You're Living Where?

I’d been identity thefted and improper evictions on my credit report continued to haunt me. I had no idea how impossible it would be to get an apartment with this roadblock, until I started to look. The broker advised that certain property owners would not take me at all, and the ones that would, required at least 3 months rent in advance, to be held in escrow for a year. Not to mention the 15 percent broker fee, and security deposit and $300 cash non-refundable application fee. I assumed since there were listings available where the property owner paid the fee, she would understand my situation and show me those apartments. I had lucked into my current apartment, which was a desperately needed blessing. I tell people that God was my broker. It was the second one I looked at, a sublet, which turned into a lease. Back in November 2004, I was temporarily living in Piscataway (aka purgatory) New Jersey, until I could find an apartment in the City. About a week into this arrangement, I discovered the person I was staying with had a collection of Adolph Hitler postage stamps. He had an unusually huge refrigerator and I wondered how many bodies he could have stashed in there. My best female friend from Philadelphia called me twice daily, to make sure I was still alive. (I should have known better than to trust a place where you can’t get Chinese food delivered and have to share a taxi with at least 10 other people. Sometimes it took an hour and a half to get home from the train station that was 10 minutes away. Once I nearly peed myself.) My apartment search went into high gear, Craigs list paid off; I found my apartment and OZ movers got me out of there, for which I’m eternally grateful. I had a flashback of my other apartment dilemma past. I’d gotten an apartment in Atlantic City the summer I did my law school clerkship. The place was advertised in the Jewish Exponent, which was the Bible of all things good back in the day. Unbeknownst to me, the building was a whorehouse and the landlady was actually a madam. She was dowdy, old, flabby, boobs down to her knees, and wore a tattered nightgown; who would have guessed? I learned this news the first day at my job, when the other clerks, who were locals, simultaneously gasped. “You’re living where?”