My old place-man it was a great one. Better than the shithole I’ve got now. Somehow, in my junior year of school, a group of us managed to find this sweet place on Plymouth Street. We even found some kid willing to live in “the slave quarters,” a room near the kitchen the size of a closet, for 300 a month. This place had two bathrooms, a kitchen with a dishwasher, an old laundry machine and dryer set molding with everything else in the basement, and all of the utilities included in rent. Paradise.
The neighborhood was the best thing too; no kids would likely be out in our yard at two a.m. , trying to puke out their alcohol poisoning on our lawn. The only people down the block were old couples, quietly bringing in groceries, mowing their lawns, or shut-up in their houses, never to be seen in the first place.
After a while though, the old people of the neighborhood didn’t like us as much as we liked them. What made our house different from theirs was that not only were we young, but we rented. It seemed to give them the impression that it was only a matter of time before the roommates and I managed to move out, but not before ruining the house and the pristine balance of the rest of the neighborhood first.
Our landlord didn’t help us smooth out the natives’ misunderstanding of our intentions.
When we first moved in, the little old ladies living around our house would knock on our door and give us the scoop on the neighborhood. In their own way, they all seemed to look at us college boys as an extension of their grandsons, knowing nothing about us, but being charmed by our youth anyway. They gossiped to us about our mysterious landlord, “Jimmy.” Jimmy had no experience being a landlord at all, or even running a house on his own. Jimmy was a bit of a sleazeball. He took his elderly mom (Mrs. Rosenbaugh, good at bingo according to Mrs. Chen) and moved down to Florida, deciding to just rent his mom’s nice, old house to a bunch of college students he met over the phone. 1,500 miles away. Ouch. To us, he was only a voice over the phone that would complain about rent and otherwise ignore our calls. What a good guy, that Jimmy.
“Mrs. Rosenbaugh always wanted to go to Florida,” Mrs. Allen told me one day, as if going there wasn’t the usual dream that old ladies had when they got older. She told me like it was a secret, something taboo. It’s so strange that I remember that now.
Our first offense to the neighborhood involved a dead lawnmower. Mowing the lawn was attempted, and then about six of us stared at it for a couple hours and hesitantly messed with the cord and that button on the side of it. We tried to call Jimmy out in Florida, but always got the machine. No luck.
So for weeks the lawn grew, and while we didn’t quite know it at the time, we were unsettling the status quo in the graveyard (as some of us started to eventually call the block). The rest of the neighbor’s lives revolved around their yards, at least until their children took that from them too. Mr. Timothy across the street would mow his little patch of lawn with his gigantic riding lawn mower, and then give our house a hard stare, as if he were wondering whether he should cross the street in his mower and fix the problem for himself.
The old ladies of the block though, they were the worst about it. They would have these garden walks every Saturday morning, where seven or eight of them would dress in some of their best clothes or their “sporty” garden sweats to look at the lawns with each other, appreciating their work. Some even wore makeup, for good or for ill depending on how shaky their hands were. Now these ladies, the extensions of our grandmothers, stopped at our little slum jungle with tight lips. To them, our lawn wasn’t only a sign of our lack of a lawnmower, but also of our lack of character. These were not children their grandkids would associate with, and neither would they.
As a consequence, everyone in the house became uncomfortable when the old ladies of the block started to silently scorn us. Every Saturday morning, someone would instinctively close up the blinds so we wouldn’t fall under their hard stare while watching TV. Would it be strange if I told you that at that time, the smell of warm cookies would make me feel really disappointed with myself? The worst of us was Jeff, who used to live with his grandma; he started to hide his beer in weird places on Saturdays, even though he was of legal age. On Sunday, I once saw his girlfriend sleeping on the couch in the living room instead of his bed. Everything was a bit strange then, but no one admitted it at the time.
Then all hell broke loose, or at least the porch did. Jeff went to get the mail one day, and suddenly had a foot through a mess of decaying wood. It wasn’t a surprise; the entire thing was rotting through except for two fresh boards from the last time it broke, before we came here. The entire house was a mess. Most of us had pooled our money on me stomping through the porch first. The only person who had bet on Jeff was himself. Needless to say, chaos. Second offense.
The third offense happened when I glanced at the hole a week later and noticed a rotting skull peaking out a little bit from the dirt a couple feet below me. No wonder the badgers ignored our garbage that week. An hour later, three police cars were hanging outside our house to ask questions, an hour after that, an ambulance came to take the corpse. Poor Mrs. Rosenbaugh. It seemed she never went to Florida with her son after all.
That Saturday afternoon, the garden walk was prolonged by the busy motions coming from outside our shabby little house. The ladies probably thought that it was an obvious place for a crime to happen. As they took the corpse away, hidden in a thick body bag, the old ladies found another thing to hold against us. They seemed to wonder how we couldn’t notice that we were standing three feet over a corpse for so long, like we did it, us poor college students, the extensions of their grandkids. Yeah, well, who knew?
Is it wrong to say that I still miss that house? Is it horrible to say that when I look at my dirty sink or the heating bill in my crummy little apartment, I always kinda wish that we hadn’t found that little old lady? I wonder if they ever found Jimmy, wherever he is by now. Florida, Brazil, buried in the basement, smoldering in an old furnace, laughing all the way to the bank, cashing out, watching I Love Lucy, decaying under a porch as well. Who knows. I sure as hell can’t say anything about that.
