from the courtyard, and not the street."
  I had no idea that my bed mates would be arriving from Mexico. Some were Heroin addicts, others had diseases in remission like Pneumonia, T.B. and Whopping cough among other diseases.
   It appeared that San Diego had an exchange program with Mexico. The Green Cards would first go to one of our hospitals, treated and then HUD would give them a voucher to come to my building.
Yet that was not the least of my problems. My biggest headache were the bed bugs. Why they feasted on me. I woke up every night with endless scratching. And it was infectious. Soon my entire body itched. Even a trip to the bathrooms did not help with a hot shower. Blood appeared on my wounds and soon covered my bed.
   I learned to sleep with my clothes on. And that proved to be difficult. Summer months produced room temperatures in the eighties with no ventilation. Since the wooden vented doors had been locked shut, It felt like there was no air inside the room.
   Yet I brought on the cockroaches. I never kept room clean. I was a mess, all of me from my toenails to my hair on my chin. Any food left out became fodder for these varmints. They bugs crawled over me at night. Some attacked my food inside the small refrigerator. Once I made the error of eating one whole until I heard a scream.
   That was when I met up with Freddie the Roach. We became good friends, so good in fact, he requested his family to stay away from my room for awhile. Yet loud music down the hall steeled my serenity at night.
   A large black dude wearing Cameroon letters on a tee shirt had it out for me. The first time I met him he told me to "To Go f...k Myself." From then on until the time he was thrown out, my blood pressure had no control anymore.  He would lumber down to the second floor hall wearing nothing but a towel draped around his belly.  I nick-named him Jelly Belly. Sir Thomas moved this loud vulgar voice twice, the last time a few doors down from me. Why his voice sounded like an elephant in heat. He was always ironing and playing that darned music at night.
Yet that summer month was something else. I had made Lindbergh Field my home. My Compass Pass took me everywhere for only $41. We had a dreadfully not summer. The airport buss or 992 took me to the airport. My air filter needed pure oxygen to live. Yet on this day, no car ran downtown. With the California heat wave came a problem with electricity. The grids shut down all through parts of California.
   I was stuck at the airport. Their generator kept me alive with clean air. The downtown bus was two hours late but eventually I returned to the darkened 'Y'. I used my hands to fumble my way down the hallway. I made it into my room, alive barely. Somehow I made it through the long hot summer. I wondered why San Diego did not have A/C's inside all hotels, what with global warming and all.
  About that time, the El Loco Hotel began having endless fire alarms-for one week. I soon learned to ignore the alarms. Nobody knew who set them off. The 'Y' paid for a security guard then. After one week the culprit was called. The management had locked his door but the police soon came to take him away.
  Most of the second floor housed mainly blacks and a few whites then. The above black attacked my next-door-neighbor with a pen. Sir Thomas, the landlord ignored most of the problems. A case to point out his agendas can be made after one of my throbbing molars had been extracted. I was drinking salt water and afterwards, threw the remaining water into one of his prized miniature potted palms in the front.

Dead Man walking 

  "Cryin-out-Loud...You goin kill my plants...I will throw you out...!" I told Sir Thomas it was just water and he never apologized. He was always sweeping his hands over the stairway wooden railings. Dust or dirt made the man insane as did drinking coffee from the lobby.
   When I first arrived, I was considered a guest and had coffee, maid, and other privileges. I learned that he allowed the homeless to enter and indulge after the seven o'clock coffee was made. Soon, he discovered that some of the tenants filled up their thermoses with coffee.
   "George, you had enough coffee. No more", or "You are no longer a guest, no more coffee or apples." One year later, the owners removed our security guard, once-a-week housecleaning among other things. Yet with the bad comes the good. Music always blared in the night.

Today, the new Egyptian owners have given me sixty days to vacate the building. They even turned off the hot water for a spell until I told one of the owners off. In a letter, he wrote about demolishing the landmark.
  A staff member told me that somebody named Gloria gave the Egyptian's the go-ahead. The first thing they did was wax the halls, stairs and everything everyday. Then the paint came along. A man named Luis worked night and day to get the new hotel in shape. New, brand new beds, and sheets would now adorn every room and also new hallway rugs. In a letter to everyone, he the new owner Mansour, wrote he would "demolish" the hotel and make it like a franchise looking one.
  Yet what would become of the young who could only afford the YMCA. Even a younger Charles Lindbergh paid only a dollar a night to live there. The one dollar is now fifty today but tomorrow who knows? It is anyone's guess but mine is more HUD's will die on the street and the young ones will need to go elsewhere, but where???
  Comic-Com brought a deluge of fans into San Diego. The rooms went as high as $300 a night. Most of the rooms now had bunk beds. The new owners had upgraded the rooms without upgrading the hotels. In illegal termination noticed removed most of us -- as they gave a few dollars for resettlement.
  There is still no air conditioning and only one elevator works. Today it is $65 to share a bunk bed in the myopic rooms. The polluted off-Broadway air has no place to circulate as towering buildings have removed the wind drifts off of the Harbor.