10/17/00: Freaks Me Out Every Time
I live in a reasonably decent apartment building, up near Lincoln Center, the west 60s. My building is full of mainly young people, starving artist types. It’s nice enough I guess but what I’m paying in rent I could be using to… do something else with. Enough on that subject for right now.
What I want to tell you is about the basement.
When you do laundry in my building, naturally you have to go to the basement. You come out of the elevator and go down a long, dimly lit corridor. The lights are greenish and they flicker, and as you pass the trash room the smell is overpowering, stale and musty more than rotten but certainly unpleasant. Once walking down this corridor, I saw something furry moving towards me very rapidly. I don’t have very good distance vision so that’s all I could register until it was up close. Of course I still surprised myself by screaming very loudly and launching myself into the air with a little yelp. Turns out it was a cat chasing a rat that was almost the same size. That’s pleasant.
Another time, walking down this corridor, I was surrounded by buzzing things that I realized very soon were yellow jackets. Now, I should tell you that when I was four, my cousin Sean was collecting yellow jackets in jars for reasons known only to himself – he was four also, and I’m sure it seemed a good idea – and he dropped a jar full of them at my feet. The jar smashed open and the bees took out their aggression on me. That's kind of traumatic for a small child, and suffice it to say I don’t like yellow jackets much now. So until the maintainance guys got rid of the bees, I had to walk through this area with the laundry basket over my head like a shark cage. Except when the basket was full, and then I just had to walk VERY CAREFULLY.
I told you that story to tell you this one.
I almost never notice this other freaky basement thing on my way to the machines, but on my way back up, waiting for the elevator, I see it and it gives me the shivers every time. There’s a door that’s roughly perpendicular to the elevator door, and it’s marked “Meter Room” or something else official like that. This door is locked with a pretty badass lock. To wit: someone drilled a hole with a diameter of about 2 inches in the door itself, near the doorknob, on the left side of the door. Just to the left of the door, someone made a hole in the wall itself, about the same size, but a bit rougher. You can see the netting that was used when the area was replastered. There is a thick, heavy chain that goes through these two holes, and it's secured with a big bad Master lock. And as an additional warning, or maybe as a gleeful taunt, someone wrote in the once damp concrete -- probably with his finger -- "TRY IT NOW ASSHOLE".
I don't know why this freaks me out. It's like this recurring dream I had as a little one, where I would be in a courtroom and I'd be waiting for the judge to turn around in his swivel chair, and when he did he would shout "COURT!" at the top of his lungs and I would wake up, trembling in fear, my ears ringing from the sound. I told people about this dream and they didn't see what was scary about it. But it was terrifying.
This TRY IT NOW ASSHOLE thing gives me the absolute creeping willies. I can't help it. Maybe it's the flickering lights, or the threat of the yellow jackets or the possibility that any moment a furry thing will run at me or maybe it's just the thick damp smell. But I feel like the corridor of the basement is my own private hell.
Now you think I'm a wimp, don't you? Well, I'm not afraid of heights or daddy longlegs. So there.
other musings about needing to get out of new york and stuff
More musings that involve my childhood. I promise that none of them are particularly precious.