Apartment Number Three

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.

____

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.

______

Thank you Ozzie Ausband for proofreading and making my writing better – Blue Tile Obsession

The Motel

This story was inspired by a day I was painting the Pink Motel pool, AKA Fishbowl. Tom, the manager had asked my friend Ozzie and I to help paint the Fishbowl for a video shoot. The job took several days and on the last day Ozzie couldn’t make it so I ended up going by myself. It was a Saturday in Mid-June and it must have been 110 degrees. I was about to put the last layer of paint on when Tom told me he had something to do and would be gone for a couple of hours. I was completely alone on the old motel property. I remember it being very quiet and giving me a strange feeling. Behind the motel is a hospital and you can see the building from the pool. As I was painting, I heard screams coming from inside the hospital. The screaming went on for several hours. I knew it must have been a patient, probably going through a schizophrenic phase, but it made the whole situation feel like a scene out of a horror movie.

 

The San Fernando Valley sweltered under a mid-July heat wave. The sun hung high on a cloudless sky. It scorched everything under its angry rays. Silently the old motel rested between railroad tracks and the Sun Valley Asylum. A big sign once welcomed its guests with glowing letters: “AIR CONDITIONED”, “REFRIGERATOR”, “TV”, “CAFÉ”. Relics from its heyday in the nineteen fifties. Now, the sign was long weathered. The walls of the old building – once vibrantly glowing in pink – were sun-faded and thick wooden planks covered the windows of each of the fifteen rooms.

He was sweating under a black winter coat. The holes in his wool hat exposed a red, sunburned balding head. Life had carved deep furrows in his features and his skin had grown leathery over the years. He limped down the deserted road, a clumsy boot on one foot and the remnants of what used to be a woolen sock on the other. He had been roaming the streets ever since they threw him out of the shelter a couple of weeks ago. One night, Henry had told him that the new guy, Frank, had talked behind his back. Henry coerced him into teaching Frank a lesson by beating him up and biting off his lips. The shelter workers didn’t believe that it was Henry’s fault and asked him to leave. He sighed and looked down. Frank’s blood had formed a dark brown crust on his jacket. At least Frank would never speak ill of anyone again.

He startled when he saw the weathered motel sign rising in front of him. He immediately recognized it. For years there had been rumors about the old motel and the Sun Valley Asylum. At night some of the old guys in the shelters would tell stories about how the motel became abandoned after guests kept disappearing. Rumor had it that at night, the wardens of the asylum would come down to the old motel abducting subjects for their experiments. He was about to turn around and walk off in the other direction. “You stupid coward, you should at least look at it, now that you’re already here”. Henry screeched in his high-pitched voice. “Henry please…” he squirmed but Henry’s squeals stung in his brain like a million sharp needles. He kept walking.

The old motel loomed under the afternoon sun. An overgrown path led past the sign to the rear of the building. He squeezed through a hole in the ivy-tangled metal fence. The back of the motel lay in the shade of big palm trees. He shivered. The temperature seemed to have dropped by several degrees. Under the trees sat an empty pool in the shape of a huge fish. Behind the pool stretched a graveyard of abandoned cars from the nineteen fifties. The rusty hoods of the once glamorous vehicles morbidly gloomed in the setting sun. He walked around the pool and sat down by the shallow end in the shade of a big king palm. From here he could overlook the entire backyard. Behind the property the Sun Valley Asylum rose high into the sky casting grotesque shadows over the motel. The barred windows of the multistory building looked like dark eyes maliciously staring at him. He felt his skin crawl and had the urge to leave, but exhaustion overwhelmed him. Heat and dehydration had taken their toll. His foot hurt and he wished he still had his other shoe. He wasn’t sure what happened to it, but he was almost certain that Henry stole it the night he was sleeping in the wash behind the freeway.

He leaned back against the palm tree and closed his eyes. He would rest for just a couple of minutes. Sleep crept up onto him and lay its heavy hand on his shoulders. Afternoon became night and tinted the sky a dark blue. A scream pierced through the silence, startling him back awake. He looked around. It seemed to come from inside the asylum. “Time to go.” He muttered to himself as he lifted his aching body off the ground and inched towards the metal fence. Another scream cut through the night. His heart hammered in his chest and he started walking faster. He had almost reached the fence when a strong hand grabbed his shoulder. He spun around. A pair of light grey eyes glittered in the dark. A tall lanky figure stood in front of him. The man was dressed in white and a lab coat fluttered loosely around his grotesquely slender body. Embroidered letters on his chest said: “Sun Valley Asylum”. “It’s time to go, Sir”, whispered the figure and brandished a pair of leather restraints.

“Henry, help me” he sobbed. Then he felt a long needle gouging through his skin. Henry’s malicious laughter thrummed through his brain and it was the last thing he perceived before darkness settled over him.

His head swam. He opened his eyes. A bright light hurt his brain. Blurry silhouettes moved around him. The hollow sound of hard soles on a vinyl floor and the clacking of metal instruments echoed in his ears. It smelled of alcohol and disinfectants. He tried to move but thick leather restrains cut into his wrists.

“Welcome back, Mr. Smith” the warm voice of a women seemed to came from one of the silhouettes. “We were worried for you”. The silhouette leaned over him and slowly became a young woman in white scrubs. She smiled. “You have to keep taking your Haldol, Sir. It’ll help you feel better. Remember, we’ve talked about this before?”. She started removing his restraints and helped him sit up in his bed. “I’ll get you some breakfast. You must be hungry.” Still smiling, she walked out of the room.

He started recognizing his room. He remembered that he’s been in the hospital for weeks. They have been giving him pills that made the bad voices in his head go away. He remembered the bed with the soft pillows and the nurse that would always bring him the blueberry yogurt that he liked. Relieved he leaned against the head of his bed and closed his eyes. There was no asylum and there were no evil experiments. He was safe. He was home.

“Hihihi” someone was laughing. He opened his eyes. The room was empty. “Hihihi” there it was again. Then a sharp, high-pitched voice crawled up from deep inside his brain: “You little wimp better get out of here.”

_______

Thank you Ozzie Ausband for proofreading and making my writing better – Blue Tile Obsession