Heaving my U-Haul to the street behind our new apartment building, I put the rented behemoth into “Park.” The truck whined as it cooled from a long day on the road, which was preceded by another, and another, and another en route from Chicago to Los Angeles. After a month of angry parents and shotgun moves, we had finally arrived at our new home: Hollywood. Kinda.
I scoped out the street in my new neighborhood in Van Nuys, just north of LA, a tiny place located at the corner of Meth and Amphetamine. If I’d waited until 2007 to make this move, just one more year, I might have had mobile internet and smartphones with which to look up the sketchiness of this area. Sadly, lacking in time travel, I made do.
Popping the cap on a flat can of Monster Energy, I crammed sickly-warm caffeine into my head, grabbed my Nokia, cursed my sobriety, and stumbled out of the cabin onto the backstreet, ready to clamber into my new digs and sleep on a bare floor.
Taking in that this was my first night in my brand-new life, I saw three things: the first, an adobe-style apartment building, its charm undeniable; off-white stucco and rusty clay tiles, palm trees and birds of paradise in bloom, and an adorable little pool, surrounded by two stories of motel-rooms-turned-apartments. As far as I knew I was moving into Melrose Place.
The second thing I saw was Markie, my fiancée, raven curls tumbling over a plain grey hoodie, wearing an expression more tired than satisfied. Exhausted from caravanning across the country behind me, her slender hip cocked to the side so she could remain vertical but still slump. In Markie’s tiny arms, red and wiggling, was Savage, an ironically named wiener dog, skinny and with a head larger than the rest of her body. She was my dad’s dog just before he died and where we went, so did Savage. We were a team.
The third thing I saw was a gorgeous arrangement of wrought-iron palm fronds, which were welded to wrought-iron building gates. Which were locked shut with a chain. “Fuck,” we said in tandem, a moment I replied to by declaring “Jinx.” Markie was neither amused nor silenced.
“I don’t see a box to buzz the front office,” she said and placed Savage down on a roadside strip of grass. “Can you check around the front?” Savage, not to be forgotten, growled at me her clear need for some dad love. I knelt down and scritched the velvety patch under Savage’s chin. Markie volunteered to monitor Savage through any potential poops, so I rose to find an intercom.
Rounding the building onto a major LA thoroughfare named Sepulveda Boulevard, I walked towards the building’s front gate. From across the street, I was slapped by the obnoxious neon light and too-loud music of a dive bar calling itself ‘The Liquid Zoo.’ Not knowing it was a bar at the time, I decided this was a terrible name for an aquarium, crossed to the front gate, and found the intercom I was looking for.
After a fruitless search for some kind of directory information on the intercom, I did what 20th century America taught me to do – I dialed “0” for the operator. A brief dial tone and a ring later, I was connected with my new landlord.
“Quien eres,” or “Who is this?” replied a woman’s voice through tinny distortion. I explained who I was –I’d faxed my lease papers in last week, and had finally arrived for my move-in. I explained this in English.
“Que?” came her confused reply, buzzing through the box. After a few words into repeating myself, the intercom clicked, hissed, and cut out.
“Quien eres?!” came a man’s voice. I didn’t even get the word “Hello” out before the intercom was cut short. I peeped through the gate, at the building number mounted on a tarnished brass sign: It read 7473 N Sepulveda, an address I’d spent the last week committing to memory. I was in the right place.
“What’s up?” called Markie, finally rounding the corner with a now leashed Savage to remind me of their existence. I told her what happened and Markie, always one to trust but verify, pressed the “0” button on the intercom next to me. This time, no answer at all.
The human stomach lacks fortitude required to withstand the density of the dread that comes from suddenly becoming homeless in a city of strangers. Anxiety filled my gut and forced Monster Energy back up to my tongue. I forced it back down.
Markie, decidedly the wiser of us at the moment, knelt on the sidewalk and let Savage’s play-anywhere vibrance quell her panic. To untrained eyes in the concrete jungle of San Fernando Valley, it may have looked like Savage was attacking a leaf, but our shared giggle (and need for shelter) steeled our resolve. I scooped up Savage from her floral prey and followed Markie back to our caravan.
Since this all happened in fall of 2006, we did the most period-appropriate thing we could think of. We went to Kinko’s Copies, paid for minute-metered internet, went on AskJeeves to find a dog-friendly hotel, and printed up a Mapquest map of the route. And to our great fortune, we found one within our price range that didn’t explicitly exclude dogs, a rarity in Los Angeles County. It was perfect.
And we didn’t even have to pay for the whole night, because it was an hourly motel! We learned what that meant about four seconds after entering its lobby.
To call this place a dump is to insult landfill sanitation standards. There are a million hacky and tired jokes told about West LA motels being dirty and in need of a blacklight. This place, a tucked-away wooden block of a building on West Sunset with clanky steel doors, required no such light. The vibrant splatters of Abstract Expressionist art were alive and well on the walls and in the carpet. I cursed myself for not learning more Spanish.
Ready to finally rest our heads after the most stressful day of our lives, we consciously overlooked the line of prostitutes lining up near the pool, although to call it a line is generous. It was more of a loosely corralled herd of sex workers. It’s about this time that we realized where we’d booked our stay.
Even worse was the sign above the front desk: “NO PETS!!!” The look we shared in that moment was silent but clear: I would smuggle in the dog. Markie strode past the herd and checked us in, suitcase in hand, as I went to the U-Haul to devise a plan for Savage.
I climbed into the cabin of the truck and began scheming: It was fall in Chicago, where I’d just moved from. And in the tradition of my people, I did none of the necessary planning and brought all my winter clothing with me. Complete with my ankle-length woolen peacoat! I had my plan. A text message from Markie hit my phone, reading “Room 212.”
I do not know what they thought when I re-entered the building. I do know what I looked like: struggling to walk upright and in a straight line, suddenly wearing a woolen horse blanket I did not have on before, in eighty-degree weather, with a thin & long protrusion jutting from my sternum. I looked like two cartoon children trying to sneak into a movie.
Ignoring the sex workers who’d gathered once again at the sound of the door, I trotted up the spiral staircase with my dog’s ass bouncing in and out of my arms haphazardly. At one point, Savage began to wag. I don’t know what the sex workers imagined my anatomy to be by now and didn’t want to. I strode past the ice machine doubling as a public wastebasket and into room 212.
‘Success,’ I thought! The three of us would not sleep on the streets tonight as long as we kept our heads down. I received no time to celebrate, however, as Markie’s severe tone interrupted my celebration by telling me, “Don’t put her down yet.”
I turned around. Markie was right.
This place was even more stained than the lobby, as whatever happened here also, apparently, happened on the ceiling. The room was wallpapered in “HELLO MY NAME IS” stickers with phone numbers underneath the names on them: “Desirae,” “Ruth,” and “Candi” with an “i” were some of them. We did not call them. There was a VHS tape in the VCR underneath a smoke-stained TV. We did not watch it. Just to be safe we didn’t even turn on the TV… We were there to sleep with a roof over our heads and behind a locked door, period. This would do.
Markie finished her makeshift bed-condom and called out to Savage. Savage, undulating beneath my coat and possessed of ZERO Zen, bound from my arms onto the bed and towards my fiancée with her tongue set to “stun.” It was the first real smile I’d seen beam across Markie’s face that day. For all the trouble we’d found, we had each other. And we had Savage.
Fucking Savage, man.
That night, we only slept in the most technical sense of the word. On top of being my dad’s puppy and a badger-hunting part of our family, Savage was also a loudmouthed dickhead. She would “boof” and growl at anything that made a noise that she couldn’t see. In normal hotels, this only becomes a problem every so often. In this kind of hotel, it was a problem every 5 to 10 minutes depending on client stamina. And tonight, she chose to howl.
Any errant noise, from headboards banging to johns loudly being removed, resulted in piercing yowls. She struck into us the fear of sleeping on the streets, kicked out of a scummy motel room by surly hookers upset about our violation of tenant policy. Savage wouldn’t shut up. Desperate and terrified, we tried to hold her muzzle shut. Her piercing, plaintive cries stopped that right away.
Markie and I softly wept at our helplessness. We knew we weren’t going to make it through the night and sobbed into each other’s arms.
And then, alerted by a Nokia ringtone, we woke up the next morning. The sun was up. We made it. Instead of an angry madame confronting us, we watched the blushing dawn. Through some miracle, nobody knocked on our door to kick us out. And as a bonus, we only had to pay for eight hours. It was a success despite the quality of our efforts.
That morning, we uneventfully smuggled Savage back to the truck under the same coat. As I checked out of the hotel, the front desk clerk, a middle-aged woman with drooping aviator sunglasses and ironed brunette hair, reassured me not to worry so hard because they get dogs in their hotel all the time. It wasn’t until halfway through our gas-station breakfast that I put together what was meant by the combination of the brothel and the statement “we have dogs all the time.”
Sink baths and rubbing alcohol wipes were soon to follow. With a suitcase-wrinkled Goodwill tie knotted at my throat, I made it to the first day of my internship. To our brand-new life. While I worked, Markie sorted out a lease, securing our first apartment as a family. And sweet Savage would live on for another tongue-tumbling decade, never wanting for a clean bed again.
Or, for that matter, a leaf to fight.
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Kevin Bain is a writer and script reader whose work has been featured in ‘The Argyle.’ Originally from Chicagoland, he now resides outside Cleveland with his wife and their loving menagerie of cats.
© 2026, Kevin Bain
Halfway Down the Stairs 