The Secret Subletter


Sorry for length. Here goes: cue me, a college student in upstate New York, returning from 5 months in Japan, heavy with okonomiyaki and daifuku, remembering that I had left some boxes in the now vacated apartment that 3 friends and I had been renting at school. In order to get our security deposit back, I would have to reclaim my boxes and tidy up the room I had lived in. However, even the piss soaked fishy streets that I had occasionally wandered in outer Osaka had not prepared me for what I would see.

When I got back, the door was unlocked. This was troubling as our neighborhood was not an extremely safe one. I was prepared for the worst: a wild eyed squatter with heroin needles and swinging a sack of stolen car radios.

What I found: My room, and the rest of the 4 bedroom house, filled with ancient dirty dishes, $500 of ski jackets and shirts, oil paintings, the floor littered with dozens of nitrous oxide canisters and packets of green leafy stuff, and finally, a dark brown thick sticky film covering every flat surface in the kitchen, which I later discovered to be evaporated beer.

One of my housemates had agreed to let a mutual friend "sublet" (read: squat) over the summer, and let's just say he could have made a different and better decision.

I spent 2 entire days cleaning, but because the fire alarms had been disabled and the toilet essentially destroyed, we never got our money back (the "friend" reclaimed his jackets and paintings). I have forgotten the sum, but I will never forget the feeling of that beer film.
( the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Sun 28 Mar 2010, 20:51, Reply)