This Blows
The mirror in my bathroom is broken. The super told me the replacement vanity would be something like $29 and that he’d contact the landlord about getting it fixed. Simple enough…
Today, though, on my way out the door to go to work, the super told me the landlord refused to replace it. He said it wasn’t his responsibility. It made me angry.
To call the guy who owns the building in which I live a “landlord” would be too generous. Slumlord is far more appropriate. His argument for the broken vanity not being his responsibility is just the latest in a string of hemming and hawing to avoid fixing the results of his own cheapness.
If it rains hard enough, one of my bedroom windows leaks. When it’s cold, the same bad seal that allows in water lets the cold air seep in, negating any lingering heat in the room after the heaters quickly stop churning.
Luckily, it’s warm again. My AC works and I thank dumb luck that the socket for the AC works, because one of my bedroom sockets is totally dead. Also, the ones that work were so miserably screwed in that I had to more firmly affix them, inside the wall, myself.
Cheap, jackleg labor is all the slumlord — to call him a man would also be too generous — will spring for. A man has compassion enough to treat with decency other human beings to whom he purveys a good or service.
At work, there are three functioning urinals out of four. They are haphazardly scattered throughout the men’s bathroom. One of them is a midget / handicap urinal and it is situated right next to a grown-up person’s urinal, divided by a metal partition with flaking paint.
There is another urinal, the most private one, in a cul de sac created by a structural wall to the left and a bathroom stall on the right. This pisser is out of order and has been for weeks.
The final urinal might as well be a drain in the floor because it’s in a “Hey, look at my dick!” position that affords no privacy of any kind and gives anyone coming into the bathroom from the south entrance a presumably unwanted cock flash.
So, in short, the one viable urinal is the grown-up one near the wee people’s one, yet this urinal is caked on the inside with yellow film that proves it has never been cleaned. People at work piss on the floor more than into the receptacles, so there is always a big puddle of urine below. It is a hugely unpleasant experience to relieve oneself in such a squalid environ.
I haven’t even talked about the toilets. There is a huge handicap stall, which I could never use because I don’t need to feel like I’m shitting in an open field. In addition, there are three other stalls, one of which does not flush — and has not for more than six months — and the other two are a crap shoot. Yes, these puns are intended.
Today, someone was in one of the stalls leaving only the one that doesn’t flush and the other normal-sized one. Of course, the one viable toilet had shit on the seat. Yes. Shit. On the seat. How does that happen?
So, any attempt to de-deuce will require a field trip to a floor in the building with superior facilities.
As I stood, micturating in the disgusting, piss-film-caked urinal, I thought about my shithead slumlord and the any-price-is-too-high nature of rent in this city. I thought about the nasty state of the bathroom here at work and I tried hard to find something in the course of my everyday — something that is intrinsically part of New York — that makes living here worthwhile.
I couldn’t find it.
And then the slogan “the Greatest City in the World” popped into my head and it offended me. Yeah, right. For whom? The rich, maybe. Tourists, maybe. But for people who don’t make money hand over fist and have to live either four to a one-bedroom or, to be alone, in a piece of shit ghetto slum where some mouse-y ’stached motherfucker nickels and dimes on essential quality of life items so he can electroplate his can opener … this city is a fucking shithole.
Tags: boo-hoo, ennui, Flatbush, misanthropy