Photographs Of Places I've Lived # 12: Avenue A

(image from Google Maps)

This little efficiency is where I lived from early 1992 till the end of 1993.  It was a very long two years, in which I had to deal with my post-college life & with the disastrous end of my first relationship, about which I'm sure I'll discuss much later in this blog when I get to those years during Self Help Radio's shows about the years of my birth in the appropriate January.  It's the apartment in the middle there, in the 4552 building but on the right, under the tree.  Number 102.  This image is from around 2014, but I don't remember my door being blue.  It was a one-room apartment - there was no bedroom - with a pretty sizable bathroom that had a closet in it, & a cramped kitchen that you saw when you enter the apartment.  The kitchen ran along the north side (we're looking west in this picture).  There were windows on that side, but thanks to that lovely tree, I never had much light.  There was also a door on the "patio" side - which meant, if the front door were in the east wall, it was in the north wall - for no real reason.  There's a dumb story about that door which kind of epitomized my early days there.

The relationship ended with lies & betrayal & it fucked me up.  Many of my friends had become friends with her over the three years we were "together," & she leaned on them a lot because of her own issues, which meant I had to deal with my friends talking about her, & letting her stay with them, & other shit like that.  I was incredibly lonely & as close to mentally ill as I would ever be.  Thoughts of suicide were not uncommon.  The nights were long & I couldn't eat or sleep & I would lie on my bed wishing my mind would just break.  Certain things kept me going, usually obsessively: Neil Young's voice, the Kids In The Hall, Ellery Queen mysteries.  I woke early & walked to campus, where I now worked almost full-time, & sat in the sun until I had to go inside.  I went to movies & plays & music shows & did everything I could to keep my brain occupied.  It wasn't enough.

One night I began aware of a scratching on that north door, a door I never opened.  Not once.  It was intermittent but when it happened, it was insistent.  Could it be a bug?  An animal of some kind?  A human?  The pain in which I lived quickly translated into terror.  But I didn't believe in anything supernatural - it couldn't be a ghost or the like.  What did I have to lose by just opening the door?

To make matters worse, it was a stormy night, with high winds.  I didn't want to go out into that.  It had to be 2 or 3 in the morning.  I'd hear the wind & I'd hear that scratching & I was frightened out of my mind.

But I didn't open the door.  No, I quietly opened my front door, to peep behind the small, I guess decorative, stone wall to the door's right.  The light from my apartment would help me see what was there, if anything.  So I closed the door quietly, slowly looked past the wall - only to find a flyer of some sort put there by a restaurant advertising delivery.  There was one on the door to the apartment opposite mine.  The person tasked to spread those coupons around didn't know the doors were for the same apartments, apparently.  I felt like a fool.  I might've just let it stay there all night if I hadn't mustered up a small bit of courage.

One thing to say about this place: for a brief time, the first woman to really love me lived with me here.  I wish I had been well enough to return her love properly.  It would take a decade for me to be able to be a good partner, that's how utterly fucking destroyed I was.  I would hurt so many people - I would hurt myself a great deal - in the next few years.  She moved out because she couldn't still be with me if she lived with me, & I understood that.  But those few months - I believe from August 1992 to December 1992 - I remember them fondly.

Another thing is that a childhood friend from Garland stayed with me briefly when he came down looking to relocate.  He would actually move into a place across the street from the house where I rented a room but never lived.  When my lease here ran out, he encouraged me to get a place with him, which I did.  Although it didn't quite go as well as we hoped.