Barrel's Bottom Rents Last

The clawfooted tub on the 2600 block of Marshfield did not inspire the same romance, nor did it invoke a mediocre appreciation, as other, vintage clawfooted bathtubs might. In magazines and on cable tv, the four feet of such a tub would rise majestically from a highly polished marble floor. It would stand opposite a pedestal sink and an open organizational system for towels and toiletries.

But this tub on the 2600 block of Marshfield rose from an old laminate floor. The color of said floor was the yellow-tan tone you'd expect to see a newpaper turn following 15, 20 years of neglect. And the tub did not face a pedestal sink. There was no sink in the bathroom in the Marshfield apartment. There was no organizational storage system, open nor otherwise. Only a small toilet and a clawfooted tub, whose fourth foot was poised atop a general biology textbook.

In statues or paintings, when the subject has one foot poised atop a box, pillar, animal, or severed human head, many words come to mind, though they all have that serenely powerful connotation: triumphant, proud, conqueror. It's easy to gaze awestuck at such a figure, who cleary held mastery over something.

I sincerely doubt the tub had mastered general biology, and I say this forgetting that tubs do not invest in science. I say this with an air of pompousness: How could a tub, living in these conditions, ever improve itself to learn general biology?
Thankfully, one would not notice the textbook upon entering the bathroom. This was precisely because the textbook was from 1970--at least-- and the corner of it that was nearest the door was worn or chewed away, revealing pages that blended in perfectly with the laminate floor.

Aside from the bathroom, the rest of the apartment was in poor shape. So bad, in fact, that the bathroom seemed the highlight--which is why we started there.

The walls had holes. The wood floors collected dust balls so large, they must be considered dust rabbits, not bunnies. The dry wall rippled around the windows where water had come in and stayed. Then there was the second entryway.

The second entry was framed by an old wood trim--except, of course, where it was completely lack. Eight inched above and below the deadbolt were exposed. Where the trim began again, it was splintered and disrupted. The owner had replaced the absent accent by hammering a four-inch-long block of unfinished wood over the place where it seemed the deadbolt had plowed from its space within the frame to the inside of the apartment.

As an added sales aid, the owner took the sole lightbulb out of the main room. This gave potential renters a modified version of the "look around". It seemed that the owner believed, to view this place in its best light, required absolutely no light at all.

I hated bringing clients there. But everyone wanted to see it. It was the only apartment under $600 in all of Lakeview, and each renter wanted to believe this would be their gem--the perfect place that only they had been lucky enough to find.

Marshfield was in the database for months before I started apartment leasing in the summer of 2006. And soon I realized its usefulness. If clients had just seen an apartment they really liked, show the Marshfield apartment to make them understand just how bad the other options were. This isn't as manipulative as it sounds. It's actually doing the clients a huge service. The dumps remained available for months. But the gems--hardwood floors, eat-in-kitches, closets in the bedroom, and heat included--would stick around for a couple of hours or a day at most. As agents, we knew if a place would rent in less than a week. And if we showed a gem to clients who seemed keen on it, they'd surely be disappointed if they came back later in the afternoon and discovered it was gone.

But Marshfield was going nowhere fast.

Clients would ask me, "Would you live here?" and I would say something like, "I'd rather move back home with my nagging, coddling, nosey, controlling parents. But you don't really have any better option." I would walk into Marshfield and immediately start appologizing for the 40-year-old refrigerator and the moldy general biology textbook. I would point out the absence of the sink in the bathroom, but quickly announce that the kitchen sink is just a short trot away.

I knew I had no chance of renting it when I was showing places to a couple of college-student sisters. They were nice as can be. Fresh off the boat from Nigeria, I believe. They were used to living sparsely. They told me that they were not accustomed to air conditioning, and they were accustomed to sleeping in the same bed. We looked at the few places that were in their price range, of which Marshfield was the gem. In the end, they decided to stay another semester in the dorms.

I had only been in the leasing business for three months, long enough for my temporary license to expire. And during that time, only Marshfield was available from the start to the finish of my short career. It wasn't until Christmas time that I had gotten a call from a former coworker, inviting me out to celebrate that, in an apartment shortage, someone had finally rented the old Marshfield place.




LENT UPDATE
Four days of Lent and one Sunday: two margaritas (both on Sunday)! And I was in attendance for this weekend's mass...
Sha-Blam!