For Amber

Today is Amber's birthday. Amber is awesome and deserves to laugh on her birthday. I love Amber, she's a great friend, and so I want to tell a story to make her laugh since she says she likes to read my odd stories. I'm fairly sure she never heard any tales of the craphole apartment I lived in my first year in Cambridge, Mass. And so here is the tale.

90 Norfolk Street was a nice looking place from the outside. From the street you'd see a large light green tenement building that was a little run-down looking, but not too bad. It was the first building I lived in once I moved into Boston after spending a year in Lowell. Amy and I lived there with three other roommates. So there were five of us in a decent-sized four bedroom apartment.

And it was an odd place - mostly because of the landlady. It was obvious she was not good at being a landlady. When we moved in, there were two stoves in our kitchen. The working one was ancient. Seriously. If you opened up the left side of it, there were large flames right there in front of you - we called it our own personal Gates of Hell. The second stove was slightly newer, but who cares because it wasn't hooked up. It was stuffed into our pantry.

The landlady kept giving us excuses about how she was going to have some guy come in and switch the two out - but that didn't happen for months. I don't know if it was because of her or because of the maintenance man. They both spoke different languages (he was Portugese and she was Haitian), so watching them interact in broken English was hysterical. I almost wanted to invite them over periodically just to watch them misunderstand each other while smiling and nodding.

In any case, their misunderstanding each other helped us get things done around the apartment that were not at all necessary. For example, the stoves. One worked slightly, the other was in the pantry. Instead of making that a priority fix in the apartment, the maintenance man came one afternoon and painted the floor of the other closet in the kitchen. That's right, he painted the floor.

For me - having just moved to this apartment from a similarly poorly-managed one in Lowell - it was deja-vu. For some reason I have maintenance guys who enjoy doing useless fixes before the important ones. In Lowell our bathroom faucet had stopped working, as had two of the burners on our stove-top.....and what did the maintenance come in to do one afternoon? He painted our ceiling. Without drop cloths.

So my track record of maintenance painting random surfaces instead of fixing the real problems continued in this new Cambridge apartment.

Moving on, there was one week in our Cambridge apartment that saw our landlady field approximately 400 phone calls from us about how the hot water wasn't working. None of us had access to any part of the building that could help us figure out why the hot water wasn't on. And so we waited. For almost one week we had no hot water. 10 second showers became the norm that week.

One afternoon late that week Greg the Plumber stops into our apartment with the landlady. Why is he there? She wants him to take care of the stoves. Yes, the stoves. With a look of confusion on his face, he at least humors her while she tries to explain our dual stove situation. He can't believe the Gates of Hell stove actually works. Then he sees the other one in our pantry. She tells him she wants the pantry stove to be the new kitchen stove. He sees that several pieces of it are missing, and then says (about the PANTRY stove), "I don't think they even make these anymore."

While he's there, we beg him to fix our cold water problem. He walks into our bathroom and turns on different faucets. Oh, here's where realize I neglected to tell you readers that if you turned the water on in the sink and then in the bathtub, the sink would stop running. Greg the Plumber looked perplexed. He glanced around the bathroom and the pipes and said, "I can't believe this set-up even works" as he alternately turned the bathtub faucet on and off to watch the sink turn on and off.

He eventually went down into the basement and figured out that whoever was down there last (random maintenance guys had been down there the week before doing something) forgot to turn the hot water back on.

With the hot water situation solved, let's get back to the stove. Greg the Plumber helped the landlady realize her cheapness would not be of any use in the stove situation - she was going to need to buy another one. Most people would find a smooth way to transition two stoves out of the kitchen and then bring in the third. "Most people" does not include our landlady. After several days we had a third stove sitting in our kitchen. That's right, three stoves. I felt like I was living in the kitchen department of a shitty Sears.

After our weeks of living in a historical exhibit of stoves since the 1890s, the right people eventually came to put the newest one in and take out the old ones. Victory! you might think. Nope. Our challenge had moved elsewhere.

You see, gentle blog friends, our apartment's heat didn't work when we moved in during May. The landlady told us she was going to have it replaced with comfortable and warm baseboard heating during the summer. At one point during the summer, one maintenance guy had come in and we polled him about when it would happen and what the old heating system was.

He replied that he didn't know when it would happen....and then he looked around and laughed at our old heating system. There was a very large space heater-esque looking thing in our living room. Then, way down the shotgun hallway in the kitchen....there was our ancient Gates of Hell stove. That's right, the Gates of Hell part of the stove was in fact the other part of the apartment's heat. No way were those two fire hazards going to heat our apartment.

As the summer rolled on and we gently prodded the landlady every few weeks about when the heat would be installed, she would blow us off.

I'll pause in this part of the story to answer a question I know you all must have: Yes, we did call the local housing authority on her. That's actually a funny story, too. Amy called up the Cambridge Housing Authority one afternoon to report her and lodge a complaint. The CHA rep asked for the landlord's name, and Amy said it. Because it was an unusual last name, Amy started to spell it. She didn't have to finish.

"Oh yes, we know who she is," said the housing rep. Awesome. During our legal meetings with the CHA, we discovered that it is illegal in Massachusetts to not have a working heating system in a rental property after Sept. 15. Mr. Paint the Floor Maintenance Man had removed the space heater thing and stove earlier that summer - so we didn't even have the Gates of Hell to help us out should we hit that Sept. 15th deadline.

And of course, Sept. 15th rolled around with no new heating system in our building. I'll not bore you with the legal crap and rent with-holding. The humor comes with how she tried to get a heating place to install a heating system for cheap as it was finally getting cold outside.

I worked from home at the time, so I got to see all the winners she brought in to give her estimates. Most rolled their eyes when she complained about how expensive their estimates were. So she'd bring in someone else. I kid you not, one guy came in and measured the rooms using his arms. He literally went into each room, held out his arms, turned around and said something like, "Oh yeah, eight by 10" or some other figure that seemed very wrong. I prayed he'd give her a high estimate for fear of what kind of heat he'd put into the house. I had nightmares of heating contractors around the apartment all at their table saws measuring pipe and baseboard with their arms and fingers.

To this point I have failed to mention that we were living in our rooms with everything pushed to the center for weeks. She told us it would be baseboard heating, and because she could hire someone at any moment, we need to be ready. Being ready meant having all of your belongings shoved away from the wall.

She finally chose Sears, thank God. Those guys came in and did it fast, and there was no standing with arms outstretched in any rooms to take a good measurement.

During the Sears installation I learned something else great about our apartment. Our toilet had been rocking for some time. You'd sit down and then you could move it back and forth like a rocking chair. I didn't know how bad it was, nor did I want to ask our landlady about it. One afternoon I walked past our tiny bathroom to see four of the huge Sears guys stuffed into it. They were installing the heat in there, so I paused.

"Hey guys - I have a question about the toilet..."

"--oh yeah, I just put my hand on it and almost fell over," laughed one of the guys.

"Okay, you've noticed the rocking. I was wondering why it's doing that?"

"The floor in your bathroom is giving way, it's deteriorating," replied a Sears guy.

"What? The floor's falling in?" I asked

"Yeah, it's falling in, it's partially collapsing."

"So it could just fall out while someone's sitting on the toilet?"

"Well, no, you wouldn't fall through the floor with it if the floor went. The toilet's on a pipe, and if the floor fell through, you'd just be sitting up on the toilet on its pipe with your feet dangling."

He could hardly finish his sentence before giving way to laughter. All four of them busted up. The tiny bathroom echoed with the gruff laughter of four Sears maintenance men.

"Okay. And that's not something that's easy to fix, huh?" I asked once the laughter died down.

"No, you'd have to rip out the whole floor. You wouldn't be able to live here while that happened."

"So how long do we have until the floor falls through?"

"Oh, you've got about six months to a year, I'd say," answered the same guy.

"So I'm not going to be sitting in here tomorrow and watching the floor give way while I'm on the toilet?"

"Nope, you've got some time."

Excellent, I thought, giving him a thumbs up. I went to the pantry, grabbed a paper bag and folded it several times. Back in the bathroom, I handed it to a Sears guy stuffed by the toilet. He slipped it under the edge of the toilet and voila! We had a non-rocking chair toilet. No way in hell I was going to ask the landlady to fix that. I'd find some guy in the bathroom one afternoon using his arms to measure how far up I'd be dangling from.

The heat finally got installed (turned on Nov. 30) and that problem was resolved. We kept our talks with the landlady to a minimum after that. Everything was livable from then on until our May lease expiration.

That doesn't mean the apartment lacked in other stories, though. Because we were on the first floor, we always got to hear great conversations from the drunks who walked past our place each early weekend morning.

One of my favorites was waking up at 3am to hear a very drunk woman trying to convince a guy that she wasn't a horrible person. She went on and on, and he finally interrupted with this nugget of true friendship.

"Look, Sheila, I don't care what you do, you'll still be my friend. You could have a freakin' upside down orgy and I'd still be here for you."

Now that's friendship.

My bedroom was very close to where the trash was piled for pick-up, too. Yes, lovely. What was lovelier were the great comments we'd hear from our garbage men about just what all eight apartments in our building would pile out there on a weekly basis. They also narrated their experiences with the wildlife.

7am one day: "Holy shit - did you see the size of that rat? Shit!"

After our upstairs neighbors moved out and left almost all their furniture on the curb, we got this: "Holy shit, are you people trying to kill us? Seriously - look at all this shit! You're trying to kill us!"

And that leads me to our upstairs neighbors. An apartment of four guys. Apparently they were aspiring musicians because we regularly heard some horrible band practice up there. The guy whose bedroom was above mine enjoyed starting his guitar practice at 10:30 each evening.

When these guys finally moved out, they threw a huge party. It was insanely loud, and there was a lot of thumping and yelling and what-not. It was a Friday night, so it wasn't a big deal to me, really. But one of my roommates was studying for a tough final for the upcoming Monday, and needed her quiet. I encouraged her not to - but she decided to go upstairs to tell the boys to keep it down.

She was greeted by a very drunk shirtless man with a baseball bat. Behind him were throngs of people who were punching walls and throwing furniture. When she asked if he was having a nice moving out party, he answered by smiling drunkly and then slamming the baseball bat into the wall. She didn't say anything else.

The next day while the neighbor boys were moving out, they obviously had a lot of crap to move. I imagine they left a lot of junk in that apartment, but they also threw out a lot, too. And I really mean the "threw out" part. I was sitting at our kitchen table - which looked out the back window and onto our porch. Right off of our porch was the trash area. I heard a large dragging noise upstairs. When I looked up I saw an entire wooden futon come crashing down from the 2nd floor and into the trash area. Then peals of laughter. Hey, I can't blame them, I've wanted to do that to furniture too. I'm just glad I wasn't standing out there when it happened.

To finish off this novel, I'll talk about our horrible rental agent, Mark. This was the guy who'd found us this craphole of an apartment and assured us that the landlady was great, the neighborhood was safe (the place was broken into during our first week there) and other tales that unicorns would appear while cooking and an elf made you dinner while mermaids kept the bathroom clean. You get my drift.

We got our revenge on this guy. You see, come April, we'd let the landlady know we weren't staying. And so Mark had to start showing our place to other prospective renters. Oh the joy. Every time he'd bring a group of unsuspecting young renters by, the five of us would line up to tell them the horrors of the apartment.

We'd all be standing in the kitchen as the prospective tenants asked us questions. We were totally honest, with Marks' face growing redder and redder behind the tenants as he faced us. He would try to throw in positives as we revealed the problems.

Him: "Yeah, but she fixed that, though, right?"
Us: "After six months."

Him: "But that wasn't so bad."
Us: "You're right we had space heaters in the meantime, it was wonderful."

We won, sort of. When we moved out no one had yet rented the apartment. I think it stayed empty for another month.

Anyway, the last time we saw Mark was on one of our final days in the apartment. He was again showing people through our place. On their way out, he sent the renters on ahead into the street while he stayed back to talk to Amy and I (we were the only ones there). Was he going to yell at us for losing him business? Nope. Worse.

"Hey, I hear you guys are moving out...I can show you a few places I know of if you're interested."

I credit shock and awe for keeping me from kicking him in the balls right then.