Misery and Meager Exultations : Living: Weekly motels, the last stop on the road to hoped-for California prosperity, shelter a gritty breed of American, surviving without much encouragement.

The cities bent on image improvement don’t want them, these “weekly” motels that wind through the hardscrabble neighborhoods where the Chamber of Commerce image runs out, where prostitutes pace the sidewalks at 6 in the morning. There is talk of “the element” that these motels attract. There is talk among the minions of city halls of a “bed tax” to discourage the motels’ semi-permanent tenants, the “working poor” who can’t scrape together sufficient money to rent an apartment and put a deposit on the utilities. There is talk of “removal.”

I have been living in one of these side-street motels in Orange County, partly for convenience, mostly out of curiosity.

The girl next door has been sick for more than a week from an unspecified infection. She is thin, with a small blue tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder. She is, she tells me in the course of a brief conversation, “from a long line of rodeo people.” She is perhaps 19, with the look of a thousand other girls who married too young, had babies too early and too close. Girls from towns like Bakersfield or Omaha or El Paso. There are many other girls with the same look here.

My neighbors manage to pay their rental of $120 or $130 a week from fitful jobs, house painting or warehousing or waiting tables. They live to a large extent outside our line of vision; if they engage our attention at all, it is only peripherally, when we read about them in some newspaper account of the Other America. But they are familiar to social workers and to the police; this motel is a locus for law enforcement.

“The poor tend to live in a long unchanging present,” Gore Vidal has written, “for the rich there is always ‘next year.’ ” For these neighbors of mine, the future, is merely the next day the rent is due.

This is not home as the rest of us know the term, but for my neighbors, expatriates from real domesticity, “home” has razored down to a room in a motel, to what will fit inside these airless cubicles that often house families of five.

Kids are everywhere here, clamorous black and white and racially mixed kids who ride their Big Wheels in the parking lot and play with the rubber trash cans. On weekends their fathers lounge in their Levi’s and yell at the children they can’t afford.

It is difficult to call these sad misalliances of male and female “family.” The texture of the days here seems taut with hostility, the eruptions of alcohol and violence frequent, the wives more than occasionally battered, and in grim turn, batterers.

On more than one hot night in this tatty room I’ve thought that there is something remarkably untherapeutic about these enclosures, something that may be finally intolerable to the spirit, some rancor impelling the inhabitants beyond the levels of behavior that we consider requisite for human civility.

It is an existence shorn of endearments, of any semblance of serenity. My neighbors scream and threaten each other as if these scrimped and sapless rooms left them only this one freedom, to use their voices to batter at one another’s despair.

Maybe my neighbors once had other, fuller, lives that somehow drained down into these cramped spaces; maybe the forward momentum of their lives was balked somehow; but I suspect they are simply people who do not prevail in life but brazen it out with a kind of sad brio. Sculling through the world haphazardly, they are people in search of a situation. They came here to find a friend or a job or a house that didn’t have dust for a front lawn, but when they pulled in, the friend had moved on and the job was a mirage.

There were houses here that didn’t have dust for a front lawn, but they couldn’t touch them, couldn’t touch anything. They packed in to places like this motel for the interim, existing from week to week inside claustrophobic quarters where every pimple of frustration is magnified.

This is the underbelly of the American Dream, the place where the rents in the fabric of prosperity, of hope itself, are as obvious as the old, lumbering cars my neighbors drive.

Time and again one or another of my neighbors will assume the awkward posture of the job applicant and succeed only in pantomiming ambition. These are the “hard-to-place,” whose apparel and demeanor short-circuit any chance for success. Where will these girls go for a future, I wonder, trailing the stigmata of their tattoos and twang and clinging children? What possibility is open to them that would not repeat the failure of their unfocused pasts?

They will remain, these occasionally lovable Yahoos who are my neighbors, oddities in a county where oddities are not allowed to prosper, because Orange County is a far harsher place than the familiar obscurity of wherever it was they had driven away from in those big cars. Life in Orange County is not for the non-achiever, not for these obscure and hardened lives whose future remains a porridge of short-term jobs and the waiting for them.

We have trouble explaining why some people make it and others don’t, why some people find something to salvage from the stark fable of their lives, and others, by some fluke of luck or fate or turn of the economic screw, don’t. The men and women who live here cope in the only way they know, by living through their miseries and meager exultations.

If my neighbors are small-town folk profoundly ill at ease with the sleek corporate appetites of Orange County, they are also gritty specimens, wily survivors who exemplify the ingenuity it takes to endure their considerable deprivations. Maybe having come this far and being able to go no further, it is still their delusion that they can prosper in Orange County, that they can somehow take hold in this sunny, inhospitable place.

Cowboys in a land no longer in need of cowboys, they ride the asphalt range of Beach and Harbor boulevards in those big, unfashionable cars and try fitfully to fashion something better than a life lived in motels, in these rooms that will remain, until that something better does come along, “home.”