Wanderlust

The main trouble with apartment life, Roger thought, was the rent you had to pay.  Rent was the biggest and most disease-laden fly in the ointment.  It was the stinkiest turd in the punchbowl of zero-maintenance living.  A perfectly suitable one bedroom had to go and have a 400-buck monthly sticker on it.  This was the injustice he now faced.  The four-hundred-dollar nut.

Roger knew that the rent had to be paid.  A pad like his current 4-hondo digs was never going to be free.  He wasn’t stupid.  But the unfairness of the situation?  That was the thing for him.  Life was full of curveballs.  Handing over bread he almost never had to an asshole like Szypanski, his landlord, was a knuckleball, and it was the one that nobody – least of all him – should ever have to try to hit.  Goddamn it.  Maybe if Szypanski wasn’t such a prick…

There were other problems, other inconveniences, as Roger duly recognized, associated with apartment life.  Ignorance was a big one.  The ignorance of the other tenants.  When you lived in an apartment, you were going to run into other tenants at some point.  Take this place, his current pad, for example.  Even though his one bedroom was in the building’s basement (the boiler and Szypanski’s tool room were on the other side of his bedroom wall), and the little frame structure only had three units crammed into it, he still sometimes ran into the tenants that lived aboveground.  Like that stuck-up blonde that lived on the second floor.  The one that never smiled back at him.  He’d see her walking up the service walk while she talked on her phone, and he’d hear her drawl – Kentucky?  Tennessee? – and her flip-flops slapping on the concrete through his open window, which was tiny and hardly let in any light (that was another thing, another problem – that window), and he’d make sure to haul ass outside just before she got to the front door so he could smile at her.  But she never even looked at him.  Never stopped talking on her iPhone.  Ignorant.  And stuck-up.

At various times throughout his past, Roger had lived in trailer parks.  And he knew from experience that although one was always going to encounter other renters while living in a trailer park, the general ignorance quotient was going to be lower, as it was diluted by the factor of the modest amount of distance that separated each double-wide.  But in his current living situation, the ignorance was close at hand and impossible to miss.  It was assholes-to-elbows with other tenants in an apartment building.  Especially in Szypanski’s little sardine box of a three-flat.  So yes, in addition to the problem of rent, there was the ignorance.  And his little, shitty window.

The fact that he didn’t have the four-hundred for June’s rent compounded these issues, and, coupled with the eviction notice Szypanski had served him with last week (he hadn’t come up with the four-hundred for May, either), he recognized that imminent action on his part was going to be necessary.

These thoughts swirled and ebbed and flowed through Roger’s mind with a fluidity augmented by the wit-sharpening effects of the several cans of Old Style he’d consumed on this bright afternoon on June’s first day.  Currently, he held a perspiring can in his fist while he mulled over his predicament in the sunlight.  He stood on the service walk in front of the building and took a slug of the brew.  He watched a few drops of condensation slide off the can and land on the cracked and rutted concrete of the walk (that goddamn Szypanski was too cheap to fix it and was going to get his ass sued one of these days when someone tripped and broke their head open). 

What the hell was he going to do?  Two months down with almost zero dough to his name.  Goddamn it.

He drained the beer and looked at his watch.  Little Miss Stuck-up was due to pull up any minute, and he found himself wrestling with yet another imposing dilemma: Should he stay right where he was and be guaranteed the opportunity to grin at Blondie the Ignorant (and maybe get a longer than usual look at her ass – also, she sometimes didn’t wear a bra), or run inside and grab another cold one, and maybe lose out on the eye fuck that was certain to come?

Rent.  Eye-fucking or drinking.  These quandaries, these decisions… Jesus H. Christ.  Another beer right about now would be helpful…

The solution to both issues came to him presently with the appearance of Szypanski’s noisy white Ford pickup as it turned off Route 20 onto his street.  Shit. 

Roger made a beeline for the building’s front door and, once inside, flew down the stairs to his basement pad.  He killed the lights in his kitchen and chanced a look out his window: Szypanski dropped the truck into the spot Miss Stuck-up always used, grabbed some stuff out of the bed, and started for the front door of the building.  Roger heard the door open and then close as Szypanski traipsed down the stairs.  Then the pounding on his door started.

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud

“I know you’re in there, Patterson.  Your beater’s still parked right out front.  How stupid do you think I am?  Open the damn door.  We gotta talk.”

Shit, shit, shit.

Ok.  Alright.  Stay cool, Roger thought.  First things first.  Szypanski knew he was here, so, right off the bat, a certain amount of pretense could be shed.  Now, with no concern for the noise he knew he’d make, Roger decided to cross the floor to the fridge, open its door, and grab another can of Old Style.  This he now did.  Then he popped the top and drained half.

Better.

“I’m coming, Mr. Szypanski.  Be right there.”

There are times in life when certain circumstances, certain contingencies – abject terror, utter hopelessness, consummate despair – present themselves, and, as Roger now discovered, elicit from the mind a coldly detached, impeccably rational line of thinking.  Roger drained the beer in his fist, slammed the empty can down on the kitchen counter with a hollow thud, and knew beyond any doubt that traveling was in his immediate future.  He was going to boogie.  Tonight.  He was going to load up his rusted-out Sentra with as much of his shit as possible, leave whatever he couldn’t pack up, and he was going to bolt.  And he knew where he was headed – somewhere that he’d always wanted to go: Vegas. 

He opened the door to face his livid landlord, who was crimson.  The man opened his mouth to shout.

“Before you say anything, Mr. S, I’ve got your rent money.  I mean, I will have it.  Tomorrow morning.  All of it.  And the late charges, too.  Gonna drive it over to your house first thing in the morning.”

The landlord’s eyed bulged, but he shut his mouth for a beat, then opened it again, silently worked his jaws, then finally said “You goddamn well better.  And it’s not just two month’s rent and late fees you owe.  Now there’s court costs, filing fees… all the legal shit that went with that notice I gave you.  So you better come up with another hundred or I’m going through with evicting your ass.  Got it?”

Roger, nodding enthusiastically, heard the front door open and realized that Miss Stuck-up Blondie was home.  (Well, after tonight, she’d have to find someone else to treat like shit.)  He listened to her flip-flops slapping the stair treads as she pranced her ass up to her own apartment.

“Yessir, Mr. S.  I’ll have it all for you.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow morning.  First thing.” 

Szypanski’s demeanor changed slightly.  He looked less red, but more than a little suspicious, more than a little doubtful.  He said, “Listen, Roger, you told me the same thing last month.  You better not be bullshitting me.  I swear to God… “

While Roger shook his head and offered up his platitudinous assurances, his train of thought, its wheels greased by both the terror that facing his landlord initially inspired and the several (Twelve? Thirteen?) cans of beer he’d downed that afternoon, carried him out into a desert world, with mountainous vistas stretching out toward thrilling new horizons, and twinkling stars dreaming in a western night sky.  And he saw, beyond all, the lights of Las Vegas, heard the sounds of money being won in casinos…  

Traveling plans.  He couldn’t wait to launch.  He stopped talking, stopped gesturing, and almost swooned with joy.

“ …see your ass on my front porch by eight AM tomorrow, goddamn it.  With my money.”  Szypanski poked him in the chest with a meaty index finger, then turned and walked down the short hallway to the boiler room door.  As he unlocked it, Roger heard him mumble, “ …able-bodied, lazy sack of shit… “

Roger closed his door, locked it, took a deep breath, then let it out.  And popped another Old Style.  Time to pack.

A quick assessment of his crappy little sedan’s capacity informed his packing and limited what he could bring with him when he launched tonight.  The one thing he knew he absolutely had to bring was his stash: a few Gs of blow, and a few dozen dime bags of weed.  He hated like hell to part with it, but this, after all, was an emergency.  He’d swing by Sully’s on his way out of town.  That’d net him at least a grand or two.  Enough to make the drive out west and drop a deposit on a new place.  He wondered about the trailer park scene in fabled Sin City and his heart skipped a beat. 

By the time Roger had gotten his necessities into a more or less defined pile next to his apartment door and ready for hauling out to his beater, Szypanski had finished whatever he’d been doing in the boiler room and had split.  The coast was clear.  As soon as he got everything packed up, Roger Patterson would be driving toward his new life out west.  It was amazing how things worked out sometimes…

After several trips out to his car, Roger was finished loading up.  The trunk, back seats, and passenger seat were crammed with his stuff.  His treasured coke and weed – his ticket out west – sat in a plastic bin on the passenger side floor awaiting delivery to the eager Sully.  Back inside his apartment, Roger looked around one last time.  Even after clearing out and loading up what he believed he’d need to survive out west, the place looked surprisingly cluttered.  All the furniture, of course, remained.  Szypanski had rented the place to him furnished.  But since he knew he had to travel light, there were plenty of his own things that he was leaving behind.  A framed photo of his parents (both deceased), his little sister, and him, together at some relative’s house, taken one long-ago Christmas when he was nine or ten, sat on the bureau in his soon-to-be former bedroom, along with an ashtray an old girlfriend had made for him in a community college pottery class.  A desk set consisting of pen, letter opener, and paperweight, given him by his father during his freshman year of high school, remained on the kitchen table, pushed up against one of the walls.  Piles of clothes he knew he’d never wear, would never need, in Vegas lay picked over on the bedroom floor.  An afghan knitted for him as a birthday present one year from his grandmother sat folded neatly on a closet shelf.  These things, and many, many more flashed, incandescent, in his memory, standing out now before his eyes, as they sat forlornly, awaiting inevitable, unceremonious disposal by Szypanski and his agents. 

Roger shrugged.  He had to travel light…

There were three unopened cans of Old Style in the fridge, which he now stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie.  He slipped the key to the building’s front door and his apartment key off his ring, set them on the kitchen table, killed the apartment lights, and closed the door behind him.  He sniffed the air of the short basement hallway outside his former apartment, and the scent was one of emptiness.  He noticed, for the first time, that the color of the walls here was gray.  He trudged upward, toward the ground floor landing and the building’s entry door, and the sound of his own footfalls on the short basement stairway made him think of something…

Little Miss Stuck-up.  The blonde bitch from the second floor.  He now thought about the slap slap of her shitty, low-rent flip-flops as she strutted her ass into the building and up the stairs.  He remembered that cornpone cracker voice of hers as she talked on her smart phone even as she ignored him.  She was ignorant.  Just an ignorant tenant.  And she, just as much as his own unjust rent payments to his prick of a landlord, were the cause of his ruination here.  As he gripped the entry door’s knob and prepared to give it one final turn before embarking on his travels and leaving this building and all its associated bullshit far behind, he realized all at once that a reckoning was, much like his own rent payments, long overdue.  He immediately froze, his hand still on the doorknob, ready to turn it.

Then he dropped his hand from the knob, reached into one of the hoodie’s pockets, and extracted an Old Style.  With the unopened can in his fist, granting him now both succor and grit, he turned to face the stairway leading to the second floor, and Miss Stuck-up’s apartment that waited there.  As he placed his foot on the first step, he paused, and decided to add more succor and grit to his cause by popping the can’s top and draining its contents.  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and tossed the empty can over his shoulder, heard it land on the floor behind him.  Then he continued up the stairs.

During his climb, quickly, fleetingly, like the fading afterimage of a skyrocket’s glittering contrail before the black night sky extinguished it forever, Roger Patterson grasped something.  What?  He couldn’t now say because it passed so quickly in and out of his thinking, though he felt it in the pit of his stomach, felt it somewhere within the confines of his ribcage. 

In a moment, he stood before his quarry’s door and raised his fist to knock, but the fist faltered, then stopped within an inch or two of the door, as if of its own volition.  Roger gaped at it, and just then thought that there may have been something wrong with his vision.  But he shook his head, and brought the fist against the door.  Several times.  In a second, she was there before him, brazen, the door open wide.  She stood with one arm extended, her hand on the door jamb.  Her other hand was on her hip.  The flip-flops were off and set off to one side of the doorway.  She raised, ever so slightly, one eyebrow, and said, “Yeah?”

Roger knew he had a lot to say to this stuck-up hillbilly bitch, to this bottom-feeder who thought she was better than him.  The thoughts were right there in his head, but, as she stood before him there in the doorway, unmoving, one eyebrow slightly raised, waiting, he could not for the life of him remember what any of them were.