House Hunting IV: The Legend Continues

This could be a picture of the building - a green, windowless rectangle with no washing machines.

As you may remember, my friends and I have decided that we don’t want to be babysat by the University of Oregon next year and are thus endeavoring to find someplace off campus to live. The search has continued since I last told you about it – periodically we’ll jump up and say, “We should go house hunting! Let’s go house hunting! Let’s hunt some houses, guys!” We’ll then throw on jackets and wander around the surrounding slums in the rain, pointing out to one another which apartments look like decaying roach infested firetraps and which ones look like cheap decaying roach infested firetraps. If we were like most young men our age, any of these places would be fine, nay, “tight”, and we’d probably be willing to settle down and raise a family of shaggy haired, baggy pantsed, Tag™ wearing business majors in them. Generations would live and die on thick, stained carpeting, downing Natural Ice like it was water and playing Madden ’08 until their brains had atrophied to the point that they were unable to put on baseball caps correctly. However, we refuse to live in one of these houses for the same reason women refuse to go out with me: We have standards, and maybe we’re not impressed when the apartment tells us it has a blog.

Today we visited one of the few apartments we found acceptable – a big green building which I called The Big Green Building. Notable features included sodden carpeting on all the exterior staircases and no windows. You might think that I’m exaggerating here, that no architect, no matter how evil, would design a living space devoid of windows, but you obviously haven’t seen The Big Green Building. I think the lack of windows is all part of some greater plan; the architect had a vision of a very, very green structure, a building that Kermit the Frog could scale completely undetected, and he figured that throwing in some gay-ass windows would just screw the whole thing up by decreasing the overall greenitude. As we were looking at the place and lamenting how dark the rooms would have to be when there were no windows, I quipped that maybe it had been built before windows existed. I know now, having seen inside it, that this is not the case: This building was built before light existed.

“But Truman, you Faulkneresque rascal,” you say, “Why did you even attend a viewing of such a skeezy looking place when you were harping on your so called ‘standards’ not two paragraphs ago?” There’s a simple answer to that question: Josh said that the interior had been remodeled, and therefore we believed wholeheartedly that the interior had in fact been remodeled. Josh will be inhabiting one third of whatever apartment we get for next year, along with Jeff and myself, the minority whose name does not begin with J. Josh has been taking the lead on the apartment search for the past couple of months so far – he’s called all the rental agencies, he’s booked all the viewings, and he’s spearheaded every trek into the slums to find someplace we can call tenement sweet tenement. If not for Josh’s considerable work ethic and solid grounding in reality, Jeff and I would no doubt be dressing as homeless people and trying to get beds at the Union Gospel Mission – although what with all the crazy drug addicts and bad food, the experience would be a little too much like the dorms.

With Josh at the helm, we arrived at The Big Green Building a few days ago, ready to be blown away by a beautifully remodeled unit inside a tough, windowless green exterior – a delicious cheesy filling surrounded by crusty, unattractive walls; a Hot Pocket that charges rent, if you will. Instead, we were treated to Star Wars: Episode 1 in apartment form. Its current occupants were using the unit they showed us as an 840 square foot liquor cabinet with a couple of beds thrown in for good measure. Liquor bottles filled the kitchen counter. Liquor bottles lined the bookshelves. Liquor bottles ran along just about every wall. I have never seen that many alcohol containers before in my life, and I was raised by martini-loving, wine swilling, microbrew chugging yuppies. The occupants of this place were either selling their pee by the gallon on the black market or Irish.

Once we got past the fact that very little of the apartment was not devoted to the hoarding of recyclables, we were assaulted by the inherent badness of the unit itself. For one thing, it was dirty: I was reluctant to touch anything in there for fear that some species, at some point and time, had mated on it. The carpet was varying shades of brown, which made it impossible to tell where the coffee stains ended and the vomit stains began. Worst of all, though, it had the smell, the smell that you smell in apartments that belong to your slob friends, a smell that speaks of rotting bathrooms and secondhand furniture and mysterious stains and fleeting glimpses of gigantic insects crawling across the walls or, worse, you. It put me on edge right away and gave me the distinct impression that there were more living creatures in the room than just my future roommates and I, and that whatever else was in there wasn’t going to cough up a rent check. I guess I don’t really know what sort of smell I was specifically looking for – new car, maybe, or Jessica Alba. I’ll bet you anything she smells pretty damn good.

Of course, there were other factors. There was no on-site laundry facility. The stairs were too narrow for us to carry most of our incredibly wide furniture up. No particularly hot neighbors (although my standards are a bit high after a year of living in a place where I can go down a flight of stairs and potentially catch a girl in a towel). But most of all, we just couldn’t see ourselves living there. It didn’t feel right – The Big Green Building might just be too green for us. I try not to think of our turning down the apartment as a snobbish act that brings us one step closer to eventual homlessness, but instead a boon to a family of family of leprechauns who have turned down countless clean, cheap units for not being green enough.

The search continues. At the absolute worst, we can all pledge a fraternity next year – our food and housing would be taken care of at the reasonable cost of our housemates periodically putting superglue in our underpants.

Truman Capps would live in a van down by the river for the sheer sake of telling everyone about it as loudly as possible.