She worried about her mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder and was forgoing her medicine to save money. She worried about her 65-year-old grandmother, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and needed power for her daily oxygen treatments. The motel she called “hell on earth” and “this malnourished place” had been her home for the past nine months.
Rose hung on the edge of the crowd, thinking about the $40 she had stashed in her bedside table. Florida’s Star Motel was in disarray before coronavirus. “I paid my rent,” shouted someone, who tossed in a $10 bill.Īn elderly woman covered in bedbug bites threw $1.88 into the pot. “Nobody trusts nobody,” yelled a woman in a tank top and red pajama pants who tossed a $50 bill onto the sidewalk. Soon the pile was growing, and the Star residents who gave were angrily accusing those who hadn’t of freeloading. “Who else? Who else?” he called out as he dropped the bill on the sidewalk. “If our kids go without light, it’s because of our sorry asses.” He castigated his neighbors for spending their stimulus checks on drugs and alcohol, and then peeled a $20 from a three-inch stack of cash. “We a bunch of sorry ass men!” shouted a former felon who had served prison time on cocaine and battery convictions. “This is the third time they’re back here!” one man fumed as the power company workers, protected by sheriff’s deputies, pulled the meters from the electrical boxes. The motel’s residents needed to pay the power company $1,500. The motel’s owner had abandoned the property to its residents back in December, and now the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic was turning an already desperate strip of America - just down the road from Disney World - into something ever more dystopian.
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Several dozen of them were gathered by a swimming pool full of fetid brown water, trying to figure out their next move. She then headed outside to the motel’s overgrown courtyard, a route that took her past piles of maggot-infested food that had been handed out by do-gooders and tossed aside by the motel’s residents. The 17-year-old slammed her door and cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go, hoping that a final blast of cold air might make the 95-degree day more bearable.
The workers were about to shut off the power again. Rose Jusino was waking up after working the graveyard shift at Taco Bell when a friend knocked on her door at the Star Motel.