Home Sketchy Home

So I've decided to move to SE Washington DC. Most people I say that to automatically fear for my life although notably, ever since parents found out that my moving there gets them off the hook for cosigning a lease they've been adamant supporters of the plan. I don't necessarily think the neighborhood is unsafe but I still felt somewhat irritated with them for being less than concerned about the safety of their oldest child.
"But.. it's across the street from project housing"
"Well you won't be the only unemployed person in the neighborhood"
Point taken.

Actually I also have the option of moving into a large house in Columbia Heights with a bunch of white hipsters but I've decided against it. I have lived in nice places and I have lived in total shitholes and truthfully.. unfortunately.. I prefer the shitholes.

The house I'm going to move into doesn't even compare to some of the other places I've lived. The one that tops the list has to be the apartment I shared with three people the summer I lived in Jordan. To start with, this apartment was not made for four people.. nor was it made for seven people to live in as we did one week in July. I had my own room with a mattress and a night stand and so did my roommate Kelsey but she used the mattress as a dresser and slept on the couch which was arguably more comfortable. Our third roommate, Christopher, slept on an old mattress in an enclosed balcony-turned-bedroom and Shawn lived in the hallway... I'm not exaggerating, he lived in the little hallway/den area right outside my room and slept with half his body on one couch with his feat on a separate armchair. Our occasional couch-surfers (one of my roommates belonged to an online network of people who sleep on strangers' couches) slept in our living room which was basically just a large room with one couch an armchair and a lot of cat piss.

Oh. We also had a cat. She was the kitten of a cat that lived upstairs with our neighbor, Hakim. According to Hakim the mother cat had eaten every other kitten in her litter and three weeks after he thought all of the kittens had died he found her in a pile of trash behind the sink or something. We named her Kitha, which means "etcetera" in Arabic and sounds a lot like "kitty" in English. To her credit, she got very cute and fluffy after we actually started feeding her but at first, well it was not hard to believe that she had survived for three weeks on nothing but trash.

To accommodate our new pet we bought some cat food and filled a rusting baking pan with sand from our neighbor's small garden as a makeshift kitty litter, not fully realizing how difficult it would be to maintain or how frequently we would have to change that sand to keep Kitha happy. Since her mother had cannibalized her siblings and hoarded all the cat food available in the upstairs apartment Kitha was not accustomed to living in such splendor and consequently ate her weight in food every few hours. The first couple of weeks after moving in, before she really gained any weight, she walked around with a skeletal frame and protruding belly twice as wide as the rest of her body. Eventually she learned that she didn't have to wolf down every bite of every meal to survive. But for those first few weeks, as nature has it, everything that went in eventually had to come out. In other words, she. shat. everywhere.

Her kitty litter was not nearly big enough to contain all the waste this cat produced and we were all far to lazy and disgusted by the whole thing to really clean it that frequently. Therefore, Kitha found other places to relieve herself. She shat on piles of clothes, she shat in the corners of rooms, she pissed in my bed about five or six times (once she did it as I was changing the sheets from the previous time she pissed in the bed); she pissed in Christopher's bed another five of six times and once she defecated on the Jordanian flag. It was a nylon flag that one of us bought in downtown Amman and we had stupidly thrown it on the couch, automatically forming an inviting, crumpled toilet for our kitten to bury her feces in.

And that really only begins to skim the surface of the things that were wrong with this apartment.

To begin with, almost all the windows were broken, which would have been fine since we had no air conditioning. I mean, they weren't the most decorative windows. Our landlord had sealed most of the holes up with packing tape and when I accidentally put my hand through one of the windows I did the same thing and he never even noticed. But they would have been fine if it weren't for all the mosquitoes... At night those holes became the kiss of death for me and my insect-friendly skin. Every night I had to choose between suffocating under the heat of a long-sleeved shirt, long pants and thick covers or getting eaten alive by an armada of blood-sucking heathen. I stupidly chose both.

To cope with my lack of exposed flesh the mosquitoes merely attacked my hands, which happen to land conveniently near my face when I sleep. Night after night the sound of ominous buzzing jolted me awake and kept me that way, full of fear and adrenaline, not knowing when or where to expect the next attack. Every morning I counted the fresh bite marks on each hand. By the end of the summer I had 32 bites on the left one and 26 on the right. Anyone who shook my hand instinctively pulled back a bit upon feeling the bumpy scarred surface as I explained over and over that this was the fault of the "garris" and not an infectious disease.

But both the mosquito infestation and piles cat feces paled in comparison to what happened with our water. Water is a scarce commodity in Jordan so in order to conserve it a lot of buildings have automatic water tanks that only dispense a set amount of water every week starting Tuesday at midnight. The reason I know this is because one week my roommate (no blame games but it was not me) left one of the water taps in our kitchen sink in the on position. It was broken so at first we didn't notice it but that night, while we slept, it started working again and by the time we woke up our entire week's supply of water had vanished down the drain. That morning we found the water faucet gushing with our last few gallons. It was Thursday. We ran out of water some time that night.

People often say that you don't know what you have until it's gone. That may be true of love or friendship or family but take it from me, losing all those things pales in comparison to losing all your water. If I had to choose between losing a spouse or never getting to shower again, hand me the gun. The worst part is that at the time we had no idea when the water would come back on. Every few hours one of us would go into the bathroom, turn on the sink and come back out into a room of hopeful, desperate faces, shaking our heads in defeat. We grew dirtier and smellier. We bought bottles of water to wash our hands and eventually I caved and used one to wash my hair. Unfortunately we were all living on a budget so we really couldn't keep splurging for gallon after gallon of bottled water.

After three days none of us could use the toilet. We couldn't even bear to open the lid. We planned our day around our bowel movements, making sure to leave the house early in the morning or after a heavy meal.

I think the night we got our fresh supply of water ranks as one of the happiest days in my life. Even though we had settled in for the night and we were all ready to go to sleep, the second one of us discovered the running sink we celebrated like there was no tomorrow. We took showers, we washed the dishes, we cleaned our clothes, we brushed our teeth and we flushed the toilet as many times as we wanted! From then on we meticulously monitored our water usage. If someone announced that they were going to take a shower the rest of us exchanged suspicious glances until the person conceded that they had just showered two days ago and could probably go a little longer. Leave the water running while you brushed your teeth and you might find that someone had "accidentally" left the door to your room open for the cat to romp and piss in. I like to think that the experience taught me that if I ever have to be homeless I would probably survive.

There are a million other stories I could tell about that apartment, like the way we had to tie a long plastic bag to a faucet above the bathtub to run water into our washing machine or the time some shady guy kept ringing my doorbell and kicked in my door as I was peering through the eyehole. Turns out he wanted to pass out fliers. I did not take any on account of my near-broken nose.

I guess the whole experience proves more than anything that who you live with matters more than where you live. The summer I spent living in that shithole (you could really take that to mean either the apartment or Jordan).. it was the best summer of my life. I miss that place more than I can explain and if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't change a thing.