DESPERATE HOUSE LIVES (extended)

(from WAXXX 3.0 February 2011) 


 Liverpool’s own 72a  Rodney Street was found in a recent investigation by the department of health to be one of the worst places to live in the northern hemisphere. Our columnist Stephen Baxendale spent a year of his life there. It ruined him and he never wanted to think about it again. Fortunately we were able to change his mind with mild to moderate use of the Waxxx credit card. So heed this tale of warning, you may think you’re tough enough to live in the ‘shit’, but you have no idea what those crumbling walls can do to your mind.

( Authors note: When originally given the brief for this article I worked at it for two weeks straight, sleeping very  little and drinking far too much, trying to channel the horid memories of this time into words, I turned in a 30,000 word rambling manuscript. My editor politely reminded me of the 1,500 word limit. I managed to cut away all the crazed rambling and got it down to this piece that you see before you, which clocks in at around 3,000 words. My editor, being moderately polite, once again reminded me of the word limit. I ignored him and turned my phone off and stopped answering the door for  a week. I woke up one night and he was in my room with a bottle of rum in one hand and a small bat in the other, he very impolitely reminded me that he was going to get his 'fucking article' one way or the other. On that terrible night we crafted together the piece published in Waxxx 3.0, which is arguably much better and more readable. Perhaps the rum loosened my fingers, or maybe it was the threat of being hit with the bat. It's likely we'll never know.)

Jake had become unwell from the dust, damp, cold and general ruthless condition of the flat. He could barely stand up and spent most of his time drinking in bed. One night, Andrew, one of our other flat mates stayed in Jake’s bed with him. The temperature in his own room had gone below freezing and he suspected if he didn’t steal someone’s body heat he would perish before the morning. Andrew got up in the middle of the night to take a leak. Instead of braving the freezing conditions outside the room, he decides to piss in a small ashtray next to Jake’s head. This quickly overflows and begins trickling sweet, warm urine into Jake’s eyes and mouth. Jake, too ill to get up, asks “Are you pissing on my head?”

Andrew replies, cock still in hand, “No”.

 I describe this scene just to convey what an average night was like in 72a Rodney Street. The conditions were so bad that you might not make it till morning and even your flat mates would piss on your dying head if it benefited them in the slightest.

                 

At 72a the landlord asks for no references and takes no bank details, everything is cash and off the books. As long as you pay the rent you can live in a place that is invisible to the council, the tax office and any other troublesome authorities you might not want knowing you whereabouts. This situation attracts a certain clientele.  It pulls in a spectrum of lowlifes, fuckups, artists, musicians, drug abuses, drug dealers, dropouts, bastards, drunks, perverts and criminals.  This toxic mix of peoples causes the place to become a nest of insanity and misery.

From the outside you can see that the house is a patchwork of half completed extensions built on top of one another. The windows are opaque from years of filth and bin bags are allowed to pile up outside the doors. Somehow the inside was worse. Carpet had been put down, but not cut to size, so it bunched up in hills in places while other bits were bare floor. Pipes jutted out of walls but lead nowhere and did nothing. Years of dust hung in the air so that even in strong light the flat had the constant gray appearance of twilight. The bathroom was a horror, the shower head had fingers of mould growing out of it, which even when you removed grew back in a day. There was no locks on the front or back doors so sometimes you would come out of your room and there would be someone there, having sex or drinking a lager, you’d ask this stranger “Who the fuck are you?” and he’d usually say “Who the fuck are you?”.

                

Our first night in the flat I took all of this in and muttered “This is low.”

“This isn’t low” Jake said. “This is nothing, I’ll tell you when we’re low.”

Our landlord was was a professional bastard known as ‘The Doctor’. He insisted on being called ‘The Doctor’, even though he had no knowledge of medicine. He was a short fat elderly Egyptian man with a comb over, he wore an old mustard colored suit and constantly chewed a pipe. He could run like a bastard when he needed to and he  had a hell of an uppercut. 

We often avoided paying him rent for a variety of reasons, complaining there was no water, or the rats were eating our food again. Nevertheless a couple of times a week he would walk into our flat with no notice and start howling about rent, we’d give him a little money and he’d instantly become happy and manageable, telling us tales of the women he’d had and the men he’d throttled. He was always looking for Andrew, who never paid him a penny. Anytime 'The Doctor' banged on the door Andrew would run out the back or hide under a blanket until he was gone.

We were assured by ‘The Doctor’ when we took this dilapidated crack den that the handyman ‘Les’ was going to fix the entire place up in a month. I never saw Les renovate or repair anything. He would walk into our home, at any time of night or day, swearing into his tobacco stained beard and mumbling to himself. He would open and close a door a few times, glare at the hinges, then bark at us to make him a cup of tea, no milk, no sugar. He would then leave, without repairing anything or drinking the tea.

The only time we called on him was when winter came and we realised the heating didn’t work. He came around, laid out all his tools, took the cover off the boiler and looked intently at it for five minutes. Then he bolted upright, shouting “Jesus fucking Christ! The whole systems packed in, we’re going to need new boiler, new pipes, new everything. It’s all fucked!” He then ran out of the house, leaving everything behind. We assumed, he’d ran out to make some emergency phone call to sort the boiler out, but he never came back that night. Or even that week. We eventual called ‘The Doctor’ who said he hadn’t been able to get in touch with Les for days. His handyman had disappeared for good and so had our hopes of renovations and repairs. I took a look at it myself after this, it was only a fuse in the plug, took me five minutes. God knows what sent Les over the edge.

                

The flat was so cold it was almost impossible to sleep. We would lay in bed watching our breath condense in the air above us. Everything was damp and the bed sheets never seemed to dry out. You would wake up at three or four in the morning, your head would be numb and your arms unresponsive. I had ways of keeping warm but they caused a lot of problems between me and the girlfriend. I’d ceased to be very attractive since I began sleeping fully clothed and with an electric heater which I would spoon all night.

                

Our other flat mate Pete took it harder than the rest of us.. The stress of simply enduring in such conditions drove him over the edge. Pete found a simple solution early on which set the tone for the rest of our time there: booze. Booze seemed to help every aspect of our lives. We began drinking obscene amounts. We started ‘Beer corner’, which was to be a collection of all the bottles of booze we consumed while in the house. In a couple of months beer corner had covered half the house. There were bottles everywhere, on every surface, in every drawer, all going rotten and attracting flies.

               

This boozing inevitably attracted debauched parties that started off out of hand and gradually got worse. People would be having sex on any available floor space and strangers would start looting and attacking our property.

               

Andrew had come from strict parents and had been in a tight educational routine for many years. Something seemed to go awry inside of him when he came to 72a. It was if he turned his back on society. Some even say he turned his back on his humanity.

              

 He would sleep for four or five days. Then emerge from his room filled with a terrible hunger. He’d start cooking an unreasonable amount of food. A standard meal; a leg of pork, two chicken burgers, four crispy pan cakes, a baked potato, chips and three potato waffles. But while this was cooking he’d eat packets of crisps and then have a pan of noodles, then some toast.  Setting up his terrible feasts he’d use every dish, bowl, and plate in the house, using some to hold sauces, some for salad, other for fruit and deserts. Then when the food was finally ready he’d descend upon it, savagely tearing in it to, finishing it all in  minutes. He’d immediately collapse. His body unable to cope with all this food, his abdomen would cramp and he would cry out in pain, rolling around pounding his palms on the floor. Then came a period of being awake for four days, were he would read classic literature and watch grainy VHS while drinking stolen booze and eating nothing but carbohydrates. Then he would sleep for four or five days…

                

This eight day cycle continued for the entire year we were there. Like clockwork he would burst into the kitchen, oblivious to their being guest or not, and in his underwear, begin frying a steak, cooking an omelette, putting crumpets in the toaster. He'd eat it all like a hungry mad duck,  then he would collapse with his pains, crying out, smacking the floor in anger. This was very difficult to explain to house guests, but they got used to it eventually.

               

Jacob began to truly scare me after a few months. He found it hard to fill the hours in our strange little house. He would collect obscure objects that he had found in the street. He’d also taken to tattooing pictures of penises on his body with a needle and biro ink. You would walk into his room and he’d be using a baby’s shoe as an ashtray and prosthetic hand to hold his beer while he tattooed a pair of balls on his ankle, he’d be sitting there as naturally as someone drinking a cup of tea and reading the paper. Before every night out he would drink an entire bottle of rum then and collapse on the floor before leaving the house.  Then at two or three in the morning he would wake up again and begin drinking, he’d go out to the nearest bar and punch the first person he saw.

               

I saw him once lying on his floor, the vomit around his head almost looking like a halo.

“Will you not admit now Jake, will you not admit this is low?” I said

“This isn’t Low. I’ll tell you when we’re low, this is nothing.”

               

What really unhinged me were the rats. I couldn’t beat the bastards.  My flat mates couldn’t see the problem; they hated me for trying to get rid of the rats and held a funeral for each one I got. Eventually I gave up and just had to live with them. After I gave up all their attacks were aimed at me, they knew I was beaten. I came in one day and one was sat on my table, I took a swing at it, but it just sat there, fearless, eventually I left.

               

Living under these conditions is not good for friendships. Jacob would do anything to spite Andrew. He’d  pick up Andrews pile of unwashed dishes and throw them into his bed during his four day sleeping cycle or he would burst into the bathroom while Andrew was showering and take a shit, completely naked, when Andrew would complain about this he’d shout “I’ll shit were I like you fiend!”.  Pete was constantly accusing everyone of being a thief and a bastard. If I refused to keep drinking with them they would allow me to go to bed, then to punish me they would use all the furniture in the house to barricade me in my room until I’d realized the error of my ways. One time they kept me in there for twelve hours, Jacob threw soil at me the whole time.

               

We all came to hate and fear each other. All communal purchases stopped due to the mounting contempt between us all. Bin bags stopped early on and instead we had ‘bin corner‘, which was just a pile of rubbish, which rapidly grew and took over the other half of the house that wasn’t covered by ‘beer corner‘. Toilet paper was always a sore point between us. Pete took to using newspaper, Jacob would tear up Andrew’s clothes into strips, while Andrew used blank cheques. The problem with these things is that they don’t flush, so we had to keep the shit covered remains and add them to bin corner. I once had to use a piece of bread, which was a hard decision because it was my last slice and I was starving at the time.

               

Eventually the good times had to end.  We had pushed ‘The Doctor’ too far, he could tolerate our sinister nature and our erratic behavior, but one of our parties had been so depraved that the department of health had got involved. The last thing 'The Doctor’ wants is attention, particularly from the government, he just left us a polite note saying we had to be out by seven o’clock, or some thugs he’d hired would be round to sodomise us with claw hammers.

              

 Pete left for university immediately after reading this. Andrew packed up a small bag of things and became a vagabond. I was neither ready for education or vegabondcy so I was slightly panicked at the situation.

             

 Jacob secured us somewhere to stay just down the hill from our house on Berry Street. He was in work all day so would have to abandon his collection of bizarre possessions. The new flat was unfurnished and I wasn’t ready to start living in an empty flat. But how to move the shit? I found a wheel barrow in the garden, it was covered in rust and the wheel squeaked but it would do. I started throwing handfuls of stuff into the barrow. I had no time to sort, the stuff from the shit in the house, I’d just have to hope I had a favourable ratio. I had many strange looks wheel barrowing through the centre of town, the urban wheel barrow is not a usual sight.

              

 I dropped the first load off in the flat. It was slightly better than our last place, but to get somewhere on short notice we had to take another dodgy cash in hand deal. No doubt this would end ugly as well. I imagine I would one day have to manically wheel barrow away from this place on short notice to another corrupt landlord. Then wheel barrow from there…

                

The bed was going to be a problem. I wasn’t about to start sleeping on the floor. A good mattress is hard to come by. Even a bad mattress like the one I had is hard to come by. I began dragging the bastard down the hill. Mattresses are too heavy and floppy to be lifted by one person so the only answer was to drag it through the filthy streets of Liverpool. The mattress bore all manner of stains and it had probably seen all sorts of horrors through the years. I wondered if it had ever been dragged through the streets by a desperate man. Almost certainly, I imagined.

               

I got the mattress in and then went back up for one last barrow, it was nearly seven. I was throwing handfuls of crap in when I noticed the girlfriend standing there. “What are you doing?” she asked. I was about to explain when I heard the banging of the thugs on the front door, luckily it was still barricaded so that would buy me some time.

               

Help me with the barrow!” I said to her. She just stared. I was trying to quietly wheel out the back but the damn barrow wouldn't stop squeaking.

               

 Fuck. “Move move move.” I said to the girlfriend, quietly wheeling my stuff into the back yard. I crept out the back door but the squeaking of the barrow gave me away. One of them popped his head round the end of the street and I could see him focusing in on me. He told the others, then they were jogging down the street, Baxendale will not end like this, beaten to death in a flat of filth... and she won’t be able to keep up, can’t throw her to the dogs yet.

“Quickly, get in.” I said.

“This isn’t how I pictured my life Ste.”

“Get in the damn barrow!” I screamed.

They were running now, down the street, shouting things, gripping weapons.  Baxendale begged and she finally obliged and Baxendale was off. Wheeling through the streets like a lunatic, with his cargo in front.  Footsteps and shouts behind.  A voice form the barrow “I’m leaving you.” Baxendale with no time to consider this, must maintain concentration, barrows are notoriously hard to handle, particularly in an escape condition. Baxendale can’t take the straight root either. He must wheel through tight corners, lose them, can’t lead them to his sanctuary.

               

“Gods balls!“ Baxendale wails. Took the corner too fast, books spilling into the street. No time to pick them up. Gaining on him now he takes a corner, then another, double back on the fuckers. Now run like a bastard back down the hill and sling shot into street with the momentum. No sign of them behind. Get to the door, keys, keys, where are the fucking keys, open the door, practically break an arm throwing the barrow in,  then lay down in the safety of the hallway.

               

The girlfriend was glaring at me, saying nothing

“This isn’t Low.” I lied “I’ll tell you when I’m low, this is nothing.”

DESPERATE HOUSE LIVES by Stephen Baxendale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License