Abnormal living arrangements are commonplace in Manhattan.
With the average rent for a shabby one-bedroom in the Village holding steady at about $1,700 per, and with myriad deranged people like myself waiting in long lines to view pint-sized studios with monthly rents over a grand, folks are forced to get creative.
Although disaster often springs forth from such creativity, so does the likelihood of paying a cheaper rent and gaining access to lots of hilarious stories due to the fact that you're living with a 60 year-old man and his ferret, or a group of hippies who pay their share of the rent in homegrown weed.
This is one of those stories.
I live in a four-bedroom loft in Chelsea with two men and one woman. It took me seven weeks of searching, and living on a friend's couch, before I found the joint. That process alone could fill four or five of these columns--after allowing my friend Deb to paint my toenails bright red because she was bored, the mother of the pal whose couch I was inhabiting, in a post-visit panic, phoned her son worried that I was having men over for gay orgies.
Huh?
Anyway, my place is kinda nice. It has hardwood floors, track lighting, skylights, an elevator that opens inside the apartment, and a bunch of other cool features. It also has an abundance of mystery and intrigue. Basically, every so often, one of the people living here moves out and a room opens up. The others stay, and the room is filled by one of their friends or via an ad in the Voice. One of the perks/drawbacks of this roommate round-n-round is that those moving out always leave stuff behind--while I'm not really feelin' the huge butterfly painting in the living room, I certainly can't complain about the telephone, dresser, bookshelves, weights, cd case, and funky disco ball that I inherited upon moving into this place.
No one knows where the couch came from. There's a huge library outside my bedroom with tons of books belonging to no one in particular. And, I recently found some classic hip-hop vinyl strewn amongst the heavy metal and jazz records on a shelf in the hall.
Best of all is the fact that there is a big huge cat, "Cleaner," living with--but belonging to none of--us. The cat, you see, was here first. He was around way before any of us. He has seniority.
For a while there, this food fetish feline had me fooled. I'd mosey out of my room, see the animal's immense body sprawled out across the floor, and think to myself, "wow, our cat is larger than most preschoolers," or "how can my cat's skinny legs support that massive gut." But, the truth is that Cleaner was left here by his owner, and is no more "ours" or "mine" than the previously-owned phone sitting on the "FK" (finder's keepers) table beside my bed.
Two of the roommates feed and clean up after the cat out of allegiance to their friend who left it here, but if you were to ask them, "whose cat is that," they would most certainly not respond with the word "mine." Nonetheless, we all love Cleaner, if for nothing else than for his propensity to get himself into amusing predicaments--witness our housekeeper Zoila's propensity to "accidentally" lock him in closets, or his voyage to the lobby after entering the elevator when it mistakenly opened on our floor one night.
Sometimes the cat's misadventures go a bit far though.
Two Sundays ago, I decided to make grilled cheese for lunch. Midway through the preparation stage, someone outside of the building buzzed our apartment. Thinking that it was one of my roommate's friends, I rushed out of the kitchen and into the hallway to answer the request to enter. When I asked who it was, some woman with a heavy Spanish accent yelled "Deelivry" into the speaker at the top of her lungs.
"For who?"
"Deelivry!"
"Yeah, for who?"
"Deelivry!"
Pause
"Deelivry!"
"What number? What apartment?"
"Food. Food. Deelivry."
Realizing that this conversation would not produce a satisfactory conclusion anytime soon, I yelled down the hall, "did anyone order food?"
No one answered.
So I knocked on each of my roommates' doors, asking the same question mid-knock.
"Food? Anyone?"
As it turns out, no one else was home. When I went back over to the buzzer, the camera showed the deelivry woman talking into the speaker to another resident, and then being let into the building.
When I came back into the kitchen, the first in a series of utterly disastrous events had taken place. The large tub of butter that I had unknowingly left only an inch or two from the burner had been partially transformed into something out of a Dali painting. The portion of the container closest to the burner had melted, and stretched downward from the top, enabling the formation of a huge crevasse. And, of course, on this day, the guy who is always scraping the bottom of the container to get the last remnants from a tub that should've been thrown out weeks ago, was working with a full thing of butter.
The damage was severe.
There was a steady stream of butter flowing down the oven, onto both the countertop and the floor. I immediately stopped the flow and threw the container into the sink. In the process my foot slipped a bit to the side and I kicked over Cleaner's metal water bowl. The noise was surprisingly loud, and added to the chaos.
At that point, I knew it was all over.
Anytime someone touches the cat's food or water dishes, the beast awakens from his slumber and bolts ungracefully into the kitchen. Within seconds, the cat was at my feet. He immediately slipped and took a nasty spill right into the butter that had amassed on the floor. As he struggled to get his balance, he fell a few more times and then took off into the living room, covered in butter. A process of internal prioritizing told me to clean up the floor before going after the cat, so that's what I did.
Bad idea.
It took me about two minutes to clean up the kitchen, it would take me the rest of the day to adequately deal with the cat. You see, Cleaner, god love him, had decided that all this exercise and activity necessitated some rest. He had jumped up on the couch and made himself comfortable.
Again, it's not my couch, but I was pissed as though it was. I grabbed the animal and placed his sticky body on the floor. Of course, there was a big butter stain on the cushion where the cat had plopped. As I was halfway to the kitchen to retrieve a dishrag, I heard the cat jump back up on the couch.
I just kept walking.
After getting the cat down again, I cleaned the couch with a soapy rag and did what everyone who screws up a couch does after initial cleansing efforts fail--I flipped the cushion.
Then I grabbed Cleaner.
Efforts at bathing him resulted in miserable failure, although I will be the first to admit that by that time I was simply going through the motions in a cursory fashion so as to aid a defense to any additional stains that were sure to spring up around the house: "I tried to wash the damn thing, but he wouldn't let me. I did everything I could. Really."
As we all know, cats bathe themselves by using their tongues. And, as the cat jumped out of the tub, plopped down on the floor in the hall, and began cleaning itself, I felt like a complete idiot.
I didn't have to throw the cat in the shower, all I had to do is let it take care of the situation on it's own.
As I sat alongside him to make sure he couldn't ruin any more furniture, Cleaner meticulously, and with the precision of a surgeon, licked himself clean. After about 10 minutes, he was as good as new, and I was quite relieved. I celebrated the end of the ordeal by going into my room, closing the door, and chowing down on some coconut sorbet while lying on my bed. Cleaner celebrated by hopping onto the couch cushion that I had flipped less than an hour earlier and yaking up all the butter that he had licked off of himself.
but·ter {but´er) } n. ||< Gr bous, cow + tyros, cheese || 1 the solid, yellowish, edible fat that results from churning cream 2 any substance somewhat like butter -vt. 1 to spread with butter 2 [Colloq.] to flatter: often with up-but´ter·y adj.
