The grille made it okay at the Great Southern Hotel. The office was shut off from the guests or potential guests, so I felt safe enough. At the place next door they had no such grille, and the reception desk was just a low bench, easily climbed by enraged or deranged clientele. I wouldn’t have worked there. The grille was brass, curlicued, just like the ones you see in old bank-heist westerns. You might equally expect Sam Spade or the Sundance Kid.

The grille was directly across the vestibule, more like a corridor, from the double-doors of the television and smoking room. Everybody smoked everywhere, of course, but that big room had nicotine stains an inch thick on the embossed wallpaper and elaborate plaster cornices. The smell of history: a roomful of emphysema in what had started as a respectable gentlemen’s boarding house in the city, half a century before.

There had been another grill, without the ‘e’, back in the days when breakfast was served, before the old owner died and his son and daughter inherited the property, but not his interest in it. Six stories of jaded grandeur, she was, by the time I met her. Sunset on Spencer Street. I didn’t even discover the dining room until much later, the doors being shut up at the other end of the corridor-foyer. A huge, high-ceilinged, empty space, with kitchen, locked up and shuttered. They held the auction there the day they sold the place.

There was more than one resident who had lived there half their lives. There was one gentleman who had been making the trip in from his home in the country to work weeks in the city for forty-odd years. He wore a hat and suit straight out of Brack‘s anonymous 5pm crowd. An entire family occupied one double room, accompanied by a full set of golf clubs. They must have had mattresses on the floors. Others required rooms only for an hour or so, although they paid for the night. Twenty-four dollars for a single bed in a room about twice the size of the bed, around the corner from Collins Street, the Rialto, and the financial district.

How close these worlds were. In one I was grateful for the grille the day the guy pointed at me, just pointed, as the cops were escorting him out of the TV room. In the other, a gold-braided commissionaire opened the teak doors for you at Georges Department Store, where the true implications of the old slogan came home to me. When you’re outside, staring in the window, property looks a lot like theft. If you were brazen, you could sit on an eight-dollar cup of coffee, contemplating the financial district from the 35th floor of the Regent Hotel for hours, or drink with the stock-brokers at play in Bank Place. Continue round the corner at the end of Collins Street and the fairy-lights disappeared, to be replaced by a streetscape out of Elmore Leonard (who wrote westerns before applying the form to the mean streets) or Ed McBain, complete with elevated train tracks, and a girl with a line of blood running down her arm from inside the elbow.

Once I was chided by a writing tutor who, while praising my style, advised against letting my slip of misanthropy show. I had thought it was a relatively benign contemplation on a party, an exercise in evocation, no more, but she detected a certain contempt for the subject matter, the people. She was right, I think. Can we say the great writers have a great affection for their creations? Cannery Row comes to mind. I confess to some contempt for some of the habitués, both of the Great Southern, and of the Regent, and of Bank Place.

Some were just annoying, though, like Danny. I had no contempt for Danny, whose situation was a result of the great de-institutionalisation of the mentally misplaced in the 1980s. Asylums were such terrible places, it was decided they would be better off independent, fending for themselves on the street or in inner-city flophouses. Danny and I were mates, but he could bend your ear, one elbow on the counter at the grille, and it wasn’t exactly intellectually stimulating. He was okay when sober. One night-shift when, I confess, I had a couple of bottles of beer myself in the back office, I hid there while he called for me, wanting a yarn. I told him. I told him I couldn’t continue. I told him ten times to go watch some TV or something, but we were mates, and you know how you can push things with mates. He was a resident. My only recourse was to stay out of sight of the grille, in the little cupboard area, which led to the huge, empty back office, and the huger, emptier storage space beyond. All this empty space, in the city. I may have been reading an old copy of Atlas Shrugged I’d found in the lost property there. I’ll never forget the sound of his voice. “Ken?” Then with a downward inflection: “Kehn”. Then in a whiny way, as if he knew I was there, and what I was doing, “Ke-en…” I thought he’d give up pretty soon, but excruciating eons elapsed before he finally wandered off. It wasn’t contempt, it was just that I didn’t feel like talking to him then, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I didn’t despise the rotund lady resident who often occupied the grilled window and could repeat essentially the same sentence several dozen times, with slight variations, as a form of conversation. “I went out to visit the family, my daughter, at Horsham last weekend, for Christmas. Since it was Christmas, and I don’t see them much, I went out to see them, at Horsham. We gave the kids a little puppy. My daughter’s family. Lovely little dog. We gave it to the kids, when I was out seeing the family there, at Horsham, since it’s Christmas time. I don’t get to see them much, so I went out to Horsham and gave the kids a little puppy, you know, because it’s Christmas time.” She could continue at a steady pace like this, in a kind of twisted, unproductive form of the iterations of evolution, for hours. In the end I gave up, and would simply keep reading my book, uttering a murmur of encouragement or agreement, like Winnie-the-Pooh with Owl, every page or two. She didn’t seem to mind. It was a good arrangement.

It was me who called the cops on the guy in the TV room. He wouldn’t leave, and Con, or maybe it was Con’s son, told me about him when we swapped shifts. He had nowhere else to go, but he couldn’t stay there. I told him. I warned him. “I’m sorry mate,” I said from behind the grille, “but you can’t stay here. If you don’t go I’ll have to call the cops.”

“You’re not gonna call ’em,” he said, not slurry, but glazed, dissociated. He knew what was happening, he just didn’t care.

“Won’t I? Why’s that?” Tough guy behind the grille. He was wearing a jacket similar to the one the owner of the hotel had handed on to me, after one of her charity drives. She thought I might like it. It was classy. I wore it for twenty years. His was vinyl.

“‘Coz I’ll revenge ya,” he said, with a lopsided smile and utter conviction. So, naturally, I called them. He couldn’t get at me in there. When they came, the uniform explained to me that they had to witness someone officially tell him he wasn’t allowed to stay, or they couldn’t kick him off the premises or charge him with trespass. So I had to go into the dim TV room, where he sat in a tan cloth-covered lounge chair, and listened to me tell him that he couldn’t stay, even though he had nowhere to go, and even though I knew about the vast empty lands behind the iron-work grille.

I scurried back to the office and watched as they walked him out of the building into god knows what. As they left, he pointed, just for a moment, looking me levelly, loosely in the eye. I was one of the habitués of the Great Southern, and of Bank Place, and of the Regent. A generalised contempt for humanity can’t blind you to the fact that you yourself are a member of the species. I used the skills I had learned from Leonard and McBain to make sure I wasn’t followed as I went home to my warm, safe bed that night.