The Tao of Phil (Part One)

As I mention from time to time, I've been living in the same apartment for seven years. This is very uncommon in New York, as folks will generally run down a lease and then hop to the next place. I left my last apartment because I'd just signed a deal for my second book, had a movie option for Dark on the table and figured that I was a hop skip and a jump away from a turbo-charged career that would have me putting a SOLD sign on a brownstone in less than a year. These were good dreams to have.

But as Crown Heights had become a crowded corridor of people from work, I was looking to move into a neighborhood where the media crowd wouldn't be at every turn. So I skipped the Voice and the broker and did it old school style by taking out an ad in the Amsterdam News. And there is was, a newly-renovated one bedroom in a 4th floor walk-up in Bed-Stuy. At the time Bed-Stuy was considered borderline if not dangerous and it was removed enough from the center of the world, Fort Greene, to make it attractive to my general peer group. So I dialed the number and the broker, a nerdy and lanky cat with a short 'fro who would eventually become my neighbor, told me to come by and look at the place.

My first introduction to the building was that it didn't have a bell. My old one had a buzzer. If you came by at two in the morning I could let you up without ever leaving the crib. Oh well. I knocked on the door and a middle aged Trini guy answered. He didn't like the look of me from the beginning: dreads, jeans and t-shirt etc. But I had a reference and my credit check went through. The only thing that felt a little questionable was that the man lived in the building on the first floor. This meant that if there were problems with any thing I wouldn't be dealing with some board. I'd have to deal with him. But the crib was so dope. And as time was running out on my lease I decided to go for it. He told me to call him by his last name. But whenever I told my friends about him, he was always just Phil.

What has followed in the last seven years has played out like something in a sitcom.
I had barely been in the place a week before I opened one of the closet doors and it came off the hinges. With the way it fell, had I been a woman half my size, that could have been all she wrote. Some idiot had drilled the hinges into the doorframe with short screws. The washer on one of the showerheads needed to be replaced. When I told him about it he came up and changed the fixture to make it prettier, but let the pipes keep on dripping like that Jeru loop.

There was that eight by eleven hole cut in the drywall behind the stove in the kitchen that would serve as a welcome sign for every rodent on the block once I started cooking. A similar hole was in one of the closets and there were a good twenty other week spots all over the place. Having a father who was a master in home improvement I knew how to tackle most of these things on my own. But there were some things that were even beyond me (To Be Continued...) Out.