It Really Frosts My Cookies

The Joys of Renting a Piece of Shit Apartment

Recently I started to notice that my once appealing apartment was beginning to show some wear and tear. Bearing in mind that I live in an old apartment building and shouldn’t expect much, I generally just shrugged my shoulders and figured life could be worse and have been dealing with the little things that keep going wrong.

Lately it has become rather difficult to get out of our bathroom. BUT only if you actually close the door. So the lingering dilemma in our apartment was this: Is it more important to have privacy while in the bathroom and risk not being able to get out, or is it more important to maintain some sort of dignity and not be crying for help to be let out of the bathroom every time you use it? The general consensus between me and my roommate has been to just not completely close the door, close it enough so we know someone is in there, turn the faucet on to signify that it is being used, whatever, just don’t close it unless you want a real challenge with a busted up piece of metal that day.

Now, NORMAL folk would call the super and get it fixed. However, New Yorkers such as ourselves try to avoid our super. She’s a little bit crazy and the less time spent with her the better. To quote the building’s exterminator “If I had to live in this building with your super I’d either drink myself to death or kill the bitch myself”. So you see, we figured a janky bathroom door was worth putting up with in order to avoid a drinking problem or god forbid a homicide.

Last night however put things in perspective. My roommate’s cousin is staying at our apartment for the weekend and had indeed been given the APPROPRIATE warning about the door. Yet somehow at around 11pm last night, the door shut. I was TRYING to sleep seeing as how I had to be up at 5:30am. But who in the world could sleep with this tragedy unfolding outside my screen of a door.

Profanities were yelled, a continuous muted whimpering was heard from inside the bathroom, the crazy Russian or Czech or something or other super was incorrectly lecturing us on why it wasn’t opening, and downstairs outside my window, the super’s not so sharp daughter was attempting to throw a kinda sharp screwdriver upstairs to the poor guy in the bathroom who just wanted to get out.

Finally, after about 45 minutes the poor soul was released, the drama was over, and I could go back to pretending to be asleep in peace.

So now we really have to get the door fixed because NOW, instead of a janky door, we have a door without a knob.…which means we have a door with a big gaping hole, positioned directly in front of and facing the toilet.

Isn’t New York City great?