2001-09-27 - 4:00 p.m.

Living Above Afghanistan (2)

Continuing the story of my downstairs neighbors in my old house

Behind the house there was a small fenced-in yard that was supposed to belong to both apartments. Shortly after the Afghanis moved in they took over the whole thing. They dug up the entire yard to plant a vegetable garden, and it wasn't a very tidy one either. There was practically no path leading to the gate, to the place where the cars were parked.

However, the biggest problems had to do with the basement, which was, again, supposed to be shared by both tenants equally. It was a typical basement, a big unfinished room with a dirty concrete floor and a low ceiling. The basement was one large room that ran the entire length of the house except for two little rooms in the back that looked like they had been someone's tool closet years and years ago.

The basement was dusty and dirty and filled with junk from over fifty years of tenants. It wasn't a fun place to hang around, in fact it was kind of ill-lit and hazardous with all the crap lying around and nails sticking out of the ceiling, etc.

Generally, I only went down to the basement for two reasons: to do my laundry (I had a washer and drier down there) and to get my bicycle, which I had chained to a pole near the furnace.

Again, shortly after they moved in the Afghanis claimed the basement as their territory. I was constantly finding them hanging out there, and even cooking on the filthy basement floor, using a little grill, black with soot. Why didn't they use the stove upstairs, I wondered.

I was even more irritated to find out that some of them were actually living and sleeping down there. One day I was looking for the fusebox when I discovered that someone had put a cot in each of the little workrooms, and there were a few personal items there.

I was living in a flophouse!

One day I came home from work in the afternoon, and as I was entering the building one of the cousins, a guy in his mid-twenties, was going out wheeling a bicycle. As he passed I noticed he has a pretty nice bike, and it was gray, just like mine. I did a double take. It wasn't a gray bike LIKE mine, it WAS mine!

I put my hand on the bike and stopped him, and asked him where he got the bike. He told me that his cousin said he could use it. I told him that the bike was mine and his cousin had no right to it. He said that he needed it to get to work, and I told him I didn't care, the bike was not leaving my sight. He then started to get hot, and asked if I was calling him a thief. I said that it certainly looked like he was a thief since he was trying to make off with my bicycle.

Now things could have deteriorated further if it weren't for the fact that my next door neighbor was watching this exchange. An eminently nice and reasonable guy, he offered to loan the Afghani guy his own bike so he could get to work. Since the guy was worried about being late and didn't have time to argue, he took the other bike and was soon gone.

I then took my bike and lugged it upstairs to my apartment. It was obvious that I couldn't keep things in the basement any more. It was kind of a pain carrying the bike up and down stairs to use it, but it was better than having no bike at all.

The funny thing was I remembered locking my bike to a pillar, and when I looked downstairs I found the bike chain and lock discarded on the floor. I imagine that it was a cheap lock and easy to pick.

Unfortunately something I couldn't bring upstairs was my washer and drier. There were two sets washer/driers in the basement, one belonged to the building and was assigned to the downstairs tenants, the other I'd bought for myself and belonged to me.

I didn't realize it until I was practically packing them up to leave, but my neighbors had been regularly using my washer and drier as a food preparation area. There were all sorts of scars and stains and knife cuts that I didn't remember putting on the tops of them. I thought that maybe I'd been a little rougher on them than I thought, until I came down one day and caught one of the women cutting up some fish on the top of my drier. Hey, cut that out!

I had a little shouting match with the man of the house over that.

Then there was the War of the Shoes.

The back exit of my apartment consisted of a narrow staircase that went down to the first floor, past the back door of my downstairs neighbors and then outside. I used this entrance a lot since the communal parking lot was behind the house.

It's a custom in many parts of the world for people to take off their shoes upon entering a house. Nothing wrong with that, in fact it keeps you from tracking dirt in. The trouble was that my neighbors would take off their shoes (mainly sandals and slippers) and leave them on the stairs leading up to my apartment. This made the stairs so hazardous as to almost be impassible because there were so many pairs of shoes and the stairs were so narrow.

This was a big pain in the ass, especially if I was coming down the stairs at night when it was dark. A couple of times I slipped and almost killed myself.

Slipped on a slipper. That would have looked nice on my tombstone.

I talked to my neighbors a couple of times about it (at least to the ones I knew spoke English) and they said they'd put their shoes elsewhere, but the next day the shoes would be back again.

Since that did no good, I just decided to kick shoes off my steps whenever I saw them there. That did no good. Then I kicked them with more vigor, sending some of them spinning down to the basement. Still, they would reappear underfoot the next day.

Next, I escalated it to putting the shoes out on the porch. That didn't work either. Finally, I tossed a whole bunch of shoes out into the back yard, out into the snow. They finally got the message after that, although some months later the shoes started reappearing, so outside they went again.

However, all the shoes were a good way of keeping track of how many people were living in the house. One time I counted sixteen pairs of shoes and sandals of all sizes on my stairs.

Continued