I had no idea what was in store for me when I opened the door to that once loved apartment.
It had been more than nine months since I'd last visited.
My memories were mostly of wine bottles, 12 packs of beer, rings of smoke, naked women, and all kinds of activities that I should not have been engaging in.
Fun times!
I was just a little over 18. Most people don't even have their own apartments around here at that point in their lives much less dens of ill repute.
I had been ahead of the game.
Source: Pixabay.com
When Mark and I had moved out to explore bigger and better things, we still left three other tenants in place. Believe it or not, this apartment was 1800 square feet. Five of us were living there although only two were on the actual lease. We usually had another five to ten people staying with us on any given day for a total of fifteen or so.
To this day I have never seen another apartment that big.
Sure it was sad to leave. Especially because so many beautiful women used to hang out with us there. However, we spent all our days in that place drinking, smoking, and doing things that definitely were not helping us advance as human beings.
Therefore Mark and I had to get out. Get out we did.
I guess we assumed that the other three tenants would simply leave when their lease was up and that everything was just going to be fine. I wasn't actually one of the people whose name was on the lease, so it didn't matter that much to me. Mark was one of those people though, so I agreed to come with him to clean the place once everyone had left.
Upon opening the door we were immediately greeted by an incredibly rancid smell. It was almost like a bunch of different flavors of old Doritos and a big pile of foul socks got together in a dirty toilet and made a big stinking baby.
Disgusting.
The walls which were once white and pristine were now completely covered with graffiti. I couldn't believe that our roommates who were fun loving but also respectable people would allow the place to get this bad. They'd colored over everything!
We'd brought some rags and cleaning supplies with us so we tried to wipe the crayons and marker stains from the walls but it really was more of a task then I was prepared for.
Holy smokes.
It isn't gonna work.
The people that had stayed here were named Lillian, Ambrose, and Mary. They were all very pretty girls and that was one of the reasons I was sad to go. However, Mark and I had enough brushes with them to know we didn't really want to be around them anymore.
If anything, the shape that this place was in was proof that they were completely crazy.
So we scrubbed. We scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. After about ten minutes we had pretty much decided that there was no way we were going to be able to get any of this graffiti off the wall.
"How much was that deposit again?" Mark asked me, clearly exasperated.
"Bro, I don't know. At least a couple of hundred I think."
Not good. Not good at all.
As we stood there debating what we were going to do, I found myself continuously scratching the bottom of my pant leg. I noticed Mark doing the same thing so I pulled up my bottom cuff to reveal my black socks.
Black socks?
My socks were white that day.
A cold shiver ran through my body when I realized that my socks were completely covered in fleas. When I say covered I mean that each sock had more than 10,000 fleas on it.
I knew that the girls had several cats but this was unlike anything I'd ever seen in my life. We had so many fleas on us that we could have seriously died from having our blood drained. Little tiny vampires.
I'd like to say we handled ourselves really well, but if you try to imagine how you would have dealt with that situation I think you already know how this is going to go.
We screamed like little girls as we bolted for that front door. I tossed my socks and shirt on to the nearby lawn as we hopped in Mike's car and went flying down the road.
We only drove for about a mile. As it turned out, Mike had a flash of brilliance by pulling into a nearby apartment community swimming pool. We jumped in fully clothed and stayed submerged for several minutes. Dead fleas floated up all around us.
The entire surface of that pool was bathed in black death.
Mike spent several hours at a local car wash. They were not pleased to have to clean his car.
We never visited that apartment again and we never saw the girls again either.
I'll never forget the incident though.
Fleas.
It still makes me shiver like crazy.
