Lies My Apartment Told Me

It all began with an assortment of bodily excrement and an attempted murder.

I moved into a nice little apartment complex. At least, I thought it was a nice little apartment complex.

It seemed nice when I first met it.

But like so many other things in life, how it seems on the first meeting is nearly always in direct conflict with how it really is.

Time, like good tequila, fosters honesty.

Things seemed lovely as my prospective apartment was shown to me. Clean walls, clean carpet, the toilet flushed properly. There was no sign of mold or other unsightly anomalies. I viewed it early in the day, so maybe the crack heads, stoners, and baby-mommas were still asleep, I’m not sure. The Russian-looking drug dealer must have been in hiding. The gang of teenagers were probably pretending to be in school. All was well.

Like a maiden caught off guard by her suitor’s good manners, I said Yes.

I moved most of my belongings on my own (not having friends is no fun when its time to move), but I’d been working a freight stocking job and was getting sort of buff for a girl. Plus, a minivan can hold an awful lot of stuff. The apartment was on the ground floor, down a set of stairs and through a small corridor, so moving wasn’t as bad as it would have been if I lived on the 3rd.

That first year, things were pretty great…if you don’t count the mailman being too lazy to pick up any outgoing mail from inside the mailboxes. And someone was stealing all my bills from the top of the mailboxes when I tried putting them there for the mailman. As a result, I had to void about four checks at $25.00 a pop, and have two credit card numbers changed since they were printed on the bills. Oh, and every time it rained heavily, my sink would back up, flooding my kitchen floor and causing me to call the maintenance man in the middle of the night because the nasty, greasy water wouldn’t stop coming out. I did create a pretty little flower bed by the patio, but the plants didn’t grow.

Ok so maybe I should say things were “alright” that first year, until one morning I look out the sliding patio door and notice a trickle of water flowing from a pipe sticking up out of the small hill behind my apartment.

“Oh that’s nice, it’s running down into my flowerbed, maybe they’ll get some water.”

There were blobs of white, like soap bubbles maybe, along the path of the trickle. Curious, I went outside to investigate. My son was playing happily nearby, driving a plastic red and yellow bulldozer over some rocks. As I got closer to the trickle of water, I realized that the white blobs were toilet paper. The pipe must have been a sewer overflow pipe, because I noticed some human feces lying alongside some of the toilet paper.

"Zade,” I said, backing away, “let’s go inside and play, ok?”

“But mymy,” that’s what he used to call me, mymy. “I want to stay outside.” He mopes until I showed him the poopies, then he’s ok with going inside.

I called the apartment office and let them know that there was crap on the grass out back, and then I try to do my civil duty (get it? Ha ha!) by warding children away from the soiled areas. In the meantime, the spill from the overflow poop pipe grows, creeping down the hill toward my patio. I am forced to keep the windows on the back of my house closed, which stinks (hee hee) because its super nice outside and I’d love a good cross breeze. My apartment only has four windows though, and three of them are on the side near the poop pipe. So long, cross breeze!

Days go by, and no one comes to clean up the biohazard area. I call the office yet again. Two more days go by. I call the County Health Department and tell them my apartment office is not cleaning poo up from the common area, and that neighbor children are practically rolling in it. I considered telling them that the kids were making little crap castles with toilet paper flags, but decided that would be going too far.

The following day, a hairy, sleepy-eyed maintenance man shows up in the afternoon, looks cross-eyed at the poop pipe and its fecal offspring, plops a PVC cap on top of the pipe, and leaves. I applaud his total lack of effort in cleaning up the existing biohazard pool.

As the days pass, I notice that more human waste is now bubbling up out of the pipe. It has pushed the PVC cap off. I call the office again. Nothing. I note that there is a storm drain near the poo stream. Knowingly, I call the Environmental Protection Agency in our area and am almost but not quite surprised that there is a special automated menu option for reporting “raw sewage leaking into a storm drain.” I live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. They take their storm drains seriously. Blue crabs and all that.

The next morning, a large utility truck shows up and some serious looking fellows in rubber wader boots meet with Harry the maintenance man, and write things down in notebooks as they inspect the area. They open the storm drain, open the poop pipe, check things out, write some more, point, and nod. The important looking fellows pack up and leave. Bushy the Amazing Hairy Maintenance Man, looks cross eyed at the pipe, puts a more permanent metal cap on it, and sprinkles lime over the feces.

A week later, my flowerbeds look amazing.