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I stayed in a crap-shack the summer between my junior and senior years of college. It was a one-bedroom I was sharing with two insane women. They slept in the bedroom, and I lived on the futon in the living room.
The window above my bed had a pane of glass missing, and the landlord couldn't be bothered to fix it. That was okay, because it was Minnesota in the summer, and so roughly a billion degrees. But outside that window was the building's dumpsters, which meant that on Tuesday mornings, the truck would come and slam me awake at like 6:00, and on every other day it smelled like trash.
These women were no prize either. Complete slobs, both of them. And I'm messy, but this was ridiculous. One of them bleached her hair in the bathtub, and left a film of super-slippery bleach residue in the tub. I got in there and slipped all over the place, ended up cutting the front of my big toe on the popped-up drain plug cover... and got bleach in the cut. Bleeding and screaming in my garbage-scented apartment at 6 in the morning. Not one of my better looks.
Also, there was an old man who lived down the hall who was scary. He hung out all day on the porch of a nearby shop, wearing a blue seersucker suit and straw hat, dapper as hell. In the evening, he sat in his apartment with the door wide open, in his tighty whities. This apartment smelled like utter death. There was something dead and rotting in there, and this mostly-naked 80-year-old man. You had to hold your breath and close your eyes and go past really fast.
When lurky and I got married, we moved into what seemed at first to be a decent one-bedroom apartment. What we didn't know was, the downstairs neighbors were into rap, and had parties every night. There was a murder two buildings down the night we moved out. We were VERY glad to get out of there.
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