It seems inconceivable to me that this is so, for it's something I've wanted for a long time, and feels so, well, adult. And while adulthood is a concession I know I've long ago made, it honestly never seemed possible that I could own something, never mind a house I already love so much. It makes me nervous, and excited, and anxious to share this news with all of you.
And after years of landlords - some good, some hideously awful - I am bristling with excitement about not having to ask anyone's permission to do anything, living with walls that are not painted a glossy, industrial white, and finally having a space big enough to properly entertain and cook. Most of all, I relish the day when my desk is in a different room than my bed. There are a lot of sweat and tears and repair and so forth between now and then, but room by room it will get there, and I will complain about it sometimes but love it nonetheless.
Last week I wrote my last rent check, possibly ever. I started thinking about a blog post idea I'd had a long time ago but never followed through on: writing an entry about every apartment I'd ever lived in. Not counting dorm rooms and sublets I tallied nine apartments across four cities over the course of the last seventeen years. It's a real stretch to recall much about the earlier ones, but I have a few pictures in front of me and that helps a bit. My scanner cables are nowhere to be found, but I rephotographed these pictures and will include them here.
It will probably take me seventeen more years to work my way through nine blog posts, but here we go: my first apartment.
The word decision is so deliberate, and so sure of itself. So, too, is the verb - decide - it suggests that the decision-maker has sat down and really weighed all the options and arrived at the most sensible one. It leaves room for error - one can make a bad decision - but it doesn't account for the complete surrender of free will that, looking back, accompanied my late adolescence and early adulthood. At the time, I might have described this as "going with the flow" or "winging it"; I might have thought of everything as an adventure that should be experienced in the most visceral, immediate way. But the choices that led to my first apartment were simply elections to not do something else - I didn't want to be in college anymore, so I dropped out, and then I didn't want to be a college dropout living with my parents, so I hopped a train to Georgia to move in with a fellow dropout. Both these decisions were made with a concentrated determination and stubbornness, but underneath all of this bravado I was deeply ambivalent about all of it.
On New Years Day 1997 I boarded a midnight train to Georgia, not because of my romanticization of train rides, or for the obvious hilarity of so doing, but because it was the cheapest way to get there. A woman who eventually got off in Columbus, Georgia walked the aisles offering everyone slices of pecan pie. I dozed for a short bit, and woke to the sun rising and marveled at the color of the soil - a deep, red clay unlike anything in the north. I emerged, groggy, in Atlanta, and though it was January it was so hot, and while I stood mesmerized by the baggage carousel I shed layer after layer of winter clothes which I rolled into a gratifyingly large, warm ball, stuffed in the trunk of roommate M's car, and my life in the South began.
We started the day with breakfast at The Flying Biscuit, and I fell in love with grits. On our way home, there were wide streets and lanes that change direction at rush hour and big porches and complete strangers who say hi to you even though they don't know you and the gas station that nobody patronized because it sold Pepsi and a women's college that looked like my high school and my first foray into a Target to buy a dresser that I later had trouble assembling.
The apartment was in a basement of a house that M heard about through a friend of a friend. The owners, who lived upstairs, had recently bought the house and had big plans for a backyard pool and apartment upgrades and all that. They let M choose paint colors for the walls and the living room / kitchen floor (those rooms had cement floors), and M selected an earthy palette: terra cotta beige floors and light green and blue walls, and I liked all of it.
Though underground, some of the apartment got great light, particularly the living room and kitchen, which had this great glass ceiling with unpainted wood beams and vines creeping up the exterior that made me feel like I was in some sort of remote cabin or summer house. I had spent so much time in colonial New England homes that I was taken back by its open floor plan. Likewise, the second bathroom - though windowless - seemed so grotesquely huge to me, with a jacuzzi tub and a shower so big you could almost lie down in it and a rolling counter that could have fit four sinks with those fancy lights above that, at the time, felt lavish and made us feel like movie stars. Throughout, there were lots of built-in shelves and cabinets that would have been really useful had I brought more than a suitcase worth of stuff with me.
M had been busy scraping together furnishings, and the place felt warm and cozy, if mismatched, when I arrived. The women's college had recently disposed of a bunch of furniture, and M dumpstered a lot of it - wooden, seventies dorm "common room" chairs with naugahyde forest green and rust orange cushions, a matching coffee table, and two bar stools for the kitchen counter. This may also be where she got a cot for my bedroom - I can't remember. The couch was a big investment by our minimum-wage-earning standards: a hulking orange velour boat of a thing tinged with irony and purchased from a hip second-hand furniture place in Five Points. It was on sale, but still a stretch, and only when it arrived did M notice that it had a giant black cross burned into its back behind the cushions. It was the centrepiece, and we spent a lot of time sitting on it, drinking beer someone else bought for us and talking about nothing.
My friend R, who I knew from high school, was in town visiting her family, and she came over that evening while M was at work. We toured the apartment, and then curled up together in my creaky cot, quietly having one of those profoundly deep, meaningful conversations that one does as a teenager on the precipice of adulthood. Right before she left it was pouring rain, and we just stood by her car for a long time, completely soaked through, still talking. I begged her to come over again the next day, and when she couldn't, I lay alone in my creaky cot and cried.
It was winter break at the women's college, and one of M's friends (V) who went there couldn't go home for the break, but was not allowed to stay in the dorm, either. So for three weeks she stayed in our living room, inexplicably in a giant tent we'd pitched for her (presumably, this was fun?!). She had a part-time job at Starbucks, so we got a lot of free coffee and sugary treats, which was especially helpful because I hadn't gotten a paycheck yet.
After V left, M and I started spending a lot of time in the tent, first watching movies, and then sleeping in there, and then sleeping in M's bed. We were never a good match, but we pretended this wasn't so, at least for a while. My bedroom - which was the darkest and least accommodating, anyway - was largely unused, except for when M was at work and I would hook my computer up to the internet (think back to days of Earthlink and dial-up web service and Geosites and AltaVista and AOL chat and Hotmail) and write long, heartfelt letters to friends up north while listening to mixtapes they'd made me on a tiny, salvaged boom box.
Our stove never worked. The landlords kept promising to send someone to repair it, but this never happened. Looking back as someone who now knows a lot about buying a home, I don't think these people quite knew what they were getting themselves into. We never had a lease and they were always asking us to use fewer utilities, even though they'd concocted a "utilities included" living arrangement in the first place. At some point in April, they discovered some huge structural problem with the house, and were in complete distress. It involved redoing a large part of the foundation, which of course would not be possible with tenants in the basement. At this point they gave us thirty days to move out, and that summer M and I parted ways.
We barely knew how to cook anything as it was, but without a stove we were really in trouble. Food that could be prepared in an oven or microwave included a lot of veggie burgers, which for my first two weeks there were slowly fed to M piece by piece with a fork because she'd just gotten her tongue pierced. Following suit, on my birthday I got my navel pierced, and many nights I woke myself crying out in pain because I'd rolled over onto my stomach in my sleep.
Some time around our third month there, M and I protested the broken stove for the nth time, and the landlord placated us by inviting us up into their house to cook some pasta (read: mac and cheese). They were minimalists - like, really minimalists - no furniture in sight. The husband was a writer, and when we emerged through the door to the basement we found him sitting on the floor of an otherwise empty living room in a sweatsuit hunched over a typewriter, pounding away on the keys. At one point he paused to spill his guts to us: they were trying to adopt a kid but couldn't because of the lack of furniture; his wife thought that having a typewriter was in conflict with their value system but he didn't want to part with it. We listened quietly, and later vowed never to cook up there again.
On my third day of work, I came home to hear some high-pitched squeaking emanating from the lower kitchen cabinets. Mice, I thought, and like a cartoon character, or like a teenager who knows nothing about killing mice except from tv, I silently crept up to the cabinets wielding a frying pan. I whipped the door open to discover that the stray cat we'd recently taken in had given birth. I scooped mother and child up and gently placed them in a comforter-lined cardboard box and put them in the warmest part of the apartment. M and I stayed up all night with them both, and first thing the next morning took mother and litter of one to the vet. The kitten was orange, which delighted me because I'd always wanted an orange tabby cat, and delighted M because she matched our decor. Once mobile, the kitten would climb up into our living room ceiling rafters, then mew to be lifted down. Five minutes later, she'd be up in the ceiling again, and I'd find myself teetering on a bar stool, cradling the tiny squirming cat in my arms as I struggled to keep my balance. As I type this, that cat snoozes next to me, now frail and docile and almost seventeen years old.
When I think about that apartment, I gloss over all the things about it that would bother me now - dark rooms, cold floors, cheap carpet, bad linoleum, mirrored closets, broken stove. I do not marvel at how I struggled so much to pay even half of the rent, which amounted to a mere $250 per month - minimum wage was so brutal and I never want to lose sight of that. But even this fades away a bit, and in its place I'm just left with a very general feeling of everything feeling possible even while nothing was certain. I had approached life in that apartment like one would approach a semester abroad, not yet realizing that my hiatus from school would drag on for almost six years and that the South would remain my home for a significant chunk of that time. I hadn't fully absorbed yet just how unbelievably hard it would be to make ends meet and not have health insurance and haggle with landlords and care for a pet and care for myself and make good decisions. Apartment #1 cradled me, slowly easing me into the chaos of adulthood. It was a false sense of security, and I know that now, but at the time it made everything feel so safe, and so right. It's how home should feel - that's what that apartment taught me. It allowed me comfort in the face of so many unknowns, and I hope to be able to recreate that feeling - even knowing its flaws and falsehoods - in my new house.
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