First apartment

I’ve lived in a lot of different towns, and known so many apartments over the years, that it once became a kind of game and joke with some co-workers when we decided to actually count up the many places we’ve called home.

I’ll just say there have been many since my senior year in college, and this includes residences in five states, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Once again this is indicative of how transient and mobile I’ve been, unsettled with jobs and potential careers. It shows how often I’ve been uprooted from places I had temporarily called home, but which at the time I wished could have been more permanent.

I’ll never forget my first apartment, and it was indeed a place never to be forgotten, in more ways than one. It’s enshrined in my memory as the first apartment I found on my own following an entire summer of looking through Times-Picayune classified ads and checking out grim little apartment complexes all over eastern New Orleans and Gentilly. The search extended west over to Metairie and the tacky complex ghettos around Lakeside Shopping Center, an area notorious for the proliferation of quick-buck, cheaply-built apartments that had easy access to I-10, in fact they were often located about 20 feet from that awful interstate. I didn’t want to be lulled to sleep each night by trucks roaring by outside my window.

I was desperate to get out of the cubicle tower known as Bienville Hall, the one and only dormitory at the time on the mostly commuter campus of the University of New Orleans. This bleak monolith was my home for two years, I hate to admit, but I met some good people there, joined together by the bonds of our shared imprisonment. But I’ll never forget the 12×12 cinder block rooms with the minimalist furnishings and the cold, hard ambience. There was no way out-of-their-minds college students could even begin to trash those rooms, indestructible as they were, and I guess that was part of the philosophy underlying the construction of those abominable concrete boxes.

Thoughts of spending even more time in that dorm spurred me on zealously in the search for an apartment in the summer of 1972. Finally, I saw what I was looking for: a 1-BR apartment near UNO, quiet neighborhood, furnished, $90 per month. It was in just the area I was looking for, off Gentilly Boulevard. A real old New Orleans neighborhood, one of those original outlying suburbs built in the 1920s and accessible by bus to downtown, about five miles away. It was about two miles from the campus, so I could ride my bike to school on good days.

I called the landlord, who owned the house and lived in the adjoining unit, and said I was coming right over. I raced, literally, to get there, and while I was talking to Mrs. S., the phone rang and someone else inquired about the apartment. I took a quick tour, and paid the rent on the spot. It was a wise decision. The place would have been gone within hours if I hadn’t rented it.

That place definitely had ambience. The furniture had that long-ago, “antique” look about it, and really should have been put out on the street for pickup. Dust clouds rose from the beat-up sofa whenever I sat on it. If the house weren’t painted on the outside and kept up, one might think on entering that the place had been abandoned for years, that an old Adluh Flour calendar from 1930 might still be hanging on the wall in the next room.

The single hallway led to the kitchen in the back. That was my first kitchen where I actullay learned to bake a chicken, use an oven, and cook a hamburger, boil frozen vegetables and stock a refrigerator with groceries bought at the nearby Economical Food Store at the busy intersection of Elysian Fields Avenue and Gentilly Boulevard.

That was a formative experience for me, finding and moving into that first apartment. Nothing has compared before or since with the feeling of elation and independence I felt those first few months. In fact, it never entirely went away that whole final year of college.

I’d lie in bed with the window next to me open, the big heavy-duty kitchen fan turned on and droning away as it sucked in air from that window and moved it through my bedroom and down the hall — natural ventilation. I’d turn on the old window unit air conditioner at night when I had to, and it was real noisy, but I got accustomed to the sound.

On pleasant nights, I’d take a break from reading one of my assigned novels for an English class, go out on the narrow front porch, and sit in a chair with my feet propped up on the railing. I could hear the muffled sounds of traffic on nearby Gentilly Boulevard, but it was mostly quiet, especailly by that time of night. I’d look around, look at the stars,sit awhile longer, then go inside and shut the door to the night, grateful that I was on my own, in my own place at last.

(Written April 29, 1999)