CHICAGO, IL -

Lately, when stopping by my girlfriend’s apartment building, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tom Hanks in “The Money Pit.”

The place is falling apart faster than a button-down shirt from H&M, and every new discovery makes me laugh.

Or sigh.

Or pound my fists against the wall.

Or stand there silently.

The garage now only goes halfway up.

The ceiling in the basement just collapsed in the laundry room.

The outside brick, not the mortar, crumbles and leaves dust all over the back deck.

The toilet runs.

Firemen come by looking for reported gas leaks.

Firemen turn off the gas.

The commons area has not been swept or vacummed in four months, and it shows.

The back gate can be unlocked with a side- or front-kick.

There are random broken door frames lying in the alley.

There are drafty windows.

Shitty radiators.

Burnt-out lights.

Peeling paint.

You get the picture.

Claire was in a hurry to find a place, bless her heart, and she’s the first to admit that she chose poorly.

She’s moving out soon, thank God.

But that’s mostly because her place was burglarized in late December while we were at a show.

Some asshole went up the fire escape, pried open her living room window, and stole her beloved laptop and digital camera.

I felt awful.

Like it was all my fault somehow.

But in the end everyone was okay, and of course that’s the most important thing.

But the reason the asshole was able to make it to the fire escape, like all the other problems the building faces, was entirely due to the negligence of the management company: ICM Properties.

When Claire first moved in, she and I both emailed them a number of times to ask them to put a lock on the back gate, and to fix her windows.

“This is a major safety concern,” Claire wrote.

“This is a huge safety concern,” I wrote.

The morning after the break-in — the morning after not sleeping at all because we had visions of the intruder coming back — the morning after listening to two talkative police officers scare us with stories about backpacks and guns and carbon monoxide detectors — the morning after lying next to a hammer in case I had to defend us since the window could not be properly closed — we drove over to talk about it with ICM.

After being told to just leave a copy of the police report, we demanded to talk a manager.

With dirty looks, we were told to walk down the stairs to see Martha, a woman sitting at a U-shaped desk.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, turning back to her keyboard while we sat down, “so do you mind if I do some other things while you talk?”

“Yeah,” Claire said. “I do.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting you,” Martha said.

“Well, we weren’t expecting to get robbed last night,” I seethed. Everyone we had encountered at ICM over the past couple months, save for the young guy who showed Claire the apartment back in July, had been shockingly rude.

“Are you on the lease?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Then I don’t need to be talking to you.”

In my mind, I had lunged over the desk to press my thumbs into Martha’s eye sockets until the squishing noises stopped.

“I don’t understand,” Claire said to her, breaking me out of my fantasy, “why you’re being so rude to me. I’m here because I’m concerned about my safety. I’m not here to talk about my lease right now, I just want to know what you’re going to do to make the building secure. I was just robbed last night and you’re acting like it was my fault.”

Martha told us that some guys were already on their way over to the building to put in new lights, to put locks on the gate, to fix her windows, to put bars on the window next to the fire escape, to put a grate on the back door’s window, to do everything else we had asked them to do these past three months.

(Except clean.)

Five minutes later Claire and I were sitting in my parked car, staring straight ahead and whispering reassurances to each other.

A couple days after the break-in, Claire was allowed to break her lease with ICM.

But in the meantime, while Claire waits out the final month of her new lease which should give her ample time to find a clean and safe apartment in a better neighborhood, I stand wearily in her doorway.

Last night I wrestled her kitchen window down while saying “of course” over and over.

And as I cursed at the left side, and then at the right side, and then again at the left side of this awful window, I tried to guess what would go wrong next.

The hot water will go out.

The fridge will go on the fritz.

Broken floor boards.

Roaches.

Rats.

Howler monkeys in NASCAR leather jackets demanding that I repeat the alphabet backward while I shave my shoulders.

Ants.

Fire.

Fire ants.

Could be anything, really, at the rate things are going.

And I tell Claire that we will joke about this place in the future, but for now we are counting the days until she hands back the keys and raises her middle finger.

And we keep our ears to the Internet, emailing each other complaints found against ICM posted here and there.

Two things are for sure, though: I often think about monkeys wearing NASCAR leather jackets, and this slumlord hasn’t heard the last from us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 5:41 am and is filed under Assholes, Criminals, Home & Garden, Humor, Law, Money, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.