(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . My Rent Ran $90 Per Month [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-12-15 My first apartment was freezing in the winter, boiling in the summer and we believed it to be haunted, but you couldn’t beat the price: $180, split with my college roommate, Belinda. I was able to easily afford my share with the $3.35 per hour that almost all my student jobs paid. If you do the math, rent cost me about 27 hours of work per month. That’s a deal, even for a place decorated in shabby chic without the chic. After a year in the dorms, I felt thrilled to have space and privacy. Plus, it was close to campus. I could cross a grassy lot and walk right into the building that housed the college newspaper. If I wasn’t in class or at one of my many jobs, you could always find me there. It was an old, mint-colored house with two good-sized bedrooms and another smaller room that could have been a third bedroom. Originally, a couple more friends were interested in sharing the space with us, but they backed out as soon as they saw it. They opted for a much more expensive place across town. I don’t remember how much their nicer apartment cost, but it was wildly out of my price range. Their parents covered it. And anyway, I knew plenty of grown adults in my hometown who lived in places not much nicer. I didn’t think I was entitled to a showplace. My only concern was affordability. Even with the cheap rent, I still had to be careful. Sometimes I had the scratch to wash my clothes in the landlord’s coin-operated laundry room in his apartment building across the street. Other times I did not. I was OK with hand-washing and developed my own technique to save water. I plugged the tub, added the dirty laundry, and proceeded to take a shower, dancing around a bit to agitate my clothes as I washed myself. After I finished my shower, I added some laundry detergent to the water and scrubbed the clothes. Then I wrung everything out and hung it to dry. This double-duty method of using shower water to wash my clothes kept our water bill low. We didn’t have any sort of air conditioning, and we didn’t have central heating. Some kind of ancient gas appliance took up a big chunk of the living room. I doubt you’ve ever seen such a thing. The only one like it I’ve ever seen in my life belonged to my great-grandmother, who died in her 90s when I was a child. It functioned like a giant space heater. You couldn’t just set a thermostat and keep the room at your desired temperature. The rest of the world moved to other heating methods a long time ago. We turned it so low we could see our breath all winter, and studied in bed, under the covers. Buying food was always a problem. I didn’t have a budget for groceries, so I ate as many meals as I could at food service. I always kept a job in a dorm kitchen. If you’re short of grocery money, you need a kitchen job where they either allow you to eat or are willing to turn a blind eye. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes the ladies running the dorm kitchen would let me take home something they would otherwise throw out. One year, they had a huge frozen bag of fruit Danishes they let me take home just before Christmas break. I planned to spend most of the break alone, and scoring a bag of stale pastries meant I would have something to eat every day. They weren’t bad if I microwaved them briefly and then ate them immediately. I wasn’t picky in those days. The best haul I got was when my mom, who worked for a food brokerage company, would drop off expired food. It was almost always canned yams, cranberry drink boxes, moldy blocks of cheddar cheese and frozen sandwich steaks. I would purchase onions and bread and feast on Philly cheese steak sandwiches washed down with cranberry juice. Expired food doesn’t scare me one bit! I went home for the holiday but then returned to campus to spend a couple of weeks by myself. Once you’ve been on your own, it’s hard to be treated like a teenager again, although technically I still was a teenager at that point. I didn’t feel like a kid, though. I had felt like an adult for a long time. I knew my own mind and preferred as much independence as I could get. I might have enjoyed my solitary holiday break more if I hadn’t gotten sick and if heavy snow hadn’t trapped me inside the house. It was just me, a bunch of frozen Danishes, and a freezing house. I didn’t own a radio or TV. But I had some rare solitude, which I craved. The landlord tore that house down the year after I left and built new apartments there. Interestingly, a couple of decades later my daughter attended the same college and her apartment seems to have been located right on the site where mine had been! For my junior year, I decided I didn’t want a roommate, and found a gnarly basement apartment that only cost $125. For the first time in my life, I had a place all to myself. True, it had an open drain and lacked a bathroom door, but my requirements were minimal. That a bunch of rowdy guys lived upstairs and the house was notorious enough to have a name — The Pleasure Dome — did not bother me one bit. If you attended Eastern Illinois University in the mid-1980s, you probably went to at least one party there. Maybe you threw up in my yard. If so, you weren’t the only one. I didn’t have hot water or a working stove at first, but I was very resourceful. What I did have was a wading pool I used to fill with water and lay out in every summer (fun fact: skin cancer did not exist in the 1980s) that I dragged into the kitchen. I ran a few pots of water through the coffee maker to make the cold tap water halfway bearable and took a bath. That wasn’t even the worst thing about that crazy basement apartment. When I washed dishes, I had to let the water out very carefully, so the dirty water could slowly make its way through the trench that the landlord had helpfully chipped out of the concrete floor to help guide the running water to the open drain in the next room. If I didn’t stand there holding the stopper and letting the water out a tiny bit at a time, it would end up spreading across the floor. The landlord eventually agreed to install a pipe, which was nice. Then he actually built a wooden floor over it, which meant I had two bedrooms. What a luxury! Even better, he gave in and installed a bathroom door. For months, he refused, because he was afraid I might secretly get a roommate without paying extra rent. “You don’t need a bathroom door if you’re living here alone!” he said. I couldn’t convince him that I didn’t want to pee in front of guests. The walls were interesting. He had had a bunch of exterior orange paint mixed for his own house and it had taken a few different attempts to get the desired shade. So every wall was a slightly different orange. But again, I didn’t care. The phone company — there used to be such a thing — charged $100 to put in a landline phone, then known just as “a phone.” It may as well have been $1,000. Instead, I used the pay phone at a nearby convenience store. Just before my senior year, I married my first husband. We rented the bottom half of an unfurnished bungalow. I don’t remember for sure, but I think we paid $250. I remember it seemed extremely expensive to me. I didn’t have a bed, but I had a reclining lawn chair. It was the three-sectioned kind that folds flat, which was perfect for sunbathing (again, there was no skin cancer risk in 1987.) I threw sheets on the lawn chair and that’s where my cat and I slept. The landlord was horrified and brought over a double bed, which was a nice upgrade. Until my August wedding, I lived there alone and entertained extensively. A bunch of us worked the 4 p.m.-2 a.m. shift at a fast-food place across from campus. The intensity of serving all the drunks who wanted burgers after closing out the bars meant we were too wired to sleep right away. Since I was the only person who lived alone, we commonly had 3 a.m. cookouts at my house. I had a second-hand stereo by then. The neighbors must have hated me. But that was a fantastic summer. I found creative ways to make all these apartments livable. I painted walls and concrete floors and sewed curtains from cheap fabric store remnants. I engineered makeshift shelving. An old whisky barrel became a side table. A Chinese paper umbrella mounted in the corner of the room with a small lamp behind it diffused the light in an interesting way. Poverty didn’t bother me, because I assumed it was temporary. I felt confident that after I finished school I’d be financially secure. That turned out not to be true, but knowing how to make it on a budget is a useful life skill, especially if you insist on writing for a living. And if you’ve ever wondered why I write so much about poverty and income inequality, it’s because I’ve lived it. About Michelle Teheux: I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack, or buy me a bag of coffee beans! You can also find me on LinkedIn. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/15/2211940/-My-Rent-Ran-90-Per-Month?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/