Growing up in suburban sterility did little to prepare me for the many run-ins I would have with rodents and other detestable creatures while living in NYC. Sure, there were one or two field mice that, on rare occasion, found their way into the walls of my family's home, but those were swiftly taken care of by one or two strategically placed mousetraps, which were discarded by my dad before I could see them. I remember my mom shooting out the door of a vacation cottage we rented in North Carolina, screaming like she was leading a Baptist revival sermon because a family of roaches scattered across the floor when she'd turned on the light, but I'd never actually seen a cockroach, either.
All of that was about to change when my roommate Andy and I moved into an apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. New York's "Little Russia."
The early days of our Brighton 3rd Street inhabitance are a bit fuzzy. Andy was working as a programming associate at Comedy Central and I had just taken my first real post-college job as a production assistant at MTV, so we were filled with the kind of vigor befitting of post-grad new hires. Long workdays. Long commutes. Few wakeful moments were spent in our apartment or we might have noticed that there were more than just the two of us living there.
What we did immediately notice was the sheer amount of garbage strewn about the streets of our neighborhood on any given day. Much of it was rotten produce. The main through-road, Brighton Beach Avenue, is lined with open air produce markets, one of the nicer neighborhood amenities. But there were also a lot of haphazardly discarded items littering the streets and sidewalks: half-eaten sandwiches, broken vodka bottles, old shoes, soggy newspapers. It left the impression that the sanitation department hadn't been through to collect garbage in days, but I knew they had. They just couldn't keep up with the community-wide indifference to waste. People quite literally waded through piles of their own refuse and still couldn't be obliged to find the nearest trash can. In fact, the only person I had ever seen actually use a garbage can was the neighborhood dopehead, who I'll call Eddy for unoriginal name's sake, and that was to fish for food and bits of foil that may or may not have been used to smoke crack.
Eddy was the only Asian man I'd ever seen with dreadlocks. They were thick and streaked with grey and they hung down past his rump. Year-round, he sported only boxers, a trench coat that was always left wide-open, and unlaced army boots. There are few constants in this world, and perhaps Eddy is no exception, but at the time he seemed like a permanent fixture out there on the sidewalk at the base of the el-train stairs. I could always count on him to flutter his coat as I walked past on my way up to the train and whisper an unintelligible string of words into my ear. He was generally harmless, or as harmless as a vagrant crackhead on a daily schedule can be, but I hadn't any way of knowing this during my first days of Brighton Beach residency. So between him and the clusters of rowdy drunk men stumbling up the sidewalk, spewing Russian expletives back and forth, the walk home from the train after midnight made me nervous enough to ask Andy to wait for me outside when I got off the train.
"So where will you be?" I asked Andy during that first phone request for his accompaniment. I peered apprehensively over the platform railing down at the street below. A group of men in their 30's had just spilled out of a restaurant and were taunting another man across the street. I wasn't sure if it was friendly or not, but their Russian sounded gruffer than normal.
"Do you want me to come to the train to get you?"
"That's okay. Just meet me somewhere on the street where you can see me coming. That way if I get picked up and thrown into a windowless van, you'll at least be a witness."
"Ha! Okay. I'm outside now."
I walked to the bottom of the subway stairs and squinted down the street. "What's a landmark nearby so I know where you'll be?"
"Hmmm...I'm looking for a restaurant sign or something to stand under, but everything is in Russian," he replied. Then, after a short pause, "OR... I could meet you next to this heaping pile of--I'm actually not sure what this is--puke?"
"What?"
Andy's form was now visible. He was standing in the crosswalk where the main avenue met our street peering down at something, making exaggerated wretching sounds into the phone.
"What are you talking about?" I laughed.
"Ruth, there is a monstrous pile of puke in the middle of our road. It's so vast I'm actually pretty scared...and more than a little curious to see the size of the person this came from."
Indeed, as I approached from two or three blocks away I could see a mound at his feet, which was discernible even in silhouette against the streetlights.
"My God. You weren't kidding. That is an enormous pile of vomit."
"So wretched," he shivered when I joined his side.
Without giving it more thought, lest we both become nauseous, we hurried inside to commence our nightly tradition of recapping the workday and picking apart the latest episode of House over a drink. No matter how late it was or how early we had to wake up the next morning, Andy was always down to hang out, and thank the gods of sanity for that because, at that point, he was my only friend outside of work in the greater NYC area.
Andy had found our apartment last-minute through a Craigslist search. His prior sublease was up, and now that I was coming back to NYC full-time, we both jumped on the opportunity to be roommates again. We had less than a week to find an affordable place, so when he found a listing for a "$1300/mo. 2 BR sublet in a pre-war building on the beach," it seemed that our search was successful. Andy viewed it and despite a couple of misgivings he had we both agreed it was the best we were going to do on such short notice and working for next to minimum wage.
Despite the listing, our apartment actually had only one bedroom; the living room had been touted as the "second bedroom." The entryway of the building boasted a once-illustrious marble lobby, which was now thickly coated in decades of maroon and orange paint. There was a small elevator with loud metal doors and thick plastic bakelite buttons that we avoided because it felt like it was operated on a pulley system of floss and rust and it was always crowded with grimacing elderly neighbors . The building had a distinct scent. The aroma of years upon years of cooked stews and roasted meats mingled with the stench of the incinerator garbage shoot at the end of each hallway, providing an ambiguous experience during the many arduous ascents to our flat.
Our apartment came fully furnished with a mix of the belongings of the owner’s deceased mother and was adorned with the kind of odd décor that only a single lonely bachelor would choose to live with just before accidentally hanging himself from autoerotic asphyxiation*. Star Wars dolls, samurai swords, and a Kermit D. Frog puppet adorned a dusty shelf that hung over an upright piano oddly placed in the long, dark green hallway between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment at the back.
The first door on the left down the green hallway of unease was a bathroom containing a coffin-sized stand up shower and a separate bathtub. Hanging precariously over the bathtub was a warped wooden shelf boasting an extensive Playboy collection that spanned from present day back to 1981, 2 years before I was born.
I never used the bathtub in my time there. I was terrified that the Playboy shrine would fall and I'd be knocked unconscious in a full bath.
I could just see the news headline: "Drowned In Lust! Local woman found dead in bathtub beneath pile of porno! Catholic parents speechless with shame."
It could have been worse. I could have somehow died in the bed that, to Andy and my bemused disgust, harbored a portfolio that contained dozens of call girl numbers. If the walls could talk, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have lasted a week in there.
Every room was painted a different color. The kitchen was a burnt orange, the bedroom was a dark red, and the living room was an awful checkerboard of yellow and purple. Andy was kind enough to give me the bedroom, which had a door, while he slept on an air mattress in the living room beneath the watchful eyes of a carnival sized purple bear and a carousel horse (more of the decor that came with the apartment). Although my bedroom was the only room with privacy and an actual bed, I preferred to spend as little time as possible in it. The dark red walls made me feel like I was either going to be murdered by an axe wielding Jack Nicholson or solicited for sex like a lady of the night.
The apartment wasn't all bad. We had an excellent fire escape, as fire escapes go, that offered views of the ocean on one side and the el train on the other. It was nice having a bird's eye view of our block. There was something so very "turn-of-the-century New York slums" about it that brought extra meaning to the feeling that Andy and I were participating in our own version of working toward the American Dream.
It wasn't until about the 2nd week of living there, that either of us had time to cook in something other than the sketchy microwave. Andy was making a chicken casserole for a work potluck when the oven was first turned on. We were excited to fill the flat with the aroma of something other than Ramen Noodles and Mac n Cheese packs. After prepping the casserole and tucking it away into the oven, he joined me in the living room to watch a show.
20 minutes had elapsed when I began to notice a curious scent.
"Oh no. Do you think the toilet is backed up?" I asked.
"Why do you ask?"
"Do you smell that?"
"Um, no, not particularly..."
I shrugged it off for a minute or so, but the smell was becoming stronger.
"Oh! What is that?" Andy crinkled his nose.
"You smell it, right?"
We both got up from the couch and walked toward the smell, which was coming from down the hall. Whorehouse Bedroom was not the culprit. Playboy Shrine Bathroom was not the culprit. Andy and I walked down the long green hallway toward the front of the apartment. The smell grew stronger.
Much like the lobby and outside hallways, the kitchen was filled with opposing aromas. It smelled of hearty, homemade chicken casserole, but only if said chicken was made entirely out of butt holes.
"Andy!" I laughed, covering my nose and mouth, "What the hell did you put in that casserole, the pile of puke from outside?"
"Hey! That's not the casserole. My casseroles taste and smell amazing. That HAS to be the oven."
"Ugh. I bet it hasn't been cleaned since the 70's. I'll scour it sometime this week."
Despite cracking the kitchen window, the next hour was a long one as we waited for the casserole to finish cooking. (Indeed, the casserole itself smelled delicious and was a hit at Andy's potluck.) As the oven cooled, the smell dissipated. It wasn't until a couple weeks later that I finally found time and motivation to scour the oven from top to bottom. Oddly, the interior and the broiler were only somewhat messy and the top of the stove was pristine thanks to the vigilant cleanliness of my lovely roommate. However, the sponge and rags I used to do the job were filthy enough to pitch into the sticky drawer of the incinerator shoot at the end of the hall, so I was reassured that my hour of scour had resolved the mystery smell.
Perhaps it was the oven stench experience or a general unease with all of the stuff in the apartment that wasn't ours, but Andy and I became hyperaware of the cleanliness of the apartment and set about dusting, sterilizing, polishing, and scrubbing the place from top to bottom. Andy never let a dirty dish populate the sink. I fixed our clogged shower drain (by prying 2 feet of the previous tenant's long hair out of it with rusty pliers I found in the closet). We needed it to feel like ours. We needed to be able to sleep knowing that we weren't living in a petri dish populated by someone else's bacteria. Eventually, we felt that the sterility of the flat was under control and we settled comfortably into our lives.
...
One night I entered the apartment after a long day at work to find Andy standing just inside the door, pointing dramatically down the hallway. My hackles went up.
"Oh no. What is it?" I asked, instinct telling me that I didn't want to know the answer.
"That little bastard. That fucking disease ridden little shit. Oh no he didn't!" Andy was stammering deliriously, waving his finger in the direction of wherever this "little bastard" was.
"Don't tell me." I paused in the doorway, considering (not for the first time) heading back to the edit house to sleep on a couch there.
"I was minding my own business, playing a video game and I felt someone staring at me," he shivered, "I saw something move in the corner of my eye and turned...he was sitting next to me on the couch! Ahhhh!"
"Who was? Who?"
"A rat! A fucking rat! All I could do was yell, 'OH NO YOU DIDN'T,' and the little shit took off running!"
"A rat? Where is it now?" I scanned the baseboards from atop my new perch on the kitchen chair.
"It ran all the way around the living room and I'm pretty sure I saw it disappear into a hole in the floor by the radiator! Ahhhh!"
"Shit. What do we do? How big was it?" I could not live with rodents who felt comfortable enough to chill on the furniture.
"Ugh. Disgusting. Like *this* big." He held up his index finger and thumb and I relaxed a little.
3 inches. Okay, this was not "Food for the Gods II." We could deal with this.
...
As he maneuvered a peanut buttered saltine into the humane moustrap, Andy chuckled.
"You know, circumstances aside, he was kind of cute, just sitting there on the couch like a friend, watching me play Mario Party. I've decided to call him Sparky, because he had the nerve to make himself at home."
...
The next morning, we found Sparky had eaten half of the cracker and left the other half propped up against the outside of the trap. He was nowhere to be seen. Our humane trap was a little too humane. After a few more tries, we eventually replaced the humane trap with a traditional mouse trap and waited.
1:00 am: THWAP.
Thus ended the life of Sparky.
As a precaution, we left an arsenal of mousetraps around the circumference of the hole, in case Sparky had relatives.
...
It was difficult to sleep through the night after the discovery of Sparky. My ears were attuned to every small noise in the late hours. Visions of rodents scurrying up my bedposts and brushing against my legs left my skin crawling. It was around this time, that I began making nightly ventures to the kitchen for water in a quest to keep the crazy thoughts at bay. Unfortunately, it was also then that I discovered the roaches.
I itch even now as I write this. One night I clicked on the kitchen light and a sudden movement in the sink caught my eye. There, a colony of small roaches, startled by the light, were scrambling back into the drain from whence they came. They swirled down like a whirlpool and were gone before I could muster up a scream. I stood there, cup in hand, frozen in a mental crux between Rodent Hole Living Room, Roach Hole Kitchen, Whorehouse Bedroom, and Playboy Shrine Bathroom.
Was nowhere sacred?
THWAP.
"We got another one!" Andy's voice called out from the living room.
...
Every morning for a few weeks, we checked the mouse traps. Nearly every morning there was a dead mouse inside one. Sometimes two. It was around Sparky 10 that we realized that the peanut butter cracker bait was attracting every rodent in the whole building to our apartment, so we left the traps empty moving forward. The rate of rodent casualties in our apartment dropped significantly and life returned to tolerable.
It was mid-February, which is always the most unbearably cold time of year in the city, when the North American Blizzard of 2006 dumped over 2 feet of snow overnight on New York, effectively crippling public and private transportation and closing the airports for the first time since the September 11th attacks. It was a mere blip on the forecast radar for Andy and I, who hail from Ohio's lake effect belt, where 2 feet of snow is business as usual.
Sunday morning, after the storm had done most of its damage, I ventured outside to grab groceries and was unprepared for the vision that awaited me. Brighton Beach was transformed into an ethereal/ industrial winter wonderland. Two feet of snow covered everything: the cars, the sidewalks, the garbage, the pile of puke...
The tracks over the main boulevard were vacant with no rumbles of a train on the horizon. There were only a handful of people outside and no cars on the road. Even Eddy was nowhere to be seen. It was the cleanest and most peaceful I had ever seen the neighborhood and, much like the front yard after the first snow, I was hesitant to mess it up with my boot prints.
A short time later, I returned to the apartment with my groceries, feeling refreshed by the crisp winter air and snow under my feet. On this rare occasion, I took the elevator up to our floor. As soon as the metal doors clanged open, the smell hit me in the face...
"Didn't you say you cleaned this thing?" Andy called from the kitchen as soon as I opened the door.
"I did! What the hell? Why is it still stinking?" I shrugged off my coat and joined him in the kitchen.
"My God. It's awful, Ruth."
"I don't get it. I scoured this thing from top to bottom!"
We stared down at the oven, perplexed.
Then, a thought occurred to me that I was hesitant to pursue.
"You know, I didn't check underneath the oven..."
Five minutes later, we stared down at the floor where the oven formerly sat. To our mixed relief and astonishment, we found nothing. There was no clue as to where the stink was coming from.
"It has to somehow be the oven or maybe the wall it's against. We shouldn't even try to cook in it anymore," Andy said.
"Agreed." That was no problem for someone like me, who gives up when a microwave dinner calls for more than two steps. The oven ban was a bit harder for Andy, who missed the comfort of home-cooked meals.
The unsolved mystery festered in our minds and we would sit quietly in the living room with our drinks in hand, accompanied by the sound of a stray mouse or two scratching below the floor boards, and throw out different adjectives and explanations for the smell.
"I bet the old lady who used to live here used the oven as a toilet and just incinerated all of her poop."
"Maybe the mafia disposed of body parts in the oven."
"It's like someone flame broiled adult diapers full of diarrhea."
"Or old pus-filled bandaids."
"Or month-old moist casts."
"It smells like the giant pile of puke in the road."
"Vomit casserole."
"Fried foot fungus."
"Toasted taints."
"Ass cheese."
Grossing each other out was our coping mechanism for this bizarre place in which we were now living. Adaptation meant full-on delirious hilarity. Andy would make me laugh so hard about everything that was so overwhelmingly wrong with the apartment that my stomach would hurt for days...
The windows rattling every 20 minutes from the trains rolling past...
The bathroom lightbulb exploding on my head one morning while I blow-dried my hair...
The rodents and roaches...
The dusty containers full of rice and beans that had been sitting on the kitchen shelves for years before our tenancy...
Living out of a tupperware bin where we stored our food to keep it protected...
Playboy deathtrap...
Whore portfolios under the bed...
Syringes and malt liquor bottles littering the beach...
The pile of puke...
Eddy...
Come to think of it, we hadn't seen Eddy in a little while and began thinking of scenarios for where he could be, too.
The roaches, after feasting on the pile of puke, become radioactive and their descendants grow to human sizes. One night, as Eddy lie passed out on the sidewalk, the roaches ascend from the sewers and snatch him up, feast on his insides, and leave the brain in tact so that they may then command his body as a host body from the inside out.
Eddy was now most assuredly a walking cockroach on the cusp of cross-breeding super mutant roaches with humans.
It wasn't until summer that I began to see Eddy out at his usual post again.
By then, my fiance Andrew had wrapped up loose ends in Ohio and had moved in with us to get his own career launched in the city before our upcoming wedding in September. In between planning our wedding on the weekends and working, Andrew and I managed to find an apartment that would be ready for us to move into after our honeymoon. To our delight, it was immeasurably nicer than our current Brighton Beach closet of horrors.
In spite of myself, I started to feel nostalgic over our beach flat, most likely because the end was in sight. I was sad to leave Andy here. He had not yet found a new place and was extending his stay until he could find a roommate elsewhere. One afternoon, while drinking a glass of water out of the roach sink, I found myself staring at the oven and reminiscing. Andy had been the best roommate ever and had to stay here in this hell hole. I was going to figure out what the oven stink problem was and fix it for him or I'd be damned.
I snapped on some rubber gloves and assessed the oven. I opened it, pulled out the broiler drawer all the way, pulled the oven away from the wall...everything we had already tried, I double-checked. I checked the cabinets around the oven and scrubbed the grease off of all of them. I pulled off the gas burner caps and brushed and polished them. As I was putting them back onto the burners, something caught my eye that I hadn't noticed before.
Tucked back under the stovetop, beside the back burner, I saw what looked like a piece of fiberglass. I wouldn't have given it another thought; as far as I could guess, perhaps ovens were outfitted with fiberglass to prevent heat from escaping, but then I started to think about why an oven manufacturer would leave it loose like that right next to an open flame.
I peered around the perimeter of each burner and realized the entire stovetop was filled with the fiberglass material. How odd. A thought occurred to me that I might be able to open the stovetop. I pushed upward on the metal edge and, to my surprise, it gave way instantly. I pried it all the way open.
"Nope!" was all I could manage to croak out.
I dropped the hood and it slammed back down in place.
I had found the source of the stink.
Lest my eyes deceive me, I made the mistake of cracking open the hood again. There, beneath a quarter inch of metal, surrounding all 4 burners, and spanning the entire surface area of the stovetop, was a rat's nest.
The nest was comprised of gnawed up couch cushion foam that was saturated entirely in urine and coated in inches of rat droppings and fur. It was so thick, I could not immediately tell whether there were any current inhabitants, living or dead, nor did I look long enough to know.
I dropped the hood again, and despite my earlier determination to fix the source of the problem, I aborted mission, knowing no amount of sanitizing or hazmat suits would rectify that mess of a situation.
Nostalgia be damned. We had dodged the plague.
It has been nearly 7 years since surviving the days of Brighton Beach.
Andy now lives in a luxury high rise condo in DUMBO that is so modern and exquisite and pristine, it couldn't be any more opposite of our old flat. I'm living in a modest two bedroom in a renovated Civil War hospital in Jersey. The last news I've heard out of Brighton Beach was a few years ago when an 18 year old was shivved over a bad bet in the packed pool hall a few blocks away that Andrew once frequented. The teen passed away and when investigations commenced, supposedly, "no one saw anything." That's the Brighton Beach I know.
Though we have both seen our share of NYC pests since Brighton, nothing moves us quite as much. No rodents are quite as disgusting. No roaches quite as grotesque. No odors quite as impossible to stand. Few neighborhoods quite as menacing...
It only takes a one-word reminder: Brighton.
