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Have I Told You About My First Apartment And The Fireball That Lived There?
It was pretty crappy, but it was mine
So it’s 1990. I’m a 20-year-old college student living in my very own place. It is a tiny dump of a studio in a dump of a building on the north side of Chicago. It has an ancient and cranky elevator straight out of central casting where you have to open like four gates and sliding doors before you can get inside.
The elevator loves to get stuck between floors until some decrepit mechanism is engaged and it once again climbs, slowly, hand over hand, to your stop.
I learn early to never take it.
My apartment has a Murphy bed — the kind that you see in Abbott & Costello movies — that folds up into the wall. Its rusty springs creak every time I so much as look at it. Every couple of nights, the old Asian lady next door pounds on the wall to yell at me in not-English.
I try to tell her that she can’t get irritated every time I turn over in my own bed, but my not-English is no better than her English.
My bathroom sink is so old that it has separate faucets for the hot and cold water.
The extent of my decorations is a beaded curtain to separate the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. Remember those?
