Dead Man Rotting

As I was returning home from the sushi bar last night I saw a pleasant-looking young man moving into the apartment next door, which has been vacant for about two months now. I introduced myself and found him nice enough—perhaps mentally disabled, perhaps too much cologne—and I wondered if anyone had told him about the apartment’s previous occupant (cue flashback-style harp music now)…

Old Mill was an ass and quite possibly the worst neighbor possible for a very small, very cramped studio apartment with a shared kitchen. He earned his name by repeatedly coming home drunk at 2 a.m., proceeding to the shared kitchen, and singing—yes, singing—as he poured himself yet another Old Miluake, over ice of course. You can only listen to your drunk neighbor singing “Mmmm-mmmm, Old Mill…” at 2 a.m. about twenty times or so before despising him. But this is just for starters. He left his ratty old tennis shoes to rot on the balcony for almost a year, even after I had filled them with egg flower soup in an attempt to get him to throw them away (he did eventually throw them away—into the bushes under my window). He washed his nasty underwears in –I’m assuming—his toilet and left them to dry in the kitchen. He made rude comments about my weight and after I complained to management about his harassment he proceeded to ask me out. Foul.

Enough exposition. One Sunday afternoon about two months ago I noticed a bad odor in the kitchen, sort of like rotting cabbage. It being maybe two days after St. Patrick’s Day, I figured someone had forgotten to properly refrigerate their leftover corned beef and cabbage after celebrating with a glass or two too much of Guinness. By the end of the day, the kitchen smelled like rotting cabbage and shit. By the next afternoon, the smell was getting into my apartment and I called management to complain. Maintenance came around to investigate, failed to find a cause for the odor in the kitchen, and began searching the neighboring apartments for the source of the smell. They found it. It turns out Old Mill had died in his apartment maybe ten days earlier and had been slowly rotting ever since. The police were called, the apartment was barricaded, and a hazmat team came in to vacuum up the remains, which at that point, I’ve been told, would have been well on their way to becoming soup.

Of course I called everybody, but only Melissa was clever enough to call back and say, “My name is Wolf, I solve problems.” As many times as I had hoped and prayed for Old Mill’s demise, it was a little surreal to have it actually occur, and in such a macabre fashion. Jo asked if I felt at all bad, but if I felt anything it was more like schadenfreude. The only sad thing about the entire situation was that nobody missed this human being for ten days, and that’s not sad as in too bad, that’s sad as in pathetic.

A couple of months earlier I had been complaining about my apartment situation in the faculty lounge, and my department head told me to think of it as novel fodder. Boy was she ever right—this being the best story I’ve ever had to tell in the first person, it’s for sure making it into my memoirs. And I’ve had much more peace and quiet to work on the creative process without having a drunken ass in the kitchen whistling catches of sea shanty. Needless to say, it’s been a nice couple of months.

And so I was a little torn when I saw that the apartment would once again be occupied. I don’t try to be hermit-like, but in the end neighbors rarely turn out to be anything more than a hassle here in the ghetto. Yet the young man moving in seemed so simple and earnest I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that a fat slob had lain dead and rotting on his floor not two months earlier; I’ll leave that to one of the coarser neighbors. Besides, if all goes to plan I’ll be moving out myself before the end of the summer. Thank God.