Sleeping in a rented storage unit in mid-July in Central Florida isn’t half as bad as you think. The drone of the expressway at night could be quite mesmerizing. Some folks paid hundreds for those white noise generators. I got to have it for free. I had my favorite pillow and my own mattress between me and the concrete floor. With my Bob Marley poster stuck to the ceiling, it almost seemed like home.
My biggest problem was the heat. The concrete walls buffered the temperature somewhat, but it still got stuffy when I closed the overhead door.
So I duct-taped together a pair of screens and propped them under the door to let in a breeze but keep out mosquitoes. That helped a bit. I never really felt cool, but after midnight, it almost got comfortable.
At least I only had to be there six hours out of every twenty-four. The rest of the time I went to work or hung out in air-conditioned spaces like the mall or the hospital, where mom was recuperating from pancreas surgery.
The diagnosis shocked me at first, but by this point, cancer no longer scared me. We met plenty of folks at the hospital who had lived with it and seemed to get along just fine.
Mom had been lucky. They caught the cancer early and the tumor was operable. And the type of chemotherapy she would need wasn’t the kind that made your hair fall out.
At least she didn’t need to skimp on doctor’s visits anymore to save money. After losing the house and having to quit her job at the library, we now qualified for Medicaid.
She was better off staying in that hospital for now. I hadn’t had much luck finding us an affordable apartment. She planned to stay with a friend when she got released. In the meantime, I would keep on sleeping at the storage shed until I could save up some money for rent.
Gideon, the balding Cuban who managed this Handi-Stor, wasn’t supposed to allow squatters. But he was a family man with a big heart, so he made a deal with me and a couple others who had been lurking around the place. So long as we stayed off the facility until 11 p.m., didn’t pee in the alleys and were gone by 7 a.m., he would tell security not to hassle us. That way, the big boss and the regular clientele never had to know we were there.
The other squatters were, like me, decent folks dealing with a little bad luck. But those storage units also attracted an alarming amount of vice. This Handi-Stor was apparently a staging area for some major cocaine trafficking up and down the east coast of Florida. I doubt Gideon would have let us stay had he known. His night watchman apparently got paid to keep mum.
I would lower the shed door and keep quiet whenever I heard these drug deals going down. It got pretty stifling awful quick, but it beat letting those degenerates know I was here.
One night a squatter named Jojo came back late and walked into the middle of a transaction. He got beaten up so badly he had to have surgery on his face. The poor guy never slept there again.
A couple hours sweltering in that concrete cave, listening to the freaks outside, brought on some serious blues. I would start thinking about mom in the hospital, missing the old house, Jenny and Marianne. All those things would buzz around my brain like a swarm of bees.
Night seemed to amplify all of my worries and fears. Only when the strip of dawn light came seeping around the edge of the door would my heart and head calm down. Some nights I hardly slept at all.
***
We were out on a job west of town, getting ready to do a neighborhood, a place that looked post-apocalyptic with broken windows everywhere and hip-high weeds growing out of sidewalks.
Wayne’s phone blasted the Monday Night Football theme. He answered and handed it over. “It’s for you.”
“James?” It was Dr. Morrie, mom’s oncologist. “You’d better come down to the hospital. Your mother’s experiencing some complications.”
