Crappy places I have lived

It’s hard to believe I live in a lovely house in a safe suburb of Naples, Florida. Most of my life has been spent enduring crummy places in sketchy parts of town. But all of them were character-building and fodder for lots of colorful stories.

After college, the first place I lived was a small apartment in the bowels of Hollywood. I didn’t have a car and had to ride my bike everywhere. It was only $150 a month, but it also included four police locks since the area was crime-ridden and filled with vagrants. The soaring helicopters were a nightly comfort for me and my girlfriend, with several sirens punctuating the night.

I often heard my famed next-door neighbor, Jackie Curtis, wailing off-key to Tallulah Bankhead records. He was once an actor from the 70s who starred in several Andy Warhol movies. Sadly, he lived in the shadow of his film accomplishments, eager to tell us about his few years of Hollywood stardom. It was indeed a “Tales of the City” neighborhood.

After several close calls with local transients, my girlfriend and I had enough, so we combined our meager yard sale earnings and moved to Venice Beach, where we got a studio apartment on Oceanfront Walk.

The area was checkered with homeless people, who screamed obscenities in the middle of the night, making it hard to sleep. But hey, we were now living at the beach, with our newfound popularity. Suddenly, many people wanted to visit us in this groovy beachside community. Why didn’t they see us when we lived in Hollywood? Nothing like a beach pad to lure prospective visitors.

After being stalked by a homeless person, my partner and I decided that we should leave Venice and try to find a more suitable apartment.

We moved to a one-bedroom apartment north of Wilshire, a pristine area of Santa Monica. But that didn’t last long because my partner thought that the apartment was haunted by an old woman who had died there a few months prior. She claimed that she saw this old woman in a rocking chair in the middle of the night. It was time to move again.

We soon found a basement apartment in an old hotel that met our financial requirements. It even came with cockroaches, which greeted me every evening when I returned from my stint as a waitress at a nearby restaurant.

When I turned on the kitchen light, they would scurry under the refrigerator. “I’m home” I would chime to the cockroaches. They undoubtedly enjoyed feasting on the crumbs I would drop when I attempted to cook.

Since the apartment was underground, we could easily see people walking their dogs. An added bonus was living next door to the hotel maid. I’m sure she resented our proximity, but we couldn’t afford to live on a higher floor. I suspect our place had mold because it was always cold and damp. The elevator was on its last legs, and I was always scared we would get stuck between floors. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

Things improved after that when we moved to a small apartment in the Ocean Park area of Santa Monica. Although I had my bicycle stolen, and homeless people often slept across the street in the park, it was still an improvement from where we had been living.

At one point, our kitchen floor buckled from my neighbor’s bathtub overflowing, leaving a lumpy mess. But because the apartment was rent-controlled, the manager wouldn’t replace the floor, so I had to wait for the water to recede.

We also had a neighbor who lived above us. She and her boyfriend had wild sex almost every night. ‘Oh Victor, oh Victor, oh Victor!” She would scream in the middle of the hot summer night. With her windows open, hearing them made it hard to sleep.

We finally moved to Fox Hills, an area riddled with gangs and nightly drug activity. Because the building was over 40 years old, the cheap plumbing was always a problem.

We had a terrible flood because the hot water heater was incorrectly installed, and the dilapidated galvanized pipes couldn’t sustain the water pressure. Lots of blowers dominated the night as we and our animals attempted to get some sleep.

We finally moved to Florida, where my wife got us a good deal on a house. Nothing like living in a brand new place after growing up crappy apartments and condos.

I still can’t believe there aren’t roaches or nightly vagrants roaming the neighborhood. It’s almost too quiet.

But at last, I feel safe. Tell me about where you’ve lived.