Idle Ranting, Revisited

I took a bit of a vacation this past week. To be honest I was a bit apprehensive coming back as I figured my computer would be missing (my neighbor got broken into two weeks ago). Thankfully everything was intact upon my return.

However, there was one thing awry. As I drove by the door to the building and parked, I noticed a flyer on the door. Usually flyers are stuffed around the knob and the jamb, but this was taped onto the window of the door. My initial thought was condemnation. Homelessness. It wouldn’t surprise me. These apartments just look nice.

I walked up to the door with a dog on one arm while the other was hugging a dirty bag of laundry. It was a note from ConEd - actually it was more like a bill for $1,189.00 for the gas for the apartment. The landlord neglected to pay this bill - not the first time according to the other tennants - and ConEd was going to have to turn off the gas which heats the hot water. No hot water.

It’s a lovely little hole this apartment 

I live above a pizza place - decent pizza. When I was working on the apartment I’d often go downstairs and grab a slice, but my first real introduction to the place was dropping off an extra set of keys. (The super lost the set he made me when I signed the lease, so I made an extra copy and was told to leave it at the pizza place.)

The super told me to ask for Johnny, and tell him these were extra keys for the apartment upstairs.

Me: "Hey, I’m looking for Johnny. I got some keys for him."
Johnny: "There’s no Johnny here. There’s a Jonathan."
Me: "Oh, sorry man. The Super told me to ask for Johnny. Here’s the keys for upstairs. He had me make an extra set…"

He seemed okay to me. Obviously confrontational, but perhaps that’s just his Albanianess. (I’ve known two Albanians and they’re both the same way - yes I’m drawing a stereotype, sorry if your Albanian.) I had no idea how confrontational Johnathan really was. One afternoon as I was stripping ancient paint off the floor, I heard some banging and shouting coming from the pizza place below. I paused, listened and heard the noise move out onto the street. Sure enough it was some half-Asian guy fighting with Johnathan, and a handful of people trying to break it up. The Asian guy was yelling, cursing, and spitting blood while Johnathan - who some how managed to get his shirt off - was telling him to never come back.

This is not the only instance. I was walking my dogs around eleven - right when the pizza place opens up - and I see a Hispanic guy come out of the pizza place rather quickly, obviously in a huff. Not far behind him comes Johnathan - cursing at him in Spanish. The guy tries to just walk away and Johnathan runs back into the shop and shouts in the door "Take that pie fuckin’ out of the oven." He follows the Spanish guy down the sidewalk, calls him a queer in Spanish and then spits on the other guys neck. A big gross one. The Hispanic guy swears at Johnathan, and starts walking away again. Jonathan runs back into the pizza shop, asks the guy working if "He’s got it," and then takes off running down the sidewalk most likely to fight the Hispanic guy.

Who knew a pie could be so confrontational?

So we finally moved into our new apartment. Sanded down the floors, put down new linoleum, washed and painted the walls. An all out cleansing attack.

The man who lived here before, lived here for ten years - until he was evicted. According to the other tenants in the building, he was a sketchy little Arab cab driver with a big old beard. More often than not he would sit in the kitchen with the lights off, watching his mini black-and-white television that he left on the table, with the door open eye-ball-fucking people as they would go up and down the stairs. He never spoke to anyone, just eye-ball-fucked.

It is doubtful he owned a vaccuum, or if he even owned one, that he knew how to use it. There was dirt everywhere, and we spent a day or two running a small file between the cracks in the floorboards bringing up years of black dirt and lint. The cupboards were full of not dishes, or food, but cans of coffee and unpaid bills to ConEdison, as well as a 1,800 dollar bill to Verizon. (Why Verizon would continue to give the man phone service after he hadn’t paid 500 dollars is beyond me, but apparently collections was trying to sort it out.)

To top off his highclass shittastic dirtiness, he left the bathroom in total disarray. The drawers were empty except for some rusty disposable razors that hadn’t seen use in five years, and there was a tube of black hair dye on top of the mirror - apparently he had given up on trying to keep back the grays. The thing that really got me about the bathroom is the yellow stains on the wall. At first I thought it was piss; maybe he missed the toilet a few times (which had no seat mind you - did he take it with him?), but then I realized that this yellow stain was all over the walls. No way in hell this guy shot the cieling. But I have no clue what it was.

Things are clean now, and the crack-den-that-was is finally habitable. Just hoping that Crazy Cabbi stays away.