The Things in My Apartment: Week Three
Friday, February 26, 2010 at 1:15PM The Ghost
The ghost didn’t die in this apartment. He never even lived here.
I’ve lived here longer than this ghost.
On a dark and stormy night, with the power lines swaying dangerously to and fro, his spirit came to us.
My roommates and I had been expecting a delivery from Corporal Wang’s Kitchen. Corporal Wang’s is a highly suspect Chinese restaurant. Health inspectors have closed the doors at least twice since I moved to the area.
But Wang’s is dirt cheap, surprisingly tasty, and pretty close by.
And none of us had felt like cooking.
When the doorbell rang, my roommates and I naturally expected one of the delivery guys.
Instead we got one of the delivery guys’ ghosts.
We got Jake’s ghost.
Jake wasn't Chinese, and neither is his spirit. In life, Jake was a tubby white guy, and a bit of a hipster, who always had an attitude. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, as if he had a PhD in food delivery. Every time he showed up at my door, he looked at me like I was some sad tool of Corporate America. Which I guess I am, but what the fuck? Like he was leading the revolution by schlepping around poisonous crab rangoons?
Anyway, Jake’s ghost is even worse. Now that he's dead, I guess he thinks that gives him some credentials. He was certainly Mr. Righteous on that dark and stormy night. After I answered the door, he just stared at me with this "So-what-do-you-have-to-say-for-yourself?" kind of look.
“No, sir,” said Jake. “No I am not.” Jake had always called me “sir,” to emphasize what a dick I was for making him do his job. “Thank you for asking after my well-being, sir, but I am afraid that, far from being ‘okay’ on this fine evening, I am dead.”
Jake has this way of stating the obvious in order to make you feel stupid. I could tell he was dead. He was a glowing, transparent spectre, with evidence of a nasty head wound. Of course the guy was dead. I was just trying to be polite.
“You see, sir,” continued Jake in sanctimonious tones, “no other customers had hearts hard enough to demand my services this night. You were my only stop. Poor visibility and wet roads guided my car into a lamppost, and the impact guided my fucking body through the fucking windshield. Here is your dinner.”
In our defense, we had put together a thirty per cent tip for Jake. But he had no use for it now.
Now he just hangs out on the couch, and passes judgment on whatever TV shows we try to watch.
“Oh, Star Trek reruns!” he’ll say. “That’s lovely. Had my life not been cut so pointlessly short, I should like to think that I would have made such worthy use of my time. Really, you honor my memory by spending your lives like this”
Every once in a while, Jake will place a huge order at Corporal Wang’s, for which we have to pick up the tab. It’s not like he can eat it, or anything. And he won’t let us eat it either. And if we try to throw it away, he’ll lay down a huge guilt trip. “Don’t judge how I mourn,” he’ll say.
Once I asked Jake when he thought he’d be ready to pass over to the other side.
“Are you trying to get rid of me, sir? If so, simply say the word. Just say, ‘Jake, your presence here is a burden to us. We know we’re responsible for your demise (because we couldn’t be bothered to cook for ourselves) but we really don’t have the patience or compassion to house you any longer - even though you consume no food, use no heat, and have no physical fucking form!’”
And the crab rangoons continue to rot.
The Things in My Apartment: Week Two
Friday, February 12, 2010 at 1:15PM My Soul
Three weeks into my career as a concierge, my soul stopped coming with me to work. This made things easier on the job, but it’s put a strain on my home life.
If I ever want to do anything after work, I have to go back to the apartment first and convince my soul to come with me. There have been lots of arguments.
“Why do you need me to come?” my soul will say. “Clearly I’m just holding you back.”
When my soul first separated from my body in protest, it looked a lot like me, only nobler. But at some point, my soul turned into a beautiful young woman who stares at me with angry, betrayed blue eyes.
“What am I supposed to think?” she says. “How can I interpret your actions as anything but a rejection of our relationship? You work at a luxury hotel…"
(It’s usually at this point that I sit on the bed and try to avoid eye contact)
“You spend all your time and energy serving a hollow world of wealth and status. A world where concepts like ‘exclusivity’ and ‘preferential treatment’ are invoked as if they were sacred values!”
“It’s just a job,” I often mutter.
“And pretty soon, you will just be the job. You’ve got an education. You don’t have any children to support. How can you justify working there?”
A great way to feel truly wretched about yourself is to realize that, while your soul has been pleading with you, you’ve been staring at her legs.
Sometimes she’ll cry, and I’ll try to hug her, and she’ll push me away. Then I’ll leave our room and play video games, and she’ll stay where she is and play mournfully on a clarinet. I don’t know where she got the clarinet.
My roommates are a little worried. My soul never turns the thermostat up, or uses any electricity, but we’re not supposed to have more than three people living here at a time.
Things are also awkward when guests come over. I have tried to pass my soul off as an old friend from college, as a cousin and, yes, even as my girlfriend. But she’ll have none it.
“Pleased to meet you,” she’ll say. “I’m Greg’s soul. I’ve separated from him because he has no use for me anymore. I’m thinking about getting my own place.”
My roommate Jessica has started to take her side. “Can you really not find another job? I mean - she seems to want to make it work.”
I don’t know why I’ve decided to be so stubborn about this. I agree that it’s a crummy job with no socially redeeming value. But job hunting is such a pain, and for some reason I don’t like being bossed around by my soul.
“Maybe if you did some volunteer work at a homeless shelter, or something?” Jessica suggests.
Meanwhile, the clarinet music grows more sorrowful with each passing day.
The Things in My Apartment: Week One
Friday, January 29, 2010 at 12:00PM "The Goblin"
Every night, between the hours of one and five, a goblin rents my apartment.
I didn’t know about this arrangement until last week, but it’s been on my lease the whole time.
The goblin pays our landlord, Ted, by the hour. Goblins don’t have money, so he pays Ted with the lies of wicked little children.
That’s five lies of wicked little children a night. I asked Ted what he does with them. Ted says they make good paint thinner.
This is how I found out about the goblin that rents my apartment:
A friend of mine asked me if I would like to contribute regularly to a website. Impulsively, I agreed. But I’m not good at keeping to a schedule.
The night before my first deadline, I hadn’t started on anything. I had work the next morning, and I was dead tired. I went to bed early and set my alarm for two a.m., figuring I could write something before work.
My bedroom is an unholy mess, so I usually write at the table in my apartment’s common room. My roommates put up with this.
The goblin wasn’t cool with it.
I didn’t even notice him at first. I went straight for the kitchen, made some coffee, drank it in two gulps. Then I sat down at the common room table, right across from the goblin, and obliviously set up my laptop. As my computer booted up, I felt his glare. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt a goblin’s glare, but it feels a like bucket of wet cement pored over your head. Later on, I mentioned this to him, and he assured me that it’s intentional.
After I felt his glare, I looked up and saw his form.
His skin is the color of human failure, which is a dull orange. His three-foot tall body is plump, yet imposing. He’s bald, but he has a full beard made of black spider’s legs. They wriggle in quiet agony. His nose looks, and behaves, like a tube sock filled with cockroaches. He wears no clothing, save for a bird’s nest that serves as a loincloth. Broken egg shells and feathers can still be seen in its branches.
We stared at each other for a very long time.
Finally, in a deep, distorted voice that sounds as if it’s been slowed down to reveal satanic messages, he said, “Do you know what time it is?”
Then he explained the deal he had with our landlord. This filled me with a shrill indignation, which is my version of courage. Even after he directed my attention to page nine of my lease, I continued to argue.
“I’ve been awake at this time before,” I said, “and I’ve never seen you,”
He snorted, filling the room with a smell of sulfur.
“Well, have you ever drank coffee at this time before - dumbass?”
I admitted that I hadn’t.
“The coffee lets you see me,” he explained. “The magic beans stimulate your frontal lobe.”
I protested that it was just Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee, and that I’d bought it on sale with my Shaw’s Rewards Card.
“Beans is beans,” he informed me.
After I accepted the truth, we chatted for a while, and it seemed like this might be an okay set up. He didn't like me, but he didn't seem to like anything, so that took the stress off. Shortly before the clock struck five, however, he revealed that he intended to charge me for the three hours I’d just spent in his apartment. Another clause in my lease, which I really should have read more carefully, showed that he was well within his rights.
I told him that I couldn’t possibly pay him – I didn’t know how to collect the lies of wicked little children. He told me that was tough. But then he softened and said he could accept a jar full of the sweat created by my worst nightmares.
That worked out just fine.