Life in a closet on Craftmore

(The name of the actual street has been changed to protect identities.)

In life, there are two main types of bullshit: the kind that you have to put up with and the kind that you don’t. The bullshit you have to put up with can strengthen you and turn you into a better person.

The bullshit you don’t have to put up with can eat away at your determination and self esteem. The big trick is knowing the difference. And that’s where it can get difficult.

A few years ago, I decided I’d had enough of my tiny bullshit studio apartment. Can’t I do better than this? I wondered, and looked around for a nicer place to live. I found an ad for an apartment that sounded like a steal at $250 per month! The ad didn’t mention a deposit or last month’s rent, but apologized up front that it wasn’t the best place to live. Still, I was optimistic.

So I walked down the trash-strewn street, lined with leaning palm trees, and past the parched desert yards where guys worked on their cars. I stood outside a brightly colored brownstone on Craftmore Street in Los Angeles and waited for the guy, who showed up dripping of sweat. He took me into the place he was renting. I didn’t expect a whole lot for the rental price, but holy Hell, I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was, either.

We hit the kitchen first. It was pitch dark in there. During the afternoon. There was a busted mirror over the sink and no place to turn around. A bare, burnt-out light bulb hung from the ceiling on a single electrical cord. The fridge and stove were rusty, unused, maybe didn’t even work. The kitchen was actually smaller than my own, and that’s saying a lot because mine had originally been a walk-in closet.

I regretted mentioning to this guy that I just looooved to cook. Because if I moved in, I’d better love heavy-duty cleaning, electrical wiring and plumbing too. The landlord either didn’t exist or wasn’t told about the needed repairs. Never a good sign.

It means that either the landlord is really shitty or the residents are trying to hide something from him. Like an extra tenant who’s not on the lease, for instance. A tattered bedsheet hung by the fridge. “Oh yeah, someone lives over there,” said the guy. Mystery solved.

Okay, that sucked, I thought. But how much worse could it get? Well, I was about to find out. We turned around and I saw a spacious bedroom with one bed. There were no curtains on the window, but there was lots of space, and no furniture to speak of. Score! I thought. Look at all this room! I began fantasizing about how I could make the bedroom work, fix the kitchen, make friends with the guy behind the curtain...

But then, the guy who was renting the place out said, “Oh, this is my room.” Wait, he’s staying?  “I thought you were moving out,” I said. “No, I moved out of the room you’ll be renting.” Okay, I thought, looking around. There didn’t seem to be any other room. And if there was, why wasn’t Mystery Curtain Guy already living in it?

Then he ushered me over to his CLOSET. And that’s where my descent into madness truly began. “Here,” he said like a game show host revealing a prize in a nightmare. “This is where you’ll be living.” He gestured with a flourish toward the musty, darkened hole in the wall.

The ceiling sagged, too low for me to stand under. A big fan hummed noisily, useless against the mold on the walls. The shag carpet seemed to move of its own accord. But again, all the light bulbs were broken here, so I couldn’t tell if anything was crawling around in there besides us.

I beheld the splendor of my new home while keeping one eye on the guy, lest I get assaulted or something else crazy. The whole afternoon was sliding downhill. A dog wouldn’t have stayed in there. Even if you put in a food bowl in there for him.

I pondered whether I could just hold my breath and live there for a few months, which would at least let me save up a deposit for a much better place. I’d still have to get rid of all my belongings and install some lights and check constantly for pests, but maybe I could make it work. That’s when he came with his speech about the $400 deposit and the six-month commitment.

As I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained that it wasn’t such a bad deal. Hell, he’d lived in the closet for an entire year. So by his logic, that made it an acceptable dwelling for other human beings!

This right here is the kind of unnecessary bullshit that I hope nobody actually really needs to put up with. I’d like to believe that he could’ve done better. I think that when he settled for this whole living-in-a-closet bullshit, it twisted his mind a little.

But in a last-ditch attempt to sell myself on the place (I’d be saving $550 per month off my current rent by moving in!), I casually brought up the question of pests. “Well, I haven’t seen a roach in a while,” he said, as I wondered how he expected to notice pests in the dark. “I mean, there used to be a big problem with them, and then we cleared all that up. But let me know if you see any more,” he added helpfully.

At this point, reality started kind of blurring out on me, and I heard a buzzing noise in my head. Something told me to run, run away and never look back. He was saying something like, “Oh, you’ll see MICE, sure, we’ve got lots of them for some reason...” Maybe because they’re eating the roaches? I thought.

When I balked at the prospect of living like a kidnapping victim, and complained about the deposit and the commitment on top of it, he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like you can afford the rent anyway.” Not if the rent will be paid in my slowly draining-away sanity, like what he let happen to him. “No, I sure can’t afford the rent here,” I answered, and left.

I got home — what a nice word, “home” — to my crappy nine-by-nine studio, with a working kitchen, lightbulbs in the bathroom, and no pests. I banged my shin on the bed, tripped over an electrical cord, heard the neighbor kids shrieking outside my window... and thanked God for my good fortune.

How much of the closet-living bullshit had this guy really had to put up with, and how much had he just settled for living like vermin in this city? I felt bad for him, but the experience somehow vindicated my own life choices.

I hadn’t done as badly with my life as I could have. Is living in my tiny studio apartment the type of bullshit I had to put up with? I guess it was. That had been my real question when I started looking for another place. At least I had my answer.