Lookin’ fer Love
I can now, quite happily go a long, long time without seeing a “For Rent” sign. And that might be too soon. This weekend I got to experience that uniquely depersonalizing process of Apartment Hunting on a Low Income in a New Town. You start out with a clear idea of what you want, but then by the end of Day One, you might find yourself pacing two rooms that smell unambiguously of dog pee with a northern exposure that faces the wall of another house, thinking, “Maybe I could do this. Could I do this? Maybe I could do this.” By the end of Day Two, the clouds clear as if by magic and you find The Place, but there’s always that Day One to go through. In my case, Day One was actually three days, but I’ll just give you the highlights.

First, let me explain the conflict: I want my own place. I’ve lived with roommates for about two years. Before that, I lived with a boyfriend for about three years. The only time I’ve ever lived alone is before that, for about a year. Now I’m almost thirty and I’m tired of sharing cabinet space with people I’m not sleeping with and worrying about whether it’s okay to eat someone else’s browning banana. I’m tired of feeling resentful about sweeping and making sure everyone’s cool with the picture I want to hang in the living room. I’m a grown-up. I want my own place.

Trouble is, as a teaching assistant I’ll take a significant pay cut from my current extravagant nonprofit salary at Small Publication. I’m not really technically sure I can afford to live alone in Beach Town while I go to school. But god damn it, I told myself last Thursday night as I rolled up my sleeves to open the classifieds section of the Beach Town Observer, I’m going to fricking try.

Take One
I actually made a first visit to do this about a month ago. Marshall came with me to drive as I wrote down phone numbers on “For Rent” signs and to take photos of places with his digital camera. He thought that up. Isn’t he smart? So anyway. We went, I found a place I liked, we returned to Atlanta and the very next day, I got a phone message from landlord of said cute-place. The current tenant, he said, who was living there on a month-to-month lease and who was kind of an aimless human being in his opinion, had decided she was gonna stay “three or eight more months; she’s not sure.” He was so sorry. He sounded sorry. He really wanted me to move in, he said. Hm, I thought, and well. So do I. Too bad there’s not anyone with like, the authority to make this thing happen. Somebody who was a landlord there or something.

Standards, people.
This trip, I decided to start searching on a weekday, since that meant I could work with a realty company rather than dealing with signs put in yards by random people who had no idea what they were doing. It seemed I’d encounter a higher degree of competence and possibly, nicer places by going with the pros. See, I know that while I’m slightly poor right now and beggars can’t choose jackshit and all that, I still have certain ideals.

Number One being: Live somewhere with character. No apartment complexes with thirty buildings that all look eerily similar surrounding a sad little three-foot swimming pool. No and hell no and hell no and no. I’m more likely to sign a lease on a freaky cockroach-infested hole in the basement of a big, crazy house constructed in the nineteen-teens over a nice, clean box where I’m sandwiched in by forty-eight other identical nice, clean boxes– because, you see, the crap place has the cutest little antique stove. I’ve made such choices before. Call it a quirk.

Ideally, I’d love to live in Beach Town’s a ridiculously gorgeous historic neighborhood where they actually film movies that call for people in top-hats to ride along in horse-drawn buggies down cobblestone streets dripping with Spanish moss. And it’s right around the corner from downtown, where there are coffee shops and a farmer’s market on Saturdays. I have pictured myself writing in an actual garret there, one that I’d rent out from some nice, affluent family. Maybe they’d invite me down for dinner every now and then and I’d walk their Great Danes on Sunday mornings. I’d bring them blueberries from the man selling them on the corner and they’ make pie and invite me down for some with cinnamon ice cream. Or there was this other neighborhood with amazing houses where all the old, affluent hippies live. I’d like to live there. I’m very comfortable around old, affluent hippies, you see. Ah. Affluence.

Anyway. So I thought that maybe someone there would be more likely to list his or her carriage apartment with the hardwood floors and the surplus of natural light with the town’s main realty company, Isle Shores, than by just sticking a “For Rent” sign in the yard.

Compartment for Rent, or: Beige is the new Suicide.
So we go to Isle Shores’ main office downtown. Find three apartment-listings that look hopeful. And here, we meet Sven, the chain-smoking agent who does a piss-poor job at hiding his exasperation at spending his Friday with a prospective renter from whom he makes no commission. When we first meet him, he directs all conversation to Marshall only, until Marshall says, “I’m not renting. She is.”
We visit three places:
1.An apartment on the second floor of a four-floor complex. On the walk over, Sven asks me, to my annoyance, “Are you sure you can afford this place?” I am indignant with my Yes-!
The place is a bit boring, with a cute courtyard. It is, however, slightly out of my price range.

2. An apartment built into the second floor of one of the Historic District houses. We went inside and I immediately swooned over the bedroom, just off the entrance. Wide, shiny hardwood floors the exact hue of a bay mare! Giant windows! Bathroom with claw foot tub! Then we go back into the rest of the place, which consists of one room with a kitchen counter jammed into one corner. There’s beige carpeting and cheap, water-stained wallpaper. At noon, it’s late-afternoon dim. It also comes furnished, I read now in the rental-packet, which means I get a wet-smelling couch, a set of cheap kitchen implements including someone else’s pots and pans - and a mammoth plywood entertainment center-thing that takes up one entire wall. This includes one of those ancient Kenwood stereo-system cabinets with the glass door – you know, the kind you used to see on the side of the road following garage sales ten years ago? I’m told I’m not allowed to move or get rid of any of these objects. This is also the place that smells of dog pee.

3. On the edge of town, there’s a house. Not bad looking. A ranch-style house in a working class neighborhood with few trees. If you walk down the driveway to this house and through the carport, through the gate of the metal fence and down the dirt path, there’s free-standing garage with a second story. This second story is an apartment. An apartment that is: a strange little hallway, a bedroom, living room and kitchen. I ask Sven who lives in the main house. He shrugs, takes his cigarette from his mouth, “Renters. They are renters.” There are three more houses on the garage apartment’s other sides. There is also a streetlight that’s aimed at what would be my kitchen and living room windows. Sven tells me I would get use of the garage below. For anything I wanted.

Marshall says later, that this is the apartment where they’d find a writer dead, weeks later, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And this is how it is, this weekend. Both nights in Beach Town, I fell into bed and my sleep was pure blackness. It’s exhausting to imagine yourself into all these lives: to think, “Now, where would I put the end table my father made? Where would the litter box go?” And it’s flat-out depressing to do this in places so squalid and sad. If someone suggests you might live somewhere, the thin line that makes up your own judgment can blur when you’re short on cash and that person is also telling you, “This one will go fast.”

This, too: If shoebox apartment complexes feel soulless and anonymous, apartments constructed out of the corners of buildings with wholly different original purposes have the potential to depress. Doorways spackled shut and new walls cravenly shoved into place, delineating exactly six-hundred-dollars’ worth of living space; no more, no less, sign here; these things, they are sad. To pull into the driveway of my friend’s house where we were staying on Friday night felt like a return to open air and to breathing. A house, made to be lived in, not profited from – a house with real, generous rooms and high ceilings. To look at and to walk around in and to sit and stand and breathe and touch. Kitchen. Bedroom. Living room.

I was so tired of looking at apartments forced into other spaces that at five-o-clock that day, I insisted on visiting Quail’s Creek. We’d driven by the entrance to Quail’s Creek several times and someone had recommended it to me as a nice, quiet complex. I wouldn’t find drunken undergrads and the price was very reasonable. So we called the rental office and drove up. And into two square miles of vinyl-sided buildings with identical breezeways intersected by rivers of black concrete. With a swimming pool in the middle. As we got out of the car, Marshall said,
“Do you really want to do this?”
“Yeah. I just – Let me look.”
So, after making me fill out a card with my vital information, the guy in the light-blue golf shirt tucked into khaki pants showed us the place. It was small and clean and off-white and smelled the same way every such apartment I’d ever visited had smelled: somewhere between new carpet and plastic and air freshener. The layout was exactly what I’d imagined, too. You go in, there’s the kitchen and on the other side of the counter, you’re in the living room, and the bedroom door is right in front of you. As we walked back to the rental office through the rows and rows of other buildings, I asked Golf-shirt Guy how long Quail’s Creek had been there. He told me it had been built in 2000. The whole thing? All at once? I asked. Yes. And what had been there before? He laughed. “I don’t know. Some pine trees?” While leaving, as I tore my information card, swiped on the way out, into strips, and looked up out the car windows. There, by the entrance, were four or five thin pines. Their tops were higher than the highest apartment roof.

I knew I wasn’t going to live there. I just had to see a one-bedroom apartment that was built intentionally and from the beginning, meant to be there by the builder. I probably also had to see for myself the degree to which I didn’t want to live in such a complex. It was like a palate-cleanser for the next day of searching.

If Day One was the Twilight Zone in a really bad way, Day Two was the exact flip side of that coin. Every single place I looked at was a genuine possibility. It was like a different town with different rules.

By the end, I’d found two places. One’s a cozy, (err, small but really very) cozy apartment on the second floor of a house in the historical district and the other’s a larger place, two streets over. One-hundred dollars difference in the rents. I still haven’t decided which to take and I’m applying to both. We found both by their “For Rent” signs while driving the day before to apartments the realty company was renting. I can see myself in either, and the picture’s really darn nice.