The title pretty much sums it up, and in that order; we were going to move to Canada and that completely fell through. I thankfully landed a great job, but then my boss literally dropped dead of a heart attack. We spent a month living in a hovel, but have finally gotten settled into our new apartment in the Motor City. This place is great by the way, and no you won't be murdered if you visit. You'll just have to deal with incredible history, art, food, and a wealth of conversations about how capitalism can, in fact, fail.
While I was unemployed I took it upon myself to try a bunch of new recipes, none of which involved baking. All of my pans, whisks, spices, etc. were packed away in boxes so I had no choice but to betray my Nasty Baking motto and try my hand at cooking. Let me go on record as saying it was pretty damn rough at first. After a while though, I got the hang of it and I can cook up some damn tasty meals now, like roast chicken with smoked paprika and garbanzo beans, cauliflower soup, mexican chicken casserole, and my trademark butternut squash soup with caramelized onions and leeks. It's delicious and you're life is incomplete without it.
My baking has all but come to a standstill, which is sad but was necessary. It'll pick back up in the coming months and so will my posts once I have reliable internet. Remember now, shit got real. But all this is very dull compared to the real stories; or as I like to call them, "The Hovel Stories."
When male companion and I finally made it to the city, we had to settle for a month-to-month lease until we could find a more permanent place. We found a hovel that was right in midtown and fit within our budget, so it seemed perfect at the. It was small, falling apart, and in the throws of gentrified evictions. I know this because I saw them evict a disabled black man because he was one day late on his rent. His apartment was later rented to a hipster with a fixie. We felt really great about being white while living there.
The stories began the day we moved in. My dear friend I previously almost killed was gracious enough to help me with the move since male companion had to work. Things were going smoothly until we were moving the bed up the five flights of stairs and her magnificent ass lightly grazed the stairwell window. The force of her ass lightly touching it made the windowpane, i.e., the thin sheet of plastic, flutter down two stories to the ground below. We had a good laugh and remarked on the overall quality of the establishment. Haha.
The first two days were not so funny for us. Our poor dog would drool uncontrollably when left alone, likely because it had been sprayed heavily for cockroaches and bedbugs. There were car alarms going off every hour and the radiators made the apartment ungodly hot. Within 48 hours of moving in we had signed the lease on our current place and had handed in our 30 day notice. This did not stop the stories from accumulating.
The building office was in the basement, which I had to visit in order to submit our notice. No one was there and so I opted for the drop box, but when I looked closer, I saw that above the very formal "Office" sign someone had written a larger version in bright red bubble letters. The only problem was that, despite the plaque just below it, whoever had written it had written "OFICE." True story.
Our stay at the hovel lead to numerous encounters with some pretty eccentric characters. There was the 70 year old gay man who arose every day at 9 to get liquor from the corner store for when he would stand by the USPS drop box and drunkenly chat with the neighbours. There was the friendly homeless man who resided in the park adjacent to the building who had spent many nights with members of The Temptations, scoring pot and whores for their trip to a horse farm in Ontario. There was the heroin addict who lived below us, but her story comes later. Hers is the creme de la creme.
Our last night in the hovel involved us packing up as much as we could and renting some DVDs. As we were watching god knows what, a strange odor began to grow. After a while male companion looked at me and asked,
"Are you wearing perfume?"
"I have perfume, but no, I'm not wearing any. Why?
"No it just smells like alcohol."
I informed him that I don't wear perfume with alcohol because I have some semblance of taste (oh god I'm so white) but that I also smelled something.
We continued watching the god-knows-what movie, but we eventual couldn't take it anymore. The smell was terrible and it became increasingly clear that whatever the smell was, it was poisonous. Male companion got pretty fed up and went to see what was going on. It wasn't anything too noteworthy though, just a man varnishing floors at 11 o'clock at night with no windows open or fans going. What could go wrong with using large amounts of noxious chemicals at night with no ventilation?
Now that final hovel story took place the very next day. Male companion and I were loading up a truck with our stuff to get the hell out of that horrible, horrible place. As we were walking up the stairs for the umpteenth time, sweating in our filthiest of clothes, the heroine addict came out of her apartment.
"Hey, are you two models or something?" she asked with slurred speech.
"...no, we're not." We respond because, well, we're not even close to looking that good at that moment.
"Really? You two look like you'd be in picture frames of somethin'." She said, backing up her initial question of our modelling careers.
We continue up the stairs at that point, not really sure how to respond. After getting into our hovel apartment we had a good laugh and continued clearing out our stuff. Male companion took a trip down to the truck solo and came back up with wide eyes and a disturbed grin. Here is what he described to me:
"You know that heroine addict? The one who asked us if we were models?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I had another interaction with her outside of her apartment."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, she came out when I was going down the stairs. She said 'it takes two phones to run a business.' She then said 'I have a butter face, but a model's body. I have the clothes to prove it too.'"
"Wow," I say, "you just got hit on by a heroine addict."
Our last and final day in the hovel finished up The Hovel Stories with an emaciated junkie trying to sleep with my partner the moment he was within sight without me. These stories, as ridiculous as they are, are what makes life interesting. Who else would hear about The Temptations affection for whores and horse farms? Who else has had a junkie hit on them in such a unique way? We could have continued living in mid-Michigan where things are fairly boring and the status quo is maintained, but life is way too short for that.
Now to get me some dope and some whores, I have a horse farm to get to!
No comments:
Post a Comment