Bad Neighbors: Part 2

"Hey, you kids put those knives down and get me another pack of smokes."

In the fall of 2003, my husband and I were broke. Flat broke. Dumpster-divin', barely-thrivin' poor. We both lost jobs within six months of each other and could no longer afford the charming half-house next to the cat-cooking Chinese restaurant/family with the godfather teenage son. Forced to downsize, we moved into an old church that had been turned into apartments in the 1950s. Charming on the outside, Skid Row on the inside.

It was a dump, but I was determined to turn it into a home. It was harder than I thought, considering the bathtub that had so much mildew build-up that my husband's buddy once told us he felt like he needed to bath in Clorox after showering in it. The water ran constantly and the landlord didn't care. His idea of "fixing" the problem was to show up with a wrench and tighten the faucet handles so much that it took another wrench to turn the water on to wash our hands.

The stove in the apartment below us blew up one day. You might think I'm exaggerating for the purpose of writing an entertaining story, but I am the George Washington of neighbor stories - I cannot tell a lie. It blew up - kaboom - flames, smoke, everything. My landlord's solution? He bought our neighbor a hot plate.

There was a minor mold problem in our apartment... nothing too extreme... just, you know... mushrooms growing in the corner of our bedroom carpet, which was always wet, which the landlord also ignored. Oh, and the apartment produced strange, unidentifiable odors. Every day was a new adventure. What will the apartment smell like today? Raw sewage? What sorts of diseases would be develop from the mold contamination? Why were my eyes crusted shut every morning? It was never boring.

The town was not nearly as Rockwell-esque as the last one. It was more rural, with a dive bar on the corner of our street, but not entirely unfriendly. The neighbors smiled, flashing their tooth at you in a welcoming sort of way.

A single guy in his 30s called the basement home. The other people in the building described him as a "washed-up, wannabe rockstar." He boasted of sleeping with a middle-aged woman and her daughter on a regular basis, and left notes on my door asking me to "walk softly" because he slept during the day. (Too bad. It's a rickety old wooden church. Get a real job.)

At first, we loved the tenants in the apartment beside us. It was a single mom we'll call "Stella", her boyfriend, and her two teenage daughters. Four people, one bedroom, and a living room the size of a Pop Tart. I don't know how they did it. I worked nights and the single mom took pity on my husband by feeding him their leftovers and making small talk in the evenings. The oldest daughter, 17, had dropped out of high school. The younger one, 13, was in a special program for kids who needed a gentle beating now and then. They were the type of people, though, who would give you the shirts off their backs, and they once spent an entire afternoon doing us the favor of improperly installing a fuel pump in our car.

I was working with teen moms at the time and I enjoyed kids, so I was friendly with the neighbor girls. Unfortunately, I sometimes have a hard time being nice and helpful without turning into a complete doormat/therapist/safety net. The girls and I got along just fine until the night the youngest one wanted me to take her and her friends to the mall in the pouring rain at night and I refused. The little estrogen monkeys stood in the front yard and started pelting my front door with rocks. I hurt no one. I merely threw the door open as they scattered, and challenged them to a fight to the death. No more rocks after that.

They were hurting for money just as much as we were. Being the entrepreneur that Stella was, she decided to start a home business... running a daycare for 10 toddlers...out of the apartment. It was totally illegal, but I didn't care. I was a little bothered by the fact that Stella and her daughters chain-smoked and watched TV all day while the youngsters ran wild, but the cigarette smoking couldn't have been a mystery to the moms dropping off their tots. Just walking by their apartment gave you a whiff of smoke so strong you nearly passed out and needed oxygen right there on the front steps. If they were that dumb, who was I to say anything?

I got my book contract right before we moved into Le Toilet, so I wrote during the day and worked at the group home at night. No easy task. The walls were about as thin as toilet paper, and our living rooms shared a wall. Ten toddlers...one bedroom...a living room the size of a Pop Tart...paper-thin walls... I wrote my book to the sounds of a herd of children running and screaming from one end of the apartment to the other all day, every day, with no pauses.

Stella and her herd finally moved out a year later. She had broken up with her boyfriend to start dating a drug dealer. The oldest girl got pregnant. Shortly thereafter, I ran into the youngest daughter, who was working at a gas station and had just dropped out of high school herself. She told me her mom had become a crackhead. Nobody can say my stories are anti-climactic.

The Partridge Family was replaced by a kind 50-something trucker we both enjoyed chatting with. When his electric heat vents died, the landlord blessed him with a cooler-sized space heater. He had an adorable, sweet Akita who had a deviated septum or sleep apnea or...good Lord, I don't know what was wrong, but he snored to loudly we could hear him even when we went in our bedroom and closed the door.

It was the man living in the house next-door to our building who would eventually challenge my sanity and cause me to demand that we find another place to live...




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