Adult Apartment Number Two was a step in the right direction, allowing me to hold on to the delusion of someday living large. Though it was nothing like the spacious fantasy apartments I dreamed of as a teenager, it was surprisingly equipped given what I could afford. I’d stumbled upon it by chance while wandering through a Northwest neighborhood I’d never been to before. It was a corner unit on the top floor and had those desirable hardwood floors, plus exposed brick in the living room and the bedroom. Brick walls always felt romantic and bohemian to me (though I’d later learn that brick just means “lots of places for spiders to live”). It seemed that this apartment was worth a lot more than what the management was renting it for, which should have made me suspicious.
During my tour of the place, the landlady explained that in the spring she’d lost a dozen or so college-aged tenants who had graduated, and since she was having trouble filling the vacancies, she’d dropped the price. This made sense to me. She described the building as a hotel from the 1920s that had been shut down in the ’30s, reopened as apartments in the ’60s, and renovated in the ’80s. My brain translated this to “former brothel, probably haunted by ghost hookers.” I was sold. When I was growing up, a girl down the street had claimed her attic was haunted by an Indian chief, and I had always been jealous of her. I couldn’t wait to have a haunted house of my own.
I only had enough cash to rent a U-Haul for one day, so the move was marred by stress, sweat, and ugly frustration. I had a friend help me, and frankly I’m surprised the move didn’t ruin our friendship forever; hauling a couch up six flights of stairs is enough to break even the strongest bond. I told myself I’d stay in that apartment for years and wouldn’t have to lug furniture up narrow staircases again until I was thirty. Plus the giddy anticipation of ghost hookers kept me strong and focused.
I expected at least one slutty poltergeist to show up in the apartment, but I had no such luck. No mysteriously disappearing valuables, no faint whiffs of stagnant rosewater, no soft wailings traveling up and down the hallways. (Still, I never truly gave up on the possibility of my apartment being haunted, and I like to believe the ghosts and I just never got the scheduling right for a proper haunting.)
Before signing the lease on my new place, I’d had to do a fair amount of internal convincing since the apartment was slightly out of my price range, but once I made up my mind to splurge on rent, I settled into the apartment like cake batter being poured into a pan. I loved it instantly and completely. It felt like home in a way my childhood house never did, because I’d found it on my own and I was in charge of it. If I wanted to decorate it with animal skulls I bought off eBay, I could—and I did. I rationalized the pricey rent by telling myself it would even out in the long run if I bought smaller Americanos every morning and didn’t eat out as much. I’d opted for cable television in my old apartment, but I forwent the luxury in my new place because I was already overspending. It didn’t matter to me. As with any first love, I made excuses to be happy. And I was happy. I was deliriously happy in that apartment, and even when things started to spiral downhill, I continued to convince myself that this building was the place I’d live forever.
Winter came, and with it arrived the first little annoyances. The building was old and poorly insulated, and though Portland winters are not fierce, the winds can be biting and the chill finds its way through windowsills and cracks in the walls. One brisk night it snowed (as it does once or twice a year in Portland), and the next morning I awoke shivering. My fingers and toes felt numb and my eyeballs ached dully in my skull, barely shielded behind my eyelids. I recalled chilly January nights walking home from the pubs in Boston, and curled up into a ball. My bedroom felt as arctic as it looked outside my window. Disgruntled, I wrapped myself up in my blanket, trudged out of bed, and made my way into the living room to inspect the radiator. I twisted the icy black nozzle, but nothing happened. I kicked it and still nothing. I thought, Maybe it takes a while to initiate after the weather gets colder. Maybe the heat hasn’t been activated yet. I waited patiently for a week, but still my radiator lay dormant. Eventually, I was able to see my breath in my own living room.
I notified my landlady of the issue, and she assured me it would be fixed. She seemed unfazed by my complaint. “Sometimes it takes a while for the heat to get going. I’m sure it’ll kick in later tonight. You’ll know when the heat’s starting up, since the pipes rattle a bit.”
My landlady saying the pipes “rattle” was like calling North Korea “bashful.” I awoke that night at 3 a.m. to such a ruckus, I thought an airplane jet engine had crashed through my roof like that early scene in Donnie Darko.
A quick scan of my darkened room revealed no sign of demon rabbits or other horror-movie characters, and in my half-awake confusion I briefly hoped the racket might be all those ghost hookers finally making their presence known. When I realized it was just the building’s pipes coming alive, I was understandably disappointed.
Despite the heating issues, I still felt like I’d lucked out in finding that apartment. From that point forward, I decided to keep the heat turned off—the noise just wasn’t worth it. I spent the winter months wrapped up in blankets, and I wore extra socks and fingerless gloves, bundled up like a survivor of some post-apocalyptic nuclear ice age. I took lots of hot baths to thaw my frozen limbs and brewed tea several times a day to warm my insides. It didn’t matter that I was becoming a one-man rendition of Grey Gardens. The apartment was a freezing hovel, but it was my freezing hovel. Sometimes I’d forgo heat for weeks at a time, but I stayed put, steadfast and defiant to my apartment’s faults. I swore I’d never leave.
Winter passed and the heating concern became a memory, though new problems arose in its place. The building was just off Burnside, a busy street that acts as a main artery through the body of the city. Not far away was a homeless shelter, and at night the homeless folks would disperse and wander up and down Burnside, often congregating on the sidewalk outside my building. This had never bothered me, but one morning I noticed a flyer in the lobby window that made me uneasy.
I soon learned from another tenant that whoever this woman was, she’d been idling about in the lobby waiting for someone with a key to open the door; then she’d slip in behind them and just sort of hang out. She’d amble about the halls and mumble to herself until someone kicked her out, only to return a few days later for a repeat performance. She’d never go into any apartments, and nothing had gone missing, save for the flowers in the lobby once or twice. For some reason she insisted on returning time after time, and it had become enough of a problem that management had put up flyers in an effort to keep her out. It caused a shroud of uneasiness to fall upon the tenants.
The intruder woman eventually ceased her visits, but less than a week later a haggard-looking man was discovered in the basement rummaging through someone’s freshly dried laundry. He refused to leave and became vocally aggressive, so the police were called. A couple of tenants demanded a doorman be hired to combat intruders, but management refused, citing the cost. I shrugged off the intruder scare, figuring I’d rather put up with trespassers than pay higher rent to cover the cost of a doorman. Not everyone in the building was so forgiving, and both my upstairs and downstairs neighbors fled, prompting a shift in the type of tenants inhabiting the building.
The upstairs unit was the first to be reoccupied. A pair of elderly Russian immigrants moved in, and though I saw the man only twice and never his wife, I garnered enough information about them simply by listening to their arguments through my paper-thin ceiling. They screamed at each other from morning to night, with no real anger, but with the weary frustration I assume results from eating nothing but cabbage soup for sixty years. They had no television that I could tell, but listened instead to an old tinny radio at maximum volume throughout the day while they argued. Because I am a product of the American schooling system, my knowledge of other countries and cultures hovers somewhere between zero and Britain’s Got Talent, and as such I crafted a crude depiction of my upstairs neighbors that resembled something akin to Boris and Natasha from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
When the apartment below me was filled, the result was far less tolerable than my upstairs neighbors’ constant Slavic shrieking (which was actually somewhat therapeutic to listen to—almost like an angrier, atonal Enya). My new downstairs neighbor was a girl about my age who, I learned, worked as a florist. From what I could tell from first appearances, I liked her. She wore a lot of long flowy dresses, and her hair was always the perfect amount of tousled. She had a penchant for bulky jewelry. She was quiet and seemed like a nice neighbor to have until a couple of weeks after she moved in, when her boyfriend joined her. I found myself trapped in the elevator with him on a few occasions, and each time was galling. He wore the same hoodie every day. He described things as “faggy.” He had a tribal tattoo that looked like his buddy did it for free in a garage, all jagged edges and jerky linework. One morning he didn’t say anything, just farted in the elevator and laughed to himself. He’d complain to me (or rather at me, as I did my best not to engage him) about the homeless people milling about our block, grumbling about how they were always in the way and “smelled like garbage.” He was insufferable, but I would’ve dealt with it fine if it weren’t for the music he blasted from his girlfriend’s apartment all day long while she was at work. He blared an endless stream of Black Eyed Peas, David Guetta, and LMFAO, like a playlist created by Satan himself. I was working from home during this time doing freelance design work, a reluctant subject to his musical predilections, and I knew if I ever asked him to keep his music down he’d probably only crank it louder. I prayed regularly for his girlfriend to dump him or for him to find a job, but months passed and I eventually learned the lyrics to every Black Eyed Peas song in existence.
After several months of this, I’d had it. Eager to avoid confrontation and bordering on a manic, Peas-induced hysteria, I did the only thing I could think of: I drafted an anonymous, threatening note with cut-out magazine letters. I’ve always been nonconfrontational, but I was desperate. I feared speaking to the guy face-to-face might lead to my corpse being zipped up in a body bag, so I took the passive-aggressive route instead. I sliced tiny letters out of my back issues of Portland Monthly and methodically glued them to a piece of paper.
Ignoring the fact that such a letter could easily be construed as criminal harassment, I folded it up in an envelope and prepared to drop it in my neighbor’s mailbox the next day. It was the perfect crime, I thought, since the letter could’ve come from anyone in the building. I felt calm wash over me, knowing the ordeal would soon be resolved. But that night the girl downstairs had an explosive fight with her boyfriend, which rendered any future action on my part moot. I’d just come home from dinner with a friend and the fight was already in progress, but what I heard was more than enough to make sense of what was going down.
“… in our bed!” the girl was screaming. “Not even our bed, my bed. My bed! It’s brand-new! That bed was from CRATE. AND. BARREL. And now it’s ruined!”
“Baby, come on, you’re overreacting!” I heard the guy say.
“Shut up, Jared! I can never sleep in that bed again! It’s covered in slut germs now!”
“Come on, let’s talk about this! I’m not even gonna see her again.”
“You’re not gonna see me again either, that’s for sure! Get out!” This was followed by the sounds of objects being thrown, ceramic pieces shattering against walls, maybe a mirror breaking, then a door slamming, followed by silence. Several days later the apartment was vacated entirely, assumedly because the “slut germs” had made the air unbreathable and the apartment unlivable.
I felt like I’d weathered a storm, having survived break-ins, arguments, and unbearably loud music. I thought that I’d come out victorious, and was still entertaining the idea that I’d stay in the building until I died when my landlady raised the rent. It was a standard hike and entirely reasonable, but suddenly the apartment was just too expensive for me. The extra hundred dollars a month made my new rent firmly outside my price range, and just like that I fell out of love with the place.
I packed up and moved.