Flophouse

During one of the coldest winters of the early seventies, I lived in a steam-heated flophouse in Ottawa, Illinois that was situated over a pawn shop and was next door to a bar. One day the self-appointed overseer of the bums who lived there took it upon himself to open the door to a room in which lived a big fat guy. The guy was a part-time bartender at the saloon downstairs, and he hadn’t showed up to work for a few days.

“Well, he’s dead and he’s as cold as a cucumber!” shouted the overseer after he went inside the room. I had never touched a freshly dead person, so I went down the hall and entered the room, actually a two-room apartment unlike my own. Both rooms were littered with crumpled cigarette packs, beer cans, and whiskey bottles. And in the bedroom the 350-pound occupant was indeed dead, sitting stupidly on a bed that was pushed up against a wall - just sitting there with his mouth open and his tongue sticking out. I reached out and touched his arm, and he was indeed cold as a cucumber. It was an eerie feeling, but there was no better way of telling that a body was dead. If I had to guess I’d say the cause of death was a heart attack.

The overseer bum, himself a frequent flier at the saloon, notified the kindly woman proprietor and she called a mortician. (Why she didn’t call the police is beyond me.) Two gentlemen in somber suits and overcoats showed up outside the pawn shop sure enough, and they climbed the steep stairway to the second floor with a gurney in tow. Together we got the big body into a body bag and onto the gurney, which just wasn’t going to make it down the front staircase. Instead we took it out the back door and down the rickety outside wooden stairway, all while bundled up against the cold. We had a hysterical moment at one point when the body started to slide off the gurney, but we got down to the bottom O.K.

About a year later, I moved out of the flophouse, and my friend Jim moved in. I was astonished to find that he had rented the same deluxe room as the fat guy. It had been a while since I helped move the body, but my friend had been there a few weeks and what gave me pause was the place was littered with *Jim's* discarded cigarette packs, beer cans, and whiskey bottles. He must have been all of twenty-five.