I am the Great and Powerful OGRE, King of the World.
Look at this smile on my face.
[pretend you can see my face]
What do you think this smile represents? Is it the smile of a man who has found an apartment? Or is it the smile of a man who has found a job?
Give up?
I stopped into the Domino’s Pizza on Belvidere today and asked if, by any chance, they were hiring delivery drivers. It turns out that they are desperately in need of delivery drivers. By good fortune the GM was in when I showed up, and he and I talked for half an hour or so. I told him that I’d just finished two years delivering pizza in another town, and he basically wanted to hire me on the spot. Company policy, though, requires a background check, so I have to wait for that. If there was no background check I believe he would have thrown a uniform at me and today would have been my first shift. Anyway, the background check isn’t going to turn up anything (except a ticket for going 38 in a 35 in Ansted, WV), and I have no felonies (believe it or not), so I’m calling that job mine.
After that I went to meet Sergio. He’s the guy who was showing me apartments today. I admit I was a little tempted to take the place without seeing it just ‘cause I wanted to have a landlord named Sergio. I would have worked that into every conversation ever from here to eternity. “Yeah, I was talking to Sergio the other day…” “Well, I might have to discuss that with Sergio…”
But, you know, you can’t just be named Sergio. You have to be dark and sexy and Latin and speak with an accent. You can’t be a twenty-year-old from Westwood. He was a perfectly nice guy, you understand, and I don’t want to disparage him. It’s just that he’s totally not the Sergio I was lookin’ for.
Anyway, we looked at four apartments together, bringing my grand total for the past two days to six. I realized as we did this something that I’d known but forgotten, which is this: every single goddamned apartment in the Fan that rents for less than, say, $1200 has a galley kitchen. They ALL have those damned stupid tiny stoves. I started searching my memory, flipping through the file of hundreds of Fan apartments I’ve been in over the course of my life, and it’s true, they’re all like that. It’s the inevitable result of apartments being built into buildings that were never intended to hold apartments.
Sergio’s places were nice. They are all in the process of being renovated. New countertops, new fixtures and floors, parquet and carpeting, central air, etc. That should be a good thing, it sounded good when he was talking to me about it, but somehow it just doesn’t work, not down here. The house on Grace Street is about 100 years old. The place on Boulevard is not much younger, built in 1920, but they’re taking all the old stuff out and replacing it with new stuff. From the outside it’s still a grand old building with its brick face and colonnade, but on the inside it looks like…well, admittedly nice apartments, but apartments that you could rent in any city in the country.
I’m sure it makes the rooms more desirable for many people, but to me that isn’t what living in the Fan is all about. You don’t take an apartment here for modern amenities, no matter how excellent; for that you get a place in the West End. You live down here ‘cause you like window seats and radiators and creaky mahogany stairs. You like fire escapes with cement patios built onto them. You like a place with 15-foot ceilings that’s impossible to heat. You like a mantelpiece with a century’s worth of spackled nail-holes from Christmas Stockings Past. There are 400 years of history in Richmond, and in the Fan you feel like the latest chapter of that history, both the excellent and the sometimes inconvenient, and the Grace Street apartment represents all of it.
So I went to see Pat, the landlady. I knew I would need to talk to her rather than just turn in the application to her receptionist or whatever. I expected some trouble, since I am at the moment without a job, but when I explained the whole thing with the possibilities at the City Library and the job with Domino’s depending on a background check, I also told her all these things I’ve been telling you guys about a proper Fan apartment and how charming and perfect her place is. I guess I charmed her and she let me have it. So, as of March 1, 2010, my new address will be:
1644 W. Grace Street, Apt. #3
Richmond, VA 23220-2103.
I wish I had pictures for you guys to show how excellent it is, but I didn’t think Lauren would appreciate me running around photographing all of her possessions. Be expecting some come March, though!
Oh, and also I had lunch with Liz at one of my old haunts, the Third Street Diner, and got free coffee and a free book of coupons worth $40, which would have been enough to make today a success even without the place and the job. I hope everyone’s day has been as good as mine. Love and peace to all.