I live in one of the neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley where the streets are used as a public garbage disposal and gangs are marking their territory by tagging every surface capable of holding spray paint. Every morning homeless people dig through the trash cans in front of my kitchen window. Drug addicts, roaming the streets like zombies or passing out on the side walk, are not an unusual sight. For a while we had a young homeless man squatting in the laundry room of our apartment complex. My neighbor told me that the guy had been coming to the property for years. The former tenants of apartment number three used to cook crystal meth and he would buy drugs from them. The old tenants are long gone and the homeless guy hardly ever comes back any more but it made me wonder what was going on behind some of the apartment doors in my neighborhood.
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It was the morning of New Year’s Day. He had spent the last night in a U-Haul truck pulled over on the side of the road in the outer part of the city. The night had been cold and uncomfortable but he didn’t mind. It was what he had to do to move forward. He started the truck and turned on the heat. Sipping strong black coffee, he steered the truck into one of the poorer neighborhoods, deep in the San Fernando Valley. The sidewalks were cluttered with empty beer cans, old take-out containers and broken furniture parts. Graffiti adorned house walls and street signs. He sighed and parked the truck in front of an old apartment complex. At least he had found a place to stay. He didn’t have many options. Here, the landlord didn’t care about his bad credit as long as the rent would be paid in cash every month. He opened the door to the small apartment. It was dark and the air smelled stale. The brown linoleum floor was dirty and worn. As he turned on the light, a cockroach quickly scuttled and disappeared under the stove. Not a good sign. It didn’t take him long to move his few belongings. When night came, he lay on the old mattress in the corner of the small room. He stared at the ceiling. Tomorrow morning, he would start his new job. The first day of his new life. This time he would do it right.
“Hi my name is Chad.” A young man had just come out of one of the apartments. It was six in the morning and the winter sun crawled up behind the hills. “My wife Linda and I live in that unit.” He gestured towards a dark brown door with a rusty sign that displayed the number “three”. “Nice to meet you. I moved into number one yesterday.” He shook Chads hand. “Welcome! You should come over and watch the game with us on Sunday. Do you like football?”. He didn’t care much about football but Chad seemed nice and he didn’t have anything else to do. “That sounds great. See you Sunday.”
The next few weeks went by. Dull and bleak. He hated the monotonous work in the factory, but he needed the money. The only silver lining was the evenings he spent with Chad and Linda. They had become good friends. Their apartment was warm and cozy. They would hang out there, talk, eat and listen to music. For the first time in in a while he felt somewhat happy and content. Then spring came and Chad and Linda informed him that they had bought a condo on the other side of the hill. He helped them pack up and move their things into the big truck when they were ready to leave. “I’ll follow you soon.” He waved as they drove off. He had planned to save up his money and get out of this neighborhood. He glanced at apartment number three. The curtains were closed and it lay dark and quiet. No music, no laughter, no smell of Linda’s carne asada tacos. It seemed like Chad and Linda had taken the light and the warmth with them.
Summer came and the mid-July heat had forced life to a halt. One boiling Sunday afternoon he watched a skeletal-like figure walking up the driveway. Her blonde hair hung in messy tangles over her sweat-stained shirt. Her pale arms dragged a dirty suitcase across the rough asphalt and she disappeared into apartment number three. In the following days he watched strange men knocking on her door. They would rarely stay for much longer than half an hour and right after one left the next one would already walk up. One evening – bored and lonely – he knocked on her door. A pair of empty eyes looked at him through the door slit. “Hi I’m…” he stammered. “Come in.” Before he finished his sentence, she had opened the door and walked towards the bed that sat on the other side of the room. Her name was Leila and once again he became a regular visitor of apartment number three.
The place had changed since he last visited. Nothing remained of Chad and Linda. Gone were the fun evenings they had spent there. Dim lighting couldn’t hide the squalor. It was hot and smelled of sweat and kitchen waste. The lumpy, threadbare mattress was yellowed and stained. The sheets on the bed had short black hairs on the pillows. She wasn’t very good, but he felt a little less lonely when he was with her. One night – he was putting his jeans back on – she handed him a little glass pipe. She grabbed a green lighter from the night stand and signaled him to put the pipe in his mouth. It was the first time he smoked crack and he really liked it. It became their little ritual and in the following weeks he would bring all the money he made to apartment number three. It became the small price he paid to forget about his sorrows.
The sound of sirens woke him up one night. An ambulance had backed into the driveway and two paramedics carried a lifeless figure out of apartment number three. He stepped outside as they pushed the stretcher past his door. “What happened?” He asked. “Overdose. I hope it’s not too late.”, mumbled one of the paramedics and paced towards the ambulance. Leila never came back and nobody came to pick up her belongings. Apartment number three remained empty.
He knew something was wrong when he got the fevers and muscle aches. It had started a couple of days after they took Leila´s body away. He should have gone to a doctor but he didn’t have insurance. He caught his pale reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Do you want to know anyway?” Winter came and he developed a cough. He simply thought he had the flu but the coughing never went away. He would get nauseous and began waking in soaking wet sheets. Night sweats. When he started getting dark red blotches on his legs, he knew what it was and he knew where he got it from. “Damn it Leila”.
One morning, on his way to work, he saw that the door of apartment number three stood open. Just an inch. He thought someone had moved in after all, but when he came back that night, the door was still open. Strange. He walked past the apartment and for a split second he saw a pair of eyes glittering in the dark. The following weeks, the door remained open and every once in a while, he would see a pair of brown eyes peeking through the slit.
One cold December evening when he came back from the factory his nausea was particularly bad. He walked up the driveway and right in front of apartment number three his stomach started cramping and forced him down to his knees. With convulsive heaving, he vomited thick yellow bile. “Hey, I’ve got something for you.”, a voice announced. A young man had come out of apartment three and stared at him. Long filthy dreadlocks hung over his shoulders and his clothes were torn and dirt stained. The man pulled him to his feet and guided him into the apartment.
A candle was the only source of light in the room. Empty soda cans, tissue papers and rotting food had been carelessly thrown on the floor. It smelled of excrement. The man sat him on the bed in the corner. There were no sheets and the mattress had dark yellow stains. “You got some cash?”, the man asked. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. The man went to work. With Leila’s green lighter he melted light-brown powder on a rusty spoon. He barely noticed the dirty needle that pierced through the skin of his forearm. It was immediate relief.
The worse his symptoms got the more regular he sat on the filthy mattress. Torture loop. It became his existence. Once again, he carried every dollar, he made to apartment number three. Life punctures the skin.
The morning of New Year’s Day was cold and quiet. The sky was steel. The clouds growled on the horizon. People slept from the night’s revelries. The door of apartment number three stood wide open. It creaked on its hinges. His thin body lay on the bed, a needle in his forearm. Blank eyeballs stared at nothing. No life lived here. His lips were blue and contorted into a grotesque grimace. A week went by before they found his body. The police came and sealed the door. Once again apartment number three remained empty.
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Thank you Ozzie Ausband for proofreading and making my writing better – Blue Tile Obsession