I wanna find Anne Frank before I bite it

[enthusiastick]

Amusing anecdotes in the history of pooka_madness: go!

Flash back several years to the Spring of my sophomore year of college at Evanston's own Northwestern University. Like many people I had grown disillusioned with the housing lottery and dorm life in general and become intrigued with the possibilities of moving off campus. After some cajoling my parents, citing wholly specious figures about the cost of the endeavor, thablueguy and I began the search for an apartment within walking distance of South campus. Neither one of us was looking to spend the kind of money necessary to live in a really nice place, and so it was that we gravitated almost inevitably to the already-infamous Blue Whale.

The Blue Whale, a building affectionately nicknamed for the coat of cyan paint on the front wall of the building, was a much-esteemed edifice in the undergrad community at Northwestern and practically a dorm unto itself. Not as sketchy or far away as the theater ghetto, yet neither as close nor as condominium-esque as Evanston Place, the Blue Whale appeared to occupy the comfortable middle ground, perfect as a college apartment for a couple of regular guys. Oh how foolish and young were we. Admittedly this was in the days before the elevator started routinely smelling of cat and hobo urine, when the building's entryway door was not so horrifically mangled as to render it perpetually unlocked. We were hooked and we were sold, and so we got the place.

Or rather we tried to. We were hooked by a leasing agent from B&A Realty, then owners of the property. This woman, about whom I remember virtually nothing except that she was large and black and seemed friendly enough, showed us the place and did all the usual things salespeople do in this situation, assuring us that she was showing the same apartment to several other people that very afternoon and pressuring us to make our decision quickly. Which is why it proved so frustrating that when we actually wanted to sign the papers and give her money she was nowhere to be found.

Several days of distraught phone calls simply kept coming up dry. At first the denials seemed casual enough: she's not in the office today, but she'll be in tomorrow. Oh she's not in today either, but try back on Monday. Soon however it became clear that something was up. Both thablueguy and I were increasingly stressed the longer the matter went unsettled. In choosing to get an apartment we had more or less opted out of the housing lottery. The thought of throwing ourselves on the mercy of the undergraduate administration was too depressing to consider. There was no turning back; it was get an apartment or bust, and this apartment which had seemed like an acceptable compromise was increasingly looking like the holy grail. Once they start to go in Evanston they go fast, and our field of options dwindled. We kept calling.

In my memory its not me or thablueguy but manslayerliz who was finally able to wrestle the truth of the matter from the fine folks at B&A, but then I'm notoriously unreliable about these sorts of details (I don't even remember the agent's name, after all) so that may or may not be true. Where was our leasing agent? Why was she never in the office? Had she rented the apartment to someone else? Had she screwed us? Had she totally and utterly screwed us?!

No, came back the halting reply. No she had not screwed us. Yes we could still rent the apartment. She hadn't been in the office, its true, but that's because she had... well...

... died.

Oh.

Seriously?

We were assigned a new leasing agent, in the end. We signed the papers and thus began the two years of absolute bedlam that was thablueguy and I living together. Its important to remember how these things begin. Looking back I suppose maybe we should have taken it as an omen, that a seemingly perfectly healthy (well, OK, she was kind of obese, but its not like she was particularly old or anything) woman would inexplicably drop dead before we could get this apartment.

Comments

[devringalbrath.livejournal.com]

"Looking back, I suppose we should have taken it as an omen..."

Is this a case of "I told you that story so I could tell you this one" and part 2 is coming shortly? Or did I miss what current event this was an omen to?

[pooka-madness.livejournal.com]

There's not a specific follow-up story I'm alluding to here, no. I guess you kind of had to know me back then to get it...

Life in the Blue Whale, much as I look back on it fondly, was unmitigated pandemonium, and not just because it was where I happened to be living during the wandering craziness that is college life. The building went rapidly downhill from decent to frighteningly ghetto-esque, and would remain that way for years until it was rescued and renovated by new ownership. It also turned out to be only two doors up from Greenwood Care, a large outpatient clinic serving the schizophrenic and otherwise loony people of greater Chicago. thablueguy's car was later stolen from the parking lot there in a development that proved startling but not actually all that shocking. And in the end, though I was sad to move out, I was not sad to leave an apartment that in two years saw more than its fair share of spilt urine, vomit and blood.

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

And on that note: yo.

[pooka-madness.livejournal.com]

Yo.

I've known about your LJ for ages and ages (through the pandemonium_bks community) but am just getting around to friending you for reasons surpassing understanding.