my first apartment

My first apartment was a cockroach-infested, run-down unit at Spadina and Bloor in the summer of '83. My friend Sue Wong and I moved into the apartment to babysit it for a friend of hers who wasn't able to move in until the school year started. Sue and I were both taking summer courses at the University of Toronto.

We didn't know it had cockroaches when we moved in. The landlord had just sprayed, so it looked relatively clean at the time. And very empty...since Sue's friend hadn't moved in, there was no furniture yet. Sue and I improvised from second-hand furniture and cardboard boxes, and we used mattresses on the floor instead of full beds.

We started seeing the cockroaches within a couple weeks of moving in. I didn't know what they were at first; I had never seen them out in the suburbs. Sue and I bought "cockroach motels" (cardboard cockroach traps with sticky stuff inside that was supposed to lure and then ensnare) by the dozen at Honest Ed's, but no matter how many we put out at night, they were full of cockroaches by the morning.

The cockroaches were everywhere. I saw them skittering over the kitchen counters and dishes in the morning. If I needed to use the bathroom at night, I had to get up and turn the light on first, then go back to bed for a few minutes until all the cockroaches had run away. I remember changing a lightbulb in the ceiling once and jumping back as several cockroaches fell out after I unscrewed the bulb.

I could even hear them in the walls at night, after I turned off the light. Soft chittering scratchy sounds, as if the cockroaches were involved in some massive construction project there behind the drywall. If I turned on the light to investigate, of course, the sounds ceased immediately.

The worst cockroach experience (even worse than when I first felt one run across my hand in the middle of the night) was when I got to my class (after a short subway ride) and discovered that the binder I had been holding to my chest during the entire commute had a squished cockroach on the outside cover.

So after all these cockroach horror stories, you'd think I came away traumatized by my first real encounter with city living. To tell you the truth, I remember having a ton of fun that summer.

I was wide-eyed with the excitement of living away from home, after all. I wasn't that keen on the cockroach aspect, but part of me figured that the bugs were a worthy price to pay for the opportunity. I had a part-time job at a cigarette shop on Yorkville Avenue (that was a horror story in itself) that generated enough money to help pay the rent, with enough left over for occasional dinners out and movies.

This Blathering was inspired by the photo at the top...me in the kitchen of the apartment Sue and I shared; I came across it while browsing through an old album. It's weird to look at an old photo like that (almost 20 years old!) and not be able to remember *anything* about the clothing I wore, the striped cup on the counter, the decoration on the wall, or even who took the picture.

Yet what I do remember is how I felt when the photo was taken: a secret pride. Never mind the fact that a half dozen cockroaches would likely fall out if I opened a cupboard...I was in my own apartment (if only for the summer), and cleaning my own kitchen.

For me at the time, that was luxury. :-)



Today's Blatherpics:

As far as I can tell, these photos were all taken in 1983.

- Me in my first apartment. Note the spacey eyeglasses.

- My roommate, Sue Wong.

- Andy studying at Robarts Library (University of Toronto).

- Tom West as dungeon-master. I seem to recall that my first D&D character was a wimpy magic user named Rowanna.