When I first moved to Boston, I was staying with some “friends” (YES, the quotes are intentional) for about 4 months while I learned the city and adjusted to life on the East Coast. At the time, it was the MOST hellish living arrangement I could ever imagine. I hated every second of every minute of every hour of every day of living with those “people” (again, YES, the quotes are intentional). Thus my search for an apartment sped up!
Now apartment hunting is trying in the best of times. Combine a hellish living situation with the expensiveness and lack of space of East Coast apartments and you have a recipe for a meltdown. However, I was lucky (or so I thought). I found a cute apartment. It had hardwood floors, HUGE rooms, parking was included, one block from the beach and a back deck. It lacked closet space but I wasn’t expecting miracles. It seemed like a deal and a steal for the rent. There were only two minor catches to the apartment. It was under a flight path for the airport (eh, I grew up in L.A. – I was used to noise) and my landlord was going to be doing some minor construction for two months (or so he said).
Now, two years later and he is still doing construction. Rather than some minor cosmetic fixes, as he explained, he gutted the two downstairs apartments and completely remodeled them. Every day (EVERY SINGLE DAY), including Sunday’s, he worked until 7 or 8 at night, sometimes later. My apartment rattled and shook and new cracks formed in every wall. In the middle of this remodel, he suddenly decided to redo the heat for the entire building and last September he ripped out all the radiators in my apartment (and, I assume, the other apartments too). However, he did not replace them with anything so come mid-November, I had no way to heat my place. Snow was falling and I had no heat! I looked like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as I had to resort to wearing layers and layers of clothing to stay warm. He finally installed the heat in mid-December (after a call to the health department on my part.)
In his brilliance of the do-it-yourself remodel, he knocked down a supporting wall and when I came home from the grocery store one day, I noticed a 5-inch gap between my wall and the floor – an OPEN GAP that allowed me to see into the apartment downstairs. YES, he had sunk my apartment! So he brought in a house jack and jacked the place back up!
Truly the list is endless with the construction mishaps of slumlord that I pay rent to but I kept thinking “this place is such a deal” and what a hassle it is to move.
Now, let’s talk about neighbors. For two years, until last week, I had just one. The two apartments downstairs were under “light construction” so I shared the building with only one other neighbor – Ursula, the drunken pill-popping lunatic! She seemed friendly enough with the “hi’s” and “bye’s” and rhetorical “How are ya’s?” lobbed my way. Then she got piss ass drunk and started banging on my door with a “Do you have a problem with me” sort of introduction. And this went on-and-on. When she’s sober she is friendly and nice and when she’s drunk she is insane and confrontational. This did not work well with me and I started to literally slam the door in her face anytime she came knocking. Periodically, she would scream “I can’t take this” from the confines of her apartment. She must have been speaking to one of the many people that resided in her head. I just tried to tune-out and remind myself that I don’t spend that much time at home.
Though the apartments downstairs are not quite completed, they were rented. Last weekend, the new tenants moved in. While the new tenants were in the parking lot (a young couple in one apartment and a young woman in the other), Ursula was screaming at a neighbor across the lot and had attempted to attack them with a hammer.
In case that didn’t register, let me set the scene again. The new neighbors are moving furniture in one door and Ursula is running with a hammer out the other. Suddenly, two cop cars pull up and it was like a scene was being played out for a future Jerry Springer episode.
After things had calmed down a bit, I retired to my couch to watch some T.V. and try and relax after the craziness of the day. That was when the screaming started. It was a high-pitched screaming, like a little girl who was scared. I ran to the window. Had Ursula killed someone? Was one of her personalities on the prowl? What was going on? I couldn’t see anything.
I ran into the common shared hallway to investigate. That was where I met the young couple that had moved in. They are fresh out highschool. The baggy pants wearing suburban kids in their first place. She’s pregnant and chain smoking cigarettes. I asked if she was alright because I had heard screaming. It wasn’t her. Apparently, new tenant number two was not a single lady but rather a lady with a big parrot as a roommate. A BIG SCREAMING PARROT!
At first I thought that the bird just needs time to adjust to the new environment, the new place, the new noises. NO – it’s an asshole! It just screams. It screams in the morning when I am making coffee. I worked from home yesterday and discovered that it likes to scream ALL DAY, with very brief intervals of silence. But I found that it really likes to scream at about 2AM.
So to wrap all this up with a pretty bow on top – Jekyll and Hyde neighbor, screaming parrot, slumlord, endless construction and chain-smoking suburban teenagers! I believe that if anyone ever asks me to describe what living in hell might be like, this would be a good representation!
I’m moving at the end of the month.
