The Horrible Spaces

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

-Russell Baker

Finally, finally, finally, I get to see racist old man Clint Eastwood starring in a modern day Death Wish. I am unironically stoked (even stoked is used sincerely) to see this.

2008 is dead as Dillinger. On with 2009, in which I resolve to maintain this blog a bit more effectively, to keep in touch with friends a bit more regularly and get shit done a lot more often.

If 2006 was the year of me quitting the internet, 2007 was me slowly returning to it and 2008 was penance for my time away, then 2009 will be my glorious return complete with tweeting birds and falling rose petals.

And after the months of summer swelter, after the trip to Europe, after the fauxnados and lack of hot water and 3am tango dance parties, it all had to come to an end, and it very shortly did just after the September rent checks had been collected. One bleary-eyed morning, first cigarette of the day just barely lit and dreams just barely evacuated, I opened an email entitled, with much subterfuge, “Good Morning.”

In the past week *** and I finally got resolution on our ongoing title
dispute over the building. We now have clear title and that decision
will have an impact on you both in regards to our rental agreements.
When you both first moved in I made it clear that this would happen at
some point in some form. The discounted rate that I offered
originally will end after this month.
I am at this time gathering bids and information and will have a
clearer picture of exactly what direction *** and I will be taking
with the building soon. I would like to meet with both of you to
discuss all this, but I would like to wait a week or two so that I
have all the information and can give you clear answers.

Translation: Party = over.

After that came the meeting, about 3 weeks into the month, in the upstairs apartment. I sat cross-legged on the floor while my landlord and her ex explained their plan. First: rent was tripling. Second: tenants would be required to sign a 3 to 5 year lease and Third: all that money and commitment would be going to fund a big loan from the bank which would, in theory, restore the building to glory; or something more glorious than what we’d grown accustomed to. Which all sounds sort of nice on paper, but when you dug past the surface, we were basically being asked to fund a building rehab, one we’d have to live through as workers tore the roof, the plumbing and the electrical apart and rebuilt them, and the perks, like hookups for laundry machines, were shitty amenities compared to the free machines in the basement which had quickly been abandoned to time and flood waters after I moved in.

The girl who lived upstairs said very excitedly she was eager to stay, discussing her many plans to swing a ridiculous rent, while I waited my turn and told them I’d be out by the end of November. Long enough to stay and experience the hellishness of Halloween in the Bottoms and find myself somewhere half-decent to live, ignoring their insinuations that I couldn’t afford such a rent and silently wishing them good luck in finding someone dumb enough to float that much a month for that many years for a place that boiled in the summer and froze in the winter and would eat through your bank account with ease if you let it.

Then came October, when rent went up double and I grudgingly paid it, and adjusted to the obnoxiousness of Halloween, where the Bottoms swells with every hick and juggalo from every distant county coming to wander through any of the four haunted houses that operate every year. That was the month of the surprise renovation, when someone came in and tore the common room down, from the drop ceiling to the walls and doors that gave it its shape, a week-long odyssey of pounding and thick plumes of century-old dust pouring through the green door that separated my space from the common space, coating everything in a 20 foot radius. That was the month that the temperatures dropped from fall to winter, that people began getting walkthroughs of my space, that I started throwing everything away.

By the time November started, the girl upstairs had apparently given up on the dream and packed her pick-up truck several times over to move somewhere new, leaving me a building all to myself. I’d blast music all night until the sun rose high enough to climb over the gallery walls and let me know how early it was, I’d crank the TV, I’d smash things to bits to fit into trash cans and contemplate setting fireworks off in the gallery, only stopping short when I realized burning the building down would probably count as a black mark against me in looking for a new apartment. The cold got colder, and I dialed the reborn furnace down to 53 degrees, refusing to turn it on until my skin began turning black. Fingerless gloves and several layers were the dress code of November. Heavy hoodies and jeans, sneakers all the time and a heat lamp perched next to me at all times, plugged into a three cord extension cord so it could easily move from deskside to couchside to pianoside, until it was time to sleep and I’d unplug it and sleep in front of its bright orange eye, feeling my face like sunburn while the rest of me curled around myself to fight the cold that crept in from dozens of holes.

It was, to say the least, horrible. And to say the most, it was two of the singularly most unpleasant months I’ve had in a few years, those long drawn-out hours where you come to believe you’re never going to not live like this, coated in dirt, assaulted by cold, wandering 6,000 square feet of ruin and decay and praying for simple amenities like heat, walls and windows that open.

When it got cold enough to dip below 53, I learned, with a series of anguished cries from the basement, that the boiler didn’t even work. It would struggle every 10 minutes or so, like a car enging trying to turn over, and then go silent. By now I’d found an apartment, miles away in terms of distance and comfort, a place that lacked amenities like a walk in bank vault and 15 foot tin ceilings but included such perks as free working heat, television reception and a balcony. So I spent most of November throwing out pounds and pounds of old possessions, crap I’d been dragging behind me since I was a kid, crap that came across several state lines and several apartments and still sat untouched and unknown in boxes. And while I didn’t commit the kind of life-altering massive purge I still dream of, it’s as close as I’ve come to shedding my packrat tendencies and the boxes and boxes and trips and trips of stuff that accompany it.

One last encounter with the landlady, who walked into my space without a phone call or a knock, “I assumed you wouldn’t hear it,” sealed the deal and the Friday after Thanksgiving I was all moved out, leaving behind tons of shit for someone else to deal with. Joys of life without a lease, life without a deposit. When all my stuff was finally off the truck and glommed in my living room, I moved several boxes off my couch and sprawled across it in the middle of the afternoon, sighing contentedly. It was smaller, the doors stuck, the toilet wobbled and I was beyond 4am dance parties, but I felt like a hobo finally come in from the cold.

It started, back in June, with an email, as these things seem to do lately:

I am wondering if there is an evening next week when both of you would
be around.

Since a landlord wanting to come visit, especially wanting both tenants to be around, is suspect anytime it’s asked for, it was twice as suspect since we pretty much lived with the daily threat of being evicted to make way for the landlord’s ex to come reclaim what the courts decided was rightfully his. After no response from myself or K upstairs, the landlord pressed us, and we folded, while I climbed inside my doom cocoon and awaited the worst.

What I didn’t expect, opening the door to my landlord that day, was her calling over a woman who appeared to be a friend of hers, who then proceeded to serve me in a manner far more literal and far less enjoyable than the movie would have you believe. I got served with a summons, a 10 page smear of legal babble I’d all but purged from my brain after the debacle of working at Lawyertown. When I asked her about it, my landlord just said it was a formality and I’d be doing her a favor by not responding to it at all, which was a relief since the last thing I want to do is enter a court of law under any but the most extreme forms of pressure.

Reading over it, it tells the tale of my space I’d never heard before. Here’s what I did know, moving in: It was the first post office in all of Kansas City, in the center of what used to be the heart of town before floods drove everyone up the hill and left the Bottoms behind to elegantly rot. Time passes. Somehow it ends up in the hands of my landlord and then, when legal disputes between her and her ex make the future of tenants living here a fuzzy question mark, the rent gets chopped and I manage to weasel my way in.

What actually happened was, after closing, the post office was donated to the Humane Society of Kansas City, which is not the organization that cares for the stray cats and dogs who threaten to take over our streets, but something far more olde-timey and genteel:

In 1883 the Humane Society of Kansas City was established to prevent cruelty to women, children and animals. In 1904 they built Kansas City’s first fountain near the west end of the intercity viaduct, 3rd and Minnesota.

Meaning they’re at least partially responsible for KC being the “City of Fountains,” and they’re also my actual landlords, because almost 100 years later, they still technically own this entire building. The subpoena and all the blah blah inside was meant to wrest control from an organization that by all indications had ceased existing decades ago.  How my landlord came to take control of it is beyond me, but at this point all the squiggly conspiracy lines are pretty unimportant. What mattered was that steps were being taken. Big important steps that spelled the end of ridiculously cheap rent for a ridiculously huge space. Which basically spelled the end of my time here.

What this also meant is I am, in fact, a squatter. Except a squatter who pays rent for the privilege of living with swiss cheese architecture, barely there electrical wiring and water pressure that made sponge baths out of the kitchen sink seem like a productive alternative.

While I ran the subpoena, which required me to show up at the same time I would be in London, past a couple friends, what shook loose was that as a tenant I had a “vested interest” in the property and could go to court and argue for my slice of the pie. Which is only true on paper. In reality, I’ve done almost nothing to the space beyond putting my shit in it. From the get go, I knew the bottom could fall out any week, so what’s the point of buying shelving units for the ugly yellow kitchen wall? And why invest in starting an actual gallery when I was living on borrowed time (never mind the fact that I am probably the last person who should start an undertaking like that)? My friends who lived upstairs when I moved in had a case, since they’d lived there for several years and really fixed it up, but they’d moved out a few months prior, greasing the wheels for great justice in the courts for my landlord.

Upon me receiving the subpoena, the doors opened for weekly, sometimes twice-weekly missives from the law firm, informing me of developments that mostly looked like the last three documents they sent me. I know from working at a law firm that lawyers use paperwork to capture changes so incidental that only someone as OCD as them would catch it, so each one got scanned to make sure I wasn’t being notified of eviction and then tossed out.

As easily as I threw those letters out, I tossed out any notions of moving. The web of legal entanglements this place was wrapped up in seemed like a long road, a road long enough that I could wander the fringes of it for as long I could stand, before moving back into normal people life. I worked, I lived, I blasted music at 4 in the morning and walked the train tracks when I got stuck on something, I rode my bike up to the halfway house and down under the expressway, I packed my bags and headed to Europe. I was confident that only a 1951-style flood could send me running from all this magic living down here.

And I was sort of right.

from a comment on an anti-atheist blog:

And more of this “Atheists are pathetic” stuff. You know, if I went through life thinking everyone who didn’t constantly wear exactly the same sort of sport jacket that I do was inherently beneath me, I’d be a raging sociopath. You on the other hand, who demand strict adherence to another specific behavior to be treated as a human being, are not sociopathic, you’re “Christian.” How very nice for you.

If I become a Proper Christian(TM) is it absolutely necessary for me to insult everyone else under the sun? I mean will I actually be obligated to hate my Catholic mother and take joy in a supernatural system that will cause her to suffer eternally, because she picked a slightly wrong brand of Jesus?

Is it also necessary to completely eschew my intellect? I mean because I sort of like thinking about things and challenging my preconceptions, so is it going to be absolutely requisite that I just avoid dispassionate inquiry into all fields and force myself to ask “How does this prove God’s wisdom?” about everything?

Also, since I actually like Argument, will I need to never actually address what anyone says in a debate, or any discussion about anything, and respond with the condescending “Thats a Good Question, but let me ask you, do you think you’re a Good Person?” as though it has anything to do with anything, and compensates for my pathetic inability to respond fitfully to questions?

So, where were we?