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Vice Blog

TOXIC MY BASEMENT

I live with two friends in a run down building on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn. We moved in without signing a lease or paying a deposit, and have spent the last few months overlooking any number of deficient amenities for the sake of paying around half of all our other friends' rent.

Saturday night, however, the hallways started to smell. Like really, really smell. You hear that the scent of rotting human flesh is unlike any other smell in the world, and what our halls smelled like matched that exact description. As the night wore on, the smell kept getting worse. Granted, we had been in the process of getting rid of tons of junk and the entrance was filling up with garbage, but this smell was completely beyond the range of common garbage and, as my friend TH and I soon deduced, coming from the basement. None of us had gone down there before, and it bears mention we were all pretty scared and stoned, but the smell was such that we decided as a group to go down and investigate.

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Armed individually with a steak knife, a baseball bat, and a flashlight, the three of us wrapped our faces with t-shirts graffiti-kid-style and headed down. Even with the t-shirts the smell was triggering some very sincere dry heaves. At the bottom of the stairs there was a door.  As we slowly padded down the stairs we heard a muffled, high-pitched voice.  Instinctively, I bolted for exit, tripping over the stairs and almost knocking over my second roommate, Brayden, who was directly behind me.  While me and Brayden waited at the top of the stairs, T.H. banged his knife on the door and screamed "Who is there?! I'll fucking kill you!" Our neighborhood is not known by anyone to be particularly "Safe," so we felt this less than genteel salutation was in order. Please also don't forget that it smelled like rotting flesh.

The man who opened the door was a latino dude around my dad's age with perfect white hair and remarkably good hygiene. He welcomed us into his cluttered, 2,000-square foot apartment in polite, but severely broken English.

To the left of us was some sort of boiler room or drainage area that had been severely flooded, with visible human feces (turds) on the ground. The man took a long stick and started smacking a puddle of brown water while claiming he was "trying to fix the flood." He then gave us a walking tour of the basement. After walking through two-inches of shitwater we came to what I guess is his bedroom, a teensy dungeon with a dirty futon, a small CRT television playing Mexican cartoons, and a box of trash that we had thrown away earlier in the week. On his door there was a whiteboard with"Nuclear Waste: Not my fault. Please call for help" written in marker.

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To the right of his bedroom was a door with a blue NYPD hangtag that says something to the effect that the area behind the door is a Police sanctioned "Frozen Zone." I can't be the only person who has never heard of such a thing. Suppressing my fear of being frozen upon entry, I opened the door and beheld a storeroom filled with boxes of expired vitamins from the "nutritional supplement" store upstairs. There were also a few piles of random junk including an old 386-era computer and monitor. It was while looking at the computer that I realized I had not yet seen a bathroom. .

Brayden and I regrouped and pulled aside TH, who we felt was getting a little too sympathetic with our host. We shared a few of the odder things we've noticed which I now can't remember (stoned) and decided that it was time to make a polite exit. Before we leave our host tells us he lives in Manhattan and says that he is "Going to watch some cartoon" then makes a fart noise with his mouth and a jerking-off motion with his hand. I'm not sure what this means.

We all went back upstairs to wash our hands and breathe some fresh air.  We couldn't come to a consensus about what to do. I was primarily upset about his door sign about Nuclear Waste, and the fact that we came down masked with baseball bats and knives, and that this did not faze him. In the end our decision was to smoke more weed and pass out.

The next day the smell was gone, so we're not really going to worry too much about it.

DAN MEYER
PHOTOS BY BRAYDEN OLSON