CHAPTER 2 – THE BATTLE OVER THE HALLWAY
The first
incident with the neighbor girls started with a territory dispute over the
foyer. Now, when I say foyer, I am
in no way trying to elicit a feeling of grandeur. I do so only because it’s easier to say than “dilapidated
hallway attached to the front door.” Long and impossibly narrow, its walls have been painted two shades of dingy yellow and
overlaid with a brown hatch mark effect that looks like it was created by a mental
patient with a handful of feces.
The floor is covered with a blue and black carpet that is so matted
that if they were ever to be clean (emphasis on the if) it would be easier to use a broom than a vacuum. By the front door, there’s a large pile
of mail where two mailboxes should be, and in the very back three large recycle
bins to tie in the motif of garbage dump. Incase I have not brought my point home
yet, it’s that the foyer is disgusting.
It needs no help on being disgusting.
The girls across
the hall moved in only a week or so after first viewing the apartment. I was out of town when it happened, but
when I returned, there were two large plastic containers lying out in the
middle of the hallway, tipping me off as to their arrival. I’m just going to pause for one moment
and explain to you a little something about myself. I’m a neat person. Like, very neat. Like, “borders on obsession” neat.
It’s something I’ve always dealt with. I remember being a child and alphabetizing my parents pantry. When I went to college, I became a
tyrant –so much so that my roommates took away my dry erase privileges after I
left one too many passive aggressive notes. Since then, I’ve come to realize that it’s unfair of me to
demand the same level of cleanliness from other people. However, seeing those two bins where
they shouldn’t be immediately set my brain off into Terminator mode, identifying
both as two Sarah Connors that must be destroyed. I took a deep breath though,
and reminded myself that they literally just moved in. They probably just left them down there
while they unpacked, and would most likely take them to the curb on the next
trash day.
Three weeks
later, and the bins were still there.
They had been rearranged several times, but never thrown away. My landlord called me one afternoon to
discuss something unrelated, and in a very forced attempt to sound breezy, I brought
them up. “They’re totally not a
big deal,” I kept saying “but they just take up a lot of room down there so if
they don’t need them, maybe they could get rid of them?” He assured me that he would talk to
them.
Two months went by, and not only did they remain – but now
they were joined by several other items as well. A large cardboard box filled with metal beams sat perched
against the wall, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, as well as several
deconstructed boxes, which laid behind the recycling bins. Every day when I’d enter the hallway,
my blood pressure would start to rise.
But I decided that perhaps this was a test by our good Lord, who was
trying to teach me a little patience.
I would take a deep breath and remind myself that in the grand scheme of
things, this was not a big deal.
“They just moved in, Christopher,” I would tell myself. “Cut them a little slack.”
Another month went by, and now empty boxes and bins stretched
from one end of the hallway to the other, and showed no sign of moving. All three of the recycling bins were
completely filled with torn up boxes and packing peanut – which overflowed onto
the floor. I brought the matter up with my landlord again. He sounded confused. “But I talked to them about it. They said they had cleaned everything
out.”
Every day, my frustration about the situation would
rise. The hallway, which was ugly
before, now resembled the murder scene in a Law & Order intro. It was common for the narrow pathway
they had left to navigate through their junk to be obstructed by falling
objects. I found myself lying in
bed at night, unable to sleep knowing that such a mess existed just a floor
below me. I imagined what their apartment looked like - something out of one of those specials on hoarders no
doubt.
And then one day, after a particularly long day of work, I
decided the amount of energy I spent fixating on this mess was not equal to the
amount of energy it would take to clean it. And so I did. I
tied up all of the cardboard boxes and took them out to the curb to be
recycled. It took three large
trash bags to remove all of the packing peanuts, plastic drop cloths, balls of
painters tape, and the other garbage they had left behind. I didn’t know what the box of metal
beams was for, but it was clear they had no use for them – so I carried them
out as well. I saved the two bins
for last. As I looked down on
them, I muttered under my breath “Hasta la vista, baby.” After I swept the carpet, I took a long
moment to admire my work. It was
beautiful. Well – not beautiful,
it was still a shit hole – but a clean shit hole with everything right where it
should be.
My roommate was appreciative of my hard work, but was concerned
as to the aftermath. “They’ll
probably assume now that they can leave anything down there and someone will
clean it up for them.” I reassured
her that she was wrong – that they would be so embarrassed when they saw that
someone else had cleaned their mess up for them, that they would never do it
again. She stared at me blankly
for a moment and then said, “I just don’t understand how your brain works sometimes.”
Of course, she was right. Two weeks later, a bunch of boxes filled with trash appeared
in the hallway again. The most
frustrating part was the girls next door had placed them there on trash day –
instead of two yards further on the other side of the door where they would
have been picked up by trash men.
“Oh HELL no!” I said, and went back to the apartment to find the dry
erase markers that I had sheathed so many years before.
My note exemplified my best attempt to resist every passive
aggressive inclination in my body.
It simply said; “Be aware – tenants are responsible for their own trash.
Please refrain from leaving refuse here.”
And sure
enough, the next day the trash was gone, as was my note – which was torn up and
left in the recycling bin labeled “paper.” I thought it was a weird move, ripping the sign down, but I
was just glad it was over. At
least, I thought it was over. What
I didn’t know then was that things with our neighbors were about to get
worse. Much worse.
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