When I went off to college I was not yet 18 because of where my birthday lies. It's an unusual thing being a minor and moving into your own place because you are not yet legally allowed to sign a lease or at least that was the case back then. My parents had to sign off on the lease.
I remember how I met my first roommate. I was at a party surrounded by people that I mostly didn't know and I just shouted out "is anyone here looking for a roommate?" and this little long-haired dude called out "I am!" and thankfully we got along and neither of us turned out to be a nutjob. We stayed roommates for a year I think, then we of course lost our deposit.
Recently I was back in that part of the state for some reason and swung by the ol apartment to see if it was still there and it actually was.
This is not a picture from the 90's this is from last week. You can tell by the more modern cars I guess. But let me tell you how absolutely awful this place was when we first moved in.
For starters, the place was filthy and there were dead bugs all over the apartment. I guess we were just willing to deal with whatever because me and Jay just went ahead and moved in. I don't think the place had a phone line installed yet so it's not like we could call anyone.
The biggest problem was that the back bedroom was missing a window. it was broken, it just wasn't there at all. It was very strange. We borrowed a phone from a neighbor and called the landlord who immediately accused us of breaking it. That should have been a warning sign that this guy was a slumlord. He did reluctantly send someone down to replace the window and behaved as though he was doing us a favor by putting the new window in. He said something along the lines of "be more careful from now on" still insinuating that we broke the window, which we definitely did not.
The total rent for this 2 bedroom place was 425 dollars a month. I rember that so well because writing a check for 212.50 is an odd amount of rent to pay. I had plenty of checks with that carbon copy of them on it because I didn't really write any other checks.
Other than our own respective beds and a hand me down kitchen table that my parents gave me, we didn't really have any furniture at all and we proceeded to run around the neighborhood and go "curb shopping."
This is quite common in college life or at least it was. We would spot a sofa on the side of the road, look at it and check for rats and what not and if it was up to our standards - which trust me, were very low - we would pick it up and take it back to our place. We covered the in sheets and made some effort to clean them up but thinking back on those days and how low my standards were I am surprised we didn't get an infestation of fleas, ticks, bedbugs, and lice from each one of those.
We would later accumulate a bunch of sofas as we "upgraded" over time. The funny this is that when we put out own second-hand sofa out on the street it didn't stay there very long. Someone always needed a sofa in this neighborhood that was almost entirely college students who were rather poor.
Jay and I had a whole mess of pets and I wish I had some pictures of those times. I had a dog, Jay had a cat, I later got a rabbit and they 3 of them just lived together in harmony. The cat would go after the rabbit every now and then but the dog would defend the rabbit. Jay and I had almost no money, but we had enough for feeding and taking care of animals, which is nuts when you think about it. I was doing whatever job at a fast food place and Jay was the same but at Subway. We barely made rent every month but we always had enough money for beer and cigarettes - which I think was a priority of almost everyone else that was a student in that town.
I have continually upgraded where I live over the years but I wouldn't say that I ever became "fancy." When i think about the squalor that I was prepared to live in back in those days though I have to hand it to myself, I was content with pretty much anything.
Also, there was zero security on those buildings, especially on the bottom floor like we were but here's the thing, people never broke into it and instead of being afraid of someone being armed on the other side - which I was later on - potential thieves just probably assumed, mostly correctly, that there was nothing of value inside.
Almost everyone else I knew at the time lived in a similar dump and we all had some great times there. There was a flood in the late 90's that completely decimated this apartment complex so it actually looks a lot better now than it did when i was there.
Honestly though, it's still pretty ass
