Wilson Avenue Memories

My friend, and former roommate, sent me a photo a few days ago. I had to look at it a few times. Was that our old apartment? The outside looked different. I swear it was brick before, but now it’s an ugly blue siding.

We lived in that apartment for about six months due to the black mold we discovered growing in my roomies closet that was giving her terrible rashes. We only found the mold because she happened to be cleaning out her closet and we were dressing up in old Halloween costumes while rocking out to some early 2000’s music.

It all sounds like your typical twenty-something New York life. It was, except for everything the Summer we chose to move into that apartment should have been a warning sign.

Let’s go through the insane checklist of things that happened in just this one apartment:

1. The day we moved in, we were placed in the apartment across the hall from the one we had looked at, you know, where we thought we would live.
2. No running water or power when we moved in…or for the first few weeks of living there.
3. Our toilet was caked with human waste from whoever had been working in the apartment prior to us moving in.
4. The landlord was nearly impossible to get in touch with once we had the keys.
5. Things were constantly disappearing during our first few months of living there. Culminating with the disappearance of my laptop, and the morning that I was home when a thief climbed in our back window and we came face-to-face.
6. The cops, who we called due to the robberies, told us to avoid the hallways because of junkies hiding in the dark.
7. Our horrible neighbor across the hall who was constantly complaining to us.
8. A horrible stench from a dead rat that had been walled up behind the tiny dishwasher during the building’s renovations.
9. Then, of course, the mold.

Even with all those things, I still love Brooklyn, and credit it with making me a tough person. I mean, nothing living on the Upper East Side or in Puerto Rico ever compared to half of the shit that went down in Brooklyn. Remember, this was just one apartment in which we lived for a few months.