flophouse

You haven't lived until you've been in a flophouse with nothing but one light bulb and 56 men squeezed together on cots with everybody snoring at once and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable - dark snotty gross subhuman wheezing from hell itself. Your mind almost breaks under those death-like sounds and the intermingling odors: hard unwashed socks pissed and shitted underwear and over it all slowly circulating air much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans. And those bodies in the dark fat and thin and bent some legless, armless, some mindless and worst of all: the total absence of hope it shrouds them covers them totally. It's not bearable. You get up go out walk the streets up and down sidewalks past buildings around the corner and back up the same street thinking those men were all children once what has happened to them? And what has happened to me? It's dark and cold out here.