The Hotel California: residents of this convent turned boarding house say they'll never leave
Friday, 9 June 2017
They reminisce about glory days – of cars, motorbikes, families, and thumping great fortunes. But then came the sharemarket crash of the late 80s. The multimillion-dollar drug deals gone wrong. A trusted friend gone bad. Some decades long stints in the clink.
They wind up here, exchanging platitudes, in what tenant of six years Michael O'Grady calls Hotel California.
'We've gotta live somewhere, you know,' the 63-year-old says. 'That's the way it is, this is the card I've got.'
He and a motley crew of misfits live in a Spanish mission-style pile on the edge of Ponsonby. Right next to a primary school.
**READ MORE:
* Greed, desperation and squalor: life in illegal boarding houses
* From jail to boarding house to jail
* Ex-prisoners feed homeless from boarding house garden**
Formally known as St Joseph's Lodge, Hotel California is one of around around 160 boarding houses in Auckland. Built in 1922 and at one time a nunnery, its high wood panelled walls, carved staircases, and leafy views over the Arch Hill Scenic Reserve lend a lofty – if shabby – glamour.
Earlier in the year the council declared the place in breach of health standards, but it's since been given a good scrub. St Joseph's is threadbare and battered with the odd broken window, but you wouldn't call it filthy. There's rhubarb in the back garden and a little library upstairs.
A Trademe ad – for Hotel California is for sale – points out that the building's heritage status has recently been lifted, giving it 'huge development potential'. The primary school would applaud the end of the boarding house.
For now, tenants check in any time they like - for $240-odd per week - and seem lacking in serious intent to leave.
O'Grady is a hoarder. The door to his room won't shut and he scrambles over hillocks of belongings to reach the valley of his sleeping nest. It's not a bed, it's a tangle of blankets and pillows nestled between mountains of mainly unidentifiable junk.
He suspects his hoarding might be the result of once having a lot, then the lot suddenly being gone: 'All this s… around makes you feel like you still have something,' he says.
Another tenant, recently out of prison, says he wound up at Hotel California after a spell on the streets. He'd rather be on the streets, he says, but to pay child support he needs to get the jobseeker benefit - and to get that he needs a permanent address. This was the only place he could find that would take him without photo ID.
He reckons he's better off without his 9-year-old-son's mum - and women in general.
'You know how sometimes girls say something,' he says, 'and you know you shouldn't react - but you just can't help it? I can do without that sort of trouble.'
There is trouble within Hotel California, though - it goes by the name of synthetic cannabis.
O'Grady admits to taking some while we are there; our interview gets cut short as the highly addictive drug's zombie-like symptoms kick in. He's jerky and unable to speak.
Another of O'Grady's fellow tenants, known as Scotty, says girls in particular seem to be taking the substance.
'They'll be screaming in the hallway, there'll be spew on their shoes,' he describes.
He says he often has to 'mop them and their vomit' off the stairs. Alcoholism is rife too; one tenant admits to drinking 'a dozen cans' of bourbon and cola before midday, and Scotty himself is 'very, perhaps extremely very' fond of sherry.
Scotty wears two pairs of blue striped rugby socks because 'one's bad and the other's less bad but together they're ok'. He tucks what he calls his snot rags into their tops. The snot rags are handkerchiefs made from ripped strips of sheet.
'I can't quite conceive when I started doing this,' he says. 'But it was certainly this year. It just seemed logical - who wants snotty hankies in their shirt pockets?'
He's a dapper fellow, Scotty, in a plush blue coat and very white dress shirt. His boots are holey, but shine with a lustre only durex lubricant gives leather, he says. He keeps a little bottle of it down his sock, for easy access polishing.
While he's sound on events of the Vietnam war and makes references to medieval emperors, Scotty's grasp on his own past seems hazy. He 'might be around 58'. He 'could have' arrived at the lodge around the time of Christchurch's earthquake.
Scotty's days are spent reading history books from the Grey Lynn library and following patches of sun around Hotel California like a cat. He eases himself down in a warm spot with a dainty cup of hot water, occasionally blowing his nose on a snot rag.
'I'd rather have a bit of coffee in my cup,' he says. 'But in this place, the coffee somehow gets liberated from your room.'
Does he think he'll ever leave? 'I should get into gear, really,' he muses. 'But after a few knocks you do become reluctant to step back into the world.'