I had to walk down a dark hallway to use the steamy communal bathroom. There were tall, spiney cactuses growing beneath a clothesline in the backyard. The rent was only three hundred dollars a month, and the landlady, while showing me the studio, had used the word character—which excuses all architectural and other oddities, including slanted floors, unclosable cabinets, and century-old smells—a dozen times. My new neighborhood was called Middletown because it was halfway between the up- and downtowns of San Diego, close to the airport and the interstate. It was a burg that felt between worlds, full of ephemeral embellishments and forgotten people. In Middletown, all the paint was peeling, but most of it was masked by the knotted masses of purple morning glories that grew everywhere of their own accord. The women wore pink foam hair curlers out of doors, the men stood on the sidewalks every day feeding pigeons, and there was always the rusty sound of a faraway accordion intermittently drowned out by the roar of rooftop-skimming airplanes headed for the tarmac.
