Oh, I remember the halcyon days of living on Havemeyer and North 7th, paying $600 a month for a railroad apartment that had no functioning kitchen appliances. The walls crumbled when trucks drove by, and the sills were so rotted that we once almost crushed our aged super with our A/C when we tried to take it out of the window. The previous tenant had made a living off of forgery and check kiting and when he died of a coronary, slumped over a table mounded with seventeen different checkbooks, no one noticed he was missing for a week. It was pretty obvious that the floors had not been sufficiently cleaned (by cleaned, I mean men in white suits doing crime scene remediation) since then, but, y'know, $600 on the northside of the WB; a lot of people would've moved into that apartment with the corpse still in situ. When we decided to move out and find an apartment with a working fridge, all our old codger homesteader artiste friends shook their heads in astonishment. The general concensus was that we were Out of Our Fucking Minds and that we should buy our own fridge and stove and just be grateful to have a cheap apartment we couldn't be evicted from. Pure folly on our part, it's true; by now I would have the perfect sniping vantage point.

Eight years later, I now live in an apartment with functioning kitchen appliances and a decrepit bathroom (Eating, shitting: Pick 'em) and N and I keep the place slightly above Crazy Hoarding Lady standards of cleanliness but, y'know, we all have our off fortnights.

Last night in our sweltering, soporific confines, the kitchen garbage was in its second day of stinking. And amazingly, it was emanating heat. I had a flashback to childhood, when we would turn the compost pile** over with a pitchfork and dig out the wriggly earthworms for bait. The thought of spontaneous garbage can combustion crossed my mind, but it's one of those bourgeois stainless steel jobbies, so I went back to the living room to don my wet-towel tallit and sit in front of the fan, davening for a drop in temperature.***

So hey, this morning? New things afoot in the garbage: Maggots! Squirming. Everywhere. And although I once summoned the fortitude to run down a flight of stairs carrying a roach-infested armoire, today I decided to assume a traditional gender role, freak out, and roust N to take care of it.

It reminded me of the check-kiter. As I said, he'd been dead for awhile by the time my downstairs neighbor called the police. They crawled up the fire escape and jimmied open the window. As the story goes, the stench was so awful that one of the cops almost fell off.

This morning wasn't quite that bad.

*This is true. Someone horked up what looked like pizza and Fruit Loops up and down the stairwell in our building. They didn't clean it up, either. Only after calls to the landlord did the super get off his lackadaisical war criminal ass and clean it up. (What. Every year he gets 50 goddamned bucks from us for Christmas. For $50 I'd have cleaned it up.) He did a halfhearted job of it, too, and there are crusty remains of said vomit all over the place, a daily reminder that we don't deserve nice things.
**My mother was very avant, another city person who feels virtuous because she touches her own garbage.
***Classy.