apartmentalism (satan)

I just remembered something else about the place on Jack Street.

The last day I was gathering my stuff up to move out, I was experiencing a profound mixture of devastation, rage, and helplessness. I was anxious to move, but I was also breaking a lease. The landlord and I had gone back and forth about the fact that he was going to hold me to pay a month's worth of rent and some other lease-breaking and property-damage fees he came up with, none of which I could afford. He sensed this, and he was trying to coerce me into staying, promising he would put burglar's bars on the windows and that this would make it safer. (Never mind the place was now associated with something awful. It didn't matter if even the National fucking Guard showed up to protect me. Nothing was going to make it feel secure.) I felt too worked up to be rational. The whole thing felt like a terrible injustice and, since I would most likely never set foot inside of the building, it seemed like I needed to, well, to *do* something.

(I couldn't imagine doing something really awful. I knew a crazed grad-school drop-out who left Houston in a totally manic freak out, convinced that her landlord [and everyone else] was ripping her off, and so --without telling the landlord she was moving out -- she had the apartment's electricity turned off, opened up giant vats of mayonnaise-drenched cole slaw in the fridge, and left them for him to find after they had gone sour and rotted in the 100-degree heat. No, that kind of thing takes far too much planning and cruelty.)

In a moment of -- what? impotent agitation? neurotic symptom? sublime revenge? I grabbed a Sharpie marker, crawled inside the bedroom closet, stood up as tall as I could, and stared at about four inches of white wall over the frame. Here, for some really weird reason, which must have something to do with early-childhood connections between panic, fear, and the devil, I wrote, in thick black letters: BEWARE -- SATAN HERE!! 666!!! LIVE WITH EVIL AT YOUR OWN RISK!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! And I emerged from the closet, shaking, but feeling like I had put a mark on the place that would forever curse it and prevent my landlord from making a future profit.

The strange part (well, I guess one of the many strange parts) of this is that I seriously doubt anyone, with the exception of a very tall child playing hide-and-go-seek, will ever see this message. And yet, at the time, I imagined that everyone considering tenancy would, no doubt, discover this terrifying message and run screaming out the front door. It makes the event that much more interesting to me, now, given the chain of signifiers: impotence, the closet, rage, writing, fear, and evil. And the message itself -- a warning to, most likely, no one -- a literal sign, but one that, in the end, only points back to me and my slightly bizarre moments of private acting out.