Villa St.

This building, yet another casualty of population growth, was at some point subdivided into studio apartments. The window on the right was the one I peered out from while living there with Shoggoth the cat and an assortment of reptiles. The reptile cages took up most of the space in the living area.

The apartment consisted of two similarly sized rooms, one being the living/sleeping area and the other being the kitchen. There was a bathroom abutting the kitchen, but I can't picture it in my head now.

Shoggoth was an illegal tenant, and I used to sneak him outside when the property manager wasn't around, just so he could touch a tree or smell the grass. The property manager breathed through a hole in his throat and spoke with the aid of technology, making him sound like Darth Vader.

My friend Josh, who was a co-worker at Tower Books, briefly lived in the apartment across the hallway, but soon vacated it because part of his room was under the stairs. I lived there long enough to have several upstairs neighbors, all of them annoying in their own ways. One neighbor made noises that sounded like he had a typewriter on the floor, with which he frantically composed letters during the nocturnal hours. The worst upstairs neighbors were a pair of roommates who fought (I once distinctly heard, "Ow! You didn't have to cut me!". Plus, they had a car with an uncommonly sensitive alarm. It went off every time a truck went down the street.

One day, while I was standing out near the curb (putting something into my trunk, I think), a large sedan whipped around the corner and a hand holding a baseball bat shot out the passenger side window just long enough for the bat to swing into the rearview mirror of the alarm car. The mirror was a home run, bouncing away down the street. The guy upstairs popped his head out of the window and asked what happened, and I had to refrain from laughing while I told him. It seems I wasn't the only one who hated that alarm.

Once, I decided to defrost my freezer at a late hour. It was well and truly iced over, and I attacked it with a hammer and screwdriver. The next day, the property manager told me that there had been complaints, and asked if I'd heard anything. I innocently shook my head and said, "no, because I wasn't home." He immediately concluded that my upstairs neighbors must be the culprits, since they were habitually loud to begin with. This was admittedly a passive-aggressive way of getting back at them, but it worked.

I wouldn't live in a studio apartment again until after my divorce, and my experience living in a small space with a bunch of reptiles inspired me to find a different solution the second time around.