I drove around in my car, homeless and going nowhere.

In my pocket was an old fashioned paper paycheck for $696. It represented two weeks of work at my job as a convenience store clerk. My wife was always trying to get me to switch over to direct deposit so my pay would appear instantly in our account with nary a fingerprint from me, but I always refused. On and on she would rattle about how convenient it would be, how easy. “Why must everything be convenient and easy?” I’d ask her and she’d just look at me, blinking and stumped.

So every other Tuesday I would physically get my check from work and take it to the bank. I’d fill out a form made out of paper, hand the form and my check to a bank teller made out of a person, and watch as that person physically deposited my pay into our account. Once there, it would POOF, vanish into digitality anyway.

I had no real options and ran them down in my head. There was Don, but Don was married and had a new baby. I couldn’t see him or his wife Shelby being all that receptive to me just showing up at their door in the late afternoon and going, “Hi, can I live here now?” There was my sister, but she had recently turned into a Jehovah’s Witness. No need to elaborate. There was Larry from work, but Larry from work was young and had room mates. Where would I sleep, the floor? Plus, I’d probably have to listen to them talk about video games and tv shows and movies. I’d probably have to sit there in the corner, watching them eat their psych meds as they explained how nothing ever at all was their own damn fault—whatever it was people in their early 20s did.

I went to the bank and cashed my check, which I deposited in my pocket instead of our account, then drove to the north side of town. The north side was where they kept all the poor people. It was where you went for meth or prostitutes or, like me, a cheap room to rent.

Amid the pawn shops and casinos and cop cars I found the Time Inn. It was sketchy, like every motel on the north side, but maybe not as much. I didn’t spy any old wads of yellow police tape caught in the surrounding fences and dead weeds anyway, and its garbage was actually in the dumpster rather than piled in front of the doors. I also liked how it had an associated bar. Across the cracked and dying asphalt of its parking lot, and in the same peeling colors, was the Time Out.

The Time Inn and the Time Out: someone was witty.

Rooms could be rented by the hour, day, week, or month, with month being the best deal at $250. With my $696, I could live there for two months and still have money left over for meth and prostitutes. But there was no way I was going to do that. Despite the Time Inn’s charming lack of police tape and garbage inside a dumpster, it was still a sad, lonely, end-of-the-road, nowhere-else-to-turn place. Just pulling into the parking lot made me want to pull out of it, go back home, and beg the wife I’d been about to leave to take me back.