I walked into my apartment building this evening and was met by a surprise most unpleasant: a tall guy, whom I instantly pegged as the son of the giant who lives upstairs (Giant Jr., I supposed; he who plays bad jazz on his bass into the wee hours of the morn), walked past me holding...a small black mouse.
He was headed outside, dangling the poor bastard by his little tail. His friend held the door open for him.
"Shit!"
It was all I could muster. Could he not have worn a glove or something? Even a makeshift glove, a plastic bag? Or at the very least, have grabbed a damn paper towel? Who does that?
It was the most vile thing I could have possibly seen just before dinner.
I'm well aware that living in an apartment building is a total crap shoot. I'm not even going to bore you with the details of how dreadful the first of September is when you live in a college town. No, instead I'm going to tell you a little story...semi-related...
Have you ever lived in an apartment building and banged on the ceiling with a broomstick because the people upstairs were being too goddamn loud? And then, have you ever maybe wondered who it was who lived up there, and if they were, perchance...large and frightening?
My husband is a patient, reasonable man, not prone to sudden outbursts of anger. Unless he is provoked, perhaps. Unless he has been cooped up inside our tiny apartment all day listening to the wildebeest upstairs going Bang...Bang...Bang!!!!
Who the hell moved in up there? Herman Munster? And we thought the last tenants were annoying! Please, they were a jaunt through wine country compared with this nonsense!
On top of the banging, Herman lives with someone who plays the upright bass at all hours of the night. In case you're not familiar with this instrument, it's loud. VERY loud. (To put it in perspective, in an orchestra there are twenty-four violins and only four basses.)
In an uncharacteristic turn, Hubby sort of snapped. "I can't take it anymore!" He was going to get the broom. Now, banging on the ceiling with household objects is usually my particular area of expertise, but that night it would be Hubby who'd take center stage. Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang! I had to stop him after eleven bangs. At that point he was just being gratuitous.
I'm not going to lie, I had a bad feeling about all this. Perhaps it was seeing my levelheaded husband lose his cool. At any rate, it was with a feeling of unease that I laid there on the couch watching TV. And had I just heard knocking? Nah. Couldn't be.
Tap tap tap tap tap. I muted the television. Yes, it definitely sounded like someone was knocking. ON OUR DOOR. I tiptoed over and peered into the peephole and saw...how shall I describe this soul? Think "token bad guy" from any 80's movie you've ever seen. Think hulking, ginormous brute with scraggly blond hair and beady eyes. Think Hell's Angels biker type. Think...oh shit.
I scrambled my ass back to the living room and accusingly whispered to my husband: "There's someone at the door. A huge fucking dude is at our door."
I followed Hubby and stood behind him as he opened the door. This gentleman was even bigger than I'd initially thought. He was maybe in his mid-forties, and at least 6'5".
"Is there a problem? Were you just banging on the ceiling?" The large man spoke with an accent. A Russian accent, maybe? German? (In any case, think "super villain" from a Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme movie). He was crouching down so his head would fit within the door frame.
Hubby held his ground and proceeded to explain that "someone" upstairs had been banging day and night, and also playing upright bass. I, for my part, cowered behind him and tried not to shit myself.
The giant digested the information. "My son plays bass, but he doesn't play it in the apartment; he hasn't even taken it out of its case."
"No man, he's definitely been playing it, last night he was playing it at almost midnight. And it's really loud." (Go....Hubby! Just don't get us killed.)
"Are you a musician, too?" Big dude asked.
"Yeah, I play sax, but I don't play inside the apartment out of respect for my neighbors. It's too loud." Holy crap. Did Hubby actually just say that?
Big dude: "Well, I want to live here in peace. I mean, it's only eight o'clock, I should be able to walk around, it's not even late..."
Hubby explained that he had a splitting headache and had been listening to the banging all day while trying to work on a project. He also said we'd lived here for a year and the noise had never been so bad.
At this point I piped in, my voice unnaturally high, and said, "The ceiling's are pretty thin, probably! Heh heh!"
As we closed the door we could hear the giant going back up the stairs. Boom. Boom. Boom. "Of course it sounds like he's coming through the freaking ceiling," Hubby noted, "The dude's enormous!"
He was indeed. But if Hubby had been nervous he certainly didn't show it. As for me, I felt like we'd just escaped a near and brutal death. All I could think of was that scene from Pee Wee's Big Adventure, when Pee Wee goes into the biker bar and screams out: I'm trying to use the PHONE!"
A Few weeks ago, NStar notified us they'd be turning off our electricity for the third time this summer. Oh, not because we're delinquent on payments or anything; they're shutting off everyone's power on our block to perform repair work on The Grid. I don't know where this grid is, or what it is even, but it sounds official enough. And since the electricity situation in our building is dubious at best, I understand there's a need for some serious attention. But, I ask you, in the middle of summer?
In any case, what this specifically means to me, your run of the mill residential energy sucker, is at approximately 1:00 am Saturday morning my power will be "interrupted" and will remain so until roughly 1:00 pm that day. There will be no morning mug of Fair Trade Wake Up Blend, no hot water, no fans or air conditioning. Have I mentioned July in Boston is fairly steamy?
Possibly even more distressing is the fact that the food in our refrigerator spoils. We do our best to be proactive on this front; on Friday I took one for the team and polished off the rest of that ravioli stuffed with Vermont goat cheese and arugula apricot pesto (a dangerously delectable little foodstuff I happened upon last week at Whole Foods). But some things we just aren't able to use up: a gallon of milk, two and a half sticks of butter, three quarters of a bottle of fish sauce, half a jar of mayonnaise...
It's enough to make a renter feel helpless! Hubby and I have each called NStar separately to air our grievances, and both received pretty much the same bogus answer: "You were notified in advance so you could make other arrangements."
Yes, but... (Why is yes, but such a dignity depleting phrase?)
NStar is not concerned that we've had to throw away perfectly good racks of boneless skinless chicken breast. Or that we find it a challenge to sleep in the scorching heat with no fan or white noise to block out the grid work/usual Saturday night Fenway debauchery unfolding outside our window. They don't give out coupons or compensate for spoiled food. Yikes. Stick that in your socket and smoke it.
My thoughts turn self-righteous. Forget Hubby and I, what about the elderly, hmmm? What about the sickly, or the babies, the young children? Surely it's not advisable for them to be left without electricity in this heat? The humidity alone is unbearable!
"Well, ma'am, they were notified in advance so they could make other arrangements." Incidentally, I strongly dislike it when people refer to me as ma'am. Even though I am, technically, a ma'am. (I am a ma'am. Try saying that ten times fast.) But I still feel very much like a Miss, and I like to think I look like one, too. Of course, all this is irrelevant, since I was speaking to this person over the telephone. And I digress.
The representative went on to explain that there are lots of permits NStar must receive before being allowed to perform this sort of grid work. At least they stretch these service interruptions out over time, rather than leaving residents without power for an entire weekend. Not to mention, they won't even be charging us for this "upgrade," as she referred to it. (Read: I should really shut my mojito hole and just be grateful for NStar and all their electrical selflessness.)
I'm well aware that the power situation here is "troubled". If the electricity in my apartment building were a teenager, it would be selling crystal meth to pre-schoolers, ditching Algebra and knocking up Freshman.
Likewise, I understand the consequences of a city not having adequate power. I was there in 2003 when New York had the blackout, I remember what that was like. I also remember anticipating that it might happen again every summer after that. So I'm not entirely unreasonable. But it still doesn't mean I like having my electricity switched off for twelve hour spans.
Which brings us to Friday night. We'd both had a few cocktails, but tipsy or not, we're getting pretty skilled at this whole preparation thing. We readied the flashlights, the Tap Lights, and around 12:30 we put any food worth salvaging into the freezer. We headed to bed around 1:00 to enjoy the last chilly gusts from our dinky little window air conditioner, turned on an episode of Cheers, and waited. 1:30 came and went, and still we had power. I woke up a few hours later and realized the television was still on, so I switched it off and went back to sleep. But for whatever reason, I continued to toss and turn all night in anticipation.
We never lost power. After all that fussing! Perhaps the rain prevented them from working? Although I did see lots of NStar trucks outside my window. Either way, I certainly wasn't complaining.
At around 5:30 Saturday morning, I walk into our kitchen and peer into the freezer. Our gallon of milk is frozen solid. Sometimes even the best laid plans go awry.
Something about going out of town sort of gets me in a panic; specifically, the last five minutes before we leave the apartment. This is when my inner control freak likes to come out and do a little tap routine. "KICK, ball change, shuff-le STEP!" (She wears a red leotard. It's all very frightening.)
As a rule, I tend to lean towards the morbid. As in, God forbid something terrible should happen to us while we're away, when there are empty wine bottles under the sink and dirty underwear strewn on the bathroom floor! Leaving town suddenly makes me crave a neat, orderly apartment. One that doesn't have dishes in the sink, or sour milk in the fridge, or Tampax applicators hanging out in the trash can. It just doesn't look nice. That sort of thing.
We went out of town this past weekend, and tonight Hubby and I returned to our rental, sweet rental to find something very peculiar. (Cue creepy theme music.)
When I came into the living room my husband was standing in front of our bookshelf looking puzzled. "What's the matter?" Why was he making that face?
There was a hole drilled into the ledge of our bookshelf, and sawdust sprinkled on each of the three shelves below.
Oh. Christ.
My imagination went into heart thumping overdrive. Someone had been inside our apartment, with...power tools? What kind of a sick f**k would do such a thing? Hubby wondered if the maintenance people had come in to do some work, but why on earth would they have drilled a hole in our furniture?
My hypothesis was naturally more sinister. It had to be those new neighbors, the ones who were hanging out and smoking beneath our window the other night. It was sweltering that evening and the smoke was wafting directly into our apartment, and it stunk. In a particularly passive aggressive turn, I'd yelled out, "Oh that smells SOOOOGOOD!" Granted, they were a bit confused; but they'd heard me. Could it be they entered into our apartment and drilled a tiny hole into our bookshelf as retribution for my nasty outburst?
Or could it be dogface and her two portly friends, the perpetual stoopers? Dare they apply drills to innocent pieces of cheap furniture? I was beginning to get a belly ache.
The question remained, how would anyone have gotten in in the first place? Nothing had been touched, everything was exactly as we'd left it. It was a baffling mystery. A woodworking conundrum.
After serious reflection, Hubby produced two separate theories. One, perhaps the furniture manufacturer had pre-drilled a hole that was then covered up by the shoddily painted veneer, which popped out due to the extreme heat and humidity. Come to think of it, he did sort of remember a blemish on the wood that had always sort of bothered him. Theory number two was maybe some sort of bug had eaten its way through the wood.
OR, I was thinking, a madman with a penchant for carpentry entered our apartment whilst we were out of town and drilled a perfect hole into our Target bookshelf to teach us a lesson. That would show us.
I called my sister, who called her husband, a police officer, to
relay the bizarre details: "Sissy just came home and found a hole
drilled into her bookshelf."
Now, my brother-in-law already thinks I'm a little crazy, but he was kind when I explained to him what we'd found. He didn't think we should worry too much, although he agreed it was strange.
Hubby checked the closets and under the bed to put my mind at ease. As he was peering into the hall closet, some twisted part of me braced myself for the nutcase who would surely come running out of our bedroom in full clown face, wearing a tool belt, a drill bit perched between his red clown lips. He never did emerge.
Honestly, none of the windows or locks had been tampered with, so it
just must have been one of those freak occurrences. All the same, it
was creepy. Me no likey!
There's a sort of clique that hangs out on the front stoop leading into my apartment building. There, they chain smoke, drink beers, and give off an aura of general unpleasantry.
What is this, Jr. High? Was detention just dismissed?
Furthermore, if one is going to christen oneself the gatekeeper of the front stoop, one might think about being a bit friendly. One might even consider oneself a "people person." Not so with this lot. I'm thinking of one woman in particular, who lays horizontally across the front steps with her legs stretched out, making it quite impossible to pass unless you choose to step over her. This broad is surly and sour and her face perpetually looks annoyed. For such a young person, she's developed a rather impressive chip on her shoulder. Her little dog is cute, though.
If the steps are occupied by this douchebag, the only other alternative is to take the ramp. It's a pretty long ramp, that zigzags, and most of the time I just don't feel like using it. And so I step over her. Oh yes, I go there. Here's the real kicker, though: this girl doesn't even live here!
And we mustn't forget the middle aged couple who think they're the coolest kids in town. Strangely, these two have established quite a following amongst the college set. They actually moved away the week Hubby and I moved into the building; I can't remember which state they were relocating to, all I knew is they were leaving. Good riddance!
Only, they're ba-ack! They're staying about two buildings over. And yet...they're always in front of my building! I saw dog lady also coming out of a nearby building not too long ago; can these people not loiter on their own effing stoops? And could they please throw their empty beer bottles away? If they want to loiter, fine. But don't glare at me as I walk up my own goddamn steps.
On Memorial Day they actually held a barbecue on the damn ramp! How can they be territorial about a ramp/stoop of an apartment building they don't even reside in? If it wasn't so odd, I might consider the situation to be very, very sad.
It makes me wax philosophical. Do I take the steps, for principle's sake, or do I take the ramp? I spend my entire day on my feet, so a few measly extra steps aren't going to kill me. And yet, 99 percent of the time I take the stairs. Dogface barely bothers to move her legs. What the hell did I ever do to her?
When I encounter people who are inconsiderate to the world at large, I often wonder what motivates them. What makes these stoop covet-ers tick?
And so I am faced with a moral dilemma. Glaring at them and yelling, MOVE, please!, isn't really going to make me feel any better. Though this method may work successfully for a number of people, it's simply not The Odd Broad's style. Taking the ramp is going to make me feel like a sucker. Stabbing them is going to land me in prison. And so I step over them, which can be awkward but certainly produces a statement I can live with.
Who are these people and where the heck do they come from?
On Saturday night, Hubby sat on the field at the Dave Matthews concert at Fenway Park. I did not. That doesn't mean I couldn't hear the music from my living room, however, and it also doesn't mean I wasn't highly entertained by the shenanigans taking place beneath my window.
Fenway, Schmenway. This is where the real show takes place! I should charge admission. We've got yer drunks, yer degenerates, hell, we've got it all! If you're lucky, you'll even get a contact high.
The management company for my apartment building sometimes parks their van in the alleyway. If I had a nickel for every boob that sparked up a joint behind this van, I'd be a very wealthy woman. They think they're camouflaged, you see, but they are not. The Odd Broad sees all. (Actually, I'm pretty sure just about everyone can see them.)
Yesterday morning I woke up early and came into the living room to drink coffee and watch Paula Dean. Instead, I was serenaded by two crackheads sharing a walkman. This created a warm kind of ambiance. Very relaxing.
Two nights ago there were dudes who looked old enough to be my father sparking up doobies. It was a windy night, so they were having a little trouble. I'm not going to lie, it was kind of sad. (The van didn't hide them, either.)
Tonight is the Phish concert. Need I say more?
If I thought Red Sox fans were irritating, I honestly had no idea. Even now, as I type, a twenty something hipster kid is calling after a brunette wearing a purple dress and brown cowboy boots. "Baby," he whines, "Baby, come here, wait, come back..."
I long to scream out, "Baby, just f***ing answer him, please!" Sweet Baby Jesus, make it stop.
Now they're smoking behind the van.
It's all very amusing. Until it's not. And on that note, I shall retire to bed.
Rental, Sweet Rental. xoxo
PS: I wasn't kidding about the contact high. Kittie just ordered a pizza.
Resolution # 2: Clean out my closets: Double Check!!
Incidentally, why have the closets in all of my apartments been so musty and dusty smelling? My current apartment itself has no funky odors that I know of, that is until I open the closets.
In an effort to ward off aforementioned musty aromas, I have positioned my beloved Michael Jackson action figure doll inside my bedroom closet.
I'm not going to lie, it's been lovely having all of the college kids home for the holidays and out of my apartment building. The laundry room has been especially empty, seeing as their mommies have no doubt done their washing for them. (If you detect a hint of bitterness here, the truth is I'm just jealous. Laundry is the one chore that I loathe unlike no other.)
I didn't even realize our heavy footed upstairs neighbor (Godzilla) had been gone until I noticed he'd returned. And just like that, our days and nights were once again filled with Stomp. Stomp. STOMPS.
For crying out loud, can't this kid sit down for a minute?
Evil thoughts and impulses creep into my brain. I try my best to observe and release them, but they just keep a'coming back. Thoughts like:
Godzilla, I want to flush the toilet while you're taking a shower, just because. I want to bang on the ceiling with a broom while screaming filthy, terrible obscenities. I want to sign for and then fling your Fedex packages into the Muddy River. I want...you to take off your frigging boots. That's all, really.
Oh, and do you think you could stop rearranging your furniture after 9pm? Thanks.
Apartment dwelling is always a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I'm not new; I've been a renter for nearly ten years now and yet some things never fail to set my blood a'boiling.
Take our upstairs neighbor, Godzilla, for example: He of the Heavy Boot, The Midnight Stomper, Old Cement Foot, The Elephantine Sensation. Or as I was lovingly referring to him at 3 o'clock this morning, One Crazy, Mutha ****ing, Sonofabitching Bastard. I'm not sure exactly what it is he's doing, but the more he does of it, the more curious Hubby and I become. Last night poor G-Zilla had misplaced something, or so we imagined as we listened to him bounding from room to room.
It seems our landlord, Smeagol (see inset), has taken himself on a little holiday to Vegas. Let's face it, with all the screaming that goes on between he and his elderly mother, the man is certainly in dire need of a getaway. Hubby was unfortunate enough to have run into him recently or we wouldn't be privy to this information.
Upon learning of Smeagol's departure, seedy images immediately sprung into my sordid little mind: Smeagol sitting in a smoke filled room, surrounded by cheap hookers, the sound of 5 cent slot machines echoing tinnily in the distance.
I mentioned my theory to Hubby, who immediately agreed: "Oh, of course, naturally." (God I love that man.)
I realize it is wickedly slanderous of me to insinuate that my landlord would solicit a hooker whilst on vacation. Indeed, I have never met someone whom I assumed solicited prostitutes, and yet I can't help but feel it's an accurate way to describe this particular gentleman.
One of Smeagol's sisters will be staying with their mother while he's away. He told Hubby if we should hear anything fishy to dial 911. Hopefully this won't be necessary.
Hubby has a hunch that the whole thing may be nothing more than an elaborate ruse- Smeagol's last ditch attempt to finally off his mother. What better alibi could there be? After all, what happens in Vegas...
It seems our landlord, Smeagol (see inset), has taken himself on a little holiday to Vegas. Let's face it, with all the screaming that goes on between he and his elderly mother, the man is certainly in dire need of a getaway. Hubby was unfortunate enough to have run into him recently or we wouldn't be privy to this information.
