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Now that I’m retired, I get to repeat the phrase I’ve always longed to say: I’m living on a fixed income. It is a built in excuse for being cheap. Sorry about this cheap bottle of wine I brought to your party, but I’m living on a fixed income. I would love to contribute more than $10 to your campaign, Mr. Buttigieg, but I’m living on a fixed income.
I will be the first to admit I’ve always been cheap. And anyone who has ever known me will not disagree. When my father died when I was a pre-schooler, the first thing out of my mouth wasn’t “what happened?” or “how did he die?” but instead was, “how are we going to pay for everything?”
After that, and my mother took over, being cheap was pretty much hammered into me at every turn. I was told to order the cheapest thing on the menu, to walk home from school instead of paying a dime for the bus and to always buy used, never new. I bought clothes from the thrift store after I got my first job and Mom stopped paying for them, and I still do today.
But nothing drives cheapness home like when I am forced to find overnight lodging. When I was a kid and we had the rare opportunity to travel, motels were $20-$30 a night. The $30 ones sometimes had Magic Fingers bed vibrators, which I loved, but we usually had to settle for beds that didn’t jiggle.
And today, I can’t understand why a place to stay overnight costs ten times that. Look, Other Bill and I love to visit San Francisco, but try finding a room for less than $250 or $300 a night. You can’t find one on line. You have to go to my own personal Dark Web of Lodging Dives to find it. We have always stayed at a place that doesn’t link to travel websites. When we first started going, we could get in for around fifty bucks a night, but it has been slowly rising, and I’m sure it’s close to a hundred now, if not over.
One time we arrived there in the middle of the night and got to the room, and there was only a single bed. We went down to the front desk to address that, but the clerk said she wasn’t allowed to leave the desk unattended, but if we wanted, there was a mattress in the basement we could schlep up to our room. So we did. Fortunately it was still in the plastic wrap, but we had to fold the flimsy mattress in half to get it into the tin can of an elevator.
There are no frills at the places we stay. And by frills I mean things like bath soap, ice, swept floors and washcloths.
The next time we stayed there I noticed that the bed was unusually firm. After a week we took the sheets off to wash them (you were expecting, maybe, maid service?), I realized that for the past 7 days I had been sleeping on a box spring.
A few years ago we stayed at a cheap motel in Tampa. I grabbed the phone book to look up an address (you were expecting, maybe, Wi-Fi?), and a hypodermic syringe fell out. Other Bill looked horrified, and I tried to cover by saying, “Oh, it was probably just a diabetic who left it behind,” but the trace amounts of blood left in it proved me wrong.
Our shabby accommodations rarely feature “free breakfast.” If it does, breakfast consists of a Little Debbie snack cake and a canister filled with Cheerios that you can scoop out with a paper cup. (You were expecting, maybe, a spoon?)
We recently took a trip to Wildwood, Florida. That’s where I got my first speeding ticket when I was 18. The sheriff had radar, but fortunately not much of a nose, because I was drunk at the time. Anyway, take a look at this picture, and pay attention to the scale. I used a quarter so you could understand the size of the white thing.
You probably think that this is a sliver of soap that a normal person would probably throw out, but you’re wrong. This is actually what a national budget hotel chain considers a bar of soap. This is not an optical illusion, and this soapette is brand new, unused, right aout of the bag. We considered ourselves lucky. Oh, and they had washcloths, too!
We’ve been to this chain more than once, mainly because they allow you to bring your dog in the room. And if your olfactory bulb is even half alive, you’d know that as soon as you walked in the door. Here’s a picture of the door of a neighboring room in Wildwood. Looks like a dog was left out all night and was scratching to get in.
But the room was $50, and it had two perfectly fine beds, a TV, a spitting shower, and a great view of the drug dealing and prostitution in the parking lot of the adjacent truck stop, so we didn’t really need a TV. Still no Magic Fingers though, except maybe in that parking lot.
It’s nice that Other Bill puts up with this. Other men, I’m guessing especially straight men, don’t have this luxury of understanding spouses, because let’s be clear: most of these places are not in the nicest of neighborhoods. But Other Bill makes friends with the homeless people in the neighborhood and actually bought one of them a pair of shoes. How do you not love a guy like that? Even I wouldn’t do that, because, well, see paragraph 2.
Before I retired, people would say, “Wow, I guess you can finally live a little, travel, stay at nice places?”
It’s a nice fantasy, but I doubt I’ll be able to change my ways. 57 years of Life Without Father still has its skinflint claws embedded in me. It’s one of the several characteristics about myself I hate. I still pick up a penny in a parking lot, even though it hurts my knees to stoop down. I hang clothes on the line instead of opting for the more convenient and slightly costlier electric dryer option. I never run my car through an $8 car wash when I can do it for free by hand in my driveway. It would take years of therapy to change this, and there are still no guarantees. Every time I catch myself choosing price over comfort, I ask myself, why, Why, WHY?
Because I’m living on a fixed income. I have an excuse now.