So it’s 1990. I’m a 20-year-old college student living in my very own place. It is a tiny dump of a studio in a dump of a building on the north side of Chicago. It has an ancient and cranky elevator straight out of central casting where you have to open like four gates and sliding doors before you can get inside.
The elevator loves to get stuck between floors until some decrepit mechanism is engaged and it once again climbs, slowly, hand over hand, to your stop.
I learn early to never take it.
My apartment has a Murphy bed — the kind that you see in Abbott & Costello movies — that folds up into the wall. Its rusty springs creak every time I so much as look at it. Every couple of nights, the old Asian lady next door pounds on the wall to yell at me in not-English.
I try to tell her that she can’t get irritated every time I turn over in my own bed, but my not-English is no better than her English.
My bathroom sink is so old that it has separate faucets for the hot and cold water.
The extent of my decorations is a beaded curtain to separate the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. Remember those?
But you know what? I have my very own apartment just a few blocks from the lake and the bus stops nearby and I can buy a big bowl of phở around the corner for next to nothing and the laundromat is next door and there are nightclubs and even the old lady next door is kind of funny and dammit that bed really is loud.
A day or so after moving in, I buy a few groceries at an Aldi nearly a mile away. I lug them home in a discarded box rather than hopping a bus because I have a lot more energy than money. That night, I make spaghetti for my first meal when I realize that I haven’t bought salt. And my plain spaghetti with plain spaghetti sauce really needs salt.
To do, to do?
I walk down the street to McDonald’s and up to the counter.
“Think I could get some salt?” I say, highly annoyed at their incompetence. The cashier shrugs and gives me a handful, I politely thank her, and run back home.
Like I said, not much money.
One day, I decided to bake something. I stick a match in the little hole inside the bottom of the oven to light it (there was a time, kids, when you sometimes had to light the pilot light on the stove like some animal), crank up the temperature, slide my food inside, and go watch some television.
About twenty minutes later, it occurs to me that I don’t smell the food cooking. In fact, I smell gas. I open the oven door and, sure enough, the pilot light has gone out.
Without thinking — which is pretty much the only way you do this — I drop another match into the oven…
Pro tip: natural gas is lighter than air. Given enough time, it will quickly dissipate from a confined space like, say, an oven. But I was a younger man then. And hungry.
I did not give it enough time.
The match does not hit the floor of the oven before a fireball, a CGI-like wall of flame comes roaring out, enveloping me. And just as quickly, it is gone.
I stay rooted in place, my arm still in tossing position — think Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon after the bomb goes off in his hand. At first, I smell something burning and am certain that I am dead, that I will soon fall to the floor as a pile of dust. A few seconds later, I slowly walk to the bathroom, to check out the damage.
Turns out the damage is minimal. The smell is of all of the vaporized hairs inside my nose and lower arms. I sit on the couch for a long time, staring at nothing and thinking about the fragility of life.
I’ve lived in a lot of places since that one. And lately, I’ve gotten nostalgic about where I’ve been. Some of those places bring back nothing but fond memories. Others, not so much. Still, I find my mind wandering through old rooms and walking down old streets.
So I’m curious — what was your first apartment like?
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Previously Published on Medium
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