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Crappy Apartments
(excerpts from the novel El Cumpleanos De Paco)
by Mickey Hess author info
I live in an apartment where they won't allow you to throw anything out the window. They put it in the lease. "No objects of any kind or description," it says, "should be thrown from the windows at any time."
I like how they're real specific. If they hadn't worded it that way, I might still be sitting around considering it. "But what if it was an old fashioned barber pole, and it was real early on the Fourth of July?" I'd probably call them up every few days to ask questions, all these different scenarios.
The craziest thing about it is that there are only three or four rules on the entire lease. It's pretty much just pay your rent and don't throw shit out the windows. Maybe they had a real problem with it at some point.
I've lived in Louisville for almost six years now, and I'm halfway through the lease on my fifth apartment. All our furniture is busted apart from moving so many times. We finally had to get rid of Danielle's couch when it wouldn't fit up the stairs at this place. It was one of those sofa beds, and it was so heavy it would leave dents in the floor when we moved out. When we were carrying it upstairs at the first place we rented together, it landed on our roommate's foot somehow and almost killed him.
As much as I'd like to throw stuff out the window, this place is by far the best apartment we've rented. We lived here for a month before I thought to question the smell. This whole town kind of stinks, but it turns out that in the woods behind this building there's some kind of drainage ditch that I still say is connected to the sewer system. So anytime it rains a lot, we remember why the rent's as cheap as it is.
******
You weren't supposed to do much of anything around Autumn Hills. Every month they sent out a newsletter reminding you. They called it "The Autumn Hills Chronicle." I guess it was supposed to give us some sense of community, but mostly it was just filled with threats. One page would show you some recipe for Halloween Chocolate Pie, and the next page would be a new list of things you weren't allowed to do anymore.
They were always making up new rules in that newsletter. Things they never mentioned in the lease. All the sudden you couldn't have garbage cans on your balcony, or you had to stay home for some weird inspection. If they didn't get it in the newsletter, the managers would slip these notices into everyone's mailbox, giving some new reason why they needed to get into your apartment. "Surveying for balcony replacement." That was my favorite.
And every month, the newsletter reminded you that all curtains and window coverings had to be white. When we first moved in, the manager told us we had one week to buy white curtains, but until then we had to put up white towels or sheets, just so our windows looked like everyone else's.
They were real big on conformity. One month they sent out a notice that no one was allowed to have welcome mats in front of their doors. It was all so ridiculous. They said that the hallways were Autumn Hills property, so anything left in the hallways automatically becomes Autumn Hills property too. If they found any welcome mats, they'd take them.
*******
When we lived at this place called Winding Creek, they sent the police to break into our neighbor's apartment. I was just coming home from class when it happened. The entire alleyway was blocked off by a squadcar, and they were carrying the family's stuff downstairs while two older cops stood back overseeing the whole operation. They both had these smiles of satisfaction on their faces, like justice was served. And they were both wearing trenchcoats, even though it wasn't cold or anything.
I'm not going to tell you I have all kinds of fond memories of my neighbors. I never even really got to know them. All I remember is that the mom would come over every once in awhile asking to use our phone. Her two little girls used to sit out on the balcony all the time and start whispering to each other when they saw me walk past. I always wondered what they were saying.
They always had an eviction notice on their door, but so did we. I never paid any attention to it because Winding Creek gave you an eviction notice if you were two days late with the rent. And even if you weren't, usually. Two months in a row they lost our money orders and we had to go show them the receipts.
One day the youngest daughter, she was about five, knocked on our door and asked if she could stay with us til her mother got home. She just sat on the couch and smiled the whole time. Danielle kept asking her if she wanted some Mountain Dew or anything to eat, and she'd just shake her head no and keep smiling that little kid smile where they're missing a few teeth. After a couple hours, her mom came home from work.
Living beside people is weird because you halfway hear all kinds of stuff and you never know what to think about it. Whenever anything important is going on, you hear it because people get louder. You know what time people go to bed and get up in the morning and what kind of music they listen to, but when you pass by each other in the hallways it's all polite smiles and you don't have any idea what to say to each other. It's not like having acquaintances at work or at school because with them you at least have some fake connection. You can always talk about how busy you are if you don't have anything in common. Living in apartments you can know so much about somebody, but it's all overheard. You have to act like you don't know it.
I saw those kids around there all the time, but I hardly ever saw their mom. I guess she was always at work. One night as I was on my way out I saw a guy with a bouquet of flowers getting ready to knock on her door. He looked all nervous and I'm almost sure it was the same guy who came around selling cologne about a week earlier. If not, he sure must have bought a whole lot of it. You could smell him all the way outside.
That's pretty much the last I remember about them up til that day the cops threw everything they owned out into the alley. They must have known it was coming, because they weren't around to put up any resistance that day. I don't know whatever happened to them or where they went, but they sure didn't take anything with them. When the police left, there was this mountain of furniture and clothes right in front of the door to our building. Ten minutes later, people were outside digging through it.
I saw old ladies looking through photo albums and stuffing dishes and silverware into their purses. The maintenance workers sent their kids down to look for toys. You should have seen the people who lived around there. They all acted like it was the greatest day of their lives. I don't even think they were that excited to find all the stuff, because people were outside as soon as the cops pulled up. They were just happy something was going on.
The whole pile stayed out there for over a week, so everyone got a good chance to pick through it. All the kids in the complex would come home after school and jump up and down on the thing. Nobody ever cleaned it up. It just got scattered around until most of it disappeared.
Sooner or later that police chief called again. The same one that always called. "You know," he told me. "You're the first person all day to ask how I'm doing."
Winding Creek had an evil maintenance crew. I think they were all related, and they all looked just alike. They had the weirdest outlook on fixing things. Like the time I called about our balcony screen door, which was propped against the side of the building when we moved in.
We came home that night and the screen door was right where we left it. They taped a little note to the counter that said, "Door works fine without screen."
It was always like that. "Stove works. It just catches on fire sometimes." "Toilet flushes. It just makes loud noise." All they ever did was reword the problem we told them, and add in the word "works." Like we'd called them in for some expert commentary.
I lived at Winding Creek for a year with Danielle and a guy named Chris. The other night I drove past our old neighborhood, and now they call it the Overlook at Winding Creek. But that doesn't change the fact that what they say is a creek is either completely dried-up or overflowing with sewer water, depending on how long ago it rained.
Danielle and I used to stay up every night playing darts. We had two dartboards until Chris weaseled his back to his room. We propped them up beside the stereo and took turns getting off the couch to retrieve the darts. I know we had to have played at least five hours every night, and neither one of us ever got any good at it. By the time we moved out, the entire lower half of the wall was chewed up with all these tiny little holes.
I tried to cover them up with some spackle and paint, but it still looked like complete shit. The manager even pointed it out when she came in to do our move-out inspection. "Oh yeah," I told her. "We used to have a bunch of posters down there."
The rest of the complex was such a shithole that we still got our deposit back.
******
That year we lived in a complex called Sprawling Meadows. The place was like a police state. Instead of security guards, they had actual cops. They all hung around this office at the edge of the complex, and a big group of them was always watching The Three Stooges on this little black-and-white TV. For a long time, I wasn't sure how they got selected for that job. I had a feeling somebody just wanted them out of the way at headquarters.
I think they were mostly retired cops, or at least cops who were old enough to retire, but they just kept sticking around on the force. Besides the really old ones, there was this hideously fat cop who probably wouldn't last a day outside that security office. One guy walked with a limp.
But it was the two of them who didn't have any obvious disabilities that worried me. Those were the ones that took the whole job real seriously. Every couple hours, they'd round up their buddies and pile in the cruiser. Go for a little drive around Sprawling Meadows. The whole place consisted of maybe two blocks, but they'd patrol it all really carefully. Sometimes one of them would even go out on a bike.
They started imposing all these weird rules a couple months after we moved in. Nobody could have keys to the laundry room anymore, and they locked it up at ten. No matter if you were finished or not. "It's in your lease," they were always saying. They seemed to really have something against me and Danielle. Every time one of them saw us outside at night, they had to stop us and set up this whole scene. "Where are you two headed this evening?"
I think they resented how we actually asked them to do something useful. We lived in a building with four apartments, and the door from the outside would always stick. You could get the key in the lock, but the knob would only turn about halfway. So every night when we came home, we had to walk over to the security office and ask them to let us into our building.
They always took their time about the whole thing. And they acted like it was somehow our fault. "The door wouldn't stick like that if people didn't shut it so tight."
I'm not sure exactly how much force you're supposed to use when you shut a door, but I thought their whole purpose was to shut things up tightly. Without that, you might as well have one of those swinging doors like in Old West saloons. It's all decoration.
One guy, one of the younger ones, started following us around at night. I don't know what it was about this guy, but he always had something to say. I always pictured him after he went home at night, just thinking up lines he might say in all these different situations. Coming in and running them by all his partners the next morning.
He always had a sidekick with him. Usually it was this real fat, red-faced cop, who never said anything and just laughed at whatever his buddy said. But every once in awhile it would be this seriously old guy who you could tell couldn't hear a word. His uniform was even an older model than the rest of the guys. He'd stand around all night with this shaky smile on his face like he had no idea what was going on.
So one night I was walking with Danielle, coming back from Jay's Food Mart at the corner, and the creative guy and the fat guy were waiting in front of our building. "What do you two think you're doing?"
"Not much. Just walking around."
"Well, why don't you see if you can't walk on out of here." He looked back at his partner and they both kind of laughed, but then he turned around to us real stern. "This is private property."
I couldn't figure out what was going on. They knew we lived there because they'd been following us around every night for a week. They knew exactly which building was ours. Danielle started to explain the whole thing, but the cop cut her off. The real talkative one that stopped us in the first place. The other guy pretty much just stood there and nodded his head.
"That's your apartment up there," he said. He was pointing to the wrong one, but we both had to agree with him anyway. "And look where you're standing." He pointed down at the concrete so hard that for a second I wondered if there was something important about that particular spot of it. Like maybe it was his parking space or something. He didn't even look down, though. He just pointed and held his gaze on us.
We'd been harassed by cops a lot that year, so I thought the first thing he'd throw at us would be this curfew the city had just put into effect. "We're over eighteen," I told him. I hate to even have to say something like that, because I feel like I'm playing into the whole system. There's this cafe on Bardstown Road that put a sign up last year saying no one under eighteen is allowed in there after 2 in the afternoon without a parent or guardian. They ask for I.D. and everything.
Even though it doesn't really affect me anymore, I still don't like the idea of it. I'd like to see them try that with old people, or handicapped people. "No Cripples After 2 PM." The place would get bomb threats.
I was going to take out my license and show that cop I was 20, but he shook his head and said it didn't matter. "Read your lease." The other cop made some sound in his throat. I think he was actually about to say something, but his buddy kept on. "Sprawling Meadows has a rule that nobody, no matter how old you are, comes outside after 12 PM."
12 PM is Noon, but I didn't say anything. I think Danielle caught it too, but there were more important things we had to set him straight on. What the lease actually says is no loitering in the common areas after midnight. Like in front of the rental office and up by the pool. We were out walking down the street.
He just wouldn't let up, though, and finally we went back inside. At first I felt like we gave up too easily. But, really, we were on our way inside when he stopped us. And I called the office and complained the next morning.
From what he told us, the parking lot is considered a common area, so as soon as you step out your door, you're in violation of the lease. After I put in my call, he left us alone for a few weeks. But that didn't stop all the other security guards from fucking with us. A new guy saw us out a couple weeks later, and we had to go through the whole routine all over again.
He finally let us go, and I saw him standing back there in front of the security office. Just before we made it around the corner, he yelled out and stopped us again. "All kinds of stuff goes on around here." I looked back and he had his hands on his hips. "And you don't want to end up getting blamed for it."
We never completely figured out what kind of stuff he was talking about, but everybody around that place seemed scared as hell. I still think it was all exaggerated, and maybe everybody else had been listening to those security guards too much. I mean, if there was really so much crime around there, they'd have something better to do than harass me and Danielle.
********
We used to live across from this bar called Bar. It was across the highway from Autumn Hills, in front of this complex called Venus Apartments. That was their advertising angle. "2 bedroom love nests for only $299." They had a little statue of Venus out front, but somebody knocked it over and cracked it in half.
As big as they were on love, they let a convicted wife-killer move in. There was a whole thing about it on the news that week. The tenants were protesting. One old man said he was afraid the guy would steal his mower.
We mostly tried to stay away from that side of the road, but there was something about bar that caught our attention. It was just so unassuming. Every day when we drove past it, either Danielle or I would say we should go in there and check it out. One night we finally did.
The place was really dark and small, and nobody seemed all that excited to be there. There were a couple guys in the front playing pool, and six or seven people at the bar. They all turned around to look at us when we walked in.
We took the last couple stools at the edge of the bar, and had to let the owner inspect our IDs. He was nice about it and everything, but he was very thorough. He held them both under this lamp and kept rubbing back and forth on them with his thumbs. When he was finally satisfied, he asked, "What'll you have?"
I turned to Danielle and saw this look of total bewilderment. She has to see some sort of menu. Even if she walks in knowing exactly what she wants, she has this need to look over her options. Make sure there's nothing better than what she has in mind.
So that left me. "Do you have Rolling Rock?"
"No . . . " He shook his head real slowly and bit his lip, then added this all thoughtfully, like it just came to him. "I wish we did."
He sounded so optimistic.
Autumn Hills was surrounded by some kind of theme neighborhood. It was basically a manufactured community for the workers at this new electrical plant down the road. All the houses looked just alike, and the streets had names like Mile of Sunshine and Acapulco Drive. The further you went back into it, the more exotic it got.
They always went all out for the holidays. Most of them even put up decorations for Easter that year, so you can imagine how much they try to outdo each other with Christmas lights. Danielle thought somebody must have caught their house on fire, and it must be spreading because it sounded like they had the entire fire department out there.
I could imagine this subdivision just going up in flames, all the little kids crying about their Christmas presents. There was a whole side street where four or five houses teamed up and created this huge display. Every night, you'd see people drive up to those houses and just turn off their engines. They'd sit there and look at the rotating candy canes, and these little bears on a see-saw that actually went up and down. There was a big sign in the middle of the cul-de-sac. They called it "Toyland."
I looked out the window and everybody from our apartment complex was outside watching for the firetrucks. They were actually out there talking and laughing. I couldn't believe it. There had always been some problems between us and that subdivision. They hated people from Autumn Hills driving through there as a shortcut, and you could tell they imagined a little boundary between the apartments and the people who lived in houses. One guy would always walk his dog over at night and let it shit in our bushes. That dog was huge.
But this was taking it too far. Everyone had their kids outside with them and they were all smiling like they were warming up for a hayride. I just couldn't stand it. I think part of it was that the noise from the sirens was still driving me crazy, but I stood there and complained about those people forever. They all looked so excited.
I was pacing around bitching about how they'd feel if they were losing their fucking house, and then this train of fire trucks came swerving into the parking lot. There were so many lights flashing that it looked like daytime outside. Everybody started yelling and waving. Five or six trucks pulled through and then came a big white one with Santa Claus on it. The whole thing was a fucking Christmas parade.
I just couldn't get over that. The volunteer firemen Christmas parade. I finished getting dressed and went out walking with Danielle. It ended up being a pretty good night overall. We looked at all the Christmas lights in that subdivision and then went searching for a 24-hour place that sells hot chocolate with whipped cream. Everything seemed so quiet when they finally left.
*********
Since I'm only teaching at night right now, I spend a lot of time home by myself while Danielle's at work. Yesterday morning somebody rang the bell downstairs and I had to get dressed and see what they wanted. It scared the hell out of me because nobody ever uses those bells.
I opened the door and some curlyheaded guy yelled up from the bottom of the stairs. "Hello!" He said he was with some measurement company and our landlord hired him to measure the outside of our building. "The length, the width, the size of the windows. I just like to let people know who's going to be wandering around outside. Because you never know..."
"Goofy world," he said.
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