So, here’s a funny story from the annals of tenement living. I don’t know I get such a kick out of referring to my apartment building as a tenement. Really, it’s just a 1920s brick rectangle like most of the other buildings in my hood. I like its stately-yet-dilapidated façade and the fact that my “kitchen” (that is, the northeast corner of the room) has original cabinetry and a miniature gas stove. But it’s not without a certain 19th-century-poverty quality – you know, an “I let a small room down the Moorebrooke Lane from a miserly widow” kind of thing. Thin walls through which you can hear everything, the fact that they are all one-room apartments packed like sardines along the hallways, the occasional smell of dog shit.
Also, sometimes, you come home at 11 PM to slowly realize that the “packs of revelers” inexplicably traipsing down the hallways on a Monday night are actually cops and the thumping upstairs that’s rattling your (lock-less, barred) window is, in the words of one of the cops, “a gentleman on the third floor having a rough night.” When I asked him if everything was, you know, safe, he replied, “Well, we sure hope so.” Shortly thereafter, someone ran down the hallway shouting, “Lock your doors!”
Cue me, curled up in my bathroom with a blanket and a cell phone, panic room style, ’til 3 AM, convinced that the next bump will announce a buck naked many breaking through my door asking to borrow socks, a real thing that happened to some unfortunate girl on the third floor. Hey, speaking of paranoia, here follows the wrong thing to listen to when you think (perhaps irrationally) that the above thing might occur:
