#stanleyelkin

Even his rooms in those days, those below-stairs cubicles in the homes of widows for whom he shoveled snow and stoked furnaces whose heat never seemed to reach his room, and which were all he could afford on the fifteen- and twenty-dollar-a-week salaries he made, or his rooms in the towns’ single hotels, near the railroad stations, bargained for, at a rate not simply in deference to his extended stay but in recognition of some built-in inferiority, the bed always in a vulnerable position, the room it’s self in a vulnerable position, over a boiler perhaps, or machinery, or behind the thin wall of the common restroom, or too far from it, or his window just behind the vertical of the hotel’s blazing electric sign—there was a room in Kansas where owing to some obscure fire law the bulb in the high ceiling could never be turned off—even these rooms left him (despite the indifferent luke warmth that came from ancient, prototypical radiators) with an impression not of poverty or straitened circumstance, so much as of guaranteeing his life later, discomfit comforting, assuring him of his mythic turn, patience not just a virtue but a concomitant of future fame, hard times every success’s a priori grist.