"Fair to Middlin'," or "You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You!"

SSS and I used to manage an apartment building on the north side of Chicago. It was an old building, and some of the tenants had lived there for a very long time. One man moved in across the hall from his ex-wife. We could tell that he was very ill, and found out that he went in for dialysis every week.

One day, around the First of July, we noticed that the hot water wasn't as hot as it should be. We called Maintenance, and a very strange man came in and could find nothing wrong with the water heater or the pipes. It was his contention that somebody was leaving a faucet open. We posted notices and mentioned it to all the tenants we could find.

A few days later, we got a call from a tenant on the fourth floor, complaining of a foul odour. Calling Maintenance again was traumatic, as the guy was really scary. He was Hungarian, or something, with a strong, lugubrious accent that loaded everything he said with angst. He made Dracula sound like a lightweight. So, he came; shirt open to the waist, with a lot of heavy gold chains getting tangled in his chest hair. He sprayed the trash cans with Lysol, and looked on the roof for dead birds. All too soon, he was knocking on my door, saying, "I check for bird. No bird. Is dead body up there. Is not my problem." And then he left.

Well, the tenant in 4C was one of those paranoid types that abound in big cities, and had changed the locks on his doors and refused to give us a key. He had told us to contact his ex-across-the-hall, as she had a key. We finally managed to track her down, and she opened the door to his apartment, and walked away.

There he was, on the floor, stark naked, wedged between two doors at right angles to each other. There was a safety razor on the floor beside him, and the hot water was running in the bathroom sink. He looked much as you would imagine someone would look who had been dead for four days, in the hottest apartment in the building, at the hottest time of the year. And that's all I have to say about that.

We called the police. It was the day after the 4th of July. It was a Sunday. It took a while for them to get there, and they were somewhat the worse for hangovers when they did. One spent the entire time they were there, hanging over the fire escape, vomiting four storeys down to the alley. We were spraying everything the local A & P had to offer, and burning all the incense we could find. Eventually, the cops told us to leave, and they somehow maneuvered the body into a body bag, and we trotted off to find his next of kin. He had listed his mother as contact person on his lease, so SSS called her. SSS was 24 at the time, and had never had to tell someone that a loved one had passed away. He was as tactful as possible. Her response?

"I ain't seen the sumbitch in eight years! Send him to the morgue!"

Some friends came over at that point, and asked, "How's it going?" SSS answered, "Fair to middlin'," and my response was, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you!"

SSS looked out the window just as the police carried out the body bag. "I think his head fell off," he said.