There's nothing like a houseguest to give you perspective on how you live. Like how our last visitor, G’s mom, brought to our attention we live in a shit hole. Granted it's a much nicer shit hole than two years ago --when I came on the scene with my paint and power tools, softy girlie fabric items and mad spatial reasoning— you know, now it’s not the worst place I’ve seen in New York. But subjectively? Through the eyes of an outsider? It’s a tiny awful shit hole crumbling away around us in spite of our ongoing cosmetic cover-ups. A fact we would have gone on denying, happily, had her presence not forced reality upon us.
The truth of our domestic crapitude began to reveal itself the moment she walked in the door. As she set her bags down in the front room, our living room slash guest room, I had to apologize for the lack of heat there, explain that the windows have half inch gaps around them (hence the indoor ice) and that we can't open up the radiator because the valve is cracked and shoots water two feet up the wall. More instructions and apologies were made as she continued through the apartment, each illuminating how essentially everything in our place has a warning or guideline attached to it.
When she went to wash up I had to explain why we have to keep a towel wedged between the sink and wall (to catch the leak from the faucet that’s rotting the floor). Then there's the shower that gets colder incrementally as you bathe, or shuts off completely without warning. And how --when we do have hot water at all-- it’s boiling, so to be careful of getting third-degree burns. The pots on the kitchen floor are to catch the leak we've been complaining about for over a year, they need to be emptied each morning and evening. You must stand squarely on the board in front of the kitchen sink or you'll wind up in the basement, and you must empty the bucket under the sink into the toilet each time you use it; because, you know, the sink just empties into a bucket. Everything in the cupboard needs to be pushed over to the left so that the pipe in there doesn't drip black ooze onto the dishes and food. That, and the roaches and mice, are why everything must be kept in gallon ziplock bags and the dishes rinsed before each use. A pull down and kick maneuver is the way to open the bathroom door, yell if you get stuck. And you have to slam, no really SLAM the back door to get it to close, mind the falling debris as a result. Earplugs help to block out the noise from the street (a major garbage trucking route), the Spanish Hip-Hop loving drug dealers upstairs, and the couple across the hall who insist on listening to the same fucking Coldplay album over and over everyday. And don't touch that thing there, ever. Really. You don't want to know. Any questions?
Luckily G's mom is a trooper and adventurer, a woman who jumps out of airplanes and swims with sharks, literally, so a little inconvenience wasn't going to ruffle her tough-ass Texan feathers. She didn’t complain about the place once, even when the damage list became so long she had to write it down (empty buckets twice/day, check, hold toilet handle, check, kick door, check…)
The official end of shit-hole-denial came one night while playing Scrabble in the kitchen. We sat underneath the steady downpour from the ceiling, made jokes about our 'fancy indoor feng shui waterfall' as we put towels in the pots so the brown water wouldn't splash into our drinks or onto the game board. We talked about the 'free concert' we were getting from the apartment upstairs, and how the ceaseless screaming coming from the children on the third floor gave the place a Norman Rockwell style 'family' air. G's mom was even making the best of the third degree burns she suffered from doing the dishes earlier that day, said the scorched skin was keeping her hands warm. We weren't going to let anything ruin our good time, and it didn't, until G’s mom nonchalantly said, "I think the ceiling is moving." We all looked up at the moment a four by four foot chunk of rotted plaster broke loose and fell to the floor. It hit the ground, smashed to bits, and sent wet white powder to every corner of the room. It missed our heads by inches.
You know how there's the rule that one should never say “It can’t get any worse” because you will have assured that it will? Yeah, listen to that rule. After we had cleaned up the mess, I stepped back in a corner to have a smoke and survey the damage. I took in the gaping, still dripping ceiling, the rotted lathing, took a drag, and said “Well, it doesn’t look like it will get any worse” just as my bare foot went through a hole in the rotting floor.