In brief: Josh and I got trashed and egged each other on into moving to Amherst, getting rooms somewhere together, and becoming poets. We found this place, we dubbed it “The Dam,” and our landlords, who also live here, Ma and Pa Beaver. Josh almost immediately was offered a job in Boston as a journalist, and won an internship in NYC, so he bolted within three weeks, and I’ve been here ever since. I’m currently making definite plans to leave. But meantime I’m pretty fed up: And so…these are things that piss me off:

About the House Itself

1) Spiders everywhere. They especially like the spice cabinet, and Josh said “there’s one for every spice.” At the interview I asked if there were any mice, and they laughed and said of course not. Because I’ve lived with mice and I don’t like them invading my space. But spiders…well, they’re not paying rent either. This is curious, because my landlords are heartless…but I guess it’s hard to extract a pound of flesh from a spider.

2) The bathroom grows a lake in the floor. And somebody then takes a giant sponge and tosses it into the middle of the lake, which, just as if someone tossed a sponge into an actual lake, it only becomes wet and fetid, and the lake lives on. I wondered if I contributed to the lake: one morning I reached the shower before everyone else, and I was no less careless than usual, and guess what: when I got out there was hardly a drop on the floor. The suspicioun is this: Ma and Pa spend much of the day in their bathrobes, in the kitchen, making sloppy kisses. Someone has theorized that they don’t use towels, that instead they shower, and then throw on a bathrobe, and thus everything that will drip, drips onto the floor, and forms the lake.

3) There’s not really any heat. Even though I’m paying $150 for oil, supposedly for heat. And I have a radiator in my room turned to high. The reason? Pa Beaver says that the heat is set to turn on in the evenings and in the mornings, and that’s it, and that it won’t go any higher than 67F. And when I walk into the kitchen wearing my coat and hat and gloves, shivering, and asking “is it winter enough now that we can turn on the heat?” then he cracks his voice over to the thermostat and says “well, let’s see, it’s set for 67 and…yes, it says the house is at 67 degrees.” — “Oh really?” says I, “Because then I must just be silly, you know, wearing a coat and hat and gloves indoors, when it’s 67 degrees! Guess what? If it was 67, I wouldn’t be dressed like this!” But, there’s no solution, apparently, except maybe to go outside, where it’s warmer.

4) I pay more than most people pay for an apartment, but receive what is essentially a room in someone else’s house. Let me be clear: $530 per month. There’s one bathroom for all seven of us. Four of us share a single kitchen cabinet and refrigerator. When we cleaned the fridge we found it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. We know this because we found syringes of the landlord’s from ten years ago. Cute. My housemates think I’m crazy because I brush my teeth in the kitchen and piss in the front yard. I think they’re crazy because they don’t. $530 and there’s no heat. Oh, right, and there’s no common area either. You see, because Ma and Pa are so firmly against marriage that they need two bedrooms, so they turned the “living room” into a bedroom, that is, she sleeps on the sofa and we’re not allowed in. That’s fine. But the kitchen, at least let our friends into the kitchen…no. Because the sofa is covered in 25-year-old computer parts and packing materials, and the kitchen table is a mountain of junk mail and magazines addressed to old tenants, anonymous residents, and the landlords.

5) The shower curtain is slimy. There’s scum on every wall, except where there’s holes, then there’s just cobwebs.

6) My walls are filled with hooks probably used for handcuffs and kinky shit. I think this is cool. But I don’t know any girls, so I mostly use these hooks to hang my clothes on, because I don’t have a closet. “That’s why we put your bed on top of that table, Stephen, so you can use it for storage.” Guess what, the only thing I really value in life anymore is expensive clothes, and I want a fucking ironing board and someplace to put hangers, dammit.

7) No smoking allowed. Even outdoors. Actually, no drinking allowed either. At the interview I said, “by drinking, do you mean tearing shit apart and keeping the neighbors up?” They replied yes. “Well,” says I, “that’s not drinking. That’s partying. And no, I won’t be partying. When my friends and I get drunk we quietly read poetry. Is that okay?” Well, the truth is that the day I moved in the landlords found Traci and me sitting in the dirt in the front yard like urchins, chain-smoking and getting hammered, I mean, at noon. They told us there was a front porch. And they scolded us for smoking, especially after they found a cigarette butt somewhere in the dirt. And that’s where all my phony friends would come over and make noise, and then we’d listen to dance music and play with drugs until 3am, and since all my phony friends stopped coming over and Josh moved away, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wandering between my room and the kitchen, shitfaced, having loud conversations with myself. The landlords don’t mess with me, because I become a real piece of shit, you know, lonely and drunk alone.

There’s a hidden camera in the kitchen. It’s built into the clock. I found it almost immediately. And I asked–and Ma Beaver got very nervous. Unfortunately, it’s perfectly legal as long as there’s no microphone in it. They have it because “years ago” somebody walked in, took a beer, and sat down to watch television. To protect against such criminals, this was a necessity.

9) No cooking with oil. “And how do you cook your tofu,” I asked, since when I have a decent kitchen to work with I live off pad thai with tofu. “Oh, well, I’m allergic to tofu.” I asked, “well, how would you suggest I cook tofu?” She suggested I use just a little butter in a frying pan. Indeed. This rule is because “years ago” somebody started a fire when he left his enormous wok of oil boiling unattended. He did this three times. Three times? I suggested “why not just have a rule against irresponsible cooking?” The truth is I can start a fire with anything and a stove. Just yesterday they said “____ needs to be told not to leave flammable things on the stove.” — “Like firecrackers?” I asked. And they began explaining to me, “no, like spices ah hahah, I get it, he’s kidding. Oh, that’s a joke, that’s a good one, he was making a joke.” This is why I only eat sandwiches. And yogurt. Except that–

10) The back of the fridge freezes things. So my yogurt gets frozen. This prevents me from buying more than a few days’ worth of food at once, because there isn’t space for it, so I spend a considerable amount of time at the food store, where I walk very quickly since I know where everything is kept. And the girl in the deli always tries to make me buy the store-brand cheese because “it’s on sale and it’s better.” — “Thank you, but I think I’d prefer what I just asked for.” And then they give me these fucking silver-coin coupons, three, every fucking time, and all they do is take up space. I’m going to need a vault to keep these silver-coins coupons in.

11) Every window either refuses to open or refuses to close.

12) The driveway is covered in, I’m sorry, IS ESSENTIALLY A FIELD OF, thorny vines. The first thing you do when you get inside the house is cry. And the second thing you do is pull all the thorns out of your pants.

13) The place is stinky. Very stinky. Incense? That was debatable, because they’re allergic to it. But in the end, it’s okay, as long as I keep my doors shut. Gladly. Oh, that’s right: my bedroom has double doors, you know, in case I want to drive a lawnmower in here.

14) While I was cooking breakfast one morning I heard footsteps in the broom closet. I turned around to see what would happen, and out of the broom closet came a French man. He was very polite, and it turned out that not only do we have a basement, but it’s also rented out to foreigners who don’t complain about living in a basement closet because they don’t understand American law. [When I finally called the board of health, the person living in that room was immediately thrown out because renting the room is illegal, and the landlords were nailed by the law for doing this five years ago also].

About the Landlords

1) Pa Beaver doesn’t knock on doors, but rather says “knock knock.”

2) Ma Beaver says “hey there” every single time she sees me, and “take care” when I exit a room she’s in.

3) Ma and Pa Beaver make sloppy kisses right outside my door, and my laptop can’t play music loud enough to drown them out.

4) Ma Beaver isn’t a fan of noise, but she watches the television loud enough that the neighborhood can hear.

5) They only drink peach-flavored seltzer, and have twenty bottles of it on the counter.

6) They don’t actually have jobs, but they pretend they do, though really they just work for themselves, without any effort to make a buck, and then bitch that the house is losing them money.

7) One of us can hear every time water runs in the house, from the pipes in his walls, and can’t sleep through it, so through the months he has figured out everyone’s bathing habits. He knows precisely who’s doing what based on the length of their shower and the time it takes place. Ma and Pa Beaver each take showers that last half an hour. They take these showers while they’re both in the bathroom, though we don’t think they take them together, based on the conversations we hear them having all the while, and also based on the wooden chair that sits mysteriously outside the shower.

Lately anti-Jewish sentiment seems to be running high, at least in the circles I frequent. It’s only been something I’ve noticed since the sub-prime mortgage crisis began last summer. Ma and Pa Beaver: one or both may be Jewish–I suspect both. At both work and here I pretend to be Catholic. Nobody has a clue. I can tell, at work, because everywhere I go people make antisemitic comments at me while winking and smiling. I nod and try to suck my nose in. Oh, right, but they perpetuate unfortunate stereotypes, because they’re Shylocky. What that means is that they’re conniving businesspersons, which means that when Josh left, and his room was already paid for for the next month and a half, they kept all that money, rented the room to somebody else, and then took a huge chunk of Josh’s deposit out for the next three months as they made him pay for additional utilities he never dreamed of. This is called dishonesty. Or good business. Or shylockyness. Or a couple of schmucks, wearing schmatas. Oh right, because…

9) They only shop at thrift stores, which means they spend as much as I do on clothes, but they just own a ton more. And that means many, many coats, and they’re all hung up on the communal coat pegs, where there’s no room for anyone else’s coats. Not even mine. That’s alright, because I manage to hang my coat on the kink hooks in my walls.

10) They don’t trust me. I asked to borrow a book, just so far as into my room, by Brecht, a dusty book, and received a short lecture on “putting things back where I found them.” I didn’t take the fucking book in the end. I can get it at the library, where they don’t mind where I take it, and I don’t have to put it back either.

11) Although neither has gone so far as to get a Masters, they have three BA’s between them, and they claim they have studied “everything.” Fascinating. They’re working on a book together, which they’ve been working on for ten years, and which they are certain will show the connection between everything in human knowledge, things that nobody has ever thought of before since nobody has ever studied all these subjects before. Ohhhh. And at first they were going to write it as a textbook, but realized nobody would read it, so they decided to make it a novel, in which each chapter introduces another aspect of their theory called “The Framework.” A fun game to play is to say “oh, is it like _____ (Sophie’s World? De Rerum Natura? Godel, Escher, and Bach? The Book of Los? His Dark Materials trilogy? etc.)” and receive the same answer everytime, a stormy “IT’S NOT LIKE ANYTHING ANYONE HAS EVER WRITTEN BEFORE! This book will change the way people think FOREVER!”

12) They have academic senses of humor that go like this, “now, there is a theater company in London called the ‘Really Useful Theatre’ or, as many people call it, ‘R-U-T’ which is far more apt.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

13) I like this: Pa Beaver LOVES to bring up his ex-girlfriends in discussion with Ma Beaver, which makes her visibly uncomfortable, and makes him feel real proud, I think. He does it nonchalantly. But always unnecessarily. I refuse to get into discussions with them since they fucked me over before I even moved in, so we’re not friends, but I eavesdrop as much as possible while I’m making dinner. Here’s a conversation I took part in: “You know, Stephen, you’re a creative writer, and I’m good friends with the woman who founded Shoebox Greetings, a Division of Hallmark. I’ve known her for years. Maybe I can help you out getting a job.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“On a bus.”
“Cool. What does she do there now?”
“Oh. I’m not sure. Uhm. It was a long time ago.”
“I thought she was your friend?”
“Well, we only met once. Actually, we didn’t meet, I just heard her talking on the bus.”

14) Everything I put into the trash is fished out, rinsed, and tossed into the recycling bin, whether it belongs there or not. When I tried throwing out food somebody gave me that had gone bad, old Weight-Watchers oatmeal, it was fished out, and advertised on an internet bulletin board, after which it was hung outside in a plastic bag for a full week before somebody took it.

15) Pa Beaver claims to have hypersensitive hearing. What this means is that he can hear air currents in rooms that have no air movement, so he can tell if a storm window is open or closed just by standing and listening. He could not, however, hear the sound of cocaine being snorted, apparently. Meantime, his hearing seemed to fail right before he inaccurately predicted the statuses of my storm windows.

The One Positive Aspect:

My bed is not covered in dried blood or other dark and stinky body fluids. I’ve dealt with that a couple times in the past, for over a year total, and it’s like the time I was positive I had bedbugs, resting there thinking to myself “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just bedbugs, plenty of people have had bedbugs before, that’s why there’s that rhyme, and it’s okay that they’re biting, because I can’t feel them crawling on me even though I know they’re there. I think I can’t feel them. I think. Don’t think about it, just sleep.” I didn’t actually have bedbugs it turned out–but I definitely, definitely had bloody mattresses. Why do I live in these places?

Conclusion: On a dare I called the board of health. Everyone except one roommate was pissed at me. The landlords said it was equivalent to calling the police. I don’t think so, because we were planning on calling the police about the illegal activities. And didn’t. But my roommates stuck by me by not divulging who amongst us called, even after I tried picking a fight with the landlords. Ma Beaver was so angry, but angry in that “Death of a Salesman” way, the “he may be a poor specimen of a human being, but he tries really hard, and I love him.” She stared me down for 45 minutes, I asked her if she needed a flashlight, and she yelled at me to stop staring at her. Everyone else moved out except me, because I wanted to be there up until the very last moment before my lease was up, but I did sleep with a knife and a baseball bat, quite sure they’d try to kill me. Pa Beaver’s been arrested twice, and they’re both paranoid that all their ex-tenants are trying to wreak havoc on the place, doing things like breaking into the house for the sole purpose of snapping cell phone antennae. When one tenant covered the hidden camera’s eye, she was immediately accused of stealing money and power tools from the kitchen. The board of health said they’d never seen such high utility bills before, but that the landlords had done a good job of getting us by the balls so that they couldn’t get in trouble. The board of health ordered the woman out of the basement closet, and demanded that the broken windows be fixed, that locks be placed on our doors (including the bathroom), that the mold be cleaned off the ceilings and walls, and that water temperatures be set correctly. I spent the month getting my car stuck in the front yard and making noise until Pa came out in his bathrobe and pushed me out. Pa told us that they were being fined thousands of dollars by Amherst. I contacted Amherst and was told they would be fined $25 if they didn’t add locks to the doors, etc. within a month’s time. These landlords are professionals: maybe they lead sad lives, but they’ve been taking advantage of students for twenty years now, and that’s honestly no poor way to make a living.

I left, and one guy moved back in. He’s been told that if he has any communication with me whatsoever, they’re going to throw him out. I’m not allowed on the property. They say I’m a bad person. They owed me about $100, but instead sent me a bill for $39. I refused to accept it from the post office, and that’s that.