Spring Cleaning

I’ve written before about my need for some type of cleaning service in my apartment. That was when I was living with Scott and Dave, a.k.a. Neskey. Little did I know that things were relatively spotless under the Neskey regime, and that once he left, order, such as it was, would crumble. It’s not that Neskey’s replacement, Lance, is messy—quite the opposite—it’s just that the overall roommate dynamic has changed for the messier.

Neskey used to provide the motivation to get things done. If we hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a month and were subsisting on pickles and Snow’s clam chowder, Neskey would rally us for a trip to Stop & Shop. If the apartment suffered some type of infrastructure problem, like when the dishwasher began washing the floor, Neskey would fix it. And when the general uncleanliness got out of hand, Neskey would reach his disgust threshold and break out the mop, thus guilting Scott and me into helping clean up the common areas. He even liked to cook. In retrospect, Neskey was our own Martha Stewart—a younger, male version who was liable to get drunk and go swimming in Boston Harbor in the middle of the winter, but decidedly Marthalike nonetheless.

When Neskey moved on to better himself and play with cadavers at Albany Medical College, he was replaced by Lance. I don’t know if Lance attended military school, but his bedroom usually looks like it would pass inspection by even the most ill-tempered drill sergeant. Lance is so neat that he even has an electric air purifier for his room so that his air molecules will be neat. I could probably sublet Lance’s room to Mass General to use for minor surgical procedures.

Unfortunately, Lance doesn’t use his awesome powers for the general good of the apartment. I don’t blame him, really—I wouldn’t clean the bathroom, for instance, if I thought I’d be the only one to ever do it (in fact, that’s exactly why I don’t clean the bathroom). The mutual mistrust between Scott, Lance and me means that the kitchen, bathroom and living room are perpetually not-so-fresh, the victims of an intra-apartment Cold War of cleaning. Without Neskey’s dictatorial personality in the mix, a stalemate has arisen.

I’ve tried to do my part. A few months ago my friend Kara hounded me into standing out on Charles Street with her to sign people up to get those blue recycling bins. Everyone thought we were trying to sell something, and the majority of people did what I do when I see somebody on the sidewalk with a clipboard: They either crossed the street or hurried by and avoided making eye contact. Kara would then yell after them extolling the virtues of free recycling bins while I stood there holding a recycling poster like Silent Bob. But I was able to procure a sorely needed recycling bin for our apartment. (Based on the size of the newspaper stack we had accumulated, the papers at the bottom were probably hand-written by monks.) Having witnessed firsthand the public’s disdain for recycling bins, then, I was quite surprised when someone stole ours the second week I put it out.

In addition to our recycling difficulties, the aforementioned occasional infrastructure problems are now festering unattended. For example: One corner support for the top shelf of our kitchen cabinets is broken. For the past two weeks, that shelf has been supported by two plastic Harpoon glasses wedged on the shelf below to shore up the tipsy corner. This would be a permanent fix but for the fact that the middle shelf is now sagging precariously, which makes sense since it is supporting its own load, and, via the Harpoon pillars, that of the top shelf. It’s only a matter of time before a structural failure wipes out our entire supply of dishes, but still none of us has taken the initiative to fix the top shelf with a new screw. I did it last time this happened and I refuse to be the enabler.

It may be time to have a summit meeting between the roommates to work out an official cleaning/fix-it schedule. I’m worried about Lance, though. He seemed like a nice capitalist jock when he first moved in, but lately he’s revealed a dark, hidden hippie side. He and Scott have been trading Phish bootlegs, and the other night I heard him in his room listening to a 25-minute guitar jam. They could form an Axis of Patchouli, and the next thing you know I’m scrubbing the toilet while they’re burning incense and doing easy stuff like vacuuming. On the positive side, maybe Lance will sign us up for another recycling bin. ∂