This is Livin’

The heat is broken in this hotel room, and it’s about 103 degrees in here. I’ve complained to the mostly silent men who stand guard outside my door, but they don’t respond, or do anything. So, I’m blogging naked, soaking in cold water in the tub.

By lowering a note to the street on a thread worked free of the bedsheets, I convinced a street urchin to purchase a bottle of Glenmoranjie for me, and so I’ve got a nice drink balanced on the edge of the old clawtooth tub. Things are looking up.

My present living situation and my recent contemplation of my flooding house has me thinking about places I’ve lived. Plus, I was just reading Jeff Kay’s West Virginia Surf Report and one of his recent posts was about an old apartment he lived in, so I’ve been thinking about places I’ve lived. My memories are suspect in the best of times, so really all I have are impressions:

Rented house: In my sophomore year of college I rented a house with 7 friends, or 4 friends and 3 of their friends. My main memory of this place is when one of my roommates went into the bathroom one day after a big party. The rest of us were watching TV in the living room, directly below the bathroom. Suddenly, there is a horrible, inhuman noise from the upstairs bathroom, and then, in quick succession, the sound of water dripping through the ceiling, the sound of running feet on the stairs, and then my roommate, in a green robe, skidding to a halt in the room, staring comically at the ceiling, then snatching my clean towels from the rack on which they were drying and sopping up his filthy toilet runoff with them. Good times, good times.

Apartment #1: The next year two of my friends and I rented a subterranean apartment a few blocks away. The place had no windows, particle board walls, and madness in the air. How we made it out without killing each other, I’ll never know.

Apartment #2: The first place I ever rented on my own was actually not a bad place, all things considered. The upstairs neighbors weren’t so great, though. A huge, red-faced woman and her thirty or forty kids, as far as I could tell. She took her parenting very seriously, however, asking me to go to the liquor store to buy her booze when she couldn’t leave the “young ‘uns” alone by themselves.

Apartment #3: A cheap place, with floors painted brown. I once decided to take a bath and turned the water on, and then forgot all about it until my suffering downstairs neighbor came screaming up the stairs, wondering why Niagra frickin Falls was pouring into her bathroom. Good times.

Apartment #4: Shared with the future Duchess Mrs. Somers, this was a bargain-priced railroad with the worst heat ever known to man. Pluto is warmer than that apartment in the winter. Once we put a thermometer into the bathroom in January and it told us it was 43 degrees in the bathroom. WITH THE HEAT ON. We had it “fixed” many times, to no avail. They’ll likely find an Indian Burial ground underneath that place someday.

Ah, good times, good times. When I get out of this hotel, I’m going to burn it down and send the bill to my publisher.