Room With A Bath

By the time I moved to Colorado at fifteen, having grown up in the heat and humidity of Florida, I was accustomed to two showers a day at the very minimum. Most had not heard of residential air conditioning and being an active kid, I would wind up smelling like a goat by noon. The junior high I attended required every student to participate in physical education classes and insisted no one return to class without a shower. I can’t even imagine what the classrooms smelled like in those years before public schools added gymnasiums with shower facilities, especially in the South. We did not have showers in elementary school and I do remember the smells of the old wooden “portable” classrooms and sweaty boys and girls. I can only guess that the smell was not a new one to me or any of us who were closed up on ninety degree stifling Florida afternoons.

Occasionally during the hottest months, I would sneak into the swimming pool down the street after it closed.  My friends and I would swim while hidden by darkness.  We would dog paddle around quietly so as not to draw the attention of the apartment residents  surrounding the pool and keep an eye open  for the local police.  Our late night swims would often serve as the third thorough cleansing of the day.  A morning shower before school was essential because of the humid nights.

When I arrived in Colorado, I was not prepared for the dry cool nights and being sweat free on even the hottest of days.  I was conditioned in a Pavlovian way to strip down three times a day and look for a water supply.  I can say this was just a little disconcerting to the couple I was spending the summer with.  I was told toward the end of my stay that first summer, if I returned the following year, I would either have to help my friend extend the leach lines on the septic tank or create a pool in the river I could drop into whenever the need for a bath arose.  Having fished in sixty degree water coming from the melting ice on the mountain tops, my preference would have been the leach lines.

When I moved into the little house in the feed lot, just prior to my junior year, I found it came with an outdoor privy and a milk jug for fresh water.  Since I didn’t have any way to transport the milk jug except for the graciousness of some visitor, I had to be very careful with my water supply.  Surprisingly no one got up and moved when I sat down in class or when I congregated in close proximity to others.  School assemblies really weren’t bad and if I were to guess, fifty percent of my fellow students, who lived on surrounding farms and ranches, bathed no more than once or twice a week.  Perhaps that was because none of my classmates or friends had ever lived in Florida during the hot season.  In south Florida there was only one season…HOT and HUMID.  I settled on the only thing I wanted in Colorado besides a means of transportation was a tub.  It’s funny how your priorities change with your circumstances.  I had found that for fifty cents, the proprietor of the Lincoln Hotel would allow me to use the tub in the hall bathroom on the third floor if I would promise to clean it.  The problem was the hotel was a couple of miles away and unless I went right after work, it became too much of a chore.  I soon became adept with a wash cloth and soap and a small amount of water in a porcelain bowl.  After that and even though I didn’t shave yet, there was always a splash of Aqua Velva to save me.

I had been living in the feedlot for about five months when one unusually warm Sunday afternoon a friend passing by stopped in to say hello.  He and another boy a few years older had just been to the dump when they saw me riding one of my friend Frank’s horses around the enclosure and curiously stopped to take my measure.  I have no remembrance of the driver but I will never forget his friend.

The weeks prior had been cold and snowy.  Temperatures had fallen to below freezing and snow had accumulated to a depth of a few feet.  It was not uncommon for weather to change dramatically in Colorado and in the few days since the cold weather, all of the snow had melted and the air temperature was in the seventies.  I had either been confined to school, the garage where I worked after school or the little house in the feed lot and was delighted to be outside enjoying the back of a horse.  The one boy whose name I have long forgotten climbed the fence and introduced his friend.  His name was Kenny Tinsley.  He was a big guy, or that’s how I remember him.  At least much bigger and a few years older than I was, and out of school.  He had moved to Colorado recently from California and told me he lived with his grandmother in the Arcadia Hotel.  He had never ridden a horse so I offered to give him a brief lesson and although the horse was bareback, within a few minutes he was riding around the feed lot grinning like a possum.  Once he had had enough he wanted to know how it happened I was living alone in the little house.  I gave him the short version of my story and almost before I concluded he said, “I just took a job with a tree service on the western slope and I will not need my room at the hotel.  Why don’t you take it and let me stay a few nights a month when I visit my grandmother.  That afternoon he helped me load up my few belongings and I checked into the hotel.  The weekly rent for a room without a bath overlooking a rooftop was five dollars.  One would have thought I had died and gone to heaven.  The old army cot I had been sleeping on was traded for a double bed.  There was radiator heat and a bath not two miles away but twenty feet down the hall.  Although I had to share both the toilet and the bath with the old timers who shared the residence with me, they rarely used the tub so I pretty much had it to myself.  Each room had a sink and mirror and was lighted by a huge window with a pull down shade.  The Chevrolet garage and dealership was beneath my window and only occupied during the day so while it wasn’t as quiet as my little house in the feed lot, there were no animals rubbing against the walls in the middle of the night.

I had always been afraid of the dark and had purchased a twenty dollar Saturday night special at the local pawn shop when I moved to the feed lot.  It was isolated from town and occasionally I would hear strange noises.  One night early in my residency, I heard a banging and scraping against my bedroom wall in the early hours of the morning.  I fired my .22 caliber pistol at the wall and the noise ceased.  I did not learn until days later that the donkeys would scratch themselves on the corners of the house.

I hadn’t been living in the hotel for long when Mrs. Mock, Kenny’s grandmother, left a note on my door asking me to visit her in the front office.  When I did, she told me she had another room available I might enjoy more than the one I was in.  It was located across from her office and the reception area, such as it was, and next door to a room with a tub.  I took it immediately largely because of the bath tub.  It turned out the tub was actually in a room two doors away from my room.  The space in between was a janitor closet and both it and the bathroom had small windows so my room actually looked into the utility room and the utility room looked into the tub room.  I soon figured out that if I were to climb through the window leading to the utility room and then through the utility room window into the tub room I would have a room with a bath.