CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: A Carpet of Cockroaches

I arranged to show the #apartment to the man and his wife on Saturday afternoon.  I was going to be there anyhow, cleaning and tidying, ready for painting.

As I opened the front door of 51 Manson Street, the familiar smell of rotting garbage wafted out.  Clearly, the first order of the day was to open all of the windows, which I did.  When I reached the halfway mark between the dining room and the kitchen, I stopped short in disgust.  The entire floor of the hallway, bathroom and kitchen was covered by a veritable carpet of dead #cockroaches.  The sinks and counter tops were similarly covered. 

I’d never seen anything like it!

The #pest control people had obviously come again after Natasha moved out.  I’d given Miz James a key to let them in.  The first time they were there, Natasha must have swept up the result.  Surely, even she couldn’t have lived with a solid carpet of dead cockroaches.

The odd ceiling panel had been moved aside in the kitchen and bathroom, and it looked as if the roaches had dropped through the holes in the ceilings, en masse, once the smoke of the bomb reached them.

I checked my watch.  Half an hour before the couple was due to arrive to look at the apartment.  I was just plugging in the vacuum cleaner to vacuum up the bugs, when the doorbell rang. 

Oh no!  They were early!

I went downstairs to let the couple in.  They had a little boy with them, about eight or nine years old.  As we walked up the stairs, I tried to warn them about the carpet of bugs, but no amount of forewarning could  prepare anyone for such a revolting sight.

When the wife saw the beginnings of the cockroach carpet, she recoiled somewhat forcibly and hastily backed away. 

"Um, I think I'll leave you to it," she told her husband in a faint voice.  With an embarrassed half-smile at me, she retreated down the stairs.

Her husband – who was not in possession of such delicate sensibilities as his wife – scratched at his sandy beard and looked around.  The little boy carefully tiptoed into the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to step between the bugs, bent double as he peered at the cockroaches in morbid fascination.

As I showed Sandy Beard around the apartment, we sounded as if we were walking on Cornflakes.  Cockroaches crunched underfoot, every step we took.

"It's pretty awful, isn't it?" I admitted ruefully.  "This is why I evicted my tenant.  The pest control company have come twice, and they're due to come once more to finish up.  The cockroaches are all dead, though . . ."

"Hey, this one's still alive!" shouted the little boy at that moment.  He pointed to where a cockroach lay on its back, feebly waving its legs.

". . . or dying," I quickly added. 

“Hey, here's another one!" yelled the darling child with glee.  "It's walking!"

Sure enough it was, albeit very slowly. 

I hastily stepped on it.  Scrunch! 

"Now it's not.  Come.  I'll show you the rest of the apartment."

I quickly took Sandy Beard through the back bedrooms and didn’t linger for more than a moment at the doorway to the bathroom.  The bathtub had a furry, black ring around it, and the disgusting toilet, its bowl spattered with brown spots and reeking of urine, was a sight best left unseen by a potential tenant. 

I hustled the two into the front half of the apartment where only a few cockroaches were in evidence. 

Sandy Beard looked around the dining room and living room with a non-committal expression on his face, perking up slightly when he spied the small room leading off of the living room. 

"This would be good for an office," he said.  "I work at G.P.  You know . . . General Power?   I often bring instruments home to work on, so it would be nice to have an apartment closer to work.  This seems like a nice neighborhood."

I said nothing to disillusion him of this notion. 

"They're very delicate, though . . . the instruments, I mean," Sandy Beard continued.  "I couldn't take the risk of any #bugs getting into them."

"Oh, that wouldn't be a worry," I assured him airily.  "You can see the problem's been taken care of . . . especially after the pest control people have come a third time."  I fervently hoped the little boy would keep quiet.

Sandy Beard scratched his chin again.

"I was just about to vacuum," I told him.  "Why don't I do that, and maybe your wife would like to come up again when all the bugs are gone?  It'll just take me a moment."

"Okay," he said.  "I'll ask her."

He went downstairs with his son, and I quickly vacuumed up thousands of cockroaches.  Yuck!  I probably filled a whole vacuum-cleaner bag full of them.   By the time Sandy Beard came back, minus small boy, I had just about finished.

"My wife says she doesn’t need to come up, but we'll talk about it and be in touch," he promised.  "Thank you."

"Okay," I said.  "Call me either way, won't you?"

"Oh, sure," the man said, but I knew he wouldn't.  

I cleaned and scrubbed the rest of that afternoon and the next.  Allen came by and performed his oven-cleaning routine.  He was getting very practiced at it. 

I bought some paint, and Wim showed me how to use a roller.  I actually quite enjoyed it, especially filling in with the roller after doing all the edges with a brush.  Being a novice at painting, I was very painstaking and finicky about it, and it took me hours to complete the job.  A couple of years later, I would be slapping on the paint in half the time, but for now it was still all new to me – an entire, empty apartment, all mine, to do with whatever I liked.  I still had visions of renting the house to happy, decent, Leave-it-to-Beaver kinds of families.  Sure, I'd had a couple of bad breaks so far, but hope springs eternal, right?

Over the next few weeks, Wim, Allen, and I got the place looking pretty decent. Unfortunately, however, no one seemed interested in viewing it.  Apparently people didn’t usually move house in December.

Actually, one person did show some interest.  He was a friend of the next door neighbors, Shirley and Jerry, and his name was Bryan.  He’d been helping Jerry install some windows, and he came upstairs when Wim and I were in the midst of painting and repairing.

"Heard this was vacant," he said, looking around.  He was a tall-ish, slim young man with a pretty face and a shock of long, chestnut curls any girl would die for.  Quite a sexy dude. 

"My girlfriend and me, we need a new place,” he went on.  “Don't know if I can afford one yet, though.  How much you chargin'?"

"Four twenty-five," Wim told him.  He didn’t know I’d decided to try renting the apartment for four seventy-five.

I gave Wim a surreptitious nudge in the ribs.  "No, I'm asking four seventy-five," I whispered.  "Same as downstairs."

"Hm."  Bryan shook his head.  "Nope.  Don't think I can afford fourt twenty-five.  Nice place, though.  Maybe next time, if I get this job I'm goin' for.  See ya."  

He thumped off down the stairs.

Having the house to herself, with no tenants living overhead to irritate her, Miz James remained silent for a couple of months, except for calling to complain that the City had declared Manson Street a snow-disaster area. She just needed an opportunity to moan about something. 

Luckily for me, as well as stating in the #lease that the first-floor #tenant was responsible for mowing the lawn, I had included a clause that the tenant was also responsible for clearing the sidewalk of snow.  Otherwise, Miz James would no doubt be calling Wim every other minute to make a trip out to Schemmerhorn for a few shovels' full of snow.

With only one #rent coming in each month, and more going out in #mortgage payments, I was beginning to feel slightly desperate.  I kept the advertisement in the paper every week and even dropped the rent to $450.00, but there was still no interest.

Finally, during the last week in January, someone did call.