The UCP and Other Tales of Horror

The following will be the scariest story you hear from this Halloween...If you are pregnant, have a heart condition or are upset by stories featuring massive clumps of dust and strewn debris, please go read another post.

Today, my roommates and I cleaned our living room. If I had to choose one word to describe the experience, that word would be "harrowing."

First, some background. My roommate Chris is moving back to North Carolina. We're sorry to see him go, but he's simply had enough of life on the lowest rung of Los Angeles. I can't say I blame him. In fact, he's not the first Los Angeles refugee I've known. My brother Jonathan has wisely retreated back into the comforting bosom of Orange County, a more comfortable and safe community, where the worst thing that ever happens is some maniac wearing a cape running around killing families at random. That's still a lot better than trying to get on the 405 from 3 to 8 pm, let me tell you...

So, he's out. And our good friend Vineet was planning to move into Chris' room, but in a stunning last-minute reversal, is now refusing to live with Nathan and myself. What could have prompted this decision?

Well, to be honest, the apartment is a little bit messy. Well, okay, the apartment is a little bit messy in the way travel in Baghdad is a little bit unsafe. Nathan, Chris and myself are...I don't want to say "degenerates," but let's say "gentlemen who value their leisure time more than being able to actually see their carpet."

In my more optimistic moments, I like to think of us as somehow above cleaning. We are men of ideas, we spend our days problem-solving, pondering the nature of life, and so forth. But, in reality, I spend my days blogging and watching trashy 70's Italian movies and they spend their days playing online poker and watching reality shows. I'm not sure if this qualifies as living the life of the mind.

Perhaps we are just slobs. I mean, I certainly am. I'm not sure I own a shirt without some sort of sauce-related stain on the front, and I'll go more days in a row without shaving than Mohammad Atta.

So, now that Vineet will not be moving in, we'll need to actually convince some stranger to spend their hard-earned money to move into this apartment with us. This is not an easy prospect. I feel like, in order to sell someone on moving in to this dank filth-encrusted shithole, an apartment without a single instance of insect infestation because the bugs all have found more comfortable, cleaner environs, I would have to employ sales tactics like the ones in Glengarry Glen Ross.

GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE WHICH IS DOTTED!

In anticipation of this glorious event, Nathan and Chris and I decided to give the apartment the old once-over. Clean it up a bit for the benefit of prospective tenants. Yikes. Tom Savini on his best day has not described gruesome imagery such as I found underneath our couches.

There are a few problems here to be discussed. I believe our largest single cleaning dysfunction is a failure to dust...ever. You don't think of dusting as being a particularly big deal, but no one tells you that if you leave dust undisturbed for too long, it becomes quite simply a part of your apartment. After a while, it simply refuses to leave. You can wipe shit down for hours, come back and in two minutes, it's caked with dust and grime once again.

This seems to violate some basic law of physics. But the fact is that we spent several hours throwing out trash, wiping down every surface in the room and vacuuming, and the room doesn't really look significantly cleaner. I mean, there's visibly less stuff in there. We threw out at least six big trash bags full of stuff. Here is a list of, I believe, all the unique items found during the cleaning frenzy:

Old newspapers, magazines, Victoria's Secret catalogs, opened and unopened mail, an unopened Starburst candy, cigarette packs, food wrappers, used-up lighters, soda cans, toothpicks, pennies and dimes, scrunchies, make-up (at one time, a girlfriend lived here), pens, movie and concert tickets, wire hangers, books, DVD's, CD's, folders, spoons, chewed gum, socks, little electronic toys that play 20 questions, broken PlayStation controllers, bottle caps, undershirts, jackets, underwear (why?), empty coffee cups, checkbooks, a passport, a USB cable, wads of cotton, old ashtrays, a piece of glass broken off of the entertainment unit, a copy of the PC Game "ChessMaster 8000," several broken plates, poker chips, a dried-up nearly-unrecognizable pepperocini, paper clips twisted for use as pipe cleaners, unusable broken speakers, AV cables, speaker wire, ear muffs (in California?), a pillow with a T-shirt serving as its pillowcase, a large metal tray, rolling papers, an old cell phone, brads, twist-ties, a Swiss Army Knife, sandwich bags, a law school application essay and about 100,000 take-out menus.

Once all the trash was taken out, and the dusting was done as well as it could be, we looked around and realized that the room was just ugly and dirty, that we were basically dirtbags, and that no on in their right mind was going to give us actual money to live in this place.

We also realized that it would be up to Chris to clean the bathroom he and I share (it's his turn), as well as his, quite franky disgusting, room before we show the apartment to anyone. I'd say the chance of these activites actually occuring in the next 48 hours are slim to nil. He's got to do something about that room. It looks like Meatwad's Room on "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." He's the only person I know to have little broken-up bits of styrofoam spread all over the floor of their bedroom. How does that not drive you crazy? Stepping on little bits of styrofoam peanut all day?

Anyway, the UCP...That's the Unclaimed Clothes Pile. During our cleaning, we found an entire wardrobe full of clothing. Some of it was comprised of long-lost roommate items. I found a jacket of mine, Chris a sweatshirt, and so forth. But much of the pile's contents are unknown to us. A few undershirts. A gross green blanket. Some kind of odd quilt thing. Some of this stuff has been behind the couch or under the entertainment center for so long, I can honestly say I've never seen it before. It predates me here. I'm actually quite new to the apartment, in geologic time.

We feel kind of guilty just chucking the UCP contents that aren't ours. What if it belongs to a friend who has stayed here before, and who will want their filthy green blanket back some day? (If you think this is impossible, it's only because you don't know my friends.) And isn't there someone less fortunate who could use this stuff? (Although you'd have to be really unfortunate to want to sleep under this blanket. I'd probably rather sleep under some fiberglass insulation.)

We'll probably end up throwing it away. We really ought to throw away (or burn) everything in this apartment, burn the whole building down really, and start fresh somewhere else. But we have, combined, about enough money for one night's stay in West LA's cheapest motel, so a little Fall Cleaning will have to suffice.