Seven Crappy Apartments

Or: I do, indeed, know how the other half lives

A typical scene in my first crappy apartment in Old Town. Note the purple velour curtains and lime green rope lights.

Nobody’s first apartment is particularly nice. Unless you’ve got rich parents happy to fund your lifestyle, you’re probably not moving into a place with any amenities. And by amenities, I mean things like a properly functioning shower, no immediately detectable odors or an oven that doesn’t make weird clicking sounds every time it goes over 350. You know: fancy stuff like that.

My first apartment was during college at UMaine, a three bedroom on South Main Street in Old Town, with a revolving cast of roommates and me as the only constant for the two years I held the lease. It sat kitty-corner to the paper mill, which is probably why the entire thing cost $600 a month. It constantly smelled like broccoli and boiled eggs. It had rickety wooden stairs up to our second-floor unit that would be absolutely covered in ice in January. It had electric heat, which meant that in the middle of winter our electric bill cost nearly as much as the rent. One time we had a party and our horrible frat boy neighbors called my friend the f-word and threw a firework into one of our windows. It was, truly, a dump.

I upgraded to a two-bedroom on the other side of Old Town, not far from the library. The entire apartment had wood paneling. Our downstairs neighbor was a UMaine football player who more than once pushed my crappy car out of a snowbank, and who single-handedly changed my opinion about jocks. I realized halfway through my tenure there that this apartment was the same apartment where, two years earlier, I’d attended a cast party for a UMaine theater production where there were so many people crammed into the kitchen that the floor actually dropped by an inch. We all heard a big crack, and then we all found ourselves one inch lower than we were a few seconds prior. That’s where I lived. I’m sure it was fine. Right?

I finally graduated from college and got a one-bedroom apartment in Orono, in an old, huge building that I believe was around 100 years prior a “rooming house” for “unmarried women,” which suited me because I was one. It was not large enough for me and my cat. It had that smell that’s like if musty was actually dry - like old books, dust, the faint aroma of decades of dead skin cells and creaky old furnaces blasting hot, desiccated air through ancient heating ducts. It was like living in an old school building. It was uncomfortable having people over. It was depressing.

There was a lost 18 months, when I split my time between my parent’s house, various sleepable surfaces, and bedrooms rented from friends and acquaintances. The uncomfortable house in Bangor that always felt empty even if it was fully occupied, with the driveway so steep it was a miracle I didn’t crash into the embankment by Shaw’s Supermarket. The warm, inviting hippie house in Orono, where upwards of seven people lived, where music was constantly being played and where I could have stayed forever if I didn’t value privacy. The big couch on Grant Street in Portland, where the draft from the window above felt like knives, but it didn’t matter to me because I was drunk.

My best friend moved back to Maine, and we got an apartment in a duplex on Sanford Street in Bangor, near the corner with Union Street. A new coat of paint and refinished hardwood floors were merely a facade, as it too, unsurprisingly, was a dump. Our landlords lived in the other half of the building, where they used colorful silicone to make artisanal sex toys shaped like sea creatures, and were surprisingly particular about noise and mess and visitors. The living room was so cramped you couldn’t fit a full sized couch in there. The neighborhood was pretty rough.

I was 25 years old when I lived there, and all I did was work, write, read and party. I was, generally speaking, broke all the time. Right after I moved in I told a coworker I was now living on Sanford Street, and after acknowledging that yes, I was aware that the neighborhood was not great, and yes, I was sure it was fine that I lived there, he said he thought Stephen King lived in my apartment when he wrote “Carrie.” He said it was in “On Writing,” and to look it up. I did. It was true. It was confirmed once the Stephen King tour that took people around town to see sites associated with his books stopped at my place. I waved to the people on the bus, taking pictures of me and Steve and Tabby’s shitty apartment.

I don’t know if I consciously thought about it at the time, but it occurred to me later that I felt a certain responsibility to myself, living in a place where something momentous happened, despite the quite humble surroundings. My woo woo friends say it was my Saturn return. Maybe it was just me, pulling my head out of my ass. Maybe it was all of the above.

I was hired full time at the Bangor Daily News that spring, and not long after that, I got accepted to a journalism fellowship at Columbia University. I started running and lost 40 pounds. The guy I’d later marry kissed me on the front steps at the end of that summer. Two months after that we moved in together, in a spacious apartment above a bar that was a few steps up from a dump. Ten years later, we bought our own house - a fixer-upper, to be sure, but decidedly not a dump. I started hanging up art and photos that were framed; not tacked up with pushpins straight into the wall. We both got on the right medications. We got a dog. We got new jobs. I wrote a book. He started a business. Neither of us party that much anymore, but when we do we make it count.

You grow up, hopefully. Hopefully you manage to make enough money to not live in dumps anymore. Hopefully you find what you’re looking for, or hopefully it finds you. And hopefully - preferably, ideally - you don’t ever take all the nice things you have for granted, and you never forget where you came from.

Please share your stories about the crappy apartments you lived in in the comments below. I would love to hear them!