Starving for Romance

by Blatant Appeal 

(Rough Draft)

Chapter One 

          The pizza box!  Dammit!  That was the same pizza box!

Slapping the grimy banister with his free hand as he ascended the dismal stairway, Jerrid knew it as sure as he knew his own shoes.  Ms. What’s-her-name from 5A had just returned with the same pizza box as the one she’d had in her hand when she had left earlier.

He’d known something didn’t add up when she had clop-clumped down the stairs earlier carrying the pizza box in one hand and her trash bag in the other, destination, he had thought, the dumpster.  Now here she was, hours later, carefully balancing the same pizza box back up the stairs.  As if it had pizza in it.  It defied logic that two pizza boxes would have identical grease stains.

Sure, he thought grimly, he would be happy to add this little fact to the growing pile of evidence that he had a lunatic on his hands.  He’d never get her evicted!

Crystal’s hands were shaking in anticipation as she jiggled the key in the stubborn lock to her apartment.  It didn’t fit right, but she didn’t feel up to complaining.  She was hanging on by a thread now.  Closing the door with her foot she gently laid the precious box.  It was like Shaherazade’s lucky basket—filled with food again.

He hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck, he continued his thoughts as he proceeded up the stairs with his bucket of spackling.  He had reconnoitered the situation surrounding the building before he bought it.  The realtor had even been honest.  To a point.  The neighborhood’s doors and alleys had their share of drunks and junkies.  The apartment building had been half full of tenants.  The plumbing, electrical system, and elevator needed work.

He had only himself to blame, the thought as he shook his head in disgust.  He had intended to buy a long held dream and had been enticed with a fantasy.  He had been looking some papers over, seated in the realtor’s car, parked across the street, when a well dressed woman had come out of the building.  She had looked good, very good.  He’d asked the realtor if she was a building inspector or area welfare worker and had been told that she lived here, apartment 2C.

He had only himself to blame, he thought poking the sore spot in his judgment.  He’d fallen for the notion that any apartment building a classy woman like that would live in had to have some redeeming features.

She had reminded him of laundry day at the home when the nuns had put clean cool crisp white sheets on the beds.  Crawling into them on laundry day night was like being cocooned in a sweet-smelling wonder of what life should be like every day.  He had bought it.  Fantasy and all.  Then reality had hit like the morning after a good drunk.  When you discover you are still alive and in fair shape, but that things don’t look so rosy. 

The elevator hadn’t worked for over twenty years.  But the structure was pure Pennsylvania steel and New York brick.  Built to last.  The outside ornamental moldings were in practically perfect shape around the windows and doors.  He was leaving until last the elevator repairs and the acid wash for the outside brick.  He couldn’t repair the elevator himself and the acid wash was cosmetic.  Both could wait.

The tenants were crotchety old people, down on their luck single mothers, recovering alcoholics, and a small nest of confirmed musicians in 1A trying to make it big.  The woman, Ms. 2C had turned out to be a lunatic.  Other than that, everything had been going pretty much as he had planned.