Housing Horrors
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
This week’s question:
On the possible verge of a national housing crisis, we wondered: What was your worst personal housing disaster?
Next week’s question:
What was your best, weirdest, funniest, most controversial, or just-plain favorite Halloween costume ever?
Days after I told my landlord I wouldn’t renew the lease on my rent-stabilized Brooklyn apartment because I’d had all the I’m-gonna-eat-your-baby cockroaches and broken pipes I could take, mushrooms began to sprout from my bathroom ceiling. “Maybe if you pose for him, he’ll fix it,” a neighbor joked to me about my superintendent. Word on the street is that he runs an amateur pornography photo business. A quick Google search confirmed this. In my neighborhood, harvesting locally grown, all-too organic mushrooms could be much more lucrative. Maybe I’ll put a comment on his MySpace page telling him so.
When I lived in East Boston, blocks away from my kinda sketchy apartment building a body was found—missing a head. Gambling shadiness was suspected so it wasn’t a random crime. But my roommate and I feared it was a matter of time before we’d find it, placed at our T-stop as a warning to others. We never found that head—or other severed body parts—but it added to the neighborhood’s character. That and knowing someone broke into our storage space, a burned out car that sat in our Dunkin Donuts parking lot for months, a newspaper vendor who regularly called us lewd things in Spanish, and when my roommate narrowly avoided her chance at being witness to a stabbing she heard about on the news hours later. But we saved a ton of money.
My worst personal housing disaster was when mold appeared in my apartment that was dangerous and could exacerbate asthma to the point of hospitalization. I should have figured there would be a mold problem seeing as I LIVED IN A BASEMENT. (I was paying $1000 for this basement; it was a 2BR basement.) When I called the landlord, he insisted there wasn’t a problem. “Mold, what? Mold is natural!”
My aunt and uncle lived downstairs with my 13-year-old cousin, 2-year-old cousin, and grandpa. I lived upstairs in the apartment that would be my grandpa’s when he “got better” from his brain injury. My 13-year-old cousin was molested by a teacher and went to the psych ward. Soon after, I found a gun upstairs. I didn’t think a gun should be in the house with a suicidal teenager, a toddler, and an old man with a brain damage. So I threw it in Lake Michigan. My grandpa kicked me out for undermining him. They say he forgave me on his death bed.
New York, circa 1990. I’m moving in with my boyfriend (famous musician with drug problem). I find apartment on Fifth Avenue and 11th. One bedroom perfection (sans kitchen). I pay first and last… and move in without appointment (arrived late on a Friday night and bribed night doorman for elevator access). A week later I learn we have to get board approval! Board takes one look at druggie musician just back from Amsterdam and we get rejected! But we’re ALREADY living in the building! Hiding out in the apartment that we’re not supposed to be in! Two months later: Eviction.
Alone in my apartment around midnight on a Wednesday, I heard screaming through my wall for the fourth or fifth time in so many months, but this time it sounded more urgent than the others. Is this how this couple gets off: the man calls the woman expletives I don’t say even while drinking and cursing like a pirate? Fearing the worst, I finally called the cops. The screaming had stopped by the time the officers made it into the building. I hid in my apartment and listened through the wall as the guy spoke gruffly, saying he did nothing wrong. I don’t believe any charges were filed, and I don’t think it happened again, but I avoided them until they moved out, fearing they’d ask me about it.
It was early 2003. I was living in a tiny East Village craigslist sublet and working my first real job— in (shudder) publicity. The women in my department were beautiful, blown-out, and Prada-clad. I was covered in inexplicable hives so itchy I often scratched them to bleeding, pus-filled holes. I think they found that odd. I saw a doctor, bought new sheets, switched detergents and soap; nothing helped. With hindsight, you probably see where this is going—the dreaded Bedbug resurgence. But I had the little fuckers before the New Yorker made it cool. Neither roommate nor landlord believed me or cared, so I fled under cover of darkness.
I lived with a gay couple, the three of us were a band. They got mugged and I had a miscarriage, the same weekend a band from New Orleans was crashing at our house. We maintained a sense of normalcy for the New Orleanean’s sake. Once they left, I hid in my room for a week and sobbed. The couple kicked me out for not being more supportive in the time after their mugging. Maybe I should have told them what was going on with me. But nobody’d known I was pregnant. I still have only told one or two people.
FYI: The head was found.
Yikes! I think I read that somewhere. But Leo–next time do a better job protecting your tenants’ stuff from disgruntled evicted tenants. Seriously. WTF? Smell ya later. -R.