The 'Apartment from Hell'

The Boston Herald

The soon to be 21-year-old came home from school last weekend and mentioned - solely to induce guilt, I know - how the mother of one of his roommates had suddenly appeared at their doorstep one day, like some angel of mercy, her arms laden with bags and bags of groceries. "She even made us meatballs," he said.

My guilt was instantaneous. Groceries and meatballs. I was a bad  mother.  I was a failure. Not only had I never once brought my starving son food, I'd never once even thought about bringing food.

"You don't cook, Mom," my 19-year-old daughter reminded me. "That's why you didn't think about it. Besides, let me tell you, you don't want to go near Rob's apartment. You'd flip if you saw how he lives. Why don't you just give him the money and let him do his own shopping?”

But money is so undemonstrative, whereas meatballs represent love. So last Tuesday I phoned my son and said I was coming to visit. Then I headed for the grocery store where I filled a shopping basket with  donuts and  Devil Dogs, not meatballs I know, but clearly respectable substitutes.

"You're gonna die when you see this place," my son had warned me. "It's a mess, Ma. It's a million times worse than my room."

I thought he was exaggerating. I thought that nothing could be worse than his room. That clothes sprouting from open drawers, curtains falling off windows, trash spilling from a wastebasket, old Coke cans, an unmade bed and a hardwood floor hidden under debris for years and years were the worst things that could happen to a room.

But that was before I entered the Apartment from Hell.

Here clothes sprouted EVERYWHERE, on chairs, couches, floors, countertops, even out of paper bags. Here curtains didn't fall off windows because there were no curtains, only torn shades hanging in front of glass that a hawk couldn't see through. Here there wasn't one single wastebasket surrounded by trash. There were dozens of wastebaskets (aka paper bags) from which horrid things spilled. Here there were Coke cans by the hundreds, dirty dishes, five unmade  beds (My son had made his because he knew I was coming) and a floor that hadn't seen a mop since the beginning of time. 

"I warned you," he said. Indeed he had. "You want to see how the girls live?"

We walked across the hall, opened a door and in a blink went from East to West Berlin. There were curtains and a carpet and a couch free of clothes. And pictures on the walls. And magnets on the refrigerator. And even a tea kettle.This was civilization. "Don't you wish your place looked this nice?" I asked. "When we clean it up it does," he said.

The incredible thing is that he actually BELIEVES this.