My Apartment: A Treatise

Soviet Union, or college?

Listen:

College and Communism have two things in common: Both have a lot to do with parties, and both involve a lot of standing in line and waiting for simple things. This sort of crap starts as early as freshman orientation, most of which is spent waiting in line to fill out new and interesting forms and insurance releases, and continues until graduation, when you stand in line with everyone else in your class and wait your turn to walk across the stage. The Communism parallels go even deeper if you’re in a marching band – you stand in line twice as much as usual so you can get basic necessities like food, shoes, and the exact same clothes as everyone else.

As you may recall, I’ve elected to move out of the odious black hole of the dormitories and into the odious black hole of off campus housing. My intrepid roommates, Jeff and Josh, and myself had thought we’d beat the system by finding an apartment complex that was newly remodeled, cheap, and close to campus. However, there is always trouble in paradise, even if your paradise is a tiny room in which the toilet is uncomfortably close to the bed. The company in charge of my apartment sent out an email to all of the people who had signed a lease with them and told us that we’d need to come to the rental office on September 15th with a check for the first month’s rent, and only then would we be allowed to pick up our keys and move in. The cheap solution here is to use a crowbar to smash the door open and move in without keys, but seeing as I didn’t have a crowbar and didn’t want to mess up the beautiful, richly aged faux-wood of our new doors, I decided to gain entry to my apartment through the normal channels instead.

September 15th, as it happens, was the first day of band camp,* which is traditionally the most line-happy of marching band oriented days. There’s the line to sign in, the line to check out an instrument, the line to get each different part of your uniform, the line for auditions, the line for the single bathroom provided in our rehearsal space… It’s like the bank meets Disneyland, only instead of someone waiting to give you cash or let you go on a roller coaster, you’re waiting to get a garishly colored uniform with a gigantic “O” on it. I was fortunate to have a three-hour break between the initial spate of standing in line and the subsequent hours of marching in lines, so I took that opportunity to walk a mile and a half from registration at the stadium to my apartment complex so I could pick up my key.

*Having read this, you’ve probably smiled to yourself and gleefully said, “This one time, at band camp!” to no one in particular. If so, I’d encourage you beat yourself over the head with a sack of Valencia oranges until all the stupid is purified out of you by stinging, acidic citrus. I’d do it myself, but I’m really busy these days.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly what I’d expected to happen: September 15th was the day for everyone with a lease at this company to pick up their keys, regardless of what complex their apartment was in, and everyone had been told to come to the same place to do it. I should have been able to see the inevitable outcome, but I suppose I hadn’t thought it through very well. Evidently, the apartment managers didn’t either, because there were approximately six people on staff to process the approximately literally hundreds of tenants who showed up that day, checks in hand, ready to make a few signatures and get their flashy new keys. The result was a line that stretched from the rental office, down the hall, down a staircase, across the sidewalk, and practically into the street. Yes, this was a line of Disneyworld proportions. However, I don’t think they’re ever going to make “Finalizing The Lease Papers And Paying Your First Month’s Rent - The Ride”, because I doubt that a very slow three hour long ride that ends with you giving a complete stranger $400 would be really popular. Judging by Disney’s creativity as of late, though, they’d probably make a movie out of the ride anyway.

Hours later, I finally obtained my key and was able to personally get to know my room for the first time. The experience was a little less exciting than I’d expected. The demo unit that had won Jeff, Josh, and myself over in the spring was beautifully furnished with mirrors, towels, and fake framed pictures, while the room I walked into was bare and desolate and had a toilet that was still covered in fresh drywall. At the time, I’d assumed that this was the contractor’s fault – the idiots had forgotten to install the Charm! I was so convinced that my apartment was unlivable that I opted to stay at a friend’s house for a few more nights rather than sleep in an apartment so lacking in the homey-yet-suave furnished beauty I’d been promised. Today, though, when I stopped by and peeked in to see if any Charm had arrived, I noticed that Josh had been in and set up all his stuff in his room before heading back to Reedsport for a few more days. It was then, seeing his bedspread and kitchen appliances in a room that had been blank yesterday, when I remembered that while we’d ordered a furnished unit, Charm was nowhere on the list of provided items – we had to bring that on our own. My apartment will only start to feel like home once I actually start putting my stuff in there; until then it’s just a big empty room with a bed, the sort of place a mild mannered serial killer might inhabit.

After figuring this out, I dropped by a nearby store to buy toilet paper, because I think the first step toward a livable apartment is knowing that you’ll be covered if your food starts to disagree with you. I wound up caught in a checkout line behind four other people, carrying just an armload of TP. This was yet another line that didn’t have anything fun or exciting at the end (unless you consider hygiene to be the ultimate thrill ride), but it felt worth it to me. For one thing, it was bringing my home-away-from-home that much closer to being a “home” in any sense of the word, and for another, it’s just begging for trouble to have a fully functioning bathroom but no toilet paper. Real Ben Stiller quality stuff.


Truman Capps has never had to pay for his own toilet paper before – it’s a strange feeling, given the intended use of the product.