East State Street Daze

Yes, I lived in the downstairs apartment of the building in the rear (the one in the photo below with the boarded up entrance door and window). 417 East State Street. The center door ascended to the apartment upstairs, so my living space wrapped around the casing structure of the staircase. The renter upstairs was pasty skinned and creepy. He seemed to be coated in sebum. If I thought long enough, I could probably remember his name. It may have been Prather. I'm sure his name is recorded in a deliriously scribbled journal of mine somewhere. He was not a student and had that child molester air about him.

When one entered the center doorway, two doors flanked the staircase landing—one on the right, and one on the left—both of which led into my living space. And I use the word “living” loosely. The empty space beneath the staircase was a dark trapezoidal closet with no light bulb, pitched at an angle from bending height to crawl space. Within its depths, a pair my favorite soft, flat-soled leather shoes (handmade by a woman from Nova Scotia I met at Jazz Fest) turned green one summer with mold. Every so often, when the temperature, humidity and barometric pressure came into a perniciously subhuman alignment, a swarm of mysterious, grotesque black flies would spontaneously generate from some unidentified putrefaction. It was if one of them would suddenly become two, skipping several of the normal gestation phases of your typical Musca domestica. These creatures were spawned from the bowels of Amityville. These bumble-bee-sized kamikaze beasts were mean and had perfected dive bombing. I recall grabbing my wooden tennis racket and knocking them across the room, merely stunning them temporarily, before each bifurcated into two more of its nefarious taxonomy. I always suspected my apartment was built on the sloping burial grounds of the indigenous inhabitants.

One entered the apartment through the door on the left. The entrance to the right was blockaded by the foot of my single twin bed. In the left entrance room was my stereo, LPs packed into wooden crates that doubled as furniture suitable for ashtrays and coasters, a few tentative places to sit, including a huge yellow Naugahyde chair that I wish I still owned. It was very 1970s retro, even for the early 1980s. When I moved away, I gave away that canary bucket chair, that often served as a post-party recovery cradle.

On the positive side, the apartment had lots of windows on all four sides, one in the rear through which my daydreams were often interrupted by the sight of a svelte undergraduate living in the Contempo Apartments on July Street who found great pleasure, apparently, parading around naked, toweling himself off from having just taken a summer shower.

Toward the back of the room, to the right (under the casing of the staircase), was the entrance to the bathroom. I don’t recall doors that one could actually close for privacy. The bathroom lacked a bath. The room, with a footprint about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, consisted of a toilet, sink, and shower stall (constructed of peeling powder-blue-painted Masonite) through which one had to shimmy serpentine to get to the kitchen slash bedroom. Yes, I slept in my kitchen. The leaking gas stove helped me overcome my insomnia. Next to my bed, acting as a makeshift “privacy wall,” stood a stacked set of cheap white plastic K-Mart bookshelves on which I scribbled words that I encountered while reading that I wanted to memorize. Homunculus. Maculated. Dysmorphophobia. Jejune.

The entire place smelled of mold, rotted wood, nonspecific body odor, dank mildew, old cooking grease, and a mysterious urine-tinged aroma that seemed to waft down the staircase from the upstairs apartment. Every surface seemed to be perpetually damp. Books swelled and bloated like mortally wounded animals on the side of the highway.

Yes, it was home sweet home.

Comments

[Stafford]

What poetry.

[Dabe]

East State street is so jam-packed with the busy ghosts of our former selves!