The Mysterious Tenant

Tonight I am writing at a desk. I am not hunched over a glass coffee table with a whale full of truffles, nor am I using an Indian food cookbook balanced on my thighs as a makeshift table. It feels great. When we moved into our new apartment, the landlord kindly bestowed upon us a dresser missing one drawer, a forbidding metal table, a 1970s lamp, two TV stands, and this desk.

“I don’t know about the two TV stands,” I told the landlord, an older Italian man fresh out of a black and white crime film. “We don’t even have one TV yet. But I’ll take the desk.”

I’m sure that I’ve seen this same desk on Craigslist since November. Perhaps this is what destiny feels like. The wood is light-colored and the sides are silvery metal punctured with air holes. It’s marked with marker and blotted with something that could either be nail polish or driveway tar. I don’t know who the previous owner of this desk was, but we can draw some conclusions.

When we first saw the apartment, we were instantly sold on the tacky waiting room wallpaper and the green 1970s toilet.

“You seem like two nice, attractive young people,” the landlord told us. Then we asked him if he would allow a cat.

“Eh,” he said. “I had a bad experience with cats in this apartment. I can’t have a cat spraying on the carpets.”

The last tenant had an unneutered male cat that marked every gym sneaker, couch cushion, and spider plant as his territory. We explained that Olive is female and therefore biologically incapable of spraying, that she is far too well-behaved to ever spray anything, and that we would never keep an unneutered male cat in our home in the first place. Dave offered to pay a pet deposit if necessary and the landlord caved to our attractive youthfulness.

Yesterday we moved in. While everyone else was lugging heavy boxes, Dave’s mom recruited me to help her clean the kitchen and she began wiping down the contact paper inside of the drawers and cupboards.

“What’s this?” Dave’s mom said, reaching into the back of a drawer. She pulled out a tiny black thing. “What is this?”

“That’s a pipe,” Dave explained.

Then, for some reason, everyone smelled it. Curious noses swarmed the pipe, attempting to detect a particular odor from the residue.

My mom told the story of how our neighbor found fifteen thousand dollars in her ceiling when she was renovating. We all had a good laugh because we weren’t nearly so fortunate.

I moved towards the futon, ready to sit down for a long time and leave work irresponsibly incomplete. My goal was to shut off my entire body and stare at one point on the wall like an android for couple of hours, but it was not to be.

“What is this?” said Dave’s mom, emerging from one of the cupboards. “Is this…? Is this a…?”

“Is that a syringe?” I asked, frowning at the brownish tube in her hand, with even lines up the side like a science class beaker. There wasn’t a needle attached, but otherwise it looked an awful lot like a used syringe. “Don’t touch that. Put it down somewhere and don’t touch it. Just throw it away.”

Great, I thought. The drawers are full of pipes, the cupboards are full of syringes, and we haven’t even gotten to the bathroom yet. There is probably a fully functional meth lab in the green 1970s bathtub. We could never walk barefoot in the apartment because there are used needles everywhere and there is a 90% chance of contracting blood borne pathogens from the contact paper under the silverware.

A police siren blared outside. And now we’re going to be arrested, I thought wearily. I washed my hands about six times even though I didn’t even touch the syringe, imagining little AIDS monsters swirling down the drain.

I remembered this dream I once had where someone stabbed my skull with a needle full of heroin.

“Hey! What did you do that for?” I moaned, rubbing the top of my head. “Now I’m going to get a venereal disease and a lifelong addiction.”

I stomped around for the rest of the dream slamming doors, flipping tables, and frowning mercilessly.

Now I’m piecing together the results of my investigation. Due to the scribble of blue marker on the TV stand that Dave accepted from the landlord, the previous tenant had a young child with an unschooled artistic flair. 

Our apartment also has an adjoining nursery that the landlord has claimed as a storage room, which bolsters my speculation.

“Addicts don’t clean themselves,” my mom explained to us from under a Mexican blanket on the futon. “They think bathing ruins their high.”

I’m not sure who provided my mother with this little tidbit, but she seems to think the mysterious former tenant was a bit smelly. Based on the unneutered cat spraying all over the bedding, I cannot argue.

And my desk belonged to this person. Who knows what seedy business came to pass on this very keyboard tray, what terrible things that this manufactured pine surface once witnessed? Beyond this laptop is an aura of mystery that I shall penetrate, right after I wash my hands.

Crunch Time

Having endured five separate leaks in this little sinkhole of an apartment, Dave and I are looking for a new place to live. We have seen twelve apartments to date and still haven’t found a keeper.

Dave started calling real estate agents and on Memorial Day we took a drive to visit one at her office. We arrived first and sat down at the desk. She burst through the door of her office in an American flag T-shirt and introduced herself as Elaine. She shook my hand and held onto it for a long time. Elaine stared at me intently through her darkly shaded sunglasses.

“Oh my god. Do you know who you look like?” Elaine asked. “You know, that girl that everyone says you look like.”

I shrugged. I supposed she was probably thinking of Cindy Lou Who or the flying nun.

“You know who I mean. Come on. That cute little country singer girl,” she prompted, waving her hands.

Clearly we would not be seeing any apartments at all until I produced the name of a cute little country singer.

“Taylor Swift?” I guessed, wincing. The last time I saw my sister she spent hours trying to Swift-ify my hair. I don't want to talk about it.

“YES. You look just like Taylor Swift. Don’t people tell you that all the time?”

“No,” I said.

Dave and Elaine began discussing apartments, but she was quickly reminded of a con man who had been plaguing her all month long. He called her house phone addressing her as a senior citizen and told her that she had won a brand new car. All she had to do was pay the taxes on it and he would deliver it to her house. 

She played along and said that she couldn’t possibly take the car today because she was recovering from hip replacement surgery. The next day he called her back. And the next day.

“Can you believe that this man calls poor senior citizens and takes advantage of them like that? He’s conned more than four hundred senior citizens in this area. You’d think the law would step in, but I called the sheriff myself and do you know what he said? He said that he’d been trailing this guy for weeks and he knew exactly where the con man is: he's sitting pretty in a big house in Jamaica, but there’s nothing they can do. The United States police can’t reach him there.”

Then she turned to me.

“Do you sing?” she asked. I shook my head. “What about dancing? No? Acting?”

“No, I’m a writer,” I said.

“You know what? You should enter a Taylor Swift lookalike contest. Have you ever considered entering a Taylor Swift lookalike contest?”

I admitted that I had not.

“I think you’d really have a chance. You should think about that,” she said. “She is the sweetest girl. She’s just so genuine. I was watching this talk show the other day and Taylor Swift was the guest star. She was talking about how she was driving along in her car and she saw a girl with a Taylor Swift concert T-shirt walking down the street to a record store. So Taylor had her driver pull around and drop her off in front of the record store. She came up behind the girl and just tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being a fan.’”

After listening to more of Taylor Swift’s merits, we took a ride in Elaine's SUV and checked out some apartments. The first one was on the second floor, but somehow had a small, two-tiered yard reminiscent of the ruins of Machu Picchu.

“You could clean this up really nice and put a little patio table right here,” Elaine said.

Inside there was a slight paint odor. The floorboards were warped and lumpy due to the age of the building. I don’t recall there being a bathroom.

The next apartment was in some sort of British estate house that had been transplanted into New York. Elaine presented it as a train car-style apartment. You entered in the bedroom, walked through a door to the living area, and the kitchen was all the way in the back. It was very stupid.

Elaine drove us to the last apartment and we lingered outside of the building.

“I don’t know if you’re going to like this one, but we’ll take a quick look at it. Why not?” Elaine said. “But first I want you to meet some friends of mine…”

Elaine flung open the door to the hair salon on the first floor.

“Hey girls, look who I brought you. It’s Taylor Swift’s sister.”

All of the hairdressers stopped foiling their clients and stared at me, nodding. I waved and scooted away from the door.

The last apartment we saw was occupied by an elderly Greek couple ready to move into their daughter’s house. We barged in just as the woman was frying some fragrant Greek food. They lived in the apartment for thirty-five years and it was actually quite nice. Everything was peach and frilly and smelled like food.

“I could imagine us living here,” Dave said.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the kitchen curing olives with the Greek woman. I imagined myself on the couch checking my emails as an old Greek man beside me watches reruns of Married with Children. It was impossible for me to imagine myself living in the apartment without the Greek couple cohabitating with us like the Greek grandparents I never had. But I didn't mind.

Where Is Olive?

Olive may appear in any place at any moment. She gnaws my feet as I nap and she hangs above my head as I do the dishes, prepared to face-hug at the slightest provocation. As invasive as Japanese knotweed, she squeezes into the sink while I wash my face and waves her claws under the bathroom door if I try to shut her out. While I kneel over a coffee table strewn beads and wire, Olive crouches between my calves. I wake up in the morning to Olive gazing down at me with a curious expression.

Olive is watching. Olive is always watching.

Not one surface of this apartment remains undefiled by her paws. Neither fruit bowl nor funnel nor open mouth is safe. She wants to penetrate the plastic boundaries of the water filter and curl herself up in the clammy reservoir like a catfish. Mortal illusions like “walls” and “window screens” and “impossibly small spaces” are beyond Olive’s conception, for her mind lives beyond the Matrix.

Poker-faced and twitchy-tailed, she stares at me on my tapping away on my laptop and swats my ankles with her paw. Olive wants to beat me into submission until I enjoy her illustrious company, but she will not win.

Of Monkeys and Monasteries

On Sunday morning Christine and I roused ourselves at seven in the morning for a long drive to the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York. We planned to spend the day chilling with Buddhist monks and nuns, trying to be mindful. It was an hour and a half trip fueled entirely by peanut butter smoothies and adrenaline, with only the robotic whispers of a faulty GPS and a blazing sun to keep us from dozing off on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

We arrived at nine, just in time for the impending day of mindfulness. Christine and I rushed into the meditation hall, past granite boulders announcing, “You Are Home.” We were greeted by a calm, soft-spoken monk in a brown robe. He told us that we could sit down, or we could go for a walk in the woods. Or walk the barren garden. It didn't matter as long as we enjoyed the silence. For all of our rushing, we seemed to be the only people in a rush.

Christine and I lingered stiffly in the doorway of the enormous meditation room, barefoot and unsure. It smelled delightfully like wood and campfire. To our right, a circle of monks and nuns were chanting with some people in regular clothes. Ahead of us, empty chairs and cushions were lined up in rows on the floor and a nun was misting orchids with a plastic spray bottle. Another lit up sticks of incense that made me sneeze. One monk noticed us creeping by the door and suggested we sit down in the empty arena of cushions until a question and answer session with the teachers began.

We took a seat on some cushions in the sunlight and soon the seats around us filled up. After a few minutes, I turned around and every cushion and chair was occupied. In front of me, monks struggled to pull the tail ends of their robes over the back of their meditation cushions.

A few nuns lead us in a Buddhist-style sing-along that reminded me of my days in Vacation Bible School. They sang songs about how we are all part of one tree, one sea, one sky. I smiled wryly and performed some of the hand motions. Christine hummed along.

A gong sounded and a line of teachers walked to the front of the room. They sat on their cushions and adjusted their robe tails. Sunday was the end of a retreat for members of the Order of Interbeing and a question and answer session was scheduled. (Something I found out later: Everyone is a member of the Order of Interbeing.) Since half of the overflowing room consisted of people who were visiting for the day, there were a lot of questions that had nothing to do with the retreat. Someone asked if pain and suffering are the same thing, another asked how to control feelings of “specialness.” One woman asked the best way to deal with a rogue contractor.

A teacher tackled questions about what young people should know about the practice and how to control a certain syndrome called “monkey mind.” She especially wanted young people to know that they should take care of their bodies. When you wake up in the morning, you should massage your face and thank your eyes for seeing and your mouth for taking in food. Massage your abdomen and thank your organs. If you have a hangover or ate a lot of heavy food the night before, you should apologize. The mind is important, but when you feel sick you only think about how much you would like to feel better.

Then the teacher talked about monkey mind, which is a problem that everyone has. (Also known as “monkey nucleosis.”) There’s a monkey in your brain that wants to grab things and hold onto them, not unlike a real monkey. The trick is to catch it in the act and stop yourself when you want something. She caught the monkey’s wrist in the air and held onto it. “Ha, I caught you,” she said, smiling at the monkey. “If I want something that badly, I probably shouldn't have it.”

Photo courtesy of PicturesOfMonkeys.blogspot.com. For all of your monkey image needs.

Tales from the Leaky Basement

I dreamed that I was in my kitchen and I found a crustacean with an elaborate shell tapping its fingers against the floor. I picked it up by the shell and entertained thoughts of eating it with a hot, buttery sauce and using its elaborate shell to listen to the ocean. Then I heard a sound like a fountain trickling water and wondered if the rest of the ocean was coming with the crab.

When I awoke, I was still in my apartment, cocooned in a duvet and clad in squirrel pajamas. I leaped out of bed in a frenzy, wondering if the source of the trickle was the leak over the window in the living room or the leak over the porthole in the kitchen. It seemed that I had not dreamed up the trickling after all. A cascade of water was streaming from the frame in between our kitchen and living room area, forming a little lake of water that was stretching its arms towards Dave's desktop computer.

I laid out a huge towel and made a run for the landlords upstairs. Olive made a dash for the door, too. She probably was attempting to swim for dry land. 

I burst through the door and cried, "Is your toilet overflowing again!?!"

This actually happened months ago and produced a rather surreal rain shower indoors.

The person who opened the door upstairs did not live there and didn't know the protocol for the leaky basement. She tried waking everyone else up to no avail and then called the handyman, who was an hour or so away.

I returned to the basement, assured that someone would be down to look at it in an hour. The leak had stopped spewing and the towel was soggy from end to end. Olive tried to dash outside again, ready to brave the floods. At this point, I think just about every segment of ceiling in our kitchen has erupted with a leak at some point. Surely this apartment is for the fishes.

You Can Count on Me

A snowy-haired father is dying in his bed, surrounded by three sons. There are cats walking on the headboard, on the dressers, on the carpet. The father coughs and waves over his eldest son.

ELDEST SON: What is it, father?

FATHER: I have something for you…

The father extends his closed hand and the oldest son puts his hand out tentatively.

ELDEST SON: What… is it?

FATHER: It’s a Petco savings card. Don’t lose it. The cats are your responsibility now…

The oldest son takes the savings card.

FATHER: Buy the Science Diet. It’s still on sale….

The father dies. The eldest son clutches the savings card to his heart with a dutiful expression.

ELDEST SON: I love you, Dad.

Fade to black. On the screen, the following appears:

Petco. It’s what your father would want.

The Grand Tour

When I was little, my godmother took me on an exclusive tour of the White House. I got to experience sights that people would not normally get to see on White House tours, she told me. I got to stand at the Meet the Press podium, grinning my gap-toothed smile. I got to see the entrance to the kitchen where the chef told me that Bill Clinton loved cheeseburgers more than anything.

This tour is going to be very underwhelming in comparison, I’m afraid. No former chef to former president Clinton makes an appearance in this tour – merely my kitten, Olive. Actually, Olive plays the role of tour guide; I, the role of photographer. Olive does not have the manual skill to operate a camera and lacks my steadiness of hand.

This tour is of my apartment, which is the basement of a house that is not white, but minty-green in color. A furious owl guards the property.

Our entrance is marked with a creaky screen door that blows open and closed in the wind. Beside the entrance is a smaller door which leads to a place that I have named “The Chokey.”

Olive laments her inability to turn the doorknob.

From the entrance, we have a delightful view of the mausoleum in the driveway, accompanied by its mistress the Guillotine, both of which seem to have been inching closer and closer to the door since our arrival. I hear that the landlords put on an extravagant show at Halloween.

You might notice a tiny guillotine to the  right of the mausoleum.

Inside the apartment, we have a wall of books and lots of anthropomorphic animal pictures by Michael Sowa and Louis Wain. The futon is rock-solid and the glass coffee table is a surface that Olive frequently attempts to dive through it, certain that it is a portal to another realm.

A construction worker once described this area as "groovy."

I write at a desk in the corner when Dave isn’t using the area to compose electronic music, but I couldn't take a single clear picture of it. Eventually, I intend to turn a closet in the kitchen into a writing nook where I can be a writing hermit. I also intend to install wall-to-wall Christmas lights on the ceiling pipes. Angelina the pitcher plant continues to thrive in the windowsill.

I finally have a bookcase large enough to contain my personal collection.

Olive has a cat-nook in the bookcase that she likes to think of as a treat depository. Her main goal in life is to acquire as many Greenies cat treats in her mouth as possible until her immaculate incisors fall out.

Olive sometimes sleeps here on her back with her legs straight up in the air.

I refer to this lamp as “the cocoon of the giant moth” or, alternatively, “the mummy.”

Olive has taken over many parts of the apartment, including the desk chair and the inside of the ceramic fruit bowl.

Olive territory.

Our kitchen is very utilitarian. Usually every surface is marred with borscht. Empty teacups and sticky, hollowed grapefruits are strewn across the counters. I tidied it up to give you an illusion, dear reader.

The fruit bowl, when not filled with browning bananas and granny smith apples, also serves as a container for Olive’s body. It has become her favorite cat bed, the only bed she can’t rip with her teeth. She cowers in the fruit bowl when we try to remove her from the kitchen table by the scruff.

This is our bathroom, complete with an unconventionally placed mirror-cabinet.

Sorry if I'm being invasive.

Alas, I have run out of apartment.