apartmentalism (two)

I don't know how many people remember 4311 1/2 Jack Street.

Picture a shot-gun shack with a dog-leg in its structure, and you have this apartment. It was a stand-alone buiding (think cabin meets trailer) up on cinder blocks, located on the very eastern edge of Montrose, south of Richmond where Jack dead-ends into a street called Oakley. Tucked behind a duplex and next to a garage apartment, it had three concrete steps that led up to the door and a mailbox with a large Felix the Cat sticker on it. Upon entering, you would first notice that the ceiling nearly touched my head. My friends affectionately called it Chuck's Tree House because of its small size which, I am sure, was exaggerated by my own giganticism. I am a sucker for weirdness.

When I moved in (Spring 1995), I put duck tape over two pine-knot holes in the hard-wood floors in the front room (it worked like a charm!) and furnished it with a lime green couch and orange, daisy curtains from the Second-to-None thrift store (all of the windows were painted and nailed shut, which seems dangerous to me, now). A desk went into one corner near a tiny closet. There was a slender bit of wall into which was built a narrow set of bookshelves. Here is the part that makes the place not-exactly a shot gun: the tiny kitchen (not a kitchenette, but an actual kitchen, crammed with a small stove, full-size fridge, sink, and cabinets) formed a little L shape off of which was the door to a little bedroom, about the size of the front room. The smallest bathroom you've ever seen was off to the left of the kitchen. (It included a shower stall so small I had to crouch to get in it. I filled a large cup to distribute the water evenly when I washed.) The bedroom had a back door to it that led to a small patch of grass and a wooden fence, behind which ran Highway 59, whose zooming traffic, like white noise, lulled me to sleep at night. It cost $325/month to live here.

Things went swimmingly, at first. I danced around to Bjork while cooking red beans and rice. I did laundry for free in the garage next door. I wrote seminar papers on waste and whiteness. I painted my television yellow and covered it with black daisies. I met my neighbors: a gay male couple who lived above the garage, a young punk rock boyfriend-girlfriend couple who lived in the front next to Linda, a middle-aged woman who fed all the stray cats in the neighborhood. By the time the 1995 fall semester began, I felt sure I'd finish out my stay in Houston right there.

But things went wrong really fast. Oblivious to some obvious clues, I was dating a guy who was publically cheating on me (even after I specified that we should communicate about these things). I was totally humiliated when I found out, especially since he had a key to my place and was using it when I was not there. Right after we broke up, the couple upstairs from the garage became verbally and physically abusive with each other, and I could hear them fight. I woke up at night to one of the man's screams. I felt confused and alone. A window broke out and another neighbor called the police. They would quiet down, but start up every couple of nights, usually on the weekend. When I would see them during the day, it was as if nothing weird was going on, which made it really creepy.

Simultaneously, Linda, the cat lady, fed so many stray cats it became sickening. There were kittens and cats in all of the bushes, and many would fuck and breed under my apartment, making that alarming noise that only cats-in-heat and dying children can make. But Linda loved them, and sang little songs in a pretty, little, high pitched voice to them every day while setting out dishes of food and milk. She named all of them. One day, I came home and Linda was outside crying. When I asked her what was wrong she yelled "Look around you! Just look!!" Nothing. No cats. The SPCA came and took them all away.

Finally, one night I came home from getting a drink with my friend Tony Larsen, took a shower, took out my contacts, and went into the bedroom. Although everything was blurry, it was clear that something was wrong. The air-conditioning unit was on the ground. Then I realized it had been ripped out of the wall and broken glass was all over the floor, along with all of my dresser drawers and clothes. After putting on some clothes and a pair of glasses, I rushed over and knocked on Linda's door and asked her to call the police. My place had been broken into and much of my stuff (all of which was just cheap crap, but necessary for me to live) was stolen -- most importantly my cds, portable cd player, the yellow-daisy television set, clothes, some money, and dishes (apparantly, they didn't get as far as the front room). When the police arrived, the head cop whistled and asked me why I lived in such a place. He called it a death trap. He explained that the apartment used to be a drug-dealer's house and that addicts from under the freeway were looking for crack. (It struck me, then, that an unbelievable number of nervous-looking people knocked on my door -- day and night -- looking for someone who no longer lived there. I figured it was part of living in a big city.) Before he left, the cop advised me to pack up whatever valuables were left and stay with a friend and that, if he were me, he would get a gun, sit out back and wait for whoever broke in to return, and shoot them. Interestingly enough, the same cop called me on the phone about twenty minutes later and recanted, saying: "I gave you some advice when I was there and I just want to make sure you understand that I was joking, right?" Right.

I pushed the a/c unit back into the window the next day and contacted the landlord, who was this jet-setting white guy who drove a red sports car. He sent someone over to "fix" the hole in the wall, but it really was a board nailed into place. A few days later, I returned to find the unit ripped out again, and more stuff missing. I went through the same process again, only to have it happen one more time, only this time, I was in the shower when the person broke in, so that, when I came out, I realized we had both been in this little place at the same time. In addition, and most likely unrelatedly, the driver's side door of my car was, mysteriously, crimped shut, with no sign of damage to the body. (Before it was fixed, I had to enter through the passenger's door or through the window, Dukes of Hazzard Style.) Linda, the cat lady, gently suggested that this was all connected and personal, and that someone trying to scare me. This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I gathered my stuff and camped out on my friend Sixto's apartment floor for about two weeks as I tried to find a new place and get my life together, but it was hard because I was -- without even knowing it -- severely traumatized. I slept way too much, and when I did I had terrible nightmares. My crying fits were out of control, and, at one point, Sixto came home from work, saw me sobbing on the couch, and said, pointedly, "I am really sorry your life is so hard, but I cannot help you, so you really need to find someone who can and you need to go." Unbelievably, this was exactly what I needed -- a real kick in the butt to get moving, to get over myself, and to make a change in my life. Within a few days, I signed a lease for a kooky little place on West Alabama and moved in.

The year we moved in together, Hank and I took a long walk through Montrose. One of our destinations was this old place of mine. I hadn't been back in a while, and the neighborhood had been in the news recently because it came out that, for years, a man had been buying male hustlers off the street and torturing them on the 4300-block of Jack, and that the place where he did this was known, by the hustlers, as The Freak Shack. I wanted to go back and see if my place was still there, and to look at the neighborhood to see if I could tell where the Freak Shack was in relation to my place. As we came up the driveway, I saw a woman out front, hanging her laundry from a line, surrounded by children's toys. I wanted to ask if I could go inside and check the place out again, but how would I even begin to explain? Since moving out, I have had countless dreams about this place. The one that recurs most is the one in which I still live there and, suddenly, I realize that the back door does not actually lock, and that people have been coming in and out of the apartment and taking my stuff for years without my knowledge. I didn't want to bother her, so I turned around and came back to the street. Further up the street, Hank and I stopped at what we could only assume was the Freak Shack, but, really, can you judge what goes on in a building just by looking at its exterior?