By MATT DEMIRS
When I moved into my first apartment at the age of 20, I expected nothing but freedom.
But as I got lost in the excitement of deciding with my buddies where we’d put the TV and couches, I was blissfully unaware of responsibility.
My newfound sense of responsibility came in the form of a three-bedroom apartment in the north suburbs of Chicago, less than a mile from my school, Lake Forest College.
For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a town straight out of The Great Gatsby. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote “Lake Forest was one of the most glamorous places in the world.”
And although he might have been right, my house spoke otherwise.
Lake Forest has a premier beach with sand imported from Italy and 15-plus room mansions. But as you near the “other side of the tracks” (literally a cul de sac near the train tracks), you’ll find a mustard colored duplex with untrimmed hedges and the barrels still lining the curb, days after trash day.
That’s where my responsibility lives.
It was the house you expect for someone my age working an unpaid internship, and it
was fine with me. At $450 a month, per roommate, who could beat it?
There were three of us: me, Vito from Detroit, and a girl named Josie who spent almost the
entirety of the summer between Paris or her boyfriend’s place downtown. She was only a ship passing in the night.
In this wealthy picturesque community, I thrived by being resourceful. I’d take a roll of toilet paper or two and maybe a handful of trash bags whenever I noticed an empty janitor’s closet at school. Before moving out of my dorm for the summer, I regularly borrowed kitchenware and put small
things like salt and pepper shakers into my backpack from my school cafeteria. I even became a yard sale connoisseur and scored a ping pong table for $20, which sometimes doubled as our patio table.
We were learning how to be adults through trial and error, like forgetting to transfer the water into our name.
You mean we actually have to call the city and sign up for water? Doesn’t it just automatically come out of the tap?
We were only 14 days into our lease when the water company turned off the hot water. For the next three weeks, we mountain biked to the nearest gym to shower or Lake Michigan for a quick bath.
And as we finally got hot water, the house struck again. In May, I walked into the basement to low buzzing noise, flipped on the light, and found a cloud of flies circling the light like cars at the new one-lane Federal Street rotary.
I panicked, then did what anyone in my position would do: I Googled it.
“How to get rid of flies in house” was my search, which led to trying every home recipe that supposedly worked as fly traps.
I scoured my cabinets for the four ingredients matching one home remedy: milk, dish soap, apple cider vinegar, and pepper.
I felt like a scientist, warming milk over the stove, mixing in the apple cider, pepper, and topping it off with dish soap.
We let the mixture sit all night, hoping to corral the creatures in the solution and dispose of them.
I think we had trapped one.
We then took matters into our own hands. Armed with fly swatters, we batted the critters around the basement like a game of wiffle ball. By the end of the day we had killed 47 flies.
This was one of many horrifying scenes I faced after coming home from a nine-hour work day, tired and hungry.
Like the time I tried making pizza and ran up to change in my bedroom after placing them in the oven.
There was the pizza roll incident, where after preheating the oven for only 10 minutes, my house became engulfed in smoke. What should have been a night of Netflix and pizza rolls turned into our own little emergency response team: first apartment edition.
We angled box fans and opened the windows, turning the first level of our house into a wind tunnel. We Googled how to clean an oven as the house aired out.
But nothing compared to the times it downpoured and flooded the basement.
In minutes our basement became a small swimming hole with nearly six inches of water swallowing the room we used for storage. I was tempted to grab an inner tube and float as disaster unfolded, until I remembered: oh yeah this is actually my house, my problem.
And that’s when I asked myself: Is this really what being an adult feels like?
I thought being an adult meant laundry and writing checks, or making a grocery list before you actually get to the store. I didn’t know adulthood meant caring for a house like it was a toddler.
Being 1,000 miles away from home, there wasn’t the opportunity to call Dad for help. There was me and my roommate.
Just like that, I went from wearing band aids for rug burn and needing my mom to cut my nails, to lining the foundation of my house with sandbags in my bathing suit in the middle of a rainstorm.
Dealing with the challenges of an apartment helped me learn how to be an adult.
Growing up meant cold showers if you didn’t transfer the name over in time; it meant hand scrubbing the blackness on the inside of an oven; it’s pumping out your basement in the middle of your favorite TV show after a long day of work.
Growing up is doing all these things yourself and learning the hard way.
Matt Demirs can be reached at [email protected]