1156 Patterson St. #5, I love you.
I love the three years we spent together, day and night, through dusty, hot summers and throat-burning, icy-cold winters. And even though I had to leave you several weeks ago for another studio apartment, please understand this: I don’t blame you for what happened.
See folks, I had to abandon 1156 Patterson St. #5 because run-off flood waters from the heavy rains invaded my small basement apartment, and the resulting combination of blue, fuzzy and black, stringy molds made breathing the air sickening. After three years of living there, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out at age 18, I had to leave.
That apartment was representative of my vice – an attraction to dumpy, tiny, basement crap shacks that smell like mildew and have holes in the doors and beer stains on the carpet. Now, I’m suffering from withdrawals.
And it hurts.
But I’ll never forget some of the memories me and #5 shared, even the ones that are funny only now.
Because my apartment was situated on an alley between two mini-markets, the property was prime bum real estate, a booze-bottle fertile concrete kingdom where the Steel Reserve just tastes better.
One time, I was playing my Nintendo 64 when I noticed a person wobbling near my ground-level windows. I paused the game and moved in to investigate. To my shock, a penis was peeing on the ground next to my window, right over my bed.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number on a sticky note next to the phone.
Within minutes, two Eugene police cars screeched into the parking lot. Officers surrounded the bums and gave the “urinator” – whom I identified over his garbled, drunken denial that he was the perpetrator – a stern lecture.
I’ll never forget those sons of bitches with leaf blowers who felt the need to blow dust around an empty parking lot at 6:50 a.m.
One morning, I was sleeping with the window over my pillow open to let the nighttime breezes cool the room, when I heard the familiar whining of those sadistic back-mounted banshees.
First, the sounds got louder, louder than usual. Then, a distinctive change in smell, from the usual mildewy aroma to a slightly earthy scent. Then it happened. Chunks of dead leaves and dirt exploded into the room and settled over me in a layer of dust.
There were the times I awoke curled in the fetal position in the middle of the floor with the front door open and the music blaring, surrounded by empty booze bottles with the labels half picked off.
Once the newspaper kids came over to pre-funk before going out to attack West University neighborhood, and I ended up flopped out drunk on the sidewalk outside my door – before we even left the apartment.
There was the time I was in bed and somebody pounded on my window. I dressed and opened the door. It was a couple of my buddies: one of my coworkers at the Emerald and his roommate. They were drunk, and the roommate had already hurled.
But that didn’t stop them from swooping in, drinking my microbrews and eating an entire bag of tortilla chips and container of salsa.
I now call them “beer locusts.”
There were strictly happy times there, too.
Like the time the apartment became an accomplice to a one-night hook up that turned into a (usually) happy one-and-a-half-year relationship with probably the goofiest, most charming woman I’ve ever met.
Or the two-person pasta, garlic bread and salad meals with wine and conversation, followed by nights that kept the neighbors up.
There were calm mornings in bed reading F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories, and afternoons playing chess in the yard.
But what I may remember most about my apartment is the neighbors.
There was the time I came home at midnight, only to find Eugene Police Department red and blues lighting the alley and officers wandering around the property.
I tracked down my neighbor Garrett, who lived upstairs, and he told me a teenage guy temporarily living with the guys upstairs downed a case of cheap beer and smoked a ton of pot. Then he grabbed a bow and arrow, ran into a nearby parking lot and started randomly firing into the sky over the neighborhood yelling, “I’m a fucking man!” with each arrow.
After that, I learned that a restraining order can actually ban you from going near an entire neighborhood.
There was the BB gun incident. Dan was sitting upstairs chatting when he looked over and saw Abe peering through the window with a grin, obviously standing in the hedge. He was pissing on Dan’s basement-room window.
Abe bolted down the alley laughing; Dan chased after, trying to shoot him with a BB gun.
I’ll remember cleaning my apartment one morning when my neighbor’s mom stopped in to say hello. She noticed my badly beer-stained carpet, and, despite my insistence that it was fine, she got on her hands and knees and scrubbed it clean by hand. My neighbor was just as kind.
You know, 1156 Patterson St. #5, I’ll miss those times and those people.
I know that you’re all torn up too – or at least your carpet was removed – but you should know that I feel only a warm affection for 63 W. 16th Ave., nothing more.
It’s nice knowing that I won’t have to kill the occasional centipede on the bathroom floor before taking my morning shower, but what really gets me through the day is knowing that, for the time being, you aren’t living with another tenant.
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