While living in the box and working at an architect's office I experienced a brief spasm of relatively lucid thought and decided to quit my job and pursue my dreams of becoming an artist for as long as I could live off my credit line. I pursued those dreams by long morning walks, feverish hours of artistic composition, and occasional trips to the liquor store. I sustained those dreams with regular trips to the gas station's ATM for hits to the old Available Cash Credit Line.
The long morning walks became longer and longer, extending into the early afternoons; the feverish hours of artistic composition became desultory evenings, and the occasional trips became middling to frequent to some cherished friendships with the staff and other regular customers of liquor store #51.
The regular trips to the ATM and the artistic dreams and the walks and everything else ended all at once on one afternoon when I discovered that credit card companies can change their mind about your credit line whenever they feel like it - unlike a savings account, which they can only change their mind about once. So I had to go back to work.
My landlord at the dark box on Foothill was an incredibly vigorous and healthy man fifty years my senior named Chuck (name changed, I don't know why, I'll never see him again and he'll never read this). Chuck originally lived one floor above me and was always running up and down the stairs on his way to the gym where he vigorously pumped iron and told people how happy he was to be divorced. He was especialy happy to talk about the joy of his divorce with the fifteen or so college-aged young women who lived directly above my dark box and across the hallway from Chuck. He made fast friends with all of them and dragged his telescope over to their apartment and helped them with various furniture moving and handyman type projects. He eventually became the apartment manager by complaining to everyone about how badly run and organized the complex was and blaming it all on the previous apartment manager until she'd left and he'd been chosen by whatever mysterious process stupid rich people have to choose their underlings and flunkies.
The fifteen or twenty or so young women who lived above me made an incredible amount of noise all the time by synchronizing their television, stereo system, vaccum cleaner, and mindless screams of youthful abandon to reach maximum volume at unpredictable intervals throughout the course of the day or night in order to fully establish their presence in the ears and minds of all the apartment dwellers in the complex and the surrounding neighborhoods, all in the hopes of someday being discovered by some big shot in the Noise business who would hear them and appreciate their decibelic potential and pay them money to keep people awake all the time.
But they didn't bank on having a creepy unemployed neighbor downstairs who always wore bathrobes and never shaved and sometimes staggered upstairs to knock on their door and smile apologetically and creep them out and after a few visits from el creepo they gave up on the noise business. But they schemed revenge, and eventually managed to insinuate to Chuck that the peeping tom that some of the tenants had complained about might be the creepy unemployed guy in the bathrobe who lived below them.
So one day as I returned from my daily walk, sweating and tired and wondering how it could be that I could walk myself half to death every day and still be gaining weight, I ran into Chuck, who just happened to be coming out of the apartment complex and poking around the front lawn and making as if to be examining the grass or something like any normal apartment manager would pretend to be doing so as to arrange a chance meeting with a tenant that they had some kind of vague problem with.
"How you doing, Andy?" Chuck asked me. I replied something or other, I liked Chuck all right and actually kind of welcomed having any human to talk to as my life was somewhat hermit-like at the time, but I had no interest in anything he said and couldn't think of a single thing that we could really ever say to each other because I thought he was a moron. We talked for a bit and then he told me that some of the female tenants had complained about a peeping tom. He shook his head angrily. "Boy, I'd like to catch the guy doing it," he said. "I'd hit him. I'd punch him right in the face." He made a significant look to me, as if he'd said something that only I in the whole world would find meaningful. He also told me the peeping tom had been seen in a baseball cap. He went on for a while and then left me to go prowl around the lawn again.
Only later did I realize that he might have suspected me of being the peeping tom, and that he might have been trying to scare me into making some kind of admission, or into guilty sweating or something. By the time I'd realized that he'd caught the actual peeping tom, or thought he had, and confronted him in front of the complex so loudly that I and several others came out of our apartments to see him shaking his fist at a much taller and younger man, threatening over and over again to "knock you right on your back." I was glad for Chuck to have found the villain, but the possibility of violence unnerved me enough that I crept back into my dark box.
Eventually after having to get a job and actually look at my finances I decided that I couldn't afford to live in the dark box anymore. Chuck told me to make sure and clean behind the oven and fridge and described the complicated and physically stressful process whereby these appliances might be moved away from the wall so that the black disgusting substances that tended to accumulate behind heavy appliances could be cleaned out with various chemicals and abrasive devices. He told me that if I cleaned behind these appliances that I would surely get my full $300 deposit back except for the $25 fee which was not refundable.
The friends who'd agreed to help me clean the dark box ended up watching a Karl Malone movie on old channel 20 and didn't come by until it was dark and I'd exhausted myself by looking through some of my personal papers and giving myself philosophical vertigo over the vanity of existence. They came way too late to help with the cleaning so we vacuumed a little and tried not to disturb the spiders on the fake wood walls and then we decided to go get some dinner and we got in my car and pulled away and saw a little boy carrying a gas can.
My friend Brian said we should stop and help him and I said something about Nature's Way and kept driving because I was still bitter about them coming over so late. We didn't clean any after dinner either and we drove to my new home which was Brian's couch.
Chuck probably still felt bad about suspecting me of being the peeping tom, so he only deducted $30 from my deposit and must have cleaned the back of the oven himself.
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