written inaction

As I hit snooze for the 12^th or 13^th time I begin to wonder how my life would be if I had the same drive in the early morning that I do in the late evening.  Mornings represent little more than the 12-hour wakeup process that leads to my own personal enlightenment at 9pm. But this morning is different.  Today is the day that I will enter the house.  I go out for a run around Green Lake and as I pass the corner, the building captures my eye against my will.  The brick façade contrasts the peeling yellow paint in a way that would be beautiful if it weren’t so run down. 

When I finish my run I shower, make a lunch, and let my nerves have a field day. This is stupid.  Is facing my fears worth getting hurt or killed?  At the same time, this will probably be nothing, just sleeping people.  What if they turn on me?  What if they want to hurt me?  What if they find out I live next door and think I’m one of the people that calls the cops on them?

As the piece of toast flips in my stomach a devise a plan.  I’m going to do this.  The plan is executed like this:

Phase 1:  Attire—I clearly cannot enter this building with a low profile if I’m wearing nice bright, clean clothes, so I start looking for clothes a homeless person might wear.  Soberingly, my wardrobe easily lends itself to this.  I decide on some jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a vest, and my favorite hat.  I look in the mirror and almost offer myself change.  Perfect.

Phase 2: Alibi—I decide that if anyone asks, I’m “trying to find Jeff”.  If I’m unlucky enough to be led to a Jeff, my response will then be “no, not this Jeff.  This guy was (shorter/taller) and had (brown/red/blonde) hair”, at which point I’ll shake my head in a frustrated manner and get the flying fuck out of there before they scare up another Jeff.   

Phase 3: Countenance—When I get nervous, I get overly expressive.  I talk fast, and I apologize a lot.  In my time, I’ve never met a fast-talking vagrant, nor one who offers smiling apologies.  I practice reacting to anything with dead eyes and no smile in the mirror.  If all else fails, I’ll play a drug addict and stare at the wall.  I test this as I walk past the house on my first casing.  A man in a shirt and tie seems me coming.  I meet him with dead eyes and he stiffens a little.  To make sure he’s not just a tight ass, I look up, smile, and say “how ya doing?”  and he immediately looks at me like I’m a lost friend.  This is incredible.  Perhaps I should consider part-time homelessness to freak people out.

A few more passes and it’s time to go in.  A walk towards the dumpsters between the buildings offers an opportunity to scout out the situation; a kicked-in door offers a way in, and before my mind can object, my feet take me toward it.  It’s in or out now—I have to look like I belong.  Striding confidently but silently, I climb the few stairs to the first landing in the building.  I am in a stairwell that leads to all three floors, each having it own fire door.  After I note possible escape routes and potential excuses for being there, I consider the possibility of coming up against some territorial resident who doesn’t like me on his floor.  Or the large, mentally ill man I’d seen staring at the sidewalk late at night. This has all the makings of a standard horror movie, an unnerving fact that has not gone unnoticed.  Sequestering such thoughts to the back of my mind, I push open the fire door to the first floor and walk in silently.  The carpet is warped, loose and moist, and makes a dull wet sound when I walk on it.  A stale smell permeates the air, and as I pass doors, I notice the padlocks that tenants have put on their doors.  Signs of “Dave doesn’t live here anymore” and “No entry under any circumstance” are duct-taped to the outside of some of the doors, and in passing them, I can hear people.  The people move, hold conversations, or make a sound like someone smacking a vein before shooting up, which I m sure it my imagination.  Before long, my heart pounding so hard that I can see it through my sweatshirt, I come to the front stairwell and am at a crossroads.  Either way I will have to go back through the building to get out, so why not go for broke, I think.  Looking up, I begin climbing the stairs to the second level, creaking as I go.  The doorway to the second level is worse than the first: it is graffitied and almost completely blocked by trash.  What’s more, the trash is strange and disturbing—large tubs of restaurant pickles, crumpled papers, an enormous drum that must have held food at some point, and two milk jugs that look as though they’re filled with fermenting human sick.  With no doorknob, I have to reach into a hole in the door and pry it open.

The second floor has a greater number of vacant rooms, most of them buried in papers and refuse.  Doors appear to have been kicked off their hinges, and the carpet is wetter than the first floor.  Instead of a stale smell, this level smells of mold and damp mixed with putrification.  It’s darker.  There appear to be only a few people living on this floor, and as I almost trip on the warped, carpeted floorboards, I have a hard time seeing how they can.  Even if the apartments themselves were inhabitable, which is in doubt, I can’t see someone walking through here every day without getting becoming sick.  I reach the end of the hallway and walk through, because the door has been torn from its hinges. 

Since I’d already come this far, I figure I might as well seal the deal, lest I spend the rest of my days wondering what horrors lurked on the third floor.  Ascending, I can already see the dampness of the carpet seeping down the stairs.  Two things occur to me; the fact that the recent rains cannot have helped this building, and the concern that I am walking on the third-level floorboards in a condemned and clearly water damaged building.  Deciding that this entire venture has been securely filed in the catalog of bad ideas, I press on past the fire and gawk as what I see.

In an effort to keep their presence covert, it appears that the residents, who would have been detected if they had used the dumpsters, opted to dump all of their trash on the third level.  This practice, combined with ample moisture from the failing roof, had resulted in a floor that was completely uninhabitable.  No closed doors existed in this space, as all rooms were piled high with bag, boxes, and random pieces of garbage—bicycles, tired, and old stove.  The carpet here was completely wet, and sprouted actual mushrooms in the darker corners.  Here the floorboards did not squeak, and I feared that my foot would punch through a rotten board at any moment.  I found myself breathing shallowly not out of fear, but out of concern of some strange toxic mold spore that would invade my lungs.  Before long I had delicately picked my way through to the other stairway and began my descent.  When I reached the first floor I pushed through the door with confidence—the exit was in sight and compared to what was upstairs, this level seemed to only require a quick vacuum.  When I finally reached the outside elation gave way to disappointment, which I chalked up to a learning experience.  There was no secret criminal community lurking here—sure there was some level of governance, and a population of less-than desirables, but the fact is that they were into keeping to themselves.  I suppose I had expected a vibrant or dangerous squatter community making Ramen in a kitchen area somewhere, plotting the next ciminal activity, but the building was little more than a semblance of shelter to them—a place to spend nights and keep possessions. 

As I walked back to my apartment, dropping my shoes before entering, I thought about how strange it must be to live like that.  Were people born this way?  Did they just not care?  Did they have no other choice?  Where would they go when the police finally cleared the building in a week?

I kept these thoughts to myself as I talked with Beckers later that evening.  I didn’t want to bother her with them, and I didn’t much feel like telling her about what I’d done.  But being that we have an honest relationship, I did tell her.  Very quickly.  After we had said goodnight. Right before I shut my phone off.  The all-caps text I got in the morning hinted that she was less than pleased.